Julian Dorey Podcast - 🤯 [VIDEO] - Astrophysicist Investigates "Proof" of ALIEN Civilization | Dr. Brian Keating • 173

Episode Date: December 9, 2023

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Dr. Brian Keating is an astrophysicist, award-winning author, and science popularizer. EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://legacy.23point5.com.../creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/JnhjVFJU  - SUBSCRIBE to Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  BRIAN LINKS: Brian YouTube: https://youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1   Brian Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/39UaHlB   Brian Spotify Podcast: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok   Brian Website: https://BrianKeating.com  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Brian on Eric Weinstein vs. Michio Kaku String Theory 9:42 - Can we actually “Prove” physics for good? 12:51 - What makes us Human?; 4 Billion year old Meteorites; Gravity 22:22 - The limits of String Theory 32:38 - Reducing Forces; Einstein’s Theory of Everything 36:57 - Physicist Ed Witten & 10 Dimensions; Universe 26 Billion years old? 44:35 - How do we date Galaxy & Universe?; Inflation in Universe 53:12 - Weinstein’s 2 dimensions theory 58:12 - Michio Kaku’s thoughts on being wrong; Julian Michio Kaku Story 1:13:20 - Testing String Theory; The Big Bang 1:20:27 - Meaning of Life Crisis 1:28:35 - Brian Keating’s Agnostic Beliefs & reflections on faith 1:38:10 - Brian explains Universe Inflation in depth 1:45:25 - Brian’s 15-Year Inflation Experiment in South Pole (Story) 1:53:25 - Multiverse Explained; Quantum Mechanics 2:03:18 - Why Brian’s Inflation Experiment Failed 2:09:55 - Brian’s current scientific projects 2:17:05 - Brian’s Einstein joke; Neil DeGrasse Tyson 2:22:53 - Making Science exciting; Taking risks for discovery 2:33:25 - Aliens & truth of UFO Phenomenon; Life in galaxy? 2:43:18 - David Grusch; Alien Confirmation Bias 2:51:38 - UFOs & Nuclear Bases, Roswell, and Alien Bottom Line 2:58:23 - Brian’s Podcast “Into the Impossible” CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edit by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 173 - Dr. Brian Keating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 It's not a coincidence that the first atomic bomb, a detonation on Earth by human beings, was done not far from where Roswell is in New Mexico, the first loose crash that occurred in 1947, with alien bodies and alien spacecraft and so forth. Many of these phenomena do occur on military installations to this very day. These people, aren't they worried about encountering these phenomena? They're really seen every day, as Ryan told me. They're seen every day, and people report cubes and spheres and spheres. There's a psychological component that's fundamentally not scientific.
Starting point is 00:00:29 It doesn't mean that they're wrong. Ryan Keating, you made it to New Jersey. Thank you for coming out here, sir. First time here in a while. It's good to be back on the East Coast as a New Yorker. It's always a little bit of a danger going to New Jersey, but for you, I brave it, my friend. Well, it's a lot easier getting you to New Jersey than Florida. My boy Danny Jones has been trying for 18 months, so can't wait. So we've been to the punch. I'm going to see him. I'm seeing him right after I see our mutual friend Jordan Peterson
Starting point is 00:01:29 and Peterson Academy coming up soon. Oh, what are you doing up there? So Jordan's starting this university to kind of combat both the excessive high prices, the kind of insane campus politics and so forth. So he's asked a couple of faculty members to join and to, you know, present courses on their subject matter expertise. It has nothing to do with politics or ideology whatsoever. It's completely neutral. I'll be teaching about cosmology and, you know, there's not too much.
Starting point is 00:01:57 We have our big bangs in cosmology, but we're not going to be talking about woke versus, you know, Antifa. No, that's not what my goal is so it's it's going to be an interesting experience so he has a whole studio there he built with his it's really his daughter michaela it's in miami it's in miami yeah yeah so i'll be there and then i'm gonna catch a ride uh across the state to the to the pan i've never been to tampa so i'm gonna see our mutual buddy danny boy i can't wait tampa's fun yeah it's a good town don't don't have too much fun anyway you didn't hear that from me but yeah i i connected with you back in may and now since we put this on the calendar you blew the up because you went on joe rogan that's right
Starting point is 00:02:36 the goat scoops me once again he's never scooped well all you need here is an archery range and a couple of live life-size werewolves and a picture of Klaus Schwab over the toilet. You've got Austin Scoop, my buddy. You're on your way. Your trajectory. Look at Joe. He's saturating. You're still rising. He's got a Klaus Schwab picture above the toilet. Yeah. So you're holding your business and you're doing your business and you're looking into the cold beady eyes of Klaus Schwab. I don't think I could piss. I don't think anyone would happen. I'd be a little freaked out. I don't know. I anything would happen is it the old age is it my uh prostate or what's going on oh no it's klaus it's these cold dead eyes of the world economic forum look at me yeah that's a whole if we go down that rabbit hole we'll be there all day but we got things to talk about but i had connected with you because i had michu Kaku in for the podcast.
Starting point is 00:03:25 I recorded with him at the end of April. And so when that came out, I did a little mini documentary that's still on my channel now. Just covering kind of like the eight and a half minute response within the podcast that Michu gave to your friend, Eric Weinstein's criticism that he had had for Mechu a few months before when he was on Joe Rogan. And here's the context there for those of you who aren't familiar. Listen closely. That's not just paint rolling on a wall. It's artistry. A master painter carefully applying Benjamin Moore Regal Select eggsll with deftly executed strokes. The roller, lightly cradled in his hands, applying just the right amount of paint. It's like hearing poetry in motion.
Starting point is 00:04:17 Benjamin Moore, see the love. So you're hosting the family barbecue this week, but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy, and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it. Impress even the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. And to be in the heat means, yeah, to be criticized. Well, you and I were looking at a video right
Starting point is 00:04:46 before we went on camera i wanted to show you in case you didn't have the context but we were watching a video of eric weinstein on joe rogan recently where he was i guess like having a moment with string theory and going off about it david gross and ed witton should be in front of the community explaining why did you take all the smartest people, all the resources, all the attention. Michio Kaku, get Michio Kaku in here with me. Michio Kaku is out of control.
Starting point is 00:05:19 Sean Carroll is covering up for this as well. In what way? They are too kind. Brian Greene. Like, I had this interchange with Brian Greene where I said, you know, we're not being honest about the failure of strength.
Starting point is 00:05:37 Brian was like, oh, well, maybe we were a little bit exuberant. I blurt out Institute for Arts and Ideas. I blurt out, that's like Ideas. I blurt out. That's like saying Millai. Millai was irrational exuberance. No, you put a lot of people's careers in the shredder. And for people that aren't familiar with that, I'll let you explain the details.
Starting point is 00:06:00 But we've gone back and forth. And I felt like, first of all, it would be really cool to see Eric and Mich meet you in a room and i hope if that happens it's you who does it that would be really really cool but the the core of that argument was over of course string theory which eric has presented his own theory geometric unity and string theory is obviously heavily debated within the science world because it hasn't been proven. But I guess where we stand almost 50 years since string theory was invented, where are you on that issue? Do you think it's something where we need to move past it now because it hasn't been proven and can't be tested? Or do you think it's a matter of it just has too much of like a little bit of an iron
Starting point is 00:06:41 wall around it and we should be looking at other opportunities as well. Yeah, yeah. Well, you asked a lot of good questions there. So I'll start with the original kind of statement about Michio and Eric. First of all, you have to realize it's kind of surprising that in this very relatively arcane, abstruse, abstract form of mathematical physics, that there are battles every much as intense as the east coast west coast rap battles of the 1990s that you probably don't remember but i do i know all about biggie and tupac and uh there you go that's right uh not far from here and then where i'm from on the west coast um and so literally we have east coasters ed witton michio kaku and uh literally we have East Coasters, Ed Witten, Michio Kaku, and then we have the West Coast gang out there with Eric and others taking an alternative approach. So it's surprising that there's so much heat and passion that generated behind it.
Starting point is 00:07:35 And partially, I think the reason is, is that mathematics has always held a special status in the culture. Mathematics is part of culture. It's not divorced from it. It's not some thing you use as a tool to do something else. In and of itself, mathematics has a power to captivate the mind. And I think mathematicians and so forth are some of the most respected people in the world for their brilliance, for their intellect. And so it's a very different subject from almost any other subject in that things in math are not necessarily real. In fact, I interviewed a young – she has a PhD in math but she's not a professor named Eugenia Chang and she has a book called Is Math Real?
Starting point is 00:08:17 Basically, does math exist? So I would say, can you give me a triangle? No, but you can think about a triangle. Can you give me a complex number? No, but you can think about a triangle. Can you give me a complex number? No, but we can think about a complex number. Can you even give me infinity? No, but you can think about infinity in ways that computers can't even do it. So there are these things that are purely products of the human mind. And I think the pinnacle of the human mind is mathematics. And it is the basis of all the physics and so forth that I do. Now, I'm an experimentalist. I build instrumentation. My goal is to see not if these people are right but to prove them wrong. My job is to be the exterminator of their theories.
Starting point is 00:08:54 There's no such thing as a proof in physics. Hey, guys. I need your help with three quick things. And if you're watching me on Spotify video right now, you can see this timer to my right. It is going to be fast. Number one, if you are not already following the show, please hit that follow button on Spotify or whatever audio platform you're on. Number two, if you're on Spotify right now, on our show's homepage in the description, you will see a link to our Spotify podcast clips channel. That's right. We are posting clips from this podcast every single day on there. There is a whole library,
Starting point is 00:09:23 so go over there and follow. And finally, number three, if you are on Spotify or Apple, please leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. Now let's get to the episode. So you mentioned like, well, because we don't have proof or we can't be proven. Nothing in physics can be proved. We can't prove there was a big bang. I can't prove there's not a purple unicorn on Uranus. I mean, there's no way to falsify every statement that you could make about physics. It doesn't make it scientifically accurate. But mathematics, you can. So in other words, you can determine what is property of mathematical purview.
Starting point is 00:09:54 In other words, what is kosher? What is acceptable? What is part of the project of mathematics? Because it can be proven or falsified. We may not be able to do it. It took famously 300 years between Fermat, you know, coming up with this last theorem where he put it in the margins of a little paperback that he was reading at the time before it was proven by Andrew Wiles, not far from here in
Starting point is 00:10:14 Princeton, New Jersey. And so you think about things that can be proven, it gives physicists a little bit of envy because we can't prove anything in physics. I was going to say, you don't really have, it seems to me like even when you look at some of the core tenets like people will talk about gravity well that'll probably never be disproven do we know that though you know what i mean because think about how short human history has even been to this point and how much is out there that we have no clue about like gravity for all intents and purposes could be in in an entirely different like, I'm going to make up a term here,
Starting point is 00:10:48 but like dimensional wavelength and we understand it, no? Yeah, I'm not, we don't talk about dimensional wavelengths, but we will talk about kind of an analogy. Imagine you put every theory that every physicist has ever had onto a ping pong ball and you put it into a big 55 gallon oil drum, okay? And you just pull them out. 99 out of every 100 of those ping pong ball and you put it into a big 55 gallon oil drum, okay? And you just pull them out. 99 out of every 100 of those ping pong balls would have a theory that was proven to be wrong,
Starting point is 00:11:12 provisional, incorrect. And I think now it's no different. Maybe it's even worse because it's never been easier to visit. A theory is like software. It's easy to generate a lot of software and say, I'm going to go back. It's called technical debt. You know, I'm going to go back and fix up these lines in the car. I'm going to document famously. I don't know if you ever wrote computer code. I'm terrible at this. I love to write it super fun, but you're supposed to document what you're doing so that somebody else can come and do, you know, can do some, some post-mortem analysis and why you have this bug that led to, you know, $10 billion of, you know billion of Alameda coin to drop to zero or whatever, right? So you should document it. I never do it. So that's technical debt. I'm going to go back and
Starting point is 00:11:50 do it. So it's easy to produce it and forget to do the documentation to do the technical debt that you're supposed to do. But experiments, it's not easy to make an experiment. I'm part of the leadership of a $100 million project in Chile called the Simons Observatory that's taken almost eight years to come to fruition to get its first photon from the universe. And it's not even a photon from the Big Bang. It's a photon from the planet Mars. It's nothing that you would write home about. But that's how long it's taken, 380 people, seven years working on it. So you never do some, like, it's not easy to produce experiments. It's very hard. That's why every experiment, in my opinion, should be decisive. It should have a clear-cut goal in what it's going to do. Because we never know. We serve at the, I mean, if we were living
Starting point is 00:12:33 in Ukraine right now, you know, or we're living in Israel or Gaza, like, we wouldn't be doing physics. I wouldn't be doing, my colleagues wouldn't be doing physics right now. We'd be, A, scared for our lives trying to figure out how to survive. The other thing we'd be doing is probably working on a military project somewhere. A physicist would be working on some military camp. And this is true throughout history. Physicists have always worked hand in hand or been astronomers with the military. And so what's been really interesting to me is to see that we only get to do this. We serve at the pleasure of peaceful circumstances. We do some of the most esoteric, as I said, arcane, abstruse things that you can do that actually serve no purpose. Like what I'm
Starting point is 00:13:11 doing, $100 million, you could put that to cancer research, you could put that to, you know, whatever you're saying. And maybe it would be doing more good, maybe it wouldn't. Or food, just buying food, I guarantee, or mosquito nets, it would definitely do more good ultimately. But sometimes I think that's what we should be doing because things that have no quote unquote purpose are what make human beings human and distinguished and different. I mean, animals provide for their kids and there's even some notion of altruism in the animal kingdom as Steven Pinker and other people will tell you, right? So the question is, what makes us uniquely human? It's doing things
Starting point is 00:13:44 that are useless, useless to benefit. It's not going to make a faster, although phones did come, cell phones did come out of the research in radio astronomy that I'm, not that I did, but the legacy that I'm, you know, heir to created the technology right down the road here in New Jersey, in central New Jersey, in Holmdel, in a, at Bell Labs, the technology that you're carrying in your pocket, right? And that was concomitant with the discovery of the origin of the universe via the cosmic microwave background radiation that I study. So getting back to your first question, these guys are doing stuff that's very important, but it may not be very significant.
Starting point is 00:14:20 In other words, we may never be able to have evidence for it. Now, just because we don't have evidence, – I don't have evidence for a supernova, what blew up and created this little piece of meteorite that I gave you. Oh, yeah. It's so cool. It's gratitude for hosting me. And I give it all out to my visitors on my website. You go to BrianKeating.com. I give those away.
Starting point is 00:14:39 It's 4 billion years old, you said? 4 billion years old. And I'll send you the information about it when you join my email list. You get the assay, the chemical composition. You get the origin. And you get also a guide on how to see meteor showers because I think that's super cool. And you can see them here, even in the middle of Manhattan. In New York.
Starting point is 00:14:55 You can see meteor showers now. And it's not going to be as good as if you come to the dark desert of California where I live. I was going to say. Yeah. So it's going to be a lot better when you come and do my podcast. I only do it. We'll do it in person with you. You made me come up to New Jersey. I'm going to make you come to So it's going to be a lot better when you come and do my podcast. I only do it. We'll do it in person with you. You made me come up to New Jersey.
Starting point is 00:15:07 I'm going to make you come to San Diego. I will do that. So anyway, so we can look for things that we can't – we can see the indirect evidence for things that we can't witness. That supernova produced that chunk of meteorite. That chunk is the byproduct of a fusion reaction that terminated when a star could no longer support its girth, its mass, and it succumbed, the pressure that was felt succumbed to a nuclear fusion event that then catastrophically
Starting point is 00:15:33 exploded that star out into the universe. How do we date something like that? Um, well, you go to Tinder and... No, you... That's the only dating I used to do. No, so, uh, so these are dated by their composition their their isotope ratios and also the fact that uh they they can be determined to have you know these the the metallic the same metallic origin we compare with a model for how these stars form
Starting point is 00:15:57 and then they end their life so there was a star in our neighborhood of the milky way galaxy that predated our milky way. And when it got to the end of its life, when it started to fuse heavier and heavier elements together, that no longer gave off enough energy to bloat out the star anymore, to keep the pressure needed to counteract the gravitational force of the outer layers of this onion-like star. The last thing it produces is called iron, is iron and heavy elements. And that's why this thing is so dense. And you can verify it's so dense. It's also magnetic.
Starting point is 00:16:27 You can stick it to a magnet. This is magnetic? Yeah, it's highly magnetic. Wow. Yeah, if you have one here. If you have a magnetic bobblehead, maybe that. I don't. Yeah, we got to get you one.
Starting point is 00:16:35 I got to test that. So and the exact composition of that meteorite is found in our Earth as well. And as well as in the rocky core of our planet and the other inner inner rocky planets so we can date that they came from the same supernova so the death of another star provided the impetus the material the raw ingredients that made our planet and also is then found in the crust of our planet so there's iron inside of the crust of the earth that came from that same supernova that produced that iron chunk right here and some of that iron made itself into wheat and so forth that your mother ate when she was pregnant with you and eventually your body synthesized into make hemoglobin
Starting point is 00:17:14 so the hemoglobin molecule that fixes air that basically allows you to live and breathe as a you know as a breathing individual that uh that iron came from the same meteor that came from or came from the same event that produced that. Now, we didn't witness any of that. So why am I saying all this? Because we also can't witness like what's happening in 10 to the minus 30th meters in the vibrating 10-dimensional super strength, right? That's not something we can have access to. But we can infer from the downstream effects what these models would predict for things that we haven't seen. So if I see that thing there, and I say that same model predicts that there should be an isotope ratio. If the iron, if what I said was not a lie, okay, that
Starting point is 00:17:55 the iron in your blood came from the same supernova explosion that produced that meteorite, then I've just made a testable prediction. You can test the isotope ratio in your blood, and it won't be pure iron 56 or whatever it is. It'll have some isotope ratio and it'll be the same as that. And that came from space. That was witnessed. The fall was witnessed.
Starting point is 00:18:12 It came from Argentina. You'll learn all about it when you click on the link in my newsletter. And that has a chemical assay and it's very similar to the chemical composition in your body. So that's a model prediction. Now, string theory,
Starting point is 00:18:24 the question is, can it predict anything? You're doing my job for me. I love it. You're great. Well, I've learned a lot from you. You've actually helped me grow the Into the Impossible podcast, you know, 100,000 subscribers in less than a year. Your channel is still, by the way, I will have all your links in our description.
Starting point is 00:18:41 Your channel, in my opinion, is still massively underrated. I mean, the people you're getting on there. Yeah. I mean, you're so connected in the field, but it's incredible. Yeah. It's been, you know, they say like when you get to the top of the mountain where you're closer to than I am or, you know, someone like Joe or something like Joe Rogan, who's a wonderful, I call him, you know, the biggest mention in the business. He's influenced so many of us, right? And he gives us kind of a target to aspire to.
Starting point is 00:19:04 Yeah. And when I was on the podcast with him i asked him like what are your goal because i was like you're always asking everybody else like what are your goals in the podcast like what do you want to do and where is your kind of promised land for where you want to go and he was just like i have this life that's like a life by design that allows me to not necessarily have freedom to do anything although he does i mean he owns a comedy store he probably flies private he does whatever but he has freedom from he doesn't have a boss i mean he advertises stuff that he makes like it's not like oh well like uh i don't know who you're
Starting point is 00:19:34 advertising i saw some some powders out there i'm like i don't know if i should mention them or not don't measure me up i won't mention them okay fine uh but there's some delicious stuff out there um and uh you know but like when I have an advertiser, I have to do it. And then the sponsor comes by, oh, you misplaced the, you know, kind of product placement, or my favorite is you're supposed to log in to this link. That, you know, is where you're going, or people are going to access. I'm like, the content still there. Like, why do I have to log in? And like, well, someone might see that it's like Brian Keating, or not Brian Keating, it's just like, new user. So I'm like, thanks, someone might see that it's like Brian Keating or not Brian Keating. It's just like new user.
Starting point is 00:20:05 Oh, my God. So I'm like, thanks. Now I have a boss. This is what Ari has to do for you. You should tell him to take care of it. I know. I love Ari. Hopefully we'll see him.
Starting point is 00:20:14 But the bottom line is when you have something that makes predictions, more powerful scientific theory is, the more predictions it can make. And the more retrodictions it can explain. In other words, it can explain things that used to happen. You asked me about gravity. So will we ever know that gravity has been overturned or we were wrong? I suspect no. And the reason is because we know it's already wrong. It's wrong in a certain sense. When we say that something is a scientific fact, let's say, I say, do you believe the earth is round? Yes. Okay. Well, you're totally wrong. You know, if I say to you, is the Earth flat? You'll say
Starting point is 00:20:48 no. You'll also be, you'll be right if you say no, right? But we have proven that, though, because it's here. Okay, so the Earth, now I'm going to go into professor mode, okay? My wife loves this. So the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It has some spherical property.
Starting point is 00:21:03 It's actually pretty oblate. It has properties like a pear. But has some spherical property. It's actually pretty oblate. It has properties like a pear. But it's not flat. It's not flat. So if you said it's flat, you're wrong. And if you say it's a sphere, you're wrong. But as Isaac Asimov said, you're less wrong if you say it's a sphere than if it's a flat, if you said it was perfectly flat. Now, what does that imply?
Starting point is 00:21:19 That means that there would be some perfect, there is some perfect description. And even if I said it's pear-shaped, I'm also wrong. But it's getting closer and closer to the scientific truth. Science is not about saying provable facts. Again, we can't prove that the earth is a prolate spheroid with these spherical harmonic contributions, distortions at this 0.01% level. The way that I can prove 2 plus 2 equals 4, even though that'll take 400 pages of abstract mathematics to prove that simple sounding statement. And you can't say, oh, you have one finger, you have two. No, no, no. That's not what we're talking about. The actual mathematics behind proving two plus
Starting point is 00:21:52 two equals four is significantly advanced. It's not basic mathematics like I teach to a five-year-old. But there is no such thing as proving physically that the earth is a sphere or a pear or whatever shape you want, a donut. There is no way to prove that. So scientifically, all we can do is say something is wrong. But what you should do is say things that are accurate as much as you can with precision. So let me talk about the difference between accuracy and precision. If I say you weigh less than 1,000 pounds, you may go to the gym. You look pretty diesel bodied.
Starting point is 00:22:28 But you definitely do. That's accurate. Is it precise? It doesn't tell you anything. Absolutely correct. It is not precise. So you want to have accuracy and precision. So I want to say the earth is not a sphere. Then I have to add some terms to it. That makes it more precise, but it's still not perfectly accurate. So you want to try to convert. Now my question, and I think what Eric complains about people like Michio Kaku, is that he'll say something akin to, you weigh less than 1,000 pounds. And he'll say, isn't this great? We now have a scientifically testable fact. OK, so I actually had literally one of the fathers of modern string theory. His name is Kamran Vafa. He's a brilliant man, wonderful mensch of a guy up at Harvard. And he was on my podcast.
Starting point is 00:23:05 And he said, no, Brian, it's not true that string theory doesn't make any predictions. He basically said, no, string theory predicts the mass of the electron. And I was like, I didn't know that. That's kind of news to me. What is it? What's the prediction? First of all, it's not a prediction. It's a retrograde.
Starting point is 00:23:17 We already have the measurement. So now he's saying, where does it come from purely mathematically within the confines of the limitations of string theory? He said, yes, we have limits on it. I said, obviously, you're not going to say it's exactly 10 to the minus 28 with 65 decimal places behind the 28. No, no. But he said it's greater than effectively, it would be like saying you're away between one kilogram, you, and 10 to the 30th kilograms, except it's put a negative sign. So wide. Yeah. But look, what could those numbers be, Julian? What could possibly be?
Starting point is 00:23:49 Pick a number. What is the range of those exponents? It could be anything from negative infinity to positive infinity. Yeah, numbers we can't concept at all. Exactly. But not only that we can't concept. So actually, it's a very accurate thing within the broad range of all it could be from negative infinity to positive infinity, right? So it's actually very accurate, right? Just like me saying, like, you, between zero pounds and infinity pounds, okay, so a very,
Starting point is 00:24:15 I put 1000 kilograms, rather, that's very accurate compared to what that could be this. So that's why I think people like Eric and people like me to be on, I won't speak for Eric, but for me, I get frustrated. Because when we hear other theorists talk about this, I get very upset. Because I think that their job is very envious. They get to literally think. They don't necessarily have to travel to Chile and deal with dumping concrete in the wrong place and getting electric. You think it was hard to set up this beautiful studio. Imagine doing that 17,000 feet, wearing a hard hat, oxygen mask, steel-toed boots, wearing a life-saving vest in case you fall over and die, getting checked for all sorts of high-altitude sickness and diseases, having to pass a physical exam versus sitting in your office. That's difficult.
Starting point is 00:25:03 Yeah, sitting in your office and, you know, living the life of the mind. Now, when you ask those people, when I asked Sabina Hassenfelder or I asked Stephen Wolfram, and I say, well, what do you think about Eric's theory? Or what do you think about, you know, Stephen's theory to Sabina Hassenfelder? And they'll say, oh, I don't have time. You don't have time. Like what else are you working on? I mean, she's got a thriving YouTube channel and she's, she's, you know, that's great. That's her job now. And she, she is doing research and she's to be commended for it, but she's not a professor. She's not doing it. And even as neither is Stephen Wolfram,
Starting point is 00:25:36 he's not a professor. I mean, he owns a business and he's very good at what he does, but to say, I don't have time. All I have time for is to look at my own theory and kind of verify. That'd be like me saying, I'm going to ignore these other experiments that actually saying I don't have time. All I have time for is to look at my own theory and kind of verify. That would be like me saying, I'm going to ignore these other experiments that are actually saying, Brian Keating, you saw dust. You claim to see the origin of the universe. You saw dust. You're a fraud. You're a charlatan. You're a – if I just did that and I didn't listen to the critics, that would be pathetic. And yet I do feel like there's an unwillingness for these theorists to spend a couple hours – You're referring to your bicep.
Starting point is 00:26:04 That's the bicep experiment. Got it. Okay it okay yeah but do you think part of that and that by the way i don't agree with this but do you think part of that is a little bit of that ivory tower of well the guy you're talking about with eric weinstein is is a he's a mathematician he's not even a physicist so they don't want to quote unquote waste their time with it you don't think that's it no eric said that dominant you know force in the intellectual you know intellectual sphere no i don't think that's that's true at all he does he will i'll get frustrated with him because he'll often say oh i'm just a mathematician but in reality i mean he's claiming to impinge upon the traditional pathways of modern physics including that you know, of maybe pre-discovering certain foundational equations that have led to, you know, the so-called string revolution and other things
Starting point is 00:26:52 while he was a graduate student. And there's documentation about this from his thesis. No, he traffics in physics. It's just highly mathematical physics, which is fine. Mathematicians have been, or physicists have been contributing to mathematics since you know long before you know alexander of samos and you know uh there there's uh aristotle there there are you know obviously isaac newton you know cohen discovered calculus or invented calculus depending on how you think about it significant overlap for sure yeah huge part of it but if if you had to explain to like the layman out there to get at the core of what we've been coming around to with like the Kaku camp and like the Weinstein camp, like what is string theory in your estimation and what is it that Eric is proposing with geometric unity? I think there's a misguided fasc focus, obsession in some sense with string theory. String theory has gotten a tremendous amount of attention and this is sociological perhaps and possibly because of the authority bias that's always present when you have a field as – there's no telling how much respect people have for mathematics and physics.
Starting point is 00:28:08 And I'm talking about intellectuals. There was a famous Japanese poet who won the Nobel Prize in literature. And he told his mother and his mother said, well, that's great. But I thought I always thought you'd be a physicist. You know, she was disappointed. Like he's one of, you know, 100 people still alive or even fewer. Right. So you think about like, what is the pinnacle of human brain power?
Starting point is 00:28:28 It's typically a – and I'm not a mathematician. I'm not tooting my own horn. I'm an experimental physicist, which is several levels down in the public's estimation. Who do you know as a physicist? Well, just around the corner, Brian Green, Jan Eleven. As I said, Stephen Wolfram, Stephen Hawking, the names that people know. Lenny Suskind. All these people I've had on.
Starting point is 00:28:47 I've had 14 Nobel Prize winners in physics alone on my podcast plus several others from other disciplines. They're almost all theoretical physicists, which is as close to math as you can get in physics. What I feel is missing from all these discussions, from all these series, is a recognition that they are, for some reason, putting the cart before the horse. In my case, I call this the toe before the gut. And it's a hilarious pun, trust me, Julian. So there's something in physics called unification. Between client meetings, managing your business, and everyday tasks, who has time to worry about website hosting? With Kinsta's managed WordPress hosting, you don't have to. They handle the technical stuff, delivering lightning-fast load times, enterprise-grade security, and 24-7, 365 human-only support. Simply switching to Kinsta can make your site up to 200% faster. Kinsta's custom
Starting point is 00:29:41 dashboard makes managing sites easy easy with powerful features designed to save you time and effort. Plus, their free expert-led migrations ensure a smooth transition. Ready to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses? Get your first month free at kinsta.com. That's K-I-N-S-T-A dot com. Kinsta, simply better hosting. Those are actually two sides of the same coin called electromagnetism. And they're actually different manifestations. And this is a key insight in Einstein's special theory of relativity. It was understood by James Clerk Maxwell, who laid the foundations for modern mathematical physics of electrodynamics and many other things, that actually an observer in motion. So let's say you see a charge here. There's just a static charge that's just sitting there.
Starting point is 00:30:46 You and I see it. We're static, and we see it as producing an electric field that radiates away from a positive charge or converges on a negative charge, as I mentioned. And yet, if you have somebody sliding by on a train down the street, they will see that charge in motion. How do you reconcile those two things? And by the way, a charge in motion produces what's called a current. Currents are the sources of magnetic fields. So how can you reconcile those two things with the statement that motion is relative? There's no such thing as absolute velocity. You and I can't say that someone in a car,
Starting point is 00:31:18 and you've had this experience. You're sitting on a train at Penn Station. The train next to you starts to move. You're like, oh, we're moving. No, you're not moving. You're stationary. No one can tell when an observer or a participant is in relative constant motion. They can't say that you're in relative constant motion. They can only say, according to me, you're in motion with some velocity in some direction. Are you talking, I want to make sure just for people who are following, are you talking about the difference in what I can see if you physically saw me running versus me sitting on the train and you only saw me sitting on the train, you didn't see the train itself moving? At constant velocity, it almost doesn't make a difference. If you're carrying a charge, then somebody running at the same speed as you
Starting point is 00:31:55 would see that charge being static and therefore only producing a static electric field. However, me sitting on the ground lazily sipping my delicious coffee, I would see you moving with a charge. Therefore, you'd be producing a current. Therefore, I would see that you're going to produce a magnetic field, not an electric field. There would be no electric field. There'd be an electric magnetic field. What Maxwell realized is that those are two sides of the same coin. Electricity, one man's electric field is another man's magnetic field. So what's so important about that is that there was a unification. There's actually one thing called the electromagnetic field. When did he come up with that?
Starting point is 00:32:32 1850s, 1860s. He died very young, like 40 years old. Yeah, he's been. And then even he, as brilliant as he was, he thought that these waves traveled through a medium called the ether that was rejected 50 or 60 years later but but essentially he didn't understand he could have a wave of light or electromagnetism which he also discovered how could you have a wave traveling through a vacuum where there's no medium there's no such we're talking now there's sound waves emanating from pressure and density perturbations that get picked up by a little diaphragm pressure and density what variations
Starting point is 00:33:03 or vibrations yeah yeah perturb oh perturb vibrations. Oh, perturbations. Perturbations. It's like, what the fuck is that? That's some of the things you can't, that sound dirty but are not. I'm going to go perturbate myself later on. So when you think about how these things are two sides of the same coin, the same thing exists with nuclear physics and particle physics
Starting point is 00:33:22 and quantum mechanics. There are people that say there are four forces of nature. There's electricity and magnetism. That's one force. Now, it used to be two forces. Now it's one force. There's something called the weak nuclear force. This is responsible for radioactive decay. So when a neutron decays and shoots off an electron, a neutrino, an antineutrino, and a proton, those objects are part of what's called weak nuclear decay. Then there's a strong force of electromagnetism, sorry, a strong force of the nucleus, which is responsible. You ever think, like, how does, I don't think most people think about this,
Starting point is 00:33:56 but helium has two protons in its nucleus. I never thought about that in my life. You never, well, we're going to see the Macy's Day parade soon. So when you see the helium balloon, think about the fact that helium has two protons in its nucleus. Okay. What do you know about like charges, Julian? Not much. Assume nothing. Like charges repel.
Starting point is 00:34:15 What do you know about opposites? Oh, I thought you said like charges. No, no, no. Like. Yeah, they repel opposites attract. So how do these two protons stick together? They're both positively charged. We would have to break that mold. Well, you'd have to have some other force that's stronger than the electrostatic repulsion between two light charges. And that's
Starting point is 00:34:33 called the strong force. It indeed exists. Then there's a fourth force, which you're very familiar with because you're, you know, you're jacked, right? That's called gravity. So you're working against gravity. You go to the gym, you do what the question is can we unify more of those forces? We already unified electricity and magnetism into one force. So we basically reduced five forces to four forces. Then they reduced another force in the 60s and 70s. One of my past guests, Sheldon Glashow, inspiration for young Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory. Oh, shit.
Starting point is 00:35:01 Really? Yeah. So he's a Nobel laureate up in Boston. He and his colleagues, Steven Weinberg and Abdesalam, they invented a way to unify together the weak nuclear force with the electric and magnetic force. And that's called Electra-Weak Theory.
Starting point is 00:35:17 So now we've reduced five forces down to two, down to three. Electra-Weak and then gravity and the strong nuclear force. Now the question is, can you unify the strong nuclear force with the electroweak force? That's called grand unified theory. If those were shown to be the manifestation of one single force, then you'd have two left. Guess what we'd want to do next? Unify a strong plus electroweak with gravity. That's called the theory of everything.
Starting point is 00:35:45 That, in some sense, is the unification that Eric attempts to achieve and that string theory attempts to achieve. So they're trying to achieve the ultimate unification. But wait, there's a problem. It would be like we built the second and third floor of this penthouse apartment here, but we never built the basement or the first floor.
Starting point is 00:36:05 In other words, we have not yet come to an agreement or any testable theory for what's called grand unification, abbreviation, gut. So I always joke, back to my hilarious joke. Yeah, the toe before the gut. Putting the toe before the gut. And I do that on a scale because I can't look down. But if you look at these phenomena, why is there an obsession with this? And I think it's because of what your past guest, Michio, said. If you could get this equation,
Starting point is 00:36:33 perhaps one inch long, I'm going to try to channel Michio. Perhaps one inch long. It could take you to the top. You would then have known and knowledge of the mind of God. Yes. That's why he calls it that. But wait a second. How can knowledge of the mind of God. Yes. That's why he calls it that.
Starting point is 00:36:46 But wait a second. How can you know the mind of God if you don't know his like pecs and his cranium? Because you don't have the gut. You don't have the gut, Michio. So why are you doing that? Why? Because what did he say inspired him the most? On this very chair, in this very type of studio when you were done.
Starting point is 00:37:02 He said Einstein. He said when he died, he noted that Einstein had on his desk a piece of paper and he was working so hard and it was to come up with this theory of everything. It's not really what he was doing. He certainly wasn't doing string theory. That's what he was referring to it as. Yeah. More than that.
Starting point is 00:37:17 Yeah. I mean it was his holy grail, his promised land. And Michio wanted to not take over – well, we don't have a grand unified theory. If Michio had come up as an age whatever he was when Einstein died, I want to be a theoretical physicist and understand how to unify together the strong nuclear force with the electromagnetic force. also did what einstein didn't do but because of this allure of being the next einstein and so forth people like him and and others have built up people like ed witten into these superhuman intellects that almost too much is invested in for it to not be right and that's no evidence for it that was the guy that eric was in in that same sit down with joe rogan when he talked about mitchio witten was the guy who he was like, I am so intimidated by this man. He's so smart or whatever.
Starting point is 00:38:09 But he hasn't – He's Voldemort. He's another guy who's smack in the middle of defending string theory. Well, he's one of the foremost progenitors of one of the closest and key insights of string theory, which is originally the string theory had 26 dimension. I would say- Can we break it down for people? Yeah, so string theory is a mathematical conception that attempts to do a unification of quantum mechanics,
Starting point is 00:38:38 which is the theory of the atomic world and the realm of the electrons and protons and croutons, not only electrons and neutrons and so forth, and their constituent particles, including things like quarks, and then combine them in a unification schema to make them compatible with gravity, to have a particle of gravity effectively that acts on the space, this very esoteric mathematical space.
Starting point is 00:39:02 And for technical reasons, you can't do it in the ordinary world of three-dimensional space that you and I love and enjoy, combined with time. So time plus space is called space-time. It is a network of points, mathematically, arbitrarily speaking, that there's not enough space, so to speak. There's not enough degrees of freedom to have all the particles come together
Starting point is 00:39:24 and manifest gravity with the particles of charge, electromagnetism, the particles of the weak force, and the particles of the strong force in four dimensions. So they go below it. They go above it. They say, actually, the space in which things are happening is not four-dimensional. We see four-dimensional space, just like we don't see the effects of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Starting point is 00:39:44 OK, yeah. But we will see the macroscopic manifestation of particles. We see their collective behavior. We can't see their individual behavior. They will say you can't even see the individual behavior of the dimensions because they're so much smaller. Their size scales in which they operate are so far removed from our observability. That's what I was talking about.
Starting point is 00:40:03 Go lower with the size. Yeah, exactly, right? So you're effectively talking about what are different schemes called compactification and so forth. So you have more than the four dimensions. Now the question is, is it five dimensions? There were theories. In other words, you could have a theory that would have quantum mechanics
Starting point is 00:40:20 and magnetism and electricity, and that actually could work in a certain sense if space time had five dimensions so if you added one more dimension it's kind of you'd have like an electromagnetic dimension and you can almost see this with things like there are birds or here's a good thing like there there's three properties to light like we're in this room there's certain color of light there's a certain intensity of light and there's something called polarization which is the least familiar property of light which is's a certain intensity of light. And there's something called polarization, which is the least familiar property of light, which is how the waves of
Starting point is 00:40:47 electricity and magnetism are marching up and down, left and right, or not at all. Yeah, I never thought about that building this. I thought about the first two. Exactly. It's totally unfamiliar because we don't have sensors to detect that. Bees do. Bees do, and there are certain crystals that can have this sense, and birds do. So they can navigate. There are certain
Starting point is 00:41:04 navigational properties that nature has embodied them to involve to have such that they can navigate using not just the color and intensity of the sun. But actually when the sun is down, they'll be able to navigate based on the polarization of the light's waves. But anyway, if you add another dimension, our eyes to our eyes capability and actually then we could see this phenomena. It would be like, yeah, we're adding an extra dimension to space-time. So we'd have super, what do they call that, extrasensory perception, sixth sense. So we don't have that. Technically, there's a tiny amount in certain people.
Starting point is 00:41:39 But anyway, the average person doesn't have it. So when you think about what they had to do, they had to say, well, what is the minimum number of additional properties of the universe that you'd have to add such that it could manifest the properties that you do want, which is to have quantum mechanics and gravity play together nicely and all operate as one single equation, one single force field. And that was found to be originally 26. You need 26 different dimensions of space. And then these abstract spaces that we can't, by definition, access because we exist in three dimensions. And even particles of light only travel in three dimensions of space and one in time. So you'd have to have some other way to access these dimensions. And then the immediate observations, we don't see any of these dimensions. So there must be either way too big for us to see. We're just these tiny little ants on a surface of a donut and we don't know that the donut is curving
Starting point is 00:42:31 in this direction or that direction. Or it's the opposite. We're these enormous macroscopic creatures and actually the space-time is curved in these phenomenally infinitesimally small dimensions of 10 to the minus 30th centimeters that we can't also not access. We can't detect them. There's no properties of particle accelerators.
Starting point is 00:42:51 There's no microscope that can zoom in, as you say, to see them. Real quick, to all my Discord people out there, the Julian Dory Discord is officially live. I put the link down in the description below. So go hit that. Join the community and say what's up. There's all kinds of features in there, and I look forward to hearing from you guys let's get it popping now what witten did is he realized that there was a way to reduce that number from 26 to 11 and then it was reduced to 10 dimensions how um so this is truly beyond even my mathematical you know uh concepts but
Starting point is 00:43:23 uh but effectively as I understand it, the compactification was a recognition that the instantiation of these particles, the properties of particles or the properties of these strings, they didn't need to have that many dimensions, the original number of dimensions. And so this was basically what won him the Fields Medal.
Starting point is 00:43:41 There's no Nobel Prize in mathematics. The closest thing is called the Fields Medal, and it's awarded to people under 40 for the greatest contribution to mathematics. And he won it for physics, basically, for these kind of laws and understanding how you could reduce the dimensionality down to a more tractable number. Over the summer, there was this big brouhaha with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk got all involved with, which is that this new study confirms or says the universe is 26 billion years old. Oh, yeah. And I talked about this with Joe on his show. And it's really one guy who I know. He's a nice guy in Canada. And he came out with some model that seems to suggest that, yeah, in certain circumstances, you could have a universe that's older.
Starting point is 00:44:27 It would be needed to be older in order to explain the properties of galaxies that are much, much younger or too young in a universe that's only 13 billion years old. And for people following out there, we basically go up the scale, solar system, galaxy, universe. So he's looking at the whole shebang here in science. Clusters of galaxies between that and then the universe. So he was looking at, really, as you look back in space, you're looking back in time.
Starting point is 00:44:54 So light, the only good thing about using imperial units of feet and so forth is that light travels one foot every nanosecond. So I'm seeing you. You're three feet away. I'm seeing you not as you are instantaneously right now. I'm seeing you three nanoseconds ago. You look very young and very vital and very healthy. But it's not instantaneous. So as you look back to the curtains behind you, those are six feet away. So it's six nanoseconds.
Starting point is 00:45:11 You keep going, go past New Jersey, Manhattan, go all the way back to the center of the Milky Way, go beyond the Milky Way, go to the local supercluster. Eventually, you're going to get back to where there's nothing in your way. No buildings, no planets, no asteroids, no galaxies. And there you're seeing back to when the earliest galaxies themselves are being formed, if they exist. And what this Rajendra Gupta at University of Ottawa said was, well, based on my calculations, one person's calculations, you know, bolstered by, you know, he didn't make any errors or blunders, but he sort of came to the conclusion that the universe had to be much older.
Starting point is 00:45:45 We'll talk about that later because that is a proper controversy that we can discuss. There are others that say the universe is infinitely old. So he's – even though it's twice the age of the accepted universe that Gupta has come up with, it's still a hell of a lot younger than an infinitely old universe that this other guy, Eric Lerner, had come up with about a year before that. I just don't know how you can, and this is the total non-scientist take sitting on the sidelines, just looking at this from the broadest lens you can. I don't know how you can possibly date something that we have, like, we haven't reached the limits of our solar system, let alone the galaxy, right? and there's obviously things that can go into how how physics works to say that we have things like galaxies and and there are collections
Starting point is 00:46:31 of galaxies to form the collection of galaxies in the universe but like to talk about the entire thing which could be infinite numerical values away from us and to put a to put a a finite age on it that does not process for me yeah well i can't i just want to correct you with my trademark love and affection uh it can't be infinite if the universe is not infinitely old yes okay sorry but there are people not necessarily the highest respected scientists out there um even working as professional researchers just kind of pundits almost that do say the universe is infinitely old and is static and has never changed. There is abundant evidence that the universe is not infinitely old and infinitely static and infinitely unchanging. But to give them their due, they're in good company. I mean, Einstein
Starting point is 00:47:18 believed until 1929 that the universe was static, effectively static. And in fact, he injected into his famous equations a term that would counteract the gravitational collapse that he knew as a brilliant man would be inevitable for a universe that only has matter. So I told you before, protons repel each other. A proton and an electron attract each other because they're opposite charges.
Starting point is 00:47:41 There's no such thing as negative gravitational charge. In other words, gravity is only attractive. In our solar system, there's no gravitational repulsion. There's no like anti-matter that causes anti-gravity. Right, it doesn't push you. Right. So Einstein then realized, well, I'm pretty smart. I know we live in a galaxy. Galaxy is made of stars and gas and dust and planets. That's matter. That's only attractive. How come it's not collapsing in on itself? How come I'm here to ask the question of why is there a galaxy at all? So he injected into his equations of what's called general relativity, which corrected the flaws in Newton's gravity
Starting point is 00:48:15 in the same process of going from flat Earth to spherical Earth to pear-shaped Earth, et cetera. That process is one of refinement. You start off off with an idea you look for the flaws in it then you look to find evidence and an explanation for why those flaws exist and how to correct them to make a better approximation a more accurate approximation and hopefully one that's more precise so what einstein did is he said i'm going to inject this fluid that fills the universe called the cosmological constant or the vacuum energy and that's going to act like the pressure inside of a balloon that keeps the universe expanded out against gravitational collapse of all the ordinary matter in the universe. And so he did that, later recanted it when he saw from Hubble
Starting point is 00:48:58 that every single galaxy Hubble could see was moving away from the Milky Way galaxy. So at first, the very first thing he could say was, the universe is not static, right? Do you agree that in a universe where things are moving, that the universe is not static? Is that, I mean, I'm asking you. Yeah. Yeah, right. So that torpedoed a scientific idea that held sway for 2,000 years. Can I go back for one second just to make sure I didn't mix that up at the end? But when you were saying static, because there was up at the end but when you were
Starting point is 00:49:25 saying static there was a lot in there yeah when you were saying static he's referring to it didn't have necessarily beginning it just always was all all i'm saying is static means that's unchanging it means that the only five things they knew that moved are the planets they didn't know about the other things that were moving in the universe up until you know galileo and and uh using the telescope but you had said that einstein before he changed his opinion on this had thought you know there wasn't like a beginning that had a creator he certainly didn't think that and then he didn't even think that there was something moving or expanding or collapsing remember with when you have when you have gravity and you have this mysterious other force that could blow up the universe or cause it to contract slower or ultimately contract on itself, he wasn't thinking at all about the origin of the universe. That wasn't what was leading him.
Starting point is 00:50:14 He was looking at the evidence and the evidence showed that there are all these nebulae which they thought were outside or perhaps even inside the Milky Way galaxy. And the Milky Way galaxy wasn't collapsing in on itself. So forget about these other galaxies for a second, although they're the crucial key insight that Hubble provided to Einstein to reject his original idea. But looking at just the Milky Way galaxy, there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, over 100 billion stars.
Starting point is 00:50:38 They are not all collapsing together, even to the black hole at the middle of the Milky Way galaxy. What's causing them not to do that? Well, Einstein thought the universe was the Milky Way galaxy. And he said there must be some force, some pressure that's keeping them perfectly balanced, which is very weird, right? Now, it turns out, Julian, let's blow your mind.
Starting point is 00:50:55 It is true that there is a fluid that does keep the universe inflated against collapse on itself, but it's doing too much inflation. It's actually causing the universe to expand exponentially faster over time. So tomorrow's expansion rate, the galaxy that's at a certain distance away from us, is going to be farther tomorrow, and it's going to be accelerating away from us at a greater rate than it is today. But Einstein didn't know that back then. So to be honest with you, I've committed the ultimate, you know, podcaster, you know, cardinal sin. So I don't remember what got us on the subject. But just to say that in gravity with these unification, you know, back going back to
Starting point is 00:51:33 string theory, perhaps. That's what we were doing. We were doing string theory. The ultimate goal would be to explain why is the universe expanding like this? Why are the ultimate building blocks of nature, the very smallest things in nature that we know about, why are they responsible for the large-scale behavior of the universe? And you mentioned, I think, which did get me on this tangent, it's incomprehensible. How do we even know the universe? We haven't only gone to the, you know, we've only sent people to the moon. Like, how can we say something about a galaxy that's 100 billion light years away um or less than that but the point is is that in in science you have to do the following you have to have some idea of the
Starting point is 00:52:13 current best guess for the composition and dynamics of the universe and then you have to ask a question what is it about the universe that i can predict will happen tomorrow based on the evidence today? And then using that same inductive framework, yesterday, if I was a scientist yesterday, knowing what I knew only yesterday and not today, what would I have predicted about the universe today? And then you keep iterating that process backwards to the past, into the future, and you ask, do I reach a terminus? Do I reach a point in which there is no way to go back further in time to the past or to the future? Which would point to creation. A big bang or an origin of time or a collapse of a previous universe into the raw constituents of our current universe.
Starting point is 00:52:58 And all these models have had ideas from antiquity to today. I mean, I was reading about an Egyptian cosmology from the year 1000 BCE. That's basically a cyclical universe that comes in and out of existence. And there are models that have been static, Aristotle to Newton to Einstein, believe the universe was static, unchanging. And then the question is, given the evidence that you have today, can you falsify any of those narratives? Yes, we can falsify many, many hundreds of thousands of cosmogenies, origins, genesis of the universe, models for it. And what's left is a handful, a small handful. But we can't do that with string theory. We can't really say, well, based on the evidence, this is incompatible with string theory and it's compatible with geometric unity. So that when I do what I do, my job is to, again, not prove these brilliant men and women right. It's to hopefully falsify as many of them as possible. So I ask Eric all the time. He comes and visits. He gives lectures. I go see him. Stephen Wolfram and I talk frequently. We're going to talk again soon.
Starting point is 00:54:06 I'd love to talk with that guy. Yeah, he's a brilliant guy, yeah. He's up in Massachusetts. You know, we'll see. He's kind of a night owl, so it might be, you know, like midnight on a Tuesday. Love it. We'll get some liquor flowing through the whole deal. So my job is to always hector these people and say to them,
Starting point is 00:54:23 what is it that I can turn my $100 million plus Simon's Observatory on? What can you sick the dogs of experimental physics on to get out the falsification, the disproof of what you're saying? Because they're good scientists. So they'll say, well, I predict that there's, you know. So Eric's theory has some unique predictions. One is that it has two dimensions of time. Two dimensions? Not just one dimension.
Starting point is 00:54:50 How does that work? So this is a reason for you to chat with him at some point. But the manifestation of two dimensions in time allows for – is an additional dimension in the same way that Witten's 10 dimensions are additional dimensions of space. So you should no more ask why two dimensions of time than why are there only three dimensions of space? Why can't you move back? Why aren't there two dimensions of time right now? In other words, why is it possible that there couldn't be so-called what are called closed loops that in certain trajectories you could make an excursion in time. And there were people that believe this about the standard model way before Eric that proposed multidimensional time.
Starting point is 00:55:30 He's not the first person to propose it. And that time property has to have different behaviors, the second dimension of time that then dovetail with the ordinary behavior of our current arrow of time. And that would imply also – am I incorrect in saying that would imply you could manipulate the arrow of time. And that would imply also, and am I incorrect in saying that would imply you could manipulate the motion of time? I'm not sure exactly how. It would be, you know, certainly that you could perhaps make excursions. I say you could take paths and there are trajectories that a person or an entity or particle could have. Again, we're not talking about people. These could be very compactified as well. So then the question is, well, how could you verify or validate that? How could you validate
Starting point is 00:56:10 that there's only three dimensions of space? How can you validate that gravity travels at the same speed as ordinary time or ordinary light does? And so these are questions that I ask them. And only in certain theories will you get an answer. And it turns out Eric's theory makes other predictions that are a little bit more testable than these compactified dimensions. The particle inventory of how many particles there are in the universe is a measurable quantity. In other words, we don't know all the particles that could possibly exist. So how's it measurable if we don't know? Because they have other properties in addition to like their names or whatever we call them, for example. They have intrinsic properties called spin, mass, and charge. But couldn't there be particles far beyond what we can visibly understand that we wouldn't even know how they would exist because we don't understand how that would work?
Starting point is 00:57:02 Well, at a certain level, you could always say that because you could could say but i could also say couldn't there be god or couldn't there be a poltergeist or couldn't there you know so yeah couldn't there be absolutely but then the question is well how come i always ask like how come these poltergeists and what and near-death experiences and so how come they met they don't manifest themselves with an interaction with the ordinary world or they only do for certain people, right? So these particles, let's say, we'll call it the poltergeist particle in Eric's theory, right? So this poltergeist particle does have an interaction in his theory or will have a manifestation, even though it may not exist to this day. It may have decayed away, it may no longer exist. But because his theory makes definitive predictions about the inventory of these particles, which again, only have,
Starting point is 00:57:44 every particle is fungible, right? Like one electron is as good as any other electron. If it has the same properties, it has a spin, an angular momentum, a charge, and a mass. You can swap one out for the other. You'll never, if I swapped every electron in your body out with another electron, or here's another symmetry. If I swapped every proton, neutron, and electron in your body out with its antimatter equivalent, I mean, I wouldn't exist because you'd annihilate everything in this room, but you could exist. I mean, there could be completely antimatter versions of this. We've even seen that gravity affects antimatter identical to the way it affects ordinary matter.
Starting point is 00:58:17 And some models of string theory or other models, other alternative unification ideas, do not feature that. So every time you do a test, it can be used to exclude the properties of a hypothesized new force, interaction, or particle. And that's where it's valuable to be the Roosevelt's man in the arena that's actually making predictions. And that's why I get so flummoxed and frustrated and upset when you hear theorists who are a lot closer to it than Brian Keating is. They say, I don't have time to look at your theory. What else are you doing? It's been 50 years. As you said, string theory has been around for 50 years. There are people making refinements
Starting point is 00:58:54 upon refinements upon refinements of it. Why not spend some of your time dedicated to either what particle physicists could do, what experimental cosmologists could do. And if you say there's nothing, there's no way to test this, then that's a you problem, right? I mean, it's not up to me to think about ways that I could be able to test geometric unity. And it happens to be that, as I said, he makes certain predictions with colleagues. There are ways to bridge the gap between the phenomena that he's proposing with the experimental observables that my team and I can observe, and then test those and hopefully rule out as much as possible. But again, never with the goal of proving. Yeah, there's a lot of ego that goes into anything where there's high intelligence. It's just the nature of the beast. You look throughout human history,
Starting point is 00:59:40 it's never been different. But I did ask Michio about that when he was in here. Do you believe in God? Well, I believe in the God of Einstein. He believed in God, but not the God that intervenes in human affairs. It was the God of order, the God of simplicity and elegance. Einstein was asked the question, did the universe have a choice? Is it unique? So universes, you can create universes in an afternoon, but most of them are unstable. Most of them fall apart. Most of them don't work. Our universe is stable.
Starting point is 01:00:14 It works. Everything fits together. And then the question is, what set off the bang? That's what we do for a living. We have the Big Bang Theory up to the point where the universe is going to explode. Why did it explode? We think it was a quantum event. And we are here because we are in the universe which decided to explode.
Starting point is 01:00:33 So Einstein said, was it all an accident? And he thought, no, it could not have been an accident. Towards the end, I asked him something along the lines of, would you be upset if all your work in your life was proven wrong? Or would you be happy to know that that's kind of the whole point of it in the first place? And I don't want to say what he said because I'll get it wrong. But his answer was very, very well thought. It wasn't as much like, no, look i i want to be right about this or i want to be mostly right about it and if i'm not you know it all goes away and to me when you
Starting point is 01:01:12 look across a lot of science and you could talk about this with the disagreement he may have with weinstein in this case where maybe he's not looking at it or something like that but when you look across science there's so much tied to if you you are told you're wrong, that means that you provided no value to, in my opinion, though, we can study these guys from history. We can study the Einsteins and the concepts that they came up with. And if it's all proven wrong, but that, that incorrectness actually unlocked a layer for us to look at, to be able to get step farther than – to me, that makes the word beautiful. That makes it the whole point of like the definition of the word itself. And also say like wrong or right.
Starting point is 01:01:53 You're acting – and I'm not saying you. I'm just saying one is acting as if science is what's called a finite game. So I don't know. Carol Dweck has this notion of infinite and finite games. I think it's her. It might be somebody else. But anyway, she has the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. Carol Dweck, you said?
Starting point is 01:02:11 Carol Dweck. But it's actually look up infinite game. Simon Sinek wrote a book about it, but he's not the one who identified it first. So there's a concept called the infinite game. It's something where there are clear players, clear rules, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a winner and a loser. Chess is paradigmatic of this, okay? So when you have a finite game, there's a winner and a loser. When you have an infinite game, the object of an infinite game is to keep playing. And the infinite game is very much akin to science. Science cannot be one.
Starting point is 01:02:45 But the paradoxical thing is that science is comprised of innumerable finite games. Let me mention one. Undergraduate getting into college. Like you got into some undergraduate college, that means someone else didn't, right? Then you get into graduate school. Then you do what's called a postdoc. Then you might be another postdoc. Then you might be an assistant professor. Then you have to get tenure. Not everyone. So all these hurdles,
Starting point is 01:03:08 all these, I call it the academic hunger games, because you're like fighting against these people in tribute to, you know, basically your own career of what you want to do in science. And then getting grants is even harder. And then getting publications, right? So winner and a loser. But at all these levels, and yet what's the ultimate game that you're playing you're playing an infinite game you can't win science there's no such thing so when somebody says well i hope that i'm right or i hope that i'm wrong they are treating science as if it's an infinite a finite game and i think that's fundamentally misconstrued so i don't remember what mitchio said but uh but it's natural is it let's be frank it's not if i said to you oh it's great you know if i get falsified you know and I'm proven wrong or I'm in a blunder or I do something dumb, like, oh, it's great.
Starting point is 01:03:49 I'll write another book. No. Obviously, as a human being – and you often hear this about projects like the Large Hadron Collider or building another version, a Super Hadron Collider around the circumference of the moon. You hear these things that there could be future things that cost trillions of dollars, right? And it's probably not likely to happen. And some people say, oh, the most interesting thing would be if we don't see what we expected, if we never saw the Higgs boson at the large hand.
Starting point is 01:04:15 That would have been so exciting. I'm like, no, it wouldn't be. It would be 20, 30 billion euros wasted in thousands of hours in people's lives. I mean, you're dealing with people's lives. And I think that's part of the problem that Eric has with people like Witten and even the ideology of Kaku or what have you. That they seem monomaniacally focused on one thing being right and everything else being wrong. And they don't explore as far as I'm aware.
Starting point is 01:04:39 I have yet to see a paper by, say, Ed Witten where he's looking and trying to explore the intricacies of a rival theory called – not Eric's theory, but let's call it loop quantum gravity. Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, brilliant people that promulgated this for Yabba Ashtakar. Brilliant, brilliant minds. I haven't seen like a debate between those two. I think people want to see Eric fight it out with Michio, although I wasn't clear from the interview if if mitch you had any idea who eric was so the full story there is actually a little bit funny yeah so i i do i'm not a gotcha guy i know right i don't do the whole you're walking into a buzzsaw here and i'm gonna be sure no not at all not at all that's not my job you want to go to like cbs or abc or fox news or cnn go do that but when when he came in and we were setting up the studio
Starting point is 01:05:27 and everything i didn't really think about it i just casually asked him oh did you see because it was kind of funny like let's be honest like eric weinstein is is mitchy okaka he is out of control he is involuntarily funny as fuck i think he knows what he's doing and so the like the way he said it he's just sitting there and sometimes i feel like he's having a con like especially when he's on with joe like he's just having a conversation with himself and joe's just like okay like i don't know but he's sitting there and out of nowhere he's like michiokaku get michiokaku in here with me michiokaku's out of control and he's like staring at at Joe. And Joe's like, why? He's like, he's doing this.
Starting point is 01:06:06 He's doing that. And so I said to Michio, I said, you know, what did you think of that? You know, do you think there's valid criticism or whatever? And he looks me dead in the eyes and he goes, who said this? And I go, Eric Weinstein. He was talking about this on Joe Rogan. You've been on Joe Rogan before, right? And he goes, yes, but who is this person? i'm like eric weinstein the mathematician do you think he was
Starting point is 01:06:30 like um belittling eric not at all anyway i want to think i want to be so he just has no idea i want to be so clear but isn't that a problem julian there's not a problem that you don't know who your chief i'm not saying you have to respond to every troll or whatever do everything but um but that you don't know who they are necessarily and um and and that be speaks again he asked for it though to be clear like yeah like he said he said i don't know who this is right and he was like can can you show me this right and then he said oh let's get in the kitchen and then i replied well i'm happy to provide the you know the utensils and my god and the g the Gordon Ramsay-like experience as your impartial host. And I've had both of them on, obviously. I've been on Michio's podcast.
Starting point is 01:07:09 I've been on Eric's, although he never published it. All right. Sorry about that. We should be good now. But we were talking about how Kaku didn't know about what some of the critics were saying. And I'm sorry if your point got cut off there. But, yeah, I do want to be clear. There was no – there was zero like zero like oh who the fuck is that
Starting point is 01:07:25 none of that he was he asked to look at it and then he was like it was hilarious watching him like turn to the tv and like intently watch and i my friends looking at me going like this behind but he watched it for like 90 seconds and he's like what i'd have to look at the theory but he's like if you can't take heat don't come in kitchen kitchen. And I was like, oh, my god. Fucking hilarious. When he was – I think when he was saying that, it did seem like, well, maybe he'd be open to it. Maybe he wouldn't. But look at it.
Starting point is 01:07:58 There's a famous quote I think from Richard Dawkins. When you say there's somebody who wants to debate you, Professor know, Professor Keating or, you know, Professor Dawkins. You're wrong about evolution. He goes, I can see how that would look really good on your CV. I can see how it would look really bad on my CV, right? So there's this sort of risk aversion for people, you know, that have gotten to the level of a Witten, you know, Fields medalist. Is he going to talk to Brian Keating? I mean he's turned down my many requests to talk
Starting point is 01:08:25 right whitten has yeah but he hasn't he doesn't really talk on stuff right no i mean he'll go on talk with that one guy he's talking yeah he's talked with a gram for mellows a friend who's i've had him yeah um and that's fine you know he's he's moved away i mean he's been getting into more esoteric actually related to astrophysics rather than you know string theory and stuff like that in recent years. But again, if you look at their publication records and you say, well, what are these doing? How many papers are they putting out? How many students are they advising? How many conferences are they going to speak at? Do they truly not have time to look at – I mean,
Starting point is 01:08:59 there's only like two or three theories that have come up that are plausible challengers. And I've had them on and I also hold them to account carlo ravelli look this result from you know these these quasars at a distance of you know a billion light years they seem to be inconsistent with the discretization of of loop quantum gravity what do you have to say about that oh that's a good idea you know but like i'm sure that he knows i'm sure carlo and eric Garrett Lisi and Stephen Wolfram are more than familiar with string theory. And the question I always have is why isn't the converse true? Why don't these other people have an understanding or the limitations of just some of the basics? And Eric points these out all the time.
Starting point is 01:09:39 Why are there three generations of fermions? Why are there no spin three halves particles? So there are lacunae flaws in string theory. Everybody knows that. There's what flaws? Lacunae or lack. Gaps. There are gaps in the education.
Starting point is 01:09:53 All these science terms, man. You're trying to throw them right above me. I'm from Jersey. You got to go slower. Okay. Well, you know what they call the Holland Tunnel, right? $20 is a cheap price to get out of New Jersey. I just kid.
Starting point is 01:10:04 I kid because i love the origin of the universe was discovered here in new jersey right edison was that's right he might have stole some tech so was tesla here tesla was here yeah yeah that's the guy he might have stole from yeah he could be right we got both of them so they were rivals right so you see this you see these ego now that's in the thing where there's not only intellectual um stakes and bounties right there's finance tremendous financial bounties, right? And that, you know, as well as ego and so forth. So when you look at the landscape of it,
Starting point is 01:10:31 I always want to just ask, here's a rubric, here's a checklist, here's, if I'm talking to my students, I ask them, here's what you have to do to get in. Like you have to do a certain amount of homework, you have to participate in class, you have to do, you know, discussion sections if you want to get extra, you know, so there's a whole list of things that they have to do. For string theory,
Starting point is 01:10:47 what would it have to do? What phenomena would it have to explain? And the beauty is that all these things have the same job. They all are trying to explain the fundamental linkage of gravity with the other forces of nature. But again, again, you don't see these people. So let's say that they can't attest to string theory. They can't – there's no way that you can prove or disprove string theory other than getting 30 orders magnitude range in the mass of the electron, say, as Cameron Buffett told me. Let's say you can't do that. Why aren't the same people working on a grand unified theory, which you can test? You could test it with the Large Hadron Collider. In other words, there are ways to test –
Starting point is 01:11:22 How would that work? Well, there are certain... I mean, how deep do you want to get into how particle colliders work and so forth? You can. Okay, so if you have... If I show you collisions
Starting point is 01:11:31 between a bowling ball and a crystal ball, you can learn things about the properties of the materials that each one is made of by how they behave when they interact
Starting point is 01:11:42 with each other, depending on the speed. So you shoot them together at one inch per hour. Nothing's going to happen. You shoot them at one kilometer per second. Something is going to happen when that occurs, right? So depending on, and then you learn,
Starting point is 01:11:54 well, the strength of the materials, one is stronger than the other. One is more massive than the other. You learn about the shrapnel that tells you about the materials properties, the chemistry, right? It's the analog here with particles. Particles don't have chemistry. They're particle physics, right? So you learn about the interactions. Are
Starting point is 01:12:08 they interacting at the level of 10 to the minus 10 centimeters? How strong is the interaction between these particles? What is their cross-section? Are there other particles participating, adding to the dynamics of the collision, the shrapnel that comes out from them? All those things you can learn from particle accelerators. And again, what we're trying to do in the grand unified theory, and test your knowledge, right, is not unified with gravity, which could require the entire universe to test, right? They're testing the properties of particles, the unification of electricity and magnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. To my mind, that's an unsolved problem. It's right there for the picking but guess what you don't get maybe the same glory as you know you don't get to be put
Starting point is 01:12:50 in the same book you know that has the god equation as its title as einstein and kaku and witten it is marketed very well like the the what they're trying to get at to leave off with einstein's work that was left on his desk the marketing of we're looking for reading the mind of god i mean yeah how do you beat that right yeah and there's a very it's much more quotable to say that that i'm looking for the uh the reaction cross-section in barns between a muon and a uh and a positron you just don't get the attention for doing that well the big problem here as we laid out earlier on in this podcast, is that we're still at a point here in late 2023
Starting point is 01:13:31 where it's not testable to do string theory. And I feel like, looking at it from the outside, part of that holding on to it and putting an emphasis on string theory being the – having the most potential to be correct is the fact that there is this multigenerational wait to see when we can test it. So do you think it's possible that if we get to like quantum computing or something like that, we will be able to test something – particles that small that would be a part of string theory i actually don't know if it requires new technology it may in the sense that uh when we start to look at the uh the the earliest moments of the universe the best collider that you can get is the one with the most energy because when you smash these things together you're inter you're showing not
Starting point is 01:14:22 only the constituents the chemistry of the bowling ball and the crystal ball, you're showing not only the constituents, the chemistry of the bowling ball and the crystal ball, right? You're also exploring what freedom do these particles have to move in different directions. And that's part of what these particle accelerators get out. Now, the particle accelerator that the largest one ever built is a large hadron collider. It's about 27 kilometers in circumference. It goes between France and Switzerland. And it's an incredible monument to the technology and the physics of the 21st century. It's where the Higgs boson was discovered, but very little else. There are other experiments there not related to finding new properties about the Higgs. And when I say that they found the Higgs,
Starting point is 01:15:03 that means that they measured the three properties of a particle, the fungible three that are the mass and the charge and the spin of a particle. That's really, it's on its license plate. That's what each one of these things has and nothing else. So again, each one is interchangeable. So they discovered what is the charge of the Higgs boson, which was zero. What is the mass of the higgs boson which was zero what is the mass of the higgs boson so number 125 giga electron volts um with accuracy in other words it had previously been a maximum limit like when i said you're a thousand kilograms it was like you're 125 26 kilograms at the upper end and you're 124 kilograms at the lower end very precise very precisely and it's gotten better and better with time but that that's really it. I mean these are heroic contributors. I had on Harry Cliff who's an amazing young scientist.
Starting point is 01:15:49 Many people from the Higgs collapsed from people that worked on the LHC rather. Part of it is led from UC San Diego where I am. And two different experiments measured exactly the same results. It's a beautiful thing. And these are billions of dollars worth of experiments and tens of thousands of people's career years so uh i don't want to dismiss it or cast any experience in heroic accomplishment but to date that 20 billion dollar project when you include the construction plus operating it for over a decade and the upgrades to it has been you know tremendously underwhelming i think of most physicists not
Starting point is 01:16:24 because they didn't do a good job just that's all that they were able to access with that level of microscopy of looking at the finest scale interactions between these things. We don't believe that any collider like our current generation collider can do it. But the biggest collider there could ever be is when the first moments of the universe produced the first particles energy forces and fields and that's the kind of topics that my colleagues and i are trying to get into the big bang with this yeah so the big bang is is basically a term that we use for multiple things one is the formation of the universe i.e the beginning of time one is the earliest epoch in the universe that we can apply known laws of physics to. And that could be because
Starting point is 01:17:07 of limitations on our understanding of physics or it could be in limitations of what is possible to know. In other words, there may not have been any moment before the Tuesday in which the Big Bang occurred or what have you. So looking at the universe as a collider and then looking at the shrapnel that comes off of that collider, namely the artifacts, the fossils that have persisted throughout time, just in the same way that, you know, the Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's a fossil, there's a relic, you know, the Lost Ark, it's traveled through space and time to get to us today. And we can make models about, well, how was it formed? Where did it come from? And what have you, or a T-Rex skeleton. You know, we can make models of how old it is, how it was formed, maybe how many other such objects exist.
Starting point is 01:17:50 The same thing we do with this meteorite that you get on my website or that I gave to you as a great cost. Four billion years, baby. Let's go. So you make models and then you can test them. We can do the same thing. We can ask questions. What is the earliest epoch that we have physical evidence from? What are those pieces of evidence? And what can the archaeology of space
Starting point is 01:18:09 time tell us about not only what those conditions were like back then, but what will happen in the future of our universe? And that's kind of uniquely the purview of cosmology. We've never done a particle, like we've never detected, I shouldn't say we've never, caught what are called cosmic rays, particles from the sun or from supernovae, or at least they're like protons and electrons accelerated near the speed of light. A single particle with the energy of, you know, of, I was going to say Nolan Ryan, but I don't really, maybe. I'll say. Nolan Ryan could still throw. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:43 Jake Snell. Okay. Padres Snell. Okay. Padres, right? Okay. Hopefully Cy Young or I don't know if you want the Cy Young or not. But anyway, a fastball. A single particle with the energy of a fastball from a major league baseball pitcher. Okay.
Starting point is 01:18:54 These are discovered. They were discovered in space or on balloons on the earth in 1920s and 30s. But those are some of the only particle properties that we ever discovered using astronomical technology. But now, almost without disagreement, the future discoveries in particle physics will come from cosmology and astrophysics. The properties, there is a type of, there are only
Starting point is 01:19:15 17 so-called elementary particles. That's a particle you can't chop into another particle. A proton can be chopped into quarks. Right? We can't chop up the quarks. A neutron also into quarks. An electron cannot be chopped into anything. What string theory will say,
Starting point is 01:19:32 oh no, it's a manifestation of vibration of a string, right? But we don't know that for sure. So what we know, there's 17 of them, including the Higgs boson, that can't be destroyed or reduced further. So they're called elements, elementary particles. There are three of them. They're called neutrinos. We know that the neutrinos have mass that they weigh a little
Starting point is 01:19:49 bit actually the lightest of the known particles but we don't know what that mass is with experiments like the simons observatory and other astronomical observatories we can constrain and actually detect the mass of these wispy ghost particles, which trillions are going through us every day from nuclear reactions from the sun and throughout the cosmos. So we're going to measure for the first time with a telescope the properties of something that used to be measured with a microscope, like a particle accelerator. It'll be as if we're going to learn about DNA from looking through an x-ray telescope. It kind of should blow your mind, right? We're going to learn about the building blocks of nature by looking through a telescope,
Starting point is 01:20:30 like the ultimate tiniest things. No, we're going to learn about them from the universe as a particle accelerator laboratory and effectively a grand experiment on which every property of every particle plays out. So it's's quite exciting time to be a cosmologist in particular it's wild how much innovation we have out there they're like guys like me never even think about and even when you listen to podcasts you're only touching the surface of what everyone in the world is working on it's just crazy to me and i'm sure it's way crazier yeah it's actually harder when you're in the field right but do you ever you ever – we touched a little bit on creation in this conversation so far but not like specifically. Do you ever just get stressed out about not knowing where it all began as a scientist?
Starting point is 01:21:17 Everyone thinks about this to be clear obviously. It's the meaning of life. But as a scientist where you're trying to find your way there, does it ever just just like you're like holy shit like it crashes in on you a little bit um i don't i don't have as many of those you know kind of moral quandaries or crises of faith and i think it's because of something i heard you know in the saying something like you you know, in the, in the, a poor person has, you know, basically a rich man has many, many worries and a poor man only has one or a sick man only has one wish. Right. So I think the crisis of, of sort of, you know, meaning, uh, is a luxury that one will have. I'm not saying you're some entitled person, but the byproduct of how amazing it has been
Starting point is 01:22:07 for civilization to have relative periods of freedom and peace, where we're at liberty to just do things that are useless, that don't actually create GDP or directly impact a cure for some disease or something like that. So in my estimation, I'm so busy, concerned with
Starting point is 01:22:28 logistics of day-to-day activities of trying to get this student to get his PhD, trying to teach this class of undergraduates, trying to prepare this paper for publication. And these things take so much time trying to get people to a telescope to take data so that we can release it and publish findings. So the funding agencies will keep supporting us and we can keep developing and expanding and making new inroads and so forth. So as an experimentalist, I don't really have the luxury to sit around and think about, oh, well, what does it all mean? Now, as a religious person, as somebody who is a practicing Jew and does proceed to think about the ultimate meaning of life on a daily basis, multiple times
Starting point is 01:23:13 a day in fact, then I do question how people don't come up with those moral and existential crises. And I kind of hinted at it before in the context of theoretical you know scientists versus experimental scientists in that you know all of what we do is you know it may be important but it may not be significant like the average thing that you know is it going to really change the world i feel that way by the way about like celebrities or you know people even people i you know are they important yes are they significant they significant? Is a Kardashian like changing the future of the world? I don't know. Maybe to someone who likes Skims or whatever, right?
Starting point is 01:23:54 She's got a lot of good merch. I envy that. But by the same token, if you don't think about the existential questions, then you shouldn't be a scientist. If it never occurs to you that what you're trying to do is unveil the ultimate building blocks of nature that have been hidden for the entirety of human existence up until now, and you have a right to be a part of that, and you don't question it or think about the big picture, I think there's almost, should feel evocative of embarrassment that you're just basically doing a technical trade, which is beautiful. I love technicians. I used to work on old cars. I still do. I love technical things. I don't love plumbing. I'll get somebody to do it.
Starting point is 01:24:36 But I'm not denigrating that at all. But those people, their jobs are not to think about the origin of existentialism. And yet your job is in a certain sense. Now, should that lead to a feeling of panic? I don't necessarily think so. I think it should be, it should energize without enervating. It shouldn't be irritated about it. But likewise, I get, I get, you know, kind of bemused or, you know, just find it a little bit silly when you hear people that are, you know, that will talk about, well, because we're so small in the universe, that actually gives me great comfort because like our lives are basically meaningless compared to the vast expanse of history, the future unknowable domain and the size of things in the universe that make us basically, you know, this,
Starting point is 01:25:22 this speck of dust, you know, floating in, dust floating on a sunbeam. I think that's grandiose. I think that's false humility. I don't know anyone who acts like that, like, oh, I'm not going to pay my taxes because what is it? What is life? Like Annie Hall when Alvy is a young man and he won't do his homework and he says, I'm not doing my homework, mom, and his mom takes him to a therapist. The therapist says, Alfie, why aren't you doing your homework? And he goes, because the whole universe is expanding. And after a billion years, the universe will rip
Starting point is 01:25:52 apart and everything. And his mom goes, shut up, you idiot. Brooklyn is not expanding. So it's true. You have to balance that. You have to balance the grandiose with the quotidian, with the daily kind of activities. And to me, you know, my job is this ideal balance between the two. I get to do what I love. I would do it for free. I did do it for free for, you know, most of my childhood. Have a telescope, look up, make images, make sketches, you know, develop ideas and theories for stuff. Learn about the calculus behind the orbits of the com comments that I was seeing and stuff like that. It really got me into it. Never did I once think it could be a job, you know, that could pay me.
Starting point is 01:26:30 And that payment would be, you know, the payment and the additional payment that I believe I received from my channel and doing outreach to the public who ultimately pay our salaries as professors. And I don't care where you are. You could be at Harvard or you could be at Cal State, San Marcos or whatever. You still are making a difference because of the largesse of the American taxpayer at a certain level in your education. So to me, to not give back and not explore it. So my podcast is where I scratch that itch of the existentialism, the theoretical, the philosophical.
Starting point is 01:27:04 I'm going to speak to a philosopher later today, a philosopher of physics, David Albert, a woman in Manhattan, Brian Greene. Those are the chances that you get to talk about the real meaningful things, the people that I want to talk to. And then there are people I have to talk to. There are people at different government bureaucracies and campus administration. I have to deal, those are not certain people that I want to talk to. I wouldn't like, you know, it's funny because my wife's like, oh, well, I love, you know, I'm always like, oh, why don't you just call an Instacart? She's like, no, I like to go to the supermarket. I'm like, oh yeah. So if our neighbor
Starting point is 01:27:37 called you and said like, I'll pay you five bucks to go to the supermarket for me, you go and do it. Like kind of rationalize stuff that you like to do. I know I have to do that. There's committee work. And it's funny because as a professor, I thought as a kid, when I thought about what professors did, I was like, oh, they're just sitting around, you know, they're stroking their beards or they're looking through telescopes all day. And I'm like on telecons, you know, way more than I'm on telescopes. And, and that's kind of unfortunate, you know, for the young kid version of me. But I luckily get to kind of embellish and delve into that other side of my character when I get to do podcasts and be a part of what they do as you laid out there is to think about these things. And I will admit I have the luxury, I guess, of thinking about it sometimes. Usually it's late at night when my thoughts aren't so quiet and I'm trying to make them quiet.
Starting point is 01:28:39 And then, of course, I start thinking about, well, what is nothing? Why is that? Nothing has to be something in order for nothing to exist. And then the edibles kick in. That's it. Even without the edibles, man, I'm thinking about it sometimes. But, you know, it's the ultimate question we all have, what happens when the lights turn off and when we're not here and what we're doing. And if there were ever a scientific way to prove that, it'd be pretty fucking incredible.
Starting point is 01:29:05 Yeah. But, you know, to look at your own background and what kind of where you've been, I know you laid out a lot of your childhood and story when you were with Joe Rogan. So I don't want to go through all of it here. Like people can listen. I did a great job with that. But you were adopted into a Catholic family. You later became Jewish, but somewhere along the way, you were atheist, and now you consider yourself agnostic. And I was thinking about that while you were answering that question, because it seemed to me like you
Starting point is 01:29:34 were maybe implying that there was something at the beginning. So for people out there who aren't as familiar with agnosticism, what is that, and what does that mean to you? Yeah, agnosticism kind of arose as a middle ground, perhaps, between the purely theistic conception, where there are just people that have ultimate faith, and they almost, faith transcends into belief, almost at the level of evidence and direct encounter with Jesus or God or whoever. And then there are the atheists, which means not theists. So you're defined by what you're not, which is kind of strange. And then there's this middle ground of folks called agnostics, which means that it's not knowable.
Starting point is 01:30:18 Gnosticism is a sect or an ideology that suggests that there are truths that are knowable, eschatological, what happens in the deep future, end times, or after death. One of my kids was asking me, what happens, what did I look like before I was born? I'm like, what the? Where's that children's Flintstones chewable edible? No, I don't do that. But looking at these big picture topics, thinking as a scientist, what is knowable via the scientific method? In other words, when I said before, you can make up whatever theory you want, but if it doesn't interact with the standard model of particle
Starting point is 01:30:58 physics, with gravity, with forces and fields and particles that we know about, then it's just literally complete esoteric self-history and philosophy, right? And that's what some people accuse string theory of. And then there's a counter-reaction that, no, it'll actually make predictions. We just don't have enough energy to get to them, okay? Let's leave that aside. But if you say something like God, like, does God exist? So a theologically inclined person person will say God exists. He intervenes. He's a personal God. Yeah. I'm talking about Judeo Christian God. And it's the only one I'm familiar with, but, um, but, uh, he interacts in the physical world. Well, then there should be some physically, you should be able to build a large, you know, Hashem, a large, you know, uh, God collider, you know, you should be able to see,
Starting point is 01:31:42 well, no, but, but they'll say, well, no, no, no, he interacts in other ways and changes laws and so forth. And that's what prayer does. Prayer has an effect, an immaterial effect, right? There's no, you know, cranial functional magnetic resonance imaging helmet I can put on. Can't measure it. You can't say that that has an effect. You can see that things light up in the brain differently when you do that.
Starting point is 01:32:01 It's a well-known fact. And you could even say, what is the influence on people's happiness and their charitability and the way that they live? And those are all functional benefits of being actively theistic. Now, to me, what I call myself is a practicing agnostic, not just an agnostic. So an agnostic will say, I don't know, but practicing means, but I'm searching for evidence. So if you say you don't know you're an agnostic or that it's unknowable, there's one of two options for you, right? You can say, I am going to act as if I don't know, which would mean, you know, that's the way a good scientist should approach things and say, well, let me investigate the two alternatives, right? So I can investigate atheism, which I have done, and I was an atheist for many, many years.
Starting point is 01:32:43 And I can investigate theism or practicing a religion, right? So let's say – and I interviewed my first guest ever on the Into the Impossible podcast. It was a renowned titan of physics who did truly lose the Nobel Prize named Freeman Dyson. The Dyson sphere is like the – What do you mean he lost the Nobel Prize? And that he was co-inventor of some of the theory associated with quantum electrodynamics that Richard Feynman did win the Nobel Prize for. But there were three other – two other people who won the Nobel Prize that year. And the Nobel Prize has these stupid rules put into place not by Alfred Nobel but by some committee of Swedish scientists back in the early days of the Nobel that only allowed three people to win it.
Starting point is 01:33:20 So he – wow. But it's totally arbitrary. There's nothing special about three. Would they do any money, Mo? They just excluded him. They just gave it to two other guys, Feynman and two other guys, Schwinger and Tamanga. And they definitely deserved it, but Freeman deserved it as well. Anyway, he never complained about it and he was a gentleman until he died in 2020.
Starting point is 01:33:39 But I talked to him on my podcast the first time because he called himself an agnostic. And he had won – there's a prize called the Templeton Prize, which is endowed by John Templeton of Franklin Templeton Fund and other – to be always worth a little bit more than the Nobel Prize. And it's for showing the conciliance or the reconcilability of religion and science. That's why he endowed it. And he made it more prestigious, I hope, by making it worth more money. So Freeman had won it many years ago ago like 20 years or 30 years ago and when he was on my podcast i asked him well like what do you consider yourself and he's like i'm an agnostic and i said okay so um do you go to church and he was like no i'm i told you i'm agnostic and i'm like wait but you're an agnostic so if if some brilliant alien you know is looking as cruising by my friend Avi Loeb's Amu Amu, right? And the alien is looking down and it sees Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss, you know, upcoming guest on this podcast, past guest on my podcast.
Starting point is 01:34:32 And you see Lawrence Krauss, self-declared militant atheist. And Lawrence is not going to church because he never goes to church. He never goes to synagogue. He never goes to temple or whatever. And then he sees Freeman Dyson. How could that alien, intelligent as he is, whatever you call it, whatever its pronoun happens, space pronoun is, how could you functionally distinguish between those two people? And he said, you can't. There's no way because they're not practicing anything. They're not doing – the agnostic in Freeman was not doing anything. They're not doing the agnostic and Freeman was not doing anything. He was just kind of living off the interest that he had accrued as a young man when he did go to
Starting point is 01:35:09 church. And actually to give him his credit, he would sometimes go to some fellowship, Quakers or what have you. And he was not anti-religious, but he wasn't actively pursuing the search for truth and knowledge. So did you start referring to yourself as an agnostic when you started practicing Judaism? That's a good question. I think only in retrospect do I realize that's what I'm doing now. And I should say practicing to me means like eating kosher food. So I was born into a Jewish family. Parents divorced, as you said.
Starting point is 01:35:40 Adopted by an Irish Catholic guy. Grew up in his family. Amazing family. Became so enthralled and in love with Catholicism that I became an altar boy. Never had a bar mitzvah. In fact, I just had my bar mitzvah in Israel. Oh, congrats. Mazel tov.
Starting point is 01:35:55 Thank you. Todah Rabbah in Israel in September. And that was an amazing time to be there. It would be very difficult to do that right now, as you know. Wow, you were there right i was there a week or two before yeah and uh we can talk about that later but but um so practicing it so i did these things i learned to speak hebrew i learned to read hebrew um i wanted to understand this whole legacy that i had been gifted and whether or not there was validity
Starting point is 01:36:21 to it so for the last 20 years or so, since 9-11, actually. 9-11 was the inciting incident that made me want to investigate the religion of my birth and get closer and more connected to it, including, you know, raising a family and so forth. So that's how I practice it. I learn every day. I read the Bible, the Old Testament in my case. I study the ancient philosophers. I engage in weekly study with rabbis and friends. I keep the Sabbath. I don't work.
Starting point is 01:36:55 I go to a temple. And so these are very important things to me. But I can't say ultimately that I believe in God. It's a very strange thing. Like I don't say I believe in gravity. I never say that. I don't believe in gravity. I have evidence for gravity. And so it's something so, it really tells me that I have two sort of fathers in a sense.
Starting point is 01:37:17 You know, one is like Galileo, empirical scientist, the first to come up with the scientific method to discover that laws of mathematics could be verifying verifying physical phenomena in space and he's sort of my scientific you know um father in a sense and then i have my you know religious father so to speak and the people of my my ancestry and and so forth and. But ultimately to say that I believe in God is a very strange thing for a scientist. So those two forces are at war within me. Can I reconcile the two of
Starting point is 01:37:53 them? No. Can I solve? Can I prove? No. But part of life, again, religion, like I said about science, is an infinite game. You can't say I want it. And when you meet with Lawrence, you can ask him the same thing. When did you stop learning about Judaism, the religion of his birth? And he'll say when he was 13 years old after he had his bar mitzvah at the typical age, as a 50-year-old guy. And he hasn't studied it since and he has a very superficial understanding and I've done studies with him and he will dismiss it and i'll say it's this band of bronze age peasants and what do they know about this and that but i'll always point out that there are there are life truths that he actually adheres to and owe their heritage as does much of western civilization to the old testament and our series of laws and so there's
Starting point is 01:38:40 obviously wisdom and value to it and the question, why would you abandon a source of wisdom? Like, I don't read A Brief History of Time. Ah, okay. No, I don't read A Brief History of Time to know how to raise my daughter. You know, I read A Brief History of Time to learn about a theory of physics that's mostly now out of favor that was written in the 1980s, right? And that's interesting. But as you asked about, like, Haku before, I would have hoped that, and we'd go back and look at your interview with him. But when you ask him, do you hope you're right or hope you're wrong? I hope that all my theories are wrong or my ideas or my discoveries are wrong in the same sense as
Starting point is 01:39:13 the earth being a sphere is wrong. In other words, I hope that they get refined. I hope that the ultimate truth that we can get closer and closer to, but never exactly arrive at is achieved after my, and that science. Otherwise, what's science for? Well, the other really important thing about every opinion you're expressing on the topic of whether scientists are right or wrong and how they should feel about it is that you have personal experience with that and are not only open about it, you write about it in your books because you were working on BICEP and you thought i'm not going to get into the full terminology i will let you do that but you thought you were looking for one
Starting point is 01:39:50 thing it turned out you were essentially looking at dust but you had this highly complex potentially groundbreaking idea that could show us what the beginning of the cosmos might look like and then you spent all the time on it to figure out, we don't know that. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But in your field, it can be that scarlet letter of, oh, his entire work was proven wrong. And so when you are going through all these things, and all these scientists who are afraid to even explore the topic of, well, maybe we're looking at this the wrong way. You've been there, done that.
Starting point is 01:40:28 I respect that a lot about you. Yeah. To me, it's a natural way. It's not necessarily commendable or condemnable. But to be open to being wrong if you're not, as you're not a scientist. And the type of flaw or issue that we had with BICEP that I described in losing the Nobel Prize. Can you explain it if you don't mind? Yeah. So what we were looking for, again, dates back to this distinction of the universe as the ultimate particle accelerator, as the ultimate atom smasher, particle collider, however you like to phrase it, when the early universe began to produce
Starting point is 01:41:05 out of nothing, perhaps, according to Lawrence Krauss, a universe from nothing, a fluctuation in a quantum foam that pre-existed our current universe in what's called the multiverse, perhaps, or the collapse of a previous universe onto itself that ignites an explosive origin event that then became the universe that we know and love today. That event, whenever it was, may have been accompanied by a new type of force field called inflation. So totally different, only existed for a vanishingly small amount of time, for actually a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, 10 to the minus 36 seconds. This phenomenon called inflation took place where the universe expanded from atom size to the size of over uh the size of a of a
Starting point is 01:41:52 school bus that's based on time as we know it in this dimension though right it would it would be elapsed time as we say it you know in other words you got a stopwatch that could measure uh trillions of seconds you'd see a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second go by yeah so absolutely the correct correct way to think about it so the universe expanded from you know less than the size of a you know kind of atomic size or molecule size to the size of a school bus in a trillion so faster than the speed of light and that that um that conjecture then if true explains a host of other cosmic phenomena including the structure of galaxies that we see in the universe, the clusters of galaxies that we see in the universe, and many other phenomena. It's called inflation.
Starting point is 01:42:37 It's sort of the spark. If you think about the Big Bang as an explosion, it's not really an explosion of any kind like a firecracker. But if you want to think about it, fine. It would be the match that lit it off. And that match was only ignited for a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Okay? So that event then cast the die for what our universe would look like. So by looking at the universe today, we can infer what properties it would have had in the past.
Starting point is 01:43:00 Just like we can infer that you – from the the way you look that you were once an egg and a sperm we don't know exactly which egg and which sperm you know i'm gonna keep it pg classy right it's also a very r-rated podcast so you're okay okay so you can even like nucleate you know when the first that first single uh cell became two two different cells and started to split um and start to divide it's called a blastocyst. It's a collection of cells. We can infer what that looked like, even though we don't know what you would look like. So in other words, we're looking at you today, and I'm trying to predict what was that blastocyst, that 100-cell clump that you were 100 seconds after your parents' Big Bang, you know, whatever,
Starting point is 01:43:39 30 years ago. Right, the right thing. Exactly. So when that happened, we can make inferences about that. And same way, we can observe the shrapnel from the universe, the properties of the universe today and infer what was it like at this early epoch. But we've only been able to go back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang to this time using light. Light is produced in the form of the cosmic mercury background discovered here in June Erzie down the road in Holmdel. June Erzie.
Starting point is 01:44:06 Oh, sorry. That's a good one. Yeah. I get all these people thinking I'm a white nationalist or something. But anyway, they'll have to read my autobiography to know about it. I'm not. But anyway, looking back at the heat that's left over, that's as far back as you can go with light.
Starting point is 01:44:24 But you know, if there's an irate cabbie driving across the street here, we can't see him, but we could hear another form of radiation, i.e. sound, right? If he honks the horn, F you, or whatever, right? Or, you know, go giants. You could hear it. So other forms of radiation can tell you about things that are not only of a different type of phenomena, but actually are farther away. And remember, I said when something's farther away, it's older in time. You're seeing it as it was young.
Starting point is 01:44:50 So we're using, instead of waves of sound, a type of vibration called the gravitational wave. So if inflation took place, which we don't know, we're trying to substantiate, find evidence for, but we're not trying to prove it. Remember, that's not our goal. We're not trying to prove it. We're trying to falsify everything else. All other competing theories do not have these waves of gravity. Only inflation does. So therefore, if we see gravitational waves in a background, they emanated from this trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth
Starting point is 01:45:20 of a second after the origin of our observable universe, potentially from another multiverse or a larger expanse of space-time. And that falsifies all these other models, static universe, bouncing model, cyclical cosmology, string gas cosmology. All these, there are many, many models that don't feature this type of behavior. It'd instantly be proven wrong. We thought we did that on march 17 2014 we announced that we had done that with the previous experiment uh successor to an experiment i invented called bicep this one was called bicep 2 very creatively it was announced that uh at harvard avi lobe was part of the announcement where were you doing this uh so this experiment was done at the south pole antarctica it was a telescope just like galileo has a made a refracting
Starting point is 01:46:05 telescope and used it to learn about the uh origins of his own universe so for all the flat earthers you walked off the edge that's right i went to the bottom and you know i saw i saw with my own eyes actually if you're there it looks totally flat it's it's pretty funny the south pole looks just like you know the most flat boring you know even even worse than uh the central pine barrens here but anyway looking at the uh looking at the early universe from this vantage point we claim we saw these waves of gravity via their imprint on what's called the cosmic microwave background and yet and yet we knew there are other imposter signals no scientist nowadays what do you mean by imposter signal?
Starting point is 01:46:45 A signal that could produce the exact same effect mimicking inflationary gravitational waves but not produced by gravitational waves. It would be like you saw – you look through a telescope and your theory is that the moon has this swirling fingerprint on it. There's a pattern of craters and valleys and volcanoes on the moon's surface, okay? And your theory is that there are canals on the moon and they're shaped and they're made by a god, and the god left his fingerprint on the moon, okay? So you're looking through your telescope. I saw evidence for that. Holy crap, I'm going to be super fun.
Starting point is 01:47:17 I'm going to win the Nobel Prize. Then you look at the telescope. Oh, shoot. I put my thumb on the lens, okay? So we saw something that exactly mimicked the signal that we were looking for which was inflation the swirling twisting pattern of microwaves called b-mode polarization i describe in the book in great detail and that pattern was produced not by the waves of gravity just like in this analogy not by canals on the on the moon
Starting point is 01:47:42 or or um or you know swirling pattern by a god. No, it was produced by tiny little micrometeorites. Pass me that micrometeorite I gave you so generously. What, a billy right here? This billy boy, four billy boy. So if you put this in space, remember I said this is – what is this made of? Pop quiz. What's most of it?
Starting point is 01:48:01 What's in your blood? Iron. Iron. So iron is the predominant – makes up the predominant composition of this meteorite. Little nickel, cobalt, and some other elements. What number on the table is that? We'll say that again. Iron.
Starting point is 01:48:15 Iron is 27. You've got a computer here. So I think it's- You're the scientist. 27. All right, we'll check it. Scientists don't memorize all these things, right? I leave that to my assistant, Bard.
Starting point is 01:48:26 They said you got to memorize all this shit? I would not advise that at all. I'm guessing it's 27 or so. Iron element periodic table. Yeah, let's see it. Let's see what we got here. Let's see it, baby. Dun, dun.
Starting point is 01:48:40 26, you're one off. Wow. Tough. How is that? Tough. Dang it. Anyway. So when this is in space, this, or if it's in your refrigerator, or you win one from
Starting point is 01:48:50 BrianGating.com, you put a refrigerator magnet on it, it will stick to it because it's magnetic. Iron is highly, I mean, it's compass needles and can be made of it. So it gets aligned by magnetic fields, just like the needle of a compass. So this is like an odd shape for a magnetic needle for a compass, but it actually can act like a magnetic compass. Imagine this shrunk down or shaved off. If I were cheaper, I would have brought you in like a little tiny shaving of it, like a little filing, a little tiny particle of it. Well, there's a lot of those. You ever heard of a power law? Power law is something that there's a lot of things that are small and there's very few things like companies there are a lot of small companies pizza restaurants you know uh you know gift shops or whatever and there's very few like
Starting point is 01:49:29 apples i you know and google's totally zero to one concepts right now yeah that's a power lie exactly so there's there can be you know 10 times as many that are 10 times smaller there's actually thousands and millions of times more that are the fraction of a of a of a width of a human hair but they're all in space too from the same supernova that blew up in our local corner of the galaxy 5 billion years ago or so. Those are still in our galaxy. And there's many of these supernova throughout our galaxy. There's about one every 100 years.
Starting point is 01:49:56 So the Milky Way is over 5 billion years old, 6, 7 billion years old. So there's been many times for these 100-year periods to produce a supernova to blow up. So this particular phenomena then can – these little grains of iron can get aligned. But there's a magnetic field in almost every object in the universe. The earth has a magnetic field. Our bodies have a slight magnetic field. The galaxy, the solar system has magnetic field and that can align these tiny little microscopic grains of dust made of meteoritic material in space and actually produce the same pattern and mock and mimic it exactly what we were looking for and that's what we saw we saw dust grains in
Starting point is 01:50:37 our galaxy so it wasn't like a thumbprint you know we didn't leave the lens cap on you know the thumbnail it wasn't stupid it was It wasn't a blunder. Yeah. It was an astrophysical phenomena, and it just wasn't a cosmological phenomena. How did you figure that out? So we worked with our critics, and this is this hallmark of good scientists, that there was another experiment that were our arch competitors, our nemesis, called Planck. And Planck was a billion-euro experiment launched into space with parts built by my late advisor, Andrew Lang, and Jamie Bach, and other people that were members of the BICEP team. And they had done this, mainly led out of the European Space Agency. George Asadio and many other great scientists worked on it for many, many years.
Starting point is 01:51:16 Launched into deep orbit four times the distance to the Earth to the moon, beyond the orbit of the moon. And they launched this telescope telescope and they had data that we lacked and the data that they had that we lacked was exceptionally accessible and exquisitely sensitive to dust not to the cosmic signal as much as we were but to the dust signal so what we saw and steven hawking you say every equation cuts your readership by half so i won't do any other podcast equations i don't want to cut the listenership by more than half so i won't do any other podcast equations i don't want to cut the listenership by more than half but i have to do this what we were seeing was the combination imagine the signal s that we saw was the cosmic signal c plus dust d okay so s equals c actually
Starting point is 01:51:59 not that complicated plus d okay but now it's going to get complicated because we have to invoke subtraction. Additions, tricky pal. So then we had from the plank our competitors trying to see the same thing, trying to win the same Nobel Prizes as us. They could measure the dust signal. So then we took their data in combination with us. They originally wouldn't give it to us. It would have helped if they gave it to us six months earlier. We wouldn't have put out this publication that led to this press conference that led to us being on the front page of the
Starting point is 01:52:27 new york times um and other things and then we wouldn't have had to retract it of course i wouldn't have written my book but that's the way life goes life works out okay um so they measured the d signal we combine it with c plus d or we subtracted it from c plus d and what's left is c in other words two you need another experiment. What was that like in the analogy when I said you put your thumb on the lens? That means that somebody else did another experiment. Your competitor said, hey, Julian, look there. There's a thumbprint on your lens.
Starting point is 01:52:54 Technically, it's another experiment. Oh, okay, let me wipe it off. Now I removed the dust signal or the fingerprint signal and what's left is the pure signal. And that didn't have any evidence for the gravitational waves, which would have meant inflation took place, which would have meant that we live in a multiverse so now it's not what it meant we lived in a multi-yes it's almost impossible to have inflationary
Starting point is 01:53:14 gravitational waves present if the multiverse is also not similarly true why is that so this is a defined multiverse for the people out there who aren't familiar so copernicus and galileo and others came up with the idea that the earth is not special the earth is just one planet it's not even the center of our solar system the sun is the center of our solar system later astronomers came up with the idea that the uh solar system is not the center of the galaxy later people came up with this the notion that our galaxy is just one of other galaxies and it is not in the center of the universe and the natural extension of this copernican reasoning is that we are not the only universe in a greater vaster
Starting point is 01:53:57 cosmos called the multiverse the multiverse is depending on who you get to define it there's multiple multiverses to make things super confusing. Is it multiverses or multiverse-i? I'm so bothered by this. There's so many words. Well, if you talk to my friend Andrew Huberman, he'll say it's octopuses, not octopi. Octopussies? Again.
Starting point is 01:54:15 Wait a second here. Hold on. Hey-o. Howard Doresho. So when you look at the progression, it's not out of the question that there could be other universes that we don't have access to. Just like if we go out into the Atlantic Ocean, go off Long Island, and we go fishing, we can't see land, but we could hear, let's say, you know, there's a firework show or somebody drops, you know, something or a boat crashes, you know, in the
Starting point is 01:54:41 harbor, we can see the waves coming from it over the horizon that gives us information about what kind of boats they were how fast were they traveling how an angle did they hit each other at again a tough look for the flat earth exactly it's taking a lot of l's today so when we look back at into uh into the history of cosmology what we see is that the only way that you could get inflation to spring forth from nothing, literally a universe from nothing, would mean that there are other potential universes that could exist and that we could someday obtain evidence for. And in that sense, I think it's interesting to note that if we don't get evidence for it, it's not proof that the multiverse doesn't exist. It's not proof that the universe didn't begin with inflation. It's merely a statement. Again, what we're trying to do is prove things wrong, not prove things right.
Starting point is 01:55:27 So you can't prove the multiverse is true. You can only prove that a theory that doesn't have, say, gravitational waves is false by observing gravitational waves. expectation based on the data that the multiverse system existed would you have at the same time been able to say therefore it is is possible to and probably has been done before to transverse or traverse time so not necessarily no they're not necessarily related to each other okay um so it could be that there are there are other remember there's different types of – when I say there's a multiverse, it really – there's not just one type of multiverse. There's a multiverse in quantum mechanics. It's called the many worlds interpretation, popularized by a physicist at Princeton, of course, as many great things that came out of New Jersey. A lot of good stuff in Jersey.
Starting point is 01:56:21 I know. This is where Einstein was too. Don't forget that. Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler was here. Feynman was here. Great state, man. Yeah. I'm going to sell you on it.
Starting point is 01:56:30 We're going to get you out of here. I spent a summer in Spring Lake. I enjoyed it. Asbury Park. Yep. Good spot. Point Pleasant. Point Pleasant.
Starting point is 01:56:36 Absolutely. Great place to be. A lot of good bars there. Well, I was too. Were you a fighter back then? What's that? Were you a fighter? No, I was.
Starting point is 01:56:42 Brian Barfighter? That's right. No, I was not as a nine-year-old um they love throwing hands just with my brothers yeah uh so when i um yeah so so it's basically a a concept that in quantum mechanics you've heard of schrodinger's cat yes the notion that this cat oh yeah right so the notion the cat uh in quantum mechanics can be represented as a superposition of two different completely orthogonal states that are only revealed once an observer makes a measurement. I should have said this a lot more times today, but in English now.
Starting point is 01:57:13 Okay, right. Well, I can do it in Hebrew if you like. Let's start with English. We'll work our way to Hebrew. So what there is in a famous paradox called Schrodinger's Cap, quantum mechanics is a description of the most tiniest abstract element building blocks of nature called particles. And these particles, the most common ones that we deal with are electrons, as I said, and subatomic particles like quark. But the classic one is an electron. Electrons only have these three properties, charge, mass, and spin. And they're described not by the laws of Isaac Newton that describes, you know,
Starting point is 01:57:48 force equals mass times acceleration, things fall, gravity, and so on. They're described by an analogous equation called the Schrodinger equation. The Schrodinger equation predicts, in some sense, the probability that you'll find an electron at a given point in space at a given time in that the measurement is done but the key is that these objects evolve that the the state of the electron behaves sort of like a wave where there's an oscillating probability to find it at this state in a given place at a given time and that it only depends on the interaction between the thing that you're uh the thing you're describing the electron and something has to observe it. And when you observe it, you so-called collapse the wave function
Starting point is 01:58:29 in what's called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Unlike classical, we don't have an interpretation of classical mechanics. You don't say, well, in Newton's laws of acceleration, force equals mass times acceleration. But in Keating-Kaku theory, it goes like, you know, mass equals this cube root, whatever. We don't have to interpret it. Like, what is the meaning of position? No, we know what it is. But when something's like spread out, diffuse, and is only probabilistic, then you have to ask, well, like, does this thing exist when I don't look at it?
Starting point is 01:58:59 Einstein used to ask, like, does the moon exist if you don't look at it? So there's an interplay that you don't have. Because in classical physics, I can look at this object moving through space and I can plot it just from the camera. Here it's moving as I drop it. And then I can construct. Did that fall at 9.8 meters per second squared under the force of gravity? Did its velocity increase 9.8 meters in the first second? And you will obtain that just from looking at that. What's happening when the camera does this measurement? There's lights in the room. The lights are
Starting point is 01:59:30 bouncing off of here and going into the camera and the sensor in the camera. And there's a time clock and the camera's built in and you can see how many frames it took to fall and you can measure it really accurately. What if I reduce this down to the size of an electron? Okay, let's do the same experiment. Let's drop it. It should, in abstract sense, fall at the exact same rate, 9.8 meters per second. But wait, it's not a point. It's not even a well-defined boundary or border like this meteorite has. There's a fuzzy probabilistic cloud.
Starting point is 01:59:58 That's one problem. Here's another problem. When the lights from the overhead lighting rig, the very expensive and incredibly beautiful lighting rig here in the studio, when they bounce off the electron, that changes the path of the electron because they have a lot of energy and momentum compared to the size of the thing you're talking about. Unlike this thing. They don't change that at all. Not even one micro something we can't say. No.
Starting point is 02:00:23 In fact, there's probably equal pressure from the vast amount of other photons that are also hitting it from other directions. So the art – and then you could say, well, what if I don't look at it? Well, that could not affect its properties. No. The best you can say is there's a probability for it to behave just like it's a brick falling or a meteorite falling through space. And so what there is in quantum mechanics is this interpretation. You have to say, well, when I look at it, what happens to its position and momentum?
Starting point is 02:00:48 Here's another way to think about it. Imagine you're in a room and it's completely dark and we put on this table here a ping pong ball. And I tell you it's moving around. And I ask you, Julian, tell me exactly what its velocity is and tell me exactly where it is. How would you do that? Just with your hands.
Starting point is 02:01:04 Oh. Here's the ping pong ball. It's rolling around in here. I would do it by pointing, but you wouldn't see me hypothetically. No, it's totally dark. It's totally dark, yep. So how would you do it?
Starting point is 02:01:15 I might use like sound to be able to show you it's rolling from here to there. Okay. Something like that. Let's say you do it with sound. You know, echolocation is what it's called. Another way you could do it is, let's say close your eyes, it's's moving around and you put your hands around it
Starting point is 02:01:27 and you keep making your hands smaller and then finally you measure it right so now i measured it i know exactly where it is but what do i know about its velocity i don't know anything well that's what i was saying okay but even with that you're hitting it with sound waves it's so the lighter and the smaller and the less mass these particles get, the more you disturb it by doing a measurement. So what Schrodinger's cat kind of attempts to say is that in one interpretation, the cat could physically be represented as a living cat and a dead cat. And the cat dies, by the way, of when you, every so often there's a radioactive beta decay, nuclear decay that shoots and gets detected by a Geiger counter. Here's a click.
Starting point is 02:02:09 It breaks open a capsule of cyanide, and that kills the cat. The question is, what does the cat state before you open it up? Because the decay of radioactive nuclei is purely quantum mechanical. There's some way it's like the electron. But the cat's living or dead is a classical phenomenon. All the molecules of the cat are dead or alive in this scenario. So when you open the box, you look at it, you determine, you collapse the wave function, and you force the cat to either be alive or dead. So that's in the Copenhagen interpretation. In what's called the many worlds interpretation, the cat in one universe goes and is off in the living state for all time.
Starting point is 02:02:42 You never collapsed it. It never changed. It never was dead at any time or superposition it doesn't have to be in the superposition and in the other one it goes into a state where it's dead and that's in another universe it's dead in that so there's a multiverse of quantum mechanics as well as a multiverse of cosmology and um uh and yes it's more complicated than all the marvel movies written with the word verse or multiverse or spiderverse. Yeah, it's very complicated. But it's very interesting. And again, the reason that these stakes are so high is that because if we had observed these waves of gravity, if we had been verified, or if my future experiment, the Simons Observatory, does observe these conclusively, again, it doesn't prove, but it gives credence to inflation. And inflation comes, has a big word, concomitant, always comes associated with the multiverse. In other words,
Starting point is 02:03:33 it's almost impossible to have, and you can talk to Lawrence about this when he's here, it's almost impossible to have inflation without having the multiverse. So therefore, the stakes get even higher, right? On one hand, we would have detected gravitational waves for the first time in this way. That won a Nobel Prize two years, three years afterwards from what's called LIGO. And then it would have been a detection of inflation, which is the spark, the match that ignited the Big Bang. That's like a second Big Bang, a second Nobel Prize. And then it would have been indirect evidence, as I say, for the multiverse,
Starting point is 02:04:05 which who knows how many Nobel Prizes that would have been worth. How many years of research from the first time someone, one of you guys thought about it in a room to the moment you guys figured out it was wrong, went into BICEP? 15 years and probably $8 million
Starting point is 02:04:20 and many trips to the South Pole and many people's career. But again, it wasn't wrong and actually it is the best experiment still of its kind ever done even better than my current experiment which is the simon's observance it wasn't wrong you just weren't able to observe what you were testing we observe exquisitely measured the properties of of dust in our in our galaxy so in that sense what we had claimed was we had observed the ignition of the Big Bang, the inflationary epoch.
Starting point is 02:04:48 Do you believe that that still exists and is out there, but you guys just didn't have the ability to see it? Again, I don't believe in things, right? We ask what we have evidence for.
Starting point is 02:04:56 And so we don't have evidence for it yet. We have circumstantial evidence that's very strong, that's suggestive of the fact, or else we wouldn't be building the experiment, that the best,
Starting point is 02:05:04 you know, the explanation that seems to explain the most disparate phenomena is inflation but this will be the smoking gun in other words you come to the scene of a crime and you're like there's a dead body how did he die you don't know but if you see there's a gun and there's smoke coming out of it these waves of gravity are like the smoke from that gun and so if we do see it again it's not it doesn't prove it right he could have also been poisoned and then shot you know whatever i don't know what you guys do here in new jersey but we're not gonna get into the mafia or anything like that um we have our own mafia uh and cosmology so um so yeah i think it's it's uh it's but it'd be strong and
Starting point is 02:05:41 circumstantial evidence is evidence right you can't can't dismiss it, but you can't also say it proves once and for all. But for most people, this is the holy grail for the type of cosmology that we're doing, which is why these agencies have put $100 million into building this instrument in Chile, which is now the focus of my career and probably will be for the remainder of it. What was that moment like when you realized you were observing dust and how quickly did it happen? That's a great question. It was always a question in the back of my mind and all of our minds. I mean, they're all great scientists. I had been sort of removed from the leadership of the experiment after the suicide of the
Starting point is 02:06:21 principal investigator of it. It was my mentor, Andrew Lang. Oh, he committed suicide? Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, so he committed suicide only a few weeks after we had gotten the instrument working at the South Pole. And it was just a tremendous...
Starting point is 02:06:36 He was like a father figure career-wise to me, and he was a very good personal friend of mine. And I was very devastated by it, left behind three kids and just a hole in millions of people. I mean he was like the quintessential like uber scientist. I would say like – remember that guy like Mad Men? What's his name? John Hamm. He's like just –
Starting point is 02:06:55 Don Draper, yeah. Don Draper, yeah. He's like super – Oh, yeah? There's some pictures right there. Oh, yeah. There it is. All right.
Starting point is 02:07:00 So he was just like handsome and brilliant and surefire he was going to win a Nobel Prize. His widow ended up winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry a few years ago after he died. Different – they weren't working together. But no, they're just a power couple, beautiful people, beautiful family. And nobody expected it I think. And it's just completely devastating to anybody that knew him. And cast a pall over the whole project in a certain sense but by the time we had gotten enough data to say once and for all that we had detected this pattern and ultimately we did detect
Starting point is 02:07:36 the pattern and the pattern is more significant than ever and we know it more accurately and more precisely than ever we just know that it's not necessarily from the cosmos, but rather from our galaxy, which is interesting, but it's not significant in the sense of, you know, understanding how the universe began. So we're still, they are still, I'm not affiliated with that experiment anymore, but it's gone from BICEP1 that I co-invented
Starting point is 02:07:58 all the way up in 2000. You asked me how long it was. We started in 2000, 2001. And we built, and this announcement was in 2014. So, you know, 14, 13 years. And then the retraction came sort of six months later. We didn't retract it. We said we rescinded the interpretation that it came from the origin of the universe.
Starting point is 02:08:19 And we said the most likely explanation is that it came from dust and the only way we could do that is by working with our former competitors on this plank billion euro satellite that was launched a few years before you know we made these announcements was there any sort of i mean you had called them like you use competitors there but you had called them critics earlier was there any sort of like intense behind the scenes drag it out arguments after this this came out or was it more you guys were all just looking for the truth and wanted to team up and do it? I mean I've been kind of surprised how little blowback we've gotten or the leadership. Again, I wasn't in the – I didn't make the decision to have a press conference and go to the New York Times and so forth. I had been – even though I had started the predecessor experiment and I was still involved with it
Starting point is 02:09:07 and my students were still working on bicep too. Um, so those decisions and so forth were made under the threat of pressure that we would be scooped in this discovery by this plank satellite, which had claimed that they were going to beat us. And they had all the budget and a much bigger team than we did and they were in space which is for technical reasons much better than being even at the south pole which is a great location for doing this type of work so um the critics um are came in a variety of forms so we published this paper um online it wasn't peer reviewed when we made the press conference that's how nervous the leadership was about getting scooped by Planck and that they wouldn't share their data with us before release.
Starting point is 02:09:49 This also probably gave them some concern that they were about to get scooped. So they went ahead and published it. And it was actually not peer-reviewed for many months afterwards. And then a few months after it was peer-reviewed, accepted, and published, then it was basically retracted by working with these – with the former competitors. So – but there were other critics that were basically saying that we had made these flaws and made basically blunders, not astrophysically wrong, that we had basically done bad scientific research, that we were wrong and not good scientifically. Thumb on the camera.
Starting point is 02:10:21 Yeah. Basically that we just totally overlooked the most basic astro 101 flubs and bloopers. Thumb on the sidelines, you know, throwing rocks of dust at you. Yeah. And what are – you had hinted at it a few minutes ago, but what are you working on now? So once you realize that the signal is going to be accompanied by this imposter that can mimic the signal that you're looking for, you know, it's kind of like fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So now we're aware of it. We're on notice. So every experiment that's looking for the inflationary gravitational wave background, the signal that could be the harbinger that inflation took place to ignite the Big Bang into propelling the universe to expand for basically the foreseeable
Starting point is 02:11:17 future, and that comes, as I say, concomitant, big word, but it's very descriptive, with the multiverse, that you basically cannot have the inflationary gravitational waves without the multiverse. Now all hands are on deck. So now we embedded in our team people who only focus on dust, and in their team too, on the BICEP team, which is now called BICEP Array, the fourth generation of the BICEP program. So they have people that really just focus on modeling, understanding dust, understanding the magnetic field of the galaxy. Are there other experiments from, like, say, an optical telescope? So the same dust that emits these microwaves that confused us also obstructs and blocks the light from stars behind the clouds of dust in our Milky Way galaxy.
Starting point is 02:12:00 So we're working with optical astronomers. We're working with people that look at the magnetic field of the galaxy because that's what aligns the dust. And we're looking at people that build radio telescopes at very high frequencies and very low frequencies in order to get more information only about dust and contaminants. and the Simons Observatory are now doing, both with collaborators external to the project, in other words, different teams using optical telescopes which have nothing to do with what we're doing, looking at starlight polarization and the light of stars, and people on our own team that are building channels and aspects of our experiment that can only see dust. So we have internal calibration tools and external calibration tools.
Starting point is 02:12:45 And those are all to remove the systematic thumbprint on the lens, so to speak. Wow. Yeah. So it's amazing how long this stuff takes. I mean, people spend their whole, like we've been saying, people will spend their whole life working on one thing.
Starting point is 02:12:58 But that's what makes it so exciting. And that's why I think I like to study both the biggest picture things in science, which this type of science that I get to do unifies the physics of the very small with the physics of the largest thing imaginable, the multiverse. It even has implications for the existence of life in the universe, for consciousness and for the wave function of the universe. Is there a conscious observer? Now you start to dovetail into theological consideration. I mean, to me, it's like, I'm a kid in the intellectual candy store, so I never get enough of it. I never want to retire. It's so much fun. Yeah. It's, it's, it's so like, these are the kinds of things that when I was a kid, if it didn't, if it wasn't bouncing a basketball or throwing around a football like i didn't care that much you know like i look at physics now i just wasn't interested in it when
Starting point is 02:13:50 i did it and then when i got into my 20s i'm like oh my god this is so fucking cool don't make the mistake julia yeah don't make that mistake go to a relativistic astrophysics graduate school before you start a podcast go do math and science before you start a podcast i'll endorse that doc i'm a doctor it's nine out of ten doctors agree with that it's it's it's really like when you think about the patterns of the world and and you were reminding me of this earlier when you were talking about that object in your hand there and about how there is i'm gonna get this wrong how i say it but there's basically like more massive things that happen at the top and then it trickles down and opens up at the bottom and then you think about like our parallels as to how the world works among us eight billion humans and you have the people who are rich at the top all the way spreading out to the
Starting point is 02:14:34 people who are poor at the bottom these these things right these exactly these numbers and and these these patterns of how things are distributed around the mean, they exist universally and they exist here just in our little bullshit behaviors together. Yeah, and you start to see connections. That's part of the job of a scientist is to notice anomalies, patterns, things that don't fit in, seek them out, try to explain them with existing understanding technology tools and data and then where not possible extend by making new laws new ideas new hypotheses and i think that that's a healthy sign of what makes humans unique is that we have that capability to do you know with our frontal cortex to think about experiments that aren't yet done. You know, like most chimpanzees are not doing like thought experiments. Like if I drop an apple on top of this beehive, you know,
Starting point is 02:15:31 it'll hit at the beehive with the same amount of speed as a hitting it with a giant rock, but I should hit with, you know, they're not doing these thought experiments. We are. And, and just the capacity that we have to imagine scenarios is just, you know, quite frankly, something that we should all have a little bit of cosmic swagger over. But I always say, you know, there's a quote from the Talmud that you should have two pockets and in your pockets, you should have two pieces of paper. One that says, the whole universe was made for me. That's the swagger. Like it's my playground. It's my delight.
Starting point is 02:16:06 It's my garden of heavenly paradise. And I can find things that give me beauty. And I would say like, we could be like bacteria in a Petri dish, right? Bacteria are eating agar. Have you ever tasted agar? No. I don't think, yeah.
Starting point is 02:16:18 Picture like the worst possible, you know, gelatinous, you know, non-flavored. It's just purely to get them to grow and make colonies and so that scientists can study them. That could be whatever, you know, gelatinous, you know, non-flavored. It's just purely to get them to grow and make colonies and so that scientists can study them. That could be whatever, you know, like instead of delicious coffee and the mixture with the cream and then, you know, just the incredible flavors. And then the visual sensation that we have, we have a spectrum on our tongue and we can taste these different things and we can see different colors and people and interact with them in a network and that gives us happiness so the whole world was made for our pleasure in that sense
Starting point is 02:16:49 on the other hand you should have another pocket with a piece of paper says we are nothing but dust basically our future is dust we came from dust we're nothing we're cosmically insignificant and dust to dust yeah and how do you balance that how do you balance the humility with the swagger because you can't do good science if you're only uh just purely you know humiliated humbled and and just have this this this fear of like well what is the person i can't do anything and similarly you can't um you can't really expect to proceed flawlessly if you always think i've got this total swagger i'm the man you know i know everything because we know almost nothing so balancing those two is the job of a scientist and i think you know besides getting up and you know stupid culture wars and political partisan fighting uh it's what
Starting point is 02:17:34 makes life so exciting and interesting to be a scientist that little three-liner story you had about you just remind me of it about albert einstein testing people with iq i think i've told that to like 40 people since i heard that that's one of the best things ever yeah my father used to say that where where basically like someone walks in says to einstein i want to talk about science he goes great what's your iq he says 140 he goes awesome we can talk about string theory this this or that second guy walks in says oh i want to talk about string theory, this, this, or that. Second guy walks in and says, oh, I want to talk about science. Einstein says, great, what's your IQ? And he says, 130.
Starting point is 02:18:08 He goes, awesome, we could talk about relativity, this, this, and that. Third guy walks in, says, I want to talk about science. And Einstein says, great, what's your IQ? And he says, 100. And he goes, all right, we'll talk about the fucking culture wars. That is, man, does that explain society in so many ways. Because I know some of it, like, you know, you have to get to, we're talking obviously a little bit outside the scientific realm right now. But, you know, you have to get to some consensus on how to play nice in the sandbox together.
Starting point is 02:18:33 I understand that. But we spend so much time bullshitting and fighting over, you know, who tucks their sack back or not. And it just gets so exhausting. And I don't care. Yeah. gets so exhausting and i don't care you know i find i can imagine guys like you in your field who are busy trying to figure out the most important questions of the world you know turn on the tv and hear what these two assholes are fighting about for any given five minute sound bite and you're just like what what am i even doing here these people are the same species as me
Starting point is 02:19:02 it's crazy yeah it's it's frustrating and i think you know the only thing the only person you can control is yourself and most of us can't even do that very well and i think you know to dedicate your time in the right way in the proper way and just concentrate forever with meditative you know sam harris like ability is is is beyond most people but i think you know to the extent that you can synthesize and harmonize your, what you do for work and that you can get meaning out of what you do and also significance about what you do. I think that's really powerful. I don't think that I would have, you know, I wrote my book long before I had a podcast. Um, but at the same token,
Starting point is 02:19:41 I think I get a lot more satisfaction out of those types of things because you know for the mere fact that you can spread education you know my job education is interesting the word education means to pour out of i'll demonstrate here no we would never spill any liquids on this table right so it means to pour out of not to pour into most people think oh i'm gonna jam all this educate knowledge into street smarts. You got street smarts. You don't have any book smarts. So pouring it in, no, you're actually bringing it out of.
Starting point is 02:20:11 But now, who was born knowing abstract algebra and relativity and group theory? Nobody. So you have to be mindful that you have this opportunity to do it. But you're also not expected to understand all of it, nor are you expected to desist from it. So for me, I often talk to my colleagues and I'm like, why don't you put out a YouTube video? Why don't you do something? Why don't you – besides this paper that was read by six people, all of whom are your friends or your former students or whatever. Not everyone is as good on camera as Brian Key. But that's not the point.
Starting point is 02:20:44 I wasn't always good on camera as brian key but you know that's not the point i i wasn't always good at on the camera either you know when my first book came out i had all my editor norton and they were like oh you should start a channel and start being an explainer and you could be the next neil degrasse tyson and do all this and you know he was published by the same publishing house norton and uh i was like i don't have time for that i'm a real scientist i gotta work i gotta put out these papers. I got to advise graduates. And I still do all that. But I've come to see that it's my moral obligation that I get paid to do this job. And it's because of the taxpayers that I get to do it. And every scientist is the same way. And when you hear somebody say that and you hear them say, well, I'm not good at it.
Starting point is 02:21:19 And I always say, oh, yeah, yeah. I forgot. When you were born, you understood quantum electrodynamics. And you understood string theory. No, no, yeah, I forgot. When you were born, you understood quantum electrodynamics and you understood string theory. No, no, no. I had to work on that. Oh. Oh, I see.
Starting point is 02:21:30 You work on things that are meaningful to you and matter to you. Oh, I see. Oh, so you're just saying that's for people like Neil deGrasse Tyson who most scientists don't have a lot of respect for. Oh, he's just a popular – Because they're just like – well, he's not a scientist. He's not an active scientist. He's not advising, you know know writing papers and doing research anymore he has a phd and he was trained in it but even he will say he's not an active scientist and to give him his credit you
Starting point is 02:21:53 know a lot of people don't i just saw him on bill maher and bill maher was like going off on him for being you know less than forceful in regards to college campuses um but uh it's funny here bill maher going off on him but um but neil uh neil will say you know if you come and ask me about what's the latest development string theory and um you know and whatnot he'll say you know go talk to brian green or you know someone an active scientist not me who's doing star talk and popularization so i have respect for people like that but to say that you can only do that, only do outreach and do a podcast or make a video or TikTok or whatever,
Starting point is 02:22:30 if you're Neil deGrasse Tyson, who I don't respect because he's not a real scientist is what people say, not me. Then go do it your damn self. Right. So that's true. And just, but by the same token,
Starting point is 02:22:40 what if they would say, well, I'm not Einstein, so I'm not going to even start doing physics. Einstein wasn't always Einstein. He wasn't always, well, I'm not Einstein, so I'm not gonna even start doing, well, Einstein wasn't always Einstein. You know, he wasn't always, oh, the God equation. You know, and Kaku wasn't always Kaku, and Weinstein wasn't always Weinstein, right? So from this perspective, if you start off with this only,
Starting point is 02:22:56 again, the humility has to be balanced with the swagger. I have the same number of chromosomes, I have the same number of muscles and body parts. That doesn't mean I'm gonna be Joe Rogan in the ring or as a podcaster, but if I say I'm a podcaster, I have the same number of chromosomes. I have the same number of muscles and body part, you know, uh, that doesn't mean I'm going to be a Joe Rogan in the ring or as a podcaster. But if I say I'm not going to do, because I can't be the best at it, I'm not going to do it or because it's hard for me. That's the joke to me. It's like, yeah, well, so is like, you know, going on a diet or so is, you know, teaching your, your, uh, you know, five-year-old to ride a bike. These are not easy things, and humans have to be generalists.
Starting point is 02:23:26 We have to know a lot about many different things. We're not insects. Heinlein said we're insects or specializations for insects, not for human beings. So you should be able to change a diaper, write a novel, fight in a war, and in my case, look through a telescope. Yeah, I've never really bought the argument about not being able to teach it and that whole rivalry that happens because someone has to get kids of this country. I mean, we just had a movie come out over the summer, Oppenheimer, about the guys who invented the nuke during World War II, which effectively ended that thing. I mean, physicists and science are at the middle of everything that happens. And so, you know, I've heard that criticism like a lot with Kaku.
Starting point is 02:24:20 But like a guy like that, forget Tyson for one second. But like Kaku spent years doing science and now say for the last two decades, he's focused very hard on being, as he describes himself, a popularizer of the subject. And what I like about him is he makes – he will take a lot of complex things and make it simple. He will make it fun. He'll tell a story with it. He knows very well how to explain some of this stuff and he'll do it a hundred times over so the people a kid can be like oh that makes sense you know what i mean and so we have to celebrate that we should be celebrating both in my opinion we should be celebrating the people who are trying to break those frontiers right now which is not necessarily something he's actively trying to do anymore and we should celebrate the people who are getting kids to go wow this is cool i enjoy that yeah of course the I, again, I'm going to push back with my rugged, good looks and handsome criticism, but I always criticize with love. Um, but I actually think that's, that's kind of, um,
Starting point is 02:25:15 you know, they call the benign bigotry of low expectations. Like if you say, well, you stay in your lane, which is, uh, you know, distillation of what you're saying. Um, I think it does some damage, not only because you would have – I mean you wouldn't tell – imagine you meet some cool, smart, young girl and she's into YouTube. And she's really into YouTube, but she wants to be a physicist. You wouldn't say, well, just keep doing the YouTube thing and don't go to graduate school or don't go – right? So you wouldn't tell her to stick in her lane. So I guess the – but also for my students that are – many of them, I've had 40 different students from foreign countries and all around the world, every continent, including Antarctica. Really? I've had students on, yeah.
Starting point is 02:25:57 From Antarctica? Well, they weren't born there, but they lived there for many, many months, yeah. Where do you even live? That's where we live. So I described it in my book, Losing the Nobel Prize. Interesting. So yeah, one of my students lived six months at the South Pole, basically. He almost became a permanent citizen.
Starting point is 02:26:12 Six months. Okay. You think Hoboken is exciting. Wait till you go to the South Pole. So, but these students, they get exposure to another dimension of their persona, their ability to communicate. If you can't explain it to the stereotypical grandmother, then you don't really understand it. You may understand it, but you may feature what Pinker calls the curse of knowledge where you're just so erudite and so brilliant. You can't understand
Starting point is 02:26:45 what it's like not to know something like that you may get so uh siloed and you just talk in the echo chamber of academia that you don't know how to relate to a common person i would say like imagine you came up you know you're hired um you know a producer for the show and you say i want you to do x y and z and then uh maybe they do it and maybe they don't but whenever you ask them what they do they say oh you can't understand what i'm doing julian you think you can understand with the magic that i am i'm so specialized these tools and techniques and and behaviors that i manifest you'd be like you know i'll go and get another producer like you're gonna treat me that's a chutzpah you know that is not get another producer. Like you're going to treat me. That's a chutzpah, you know, that is not acceptable. And yet we let scientists do that basically saying like,
Starting point is 02:27:28 if it was, you know, as Feynman used to say, you know, if it was easy to explain to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel prize. I think you really don't, but he would also say, if you don't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it. So we have to balance that, but we shortchange our students by not forcing them to – I had this online argument I guess with this guy Brett Hull or Brent Hull I think. Brett or Brent. Anyway, he wrote – he does all these podcasts with Naval Ravikant and their BFFs I guess. And he was like, oh, no. Like it's the opposite of what you did.
Starting point is 02:28:00 Like you became good at podcasting and then after you were a scientist, now you you're telling people not to do that i'm like what are you talking about all i'm saying is it's good for your students to get exposure to public speaking one of the things i do for my students that come from foreign countries i pay for them out of my own pocket to go to toastmasters you know like they just what are they gonna you know like they came from thailand or china and they're now learning to speak and maybe their accent is still going to be just as strong, but they're gonna be comfortable making a toast and making a joke in public. You know how much, I mean, your first podcast is probably unwatchable by you, right? And mine is like that too. So you get those at bats out of the way early on. And then when they do have to speak and they're speaking for their career now, um, having the background where they got, you know,
Starting point is 02:28:43 they made the mistakes on a podcast or on a on a tiktok video where 90 of people are young people are getting their news you know there's i don't get into i have a small tiktok following now i mean small like what's what's the ad like at brian keating at professor keating yeah i had dr brian keating and then i lost access to the phone that it was associated with god damn it i. I talked to President Xi in China and he pulled some strings, but it didn't work. Anyway, so I tried Professor Keating. Yeah, exactly. But I just put my YouTube shorts on there basically.
Starting point is 02:29:14 Gotcha. So it's fun. You can find it on YouTube and it'd be better. But anyway, it's a whole new dimension of my personality. I wouldn't have known about it if I didn't try. I was scared the first dozen times I did podcasting. And also, you know, there are perishable times. have known about if i didn't try i was scared the first dozen times i did podcasting and also you know there are perishable times and like you might not ever be able to get kaku back again i
Starting point is 02:29:30 don't know maybe you know or me or whatever you know what i might move to uh nobel uh you know to stockholm or something all right um so who knows and you only do the things in person right i'll fly from stockholm you basically get, you know, a couple of swings at the bat and you don't know if you're ever going to get that chance again. So if you're talking to somebody, you know, it's risk-taking, it's a whole other, you know, side of organization, public speaking, you know, communication, explanation. Some people I work with are not good on camera and they want to do animations. That's super cool. Like for a kid to do like research and not even a kid some i have some adults that just volunteer they make animations for my explainer videos on youtube because i do explainers and podcasts which is probably why the
Starting point is 02:30:14 algorithm has no idea what to make of the bright dr i like that keep doing that yeah it's fun and i'm gonna keep doing it you know i've tried to be divorced from the hedonic treadmill of you know how many subs how many likes comments and stuff like that um it's impossible to be divorced from the hedonic treadmill of how many subs, how many likes, comments and stuff like that. It's impossible to be completely separated from it because – and I should say I don't get the lion's share of my income from the podcast. But I make a decent living. I could subsist on it if I needed to. You have a way better setup how you're doing it though because you are you have the career you have the legitimacy there you make your money right your podcast scratches your itch of your interest it's safer for me that i'm sorry i admit 100 but julian
Starting point is 02:30:56 there's a there's 47 i should even say because some of my colleagues do listen to all the podcasts that i go on and and they're they're looking for know, little nitpicks with me, but, but I'll say, you know, there's dozens of colleagues that aren't doing it and there's more that aren't doing it, but even not doing it, I don't even mean start a YouTube channel. I mean, just go on other people's shows. You have a paper that came out. Why did you publish this paper on this type of weird liquid crystal that, that behaves at a certain property when polarized light is exposed to it? Okay. Um, to it. It's very arcane, very abstract. But someone's going to be interested in it. Some little Brianna or Brian is going to hear that
Starting point is 02:31:30 and say, wow, I'm really interested. I never knew how that worked. And if you're really good, you'll explain it in terms of something. Well, like your iPhone is a different type of screen. And it's totally different than cosmology. I admit, cosmology, aliens, consciousness, those are the biggest topics I can think of studying,
Starting point is 02:31:44 which is why I focus so much on them on my podcast. But there are other things. And a good guest, as you said, you get people to come in here that maybe aren't the most famous, you know, blown up people, the Hubermans, you know, whatever. But you get them on the show and they tell stories and they're good storytellers. And then they get there. And they get there. That's what happened to Paul Rosalie. That's right.
Starting point is 02:32:03 That's what happened to Andy Bustamante. Yeah and and yeah I mean and and by the way you're doing a kindness a hesed as well you're doing a kindness for them because who knows if that's part of their future second mount in their career you know part two and and to not do that and not go on other people's podcasts I've had on like the most dry, boring – if you read his papers, you'd be like, this guy is – and he's super cool and interesting. And he's talking on the podcast about superconductors, room temperature superconductors. And he would – that was his first podcast. He asked me recently, when am I coming on again?
Starting point is 02:32:36 Because you can bring it to life. It's fun. You can bring it to life. I'm having fun. You cannot beat somebody. I had Gad Saad on my podcast recently. He's another great guy. You should have him on.
Starting point is 02:32:44 He's up in Montreal. Is he the mind virus guy he's the parasitic mind that's right the parasitic uh he's got a big youtube channel large twitter following and uh he was basically you know he's basically like the happy poet the happy warrior and i said to him like you have all this vitriol and like after these attacks and israel you know he's jewish he came from lebanon as a refugee you know How do we maintain happiness? And he's like, if you're not happy, you're losing. If you're not doing it. And there's an old quote.
Starting point is 02:33:11 You can't beat the guy who's happy. These people that come out after Eric or whatever, Eric is a happy guy most of the time. The weight of the world he weighs on his shoulders, I'm sure, too. But he's enjoying it. He just loves it. It gives him pleasure. And people like that, people like Fey feinman people like einstein people like kaku they're having fun you can't beat people like that yes that definitely came across and it comes across
Starting point is 02:33:33 with you like i i meet people when when they're in here you know what i mean it's not just what you see on camera you get a feel for people and by the way i should say i i don't only like if somebody just invites me on their podcast, I don't just go on it. But I've started to do something and I want to get your feedback
Starting point is 02:33:49 and what you think of it. So I'll get people that'll write me, Professor Keating, I love your work. I've seen you on Rogan and Peterson and Friedman
Starting point is 02:33:56 and what have you and now on Julian's podcast. I'm going to get the same. And they're like, I want you on. And I look at their channel and they got 3,700 subscribers.
Starting point is 02:34:04 So I'll say, great, I agree to come on, but I'm going to set you a stretch goal. I'm going to give you some homework. I'm a professor. When you get to 10,000 subscribers, I'll come on. I've had people reject me as you've had people reject you. I'm sure it happens every time, but you give them an achievable goal. That's, you know, not 10 orders of magnitude. You know, it's not like detecting the Higgs boson on their YouTube channel, but they're going to do something. And then they come back and I've had this now at least twice where they come back. I hit it. I'm so glad you told me to do that.
Starting point is 02:34:33 And guess what? I had people tell me to do that. And people that even did it to me and said I would come on and didn't come on. But that's another story. So you have to be prepared for it, but it gives you ambition goals and force you to up your systems and learn all the tricks in the trade. And to me, it's all about improvement of the human condition. I think science is the clear cut tool that will allow us to do it the fastest and most
Starting point is 02:34:53 efficiently. Absolutely. You have, as you mentioned, talked about some of these major topics though on your channel with guests and yourself, whether it be be consciousness the beginning of everything which we've talked about a lot today but also you mentioned aliens in there yeah and requirement but you know i have so many open-minded thoughts on that and you want to talk about stuff you don't know i mean my god the whole thing is stuff you don't know. But we've seen a lot of news this year. We've seen congressional hearings, which in many ways are unprecedented as far as the scale of what we saw this year with Grush and stuff like that. But as a scientist, have you
Starting point is 02:35:35 seen anything that points to, I'm not going to say definitive proof, but strong evidence to show first that A, we are the simple one, we are not alone in the universe, and B, that some of these things that are being reported, the phenomena actually are true and did happen. Yeah. I mean, the most contentious part of my interview with Joe Rogan was about this topic. And it was interesting because I think there's a lot that we agree on and then there's a lot that he will just use kind of these tropes and superficial arguments, which I've heard for a long time, which aren't truly superficial in that they've been attributed to luminaries and heroes of mine like Carl Sagan, which is basically I call that like the surface area argument. There's so many planets. There's so many stars. There's even more than Carl Sagan ever knew about, you know, when he died in the 90s. And he used to say, if there's nobody out
Starting point is 02:36:28 there, it's an awful waste of space. Well, I told you, I've been to Antarctica and I've been there twice and it's not a very happening place. And it's not happening in a lot of different ways. One of which ways is that there's about 300 people there in the Antarctic winter, which is, you know, our summer in the Northern hemisphere. There's about 300 people there in the Antarctic winter, which is our summer in the northern hemisphere. There's about 300 people on the whole freaking continent. Are there any restaurants there or anything? There are military bases there, and the military bases supply food, and there's about 12 different countries that have different military bases there.
Starting point is 02:36:59 Are we sure it's just a base? There's not a little something below there? Not like the descendants of Hitler hiding or some aliens or some shit. No, they have plenty of places to go in South America, it turns out. Yes, that's unfortunately true. Yeah. So when you go there, you basically resign yourself to not seeing any other people besides the 49 people that might be in your particular military research base. Or we go in the United States owns the South Pole
Starting point is 02:37:25 because they're doing scientific research there. You're not allowed to mine minerals or construct military airfields there. It's just the military built the research facilities because they're the best for logistics like that. So when you go there, there's basically almost no, and now not only are the only life forms
Starting point is 02:37:40 that you see at the South Pole human beings, there's absolutely no other forms of life effectively in other words you don't see birds flying overhead or penguins walking by the south pole is 700 miles away from the coast so it's incredibly remote and antarctica itself was only discovered like 114 years 150 years ago in the late 1800s people never discovered until then i've never looked into that yeah now that you say that holy shit they never reached the south pole until 1911 it's less than a hundred year old you know continent that and it's just barely been explored now if you just said the same sagan argument that
Starting point is 02:38:15 it's a waste of space you would say that well antarctica must be a waste of space because there's only 49 people on the whole you know 200 people on the whole continent the whole continent only has 200 people on it's the size of like three texases but it's so small relative to the universe no but i'm just saying just take the there's but there's eight billion people on earth right there's trillions of microbes on earth or trillions of children you're more microbe than you are human but it's fucking cold down there but so what we know what we've learned about uh life is that life finds away right and jeff goldblum said life finds a way life works life you didn't think about what you should do you just thought about what you could do so channeling my jeff goldblum that was pretty good so yeah yeah and we we uh
Starting point is 02:38:56 we uh guys stick together so when you think but when you when you make that kind of argument you're assigning what's called a uniform prior. You're basically saying that the probability for life should be the same everywhere. In other words, we are a form of life, and then any other planet like Earth should be basically as probable to find life there, right? If I told you there's an identical copy of Earth,
Starting point is 02:39:18 forget about what else is there, if there are dinosaurs there or not. If I just said there's an identical copy of Earth, and it's in some other solar system, Proxima Centauri b, okay? And I said, it's identical. It's the same distance from a yellow-type star. It's in the habitable zone.
Starting point is 02:39:32 There could be liquid water there. There might not be liquid water. It could be ice there. It could not be ice. It could be carbon dioxide. What would you say the odds are that life would exist there? Would you say it's zero? I mean, you definitely couldn't say it's zero, right? It's not zero. Right. Would you say it's 100%? you definitely couldn't say it's zero right basically zero right
Starting point is 02:39:46 would you say it's 100 no no so somewhere between okay and that's all you can say right zero no life you talk about not proximate holy shit exactly so now you look at that and you say well the look at the planet mars and i made this analogy on java mars is right next to an earth-like planet in fact it's very earth-like because it's earth earth and mars exchanged particles for billions of years we've been exchanging material i have a meteorite that i didn't give to joe rogan um and i'm not giving it to you either but it came from mars it didn't just come from the the supernova that blew up that made this one that i gave you a great cost and personal risk to myself bringing it through through customs. I got to like put that through something.
Starting point is 02:40:26 Your mass spectrometer here. But despite that, there's no life on Mars. You can say, well, Mars is different. It used to have liquid water. It used to have abundant liquid water. It still has frozen water. It has carbon dioxide. Was that evidence for life?
Starting point is 02:40:42 I mean, if we see carbon dioxide on another exoplanet, we think it's potential evidence for life. It certainly doesn't forbid it. So for all these reasons, there is some probability that you should say that if life is abundant in the universe, there should be life on the planet literally next door to the only planet we know for sure has life. And yet there's no evidence for life now. There's not even evidence for life that existed in the past. That in itself is not proof that life never existed there or that
Starting point is 02:41:09 life couldn't exist there in the future. But again, we can only go with what we say right now. If I put a gun to your head and I said, I'm going to take away all the YouTube plush studio and your play button and everything. I say, I'm going to put a gun to your head. What is your factual knowledge, not your belief? What is the evidence for life outside of Earth? What would you say it is? It has to be zero or one. What would you say? Zero or one?
Starting point is 02:41:33 I don't think I can say zero or one. You wouldn't say zero? I mean, is there evidence for life? Well, no, no. I'm saying if you're saying the answer can only be yes or no, is that what you're referring to there? Yeah. Zero or one?
Starting point is 02:41:42 Yeah. Is there definitely life outside of the Earth or definitely no life outside of the Earth or definitely no life i couldn't say either really there's evidence for life outside i mean have you ever seen evidence for life outside of the earth because i haven't that's that's what i'm saying though we only know such a limited amount because we can we've only even i mean we haven't even gone to mars yet and it's a planet right next to here we've sent rovers and stuff. Yeah, no, I agree. But the fact is we only have evidence for life on Earth.
Starting point is 02:42:12 In other words, if I say to you that there's life on Mars or there's life anywhere on any particular thing, it only makes the probability a little bit bigger to say that there could be life. You're basically making this argument that because the universe is so big, there could be life in the universe. Okay, okay. But what if within our solar system let's say across our planets there's no real life on anything else which which is a distinct possibility that is one solar system in the context of a galaxy in the context of a series of galaxies in the context of a universe that we can't even know the limits of. And I've always thought it's incredibly narcissistic to assume that out of everything, this place with the 8 billion people and the
Starting point is 02:42:52 lions and the elephants and all the animals and the fish in the water, this is where the life is. And there isn't, forget just life, but there isn't a brilliant life form that exists somewhere else, I find that incredibly hard to believe, also considering the fact that creation had to start somewhere, and why would the creator, whoever that is, whether it's the god that's written in one of the holy books here, or something like it, or whatever it may be, why would they put, and again, this is an evidence-less comment to be very clear just a meta thought comment why would they put the only life so many infinitesimal layers away from where they exist i find that i find that in i think you're over i think you're over indexing
Starting point is 02:43:42 on the pocket that says we're nothing but dust and ashes and you should how do you figure you're over-indexing on the pocket that says we're nothing but dust and ashes. How do you figure? You're saying that we should have humility and say that it's impossible for us to be the pinnacle of creation. Well, who knows? Maybe you should have the other pocket that said the whole universe was made for you, not just humans. It was made for you, for you to do some grand mission. That's the notion of these two pockets. One is I'm nothing. I have to have humility and be humiliated sometimes and make
Starting point is 02:44:10 blunders that lose me the Nobel prize. The other one I have to say, this is cosmic feast, a buffet of infinite variety that's made just for me and for me to extract pleasure and happiness and make other people happy and extract pleasure for them. So, again, what if I said to you – Do you think a guy like Grouch is making it up then? Who? Grouch? Yeah. I really have almost no knowledge about him. The stuff that I've seen from American Alchemy, from – what's his name?
Starting point is 02:44:39 Is it Mitchell? He did an interview on a podcast called American Alchemy. Who I'm going to tell you about. Jesse. Jesse Michaels or Mitchells. Yeah, he's in LA. I'm supposed to see him sometime. Anyway, he did like, oh, there are bodies inside and stuff like that. The more precise that you make something.
Starting point is 02:44:55 In other words, I say, Julian, I saw a car go by today. And it was a yellow car. You'd say, OK, well, that's a high probability. And then if I say, and there's a Trump rally down the street and I saw on the back of the car it had a bumper sticker. It said Trump 2024. Which do you think is more likely to have happened? You just don't know anything else about me.
Starting point is 02:45:18 I'm just telling you there's a Trump rally and that's true. And I saw a yellow car or I saw a yellow car with a Trump bumper sticker on it going towards the Trump rally, which is happening right now. Which one do I think is more – Which is more like – yeah, which would be more likely to you? Well, if we know for a fact that the rally is happening, then yeah, that's technically more likely. No, the more restrictions you put on something, the less probable it becomes, not the more probable it becomes. What do you mean?
Starting point is 02:45:40 If I said – the more kind of boundaries and conditions and specificity that you put on something – I'm talking about the rally itself. I know that, but that could be completely irrelevant, right? It could be just a yellow car. Do you admit that there's more yellow cars in the world than yellow cars with Trump stickers on it? Yes. So why would you think – just because I gave you some additional information, that was really to distract you. I think we're saying the same thing here.
Starting point is 02:46:01 Keep going. You're saying it's more likely that I saw a yellow car than a Trump sticker? No. Oh, you're just saying that it had a – I'm saying it's – I think I answered your question wrong because now I may understand it better. But what I was saying is between the two events, the rally happening or someone seeing a yellow car with a Trump sticker, which one is more realistic or which one is more likely? Well, I said, well, it's 100%. We know the rally happened. They might have seen something wrong if they saw a moving car with a sticker that they maybe didn't see. Well, it's hard for me to parse exactly what
Starting point is 02:46:27 we're talking about, but I'll say this. The more conditions you put on something, the less likely it becomes. Just like I said to you. Sure. If I say you weigh less than a thousand kilograms, it's much more likely that that's true than you weigh 104 kilograms, 0.2375 grams, right? Yeah. Okay. So the more restrictions you put on it, the less problem. So if I put more and more restrictions on things like the origin of life and then how did conscious life begin and what properties are regular are required for life to exist if you look at all the things that had to conspire for us to be here having this podcast right now there's probably you know trillions if not an infinite number of things each one of which had almost infinitesimal probability
Starting point is 02:47:03 just flap of a butterfly's wing oh yeah but just look there are 400 million uh sperm brethren that you and i beat out okay we kicked them that's one 400 million shot right literally i think it's four trillion right no it's 400 million it's 400 million yeah i don't know about you you seem young i don't know us old guys oh that's all guys. We're talking about 400 million sperms. Interesting. So we beat it up, right? So just looking at that, it's – right? So any given configuration of probabilities that had to come together is almost zero.
Starting point is 02:47:34 But if you start speaking in generalities, the problem comes in and this is just a fallacy that Joe and Carl Sagan and others are succumbing to who really believe it. I actually don't think Carl Sagan believed it. You don't think Carl Sagan believed there was life life i don't think that he would say well belief was important to him it wasn't it wasn't at all he would say evidence so he would say there's no evidence but there's possibility for it and so that's where this this thing about mars being next to earth came in that's why i brought it up so if you you can't say again this didn't prove that life only originated on earth the fact that mars doesn't have life but if you – you can't say – again, this didn't prove that life only originated on Earth, the fact that Mars doesn't have life. But if you put a whole bunch of these things together, if you said no star within 70 light years of us has any evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence or life or anything like that.
Starting point is 02:48:15 Then you say, well, it's only 70 light years within a Milky Way that's 100,000 light years. OK, keep spreading it out. There are people that do these calculations, and they find the following statistics. And these are people that believe, or if you like, want to believe that there were and are aliens in the universe. Civilizations, technological civilizations, which I think there's certainly no evidence for any of this, right? I mean, that there are evidence for alien planets. Let's say Groucho's right. Evidence that you've been able to see. That I have been able to subject or has been subjected to a scientific rigor commensurate with the scientific method that I practice and my colleagues practice.
Starting point is 02:48:51 That's right. Even Drush doesn't say that he saw it. He says that he knows the people that saw it, right? I'm not denigrating what he says he saw or what he believes. He's certainly more of a hero than I am on a YouTube channel. But for him to come out and say it, a great risk, et cetera. But it's not scientific. It's not replicable.
Starting point is 02:49:09 It's not falsifiable in the same sense, right? He's saying that people saw it. So I can say that some people said they saw stuff that didn't. I don't have the security clearances, obviously. But look at all these different things that have to come together in order for life to exist on another planet
Starting point is 02:49:24 and for technological life to exist and so forth. And I start to think, besides the visitations from Earth, is there any other, which is disputed, right? Nobody is saying for sure Groucho is right or – Sure. I have had on Ryan Graves, the pilot who, you know, with his colleagues witnessed certain phenomena. Yeah, I think he saw DARPA weapons on that one. He could be. He could be, yeah.
Starting point is 02:49:47 He's a very interesting guy and he's doing good work. It's kind of like global warming stuff. Even if you don't believe global warming is truly happening and it's caused by human beings, reducing carbon emissions will have some benefits to human health and pollution and ancillary. So even if Ryan's wrong and they saw DARPA stuff, it'll make the lives of pilots and commercial airline travel and so forth much safer. But I'm really straying far afield. Let me just say this. For us to believe that there's visitation by advanced extraterrestrial intelligence requires a host of different things to have occurred, all of which would make me incredibly excited as a physicist, because it would allow me to short circuit maybe thousands of years of memory of evolution as a scientist. It would just be like
Starting point is 02:50:30 string theory is wrong. Sorry, move on to something else. You put more money in cosmology. There'd be so much advancement in technologies. So physicists have a confirmation bias of a vested interest in this being correct. But look at some of the biggest doubters of the extraterrestrial intelligent hypothesis. These are physicists as well. Even people like Avi Loeb and stuff, he won't say that he believes that these are definitive proofs of extraterrestrial intelligence
Starting point is 02:50:55 or physics beyond the standard model or other things. He will say that these are things that we need to collect more data on and that's why he's building these telescopes at Harvard and around the world and trying to collect samples from the bottom of the, you know, Marianas Trench or wherever he is, and Papua New Guinea, to try to find, you know, the shrapnel left over because there are so few artifacts. Astronomy, cosmology, searching for alien life is amongst the most challenging things there can be to study. If I want to study some nematode worm, okay, there's trillions of these worms or bacteria. I can do an experiment,
Starting point is 02:51:29 pour some, you know, I don't know, vitamin C on one, don't do it for the other. One dies, one dies. You can do experiments. How do you do experiments in the cosmos? There's only one, or the universe, one. How do you do experiments with like Oumuamua, which cruise by at, you know, a good fraction of, you know, 10 times faster than any commercial spacecraft that has ever traveled? You can't. It's a one-time only thing. It makes what we do so hard to do. And therefore, we project onto it what we want to see.
Starting point is 02:51:56 And that's the cardinal sin of a scientist. It's what got me into trouble with the dust findings and so forth. You saw what you wanted to see. I did. But let's say you're right in the theory about BICEP, which right now obviously can't be proven or anything like that. But let's say you are, and you figure out that due to inflation, we therefore have a multiverse. Does that then bring us onto the plane of, you know, when we define an alien, it's just something foreign that we don't think is from this earth. We don't necessarily know where that comes from from whether it comes from another galaxy and figured out how to
Starting point is 02:52:27 traverse wormholes and time and shit like that or whether or not it could be some sort of future human or some sort of future iteration that exists from the presence that we're in if you were able to prove that though if bicep were able to come through and eventually find the right measurement to be able to find inflation and therefore say aha aha, we may have multiverse eye. Multiverse is there. Would that then point to the fact that we could have people present here right now who are, as we might know them, half biological entities, whatever they might be, that are those who are future humans who have figured out how to switch between multiverses and or time wow you layered in about 10 000 different things now you're channeling tom de long on me with the future humans um so i had him on and uh about two years ago and uh i'll just say most of my audience wasn't thoroughly impressed with how he acquitted himself
Starting point is 02:53:24 i actually happen to like him. I mean it's impossible not to like him. And this colleague, Jim Semivan, who's an ex-CIA agent. Yeah, he's surrounded by spooks. So everyone's like – they keyed in because Jim said, you know, we're the US government. We're not allowed to lie. And the roasting in the comments section was just unparalleled. I'll say this.
Starting point is 02:53:45 There is a tendency to kind of project onto aliens a sort of sense of the anxieties, fears, desires, hopes, wishes of our current civilization. And this is not new. This actually dates back to the atomic age, it's not a coincidence that the first atomic bomb detonation on Earth by human beings was done not far from where Roswell is in New Mexico, or the first of this crash that occurred in 1947, or allegedly had occurred, with alien bodies and alien spacecraft and so forth. Many of these phenomena do occur on military installations to this very day. Many of them are also not only kind of denigrated by people of the scientific community,
Starting point is 02:54:30 not saying I never denigrate these people that have more courage in their little fingers than I do in my whole body, but I will say that some of the tell to me, to use a poker analogy, we're not far from Atlantic City, is how are they treated by the people, their colleagues and cohorts? You would think that another pilot wouldn't mock, you know, by putting little green men on David Fravor's pillow or all the stuff that he alleges that they did.
Starting point is 02:54:56 And he's correct. I'm not saying he didn't do it. He didn't witness what he did. But these people should, aren't they worried about like encountering these phenomena? They're really seen every day, as Ryan told me. they're seen every day and people report cubes and spheres or spheres and that no commercial airliners as yet and he's working to advance the reporting mechanisms and stuff to destigmatize it there's a psychological component that's fundamentally not scientific it doesn't mean that they're wrong after all i, circumstantial evidence on eyewitness testimony, it's a mixed thing. Sometimes it is used in court. Sometimes it's
Starting point is 02:55:28 not used in court. Sometimes photographic evidence can't be used in court. And we're getting into an era of deep fakes and so forth like that. So Elon Musk saying, oh, with all these camera technologies, shouldn't the videos have gotten better? I think that's a little simplistic too. But what you want to do is not pit natural allies, as I've said, and I find this a lot on my channel. I get comments like this. Of course, you astronomers, you're paid by NASA to have this opinion, scientific replicable data from the existence of an extraterrestrial intelligence. That would be more significant than 10 times what I'm doing, I have to say. What I'm doing as a scientist, I would feel like I wasted it and I would immediately pivot to this. And I'm not unwilling to do that. I've changed my career from just being a pure scientist that does nothing else to being a podcaster, to being an author. I'm comfortable with making pivots. I'll do that in a reinvention
Starting point is 02:56:29 in a second. It has to be warranted. And so don't make an enemy out of scientists who spend their freaking jobs looking at space in many different domains, from the radio to the x-ray and everything in between, from gravitational waves and then their partners in the theoretical sciences. Don't make enemies out of us just because we disagree with your innate feeling, which is only a feeling, which is ultimately psychological in nature and not scientific, that aliens must exist, and maybe even that I've had an alien encounter. We're not even saying that. Don't make enemies of us. Partner with us. Work with us. Support us. Get more funding for research into this. I just had, you know, I'm going to be
Starting point is 02:57:10 meeting with my friend David Spergel, who's the president of the Simons Foundation, which funds my research in cosmology. He led the NASA study panel in UAPs. And people came out, oh, he's just a, you know, he did a terrible job. And and of course he's just speaking the party line because it came out and it didn't show that there was credible evidence. Even they didn't say that there's no evidence. They just said that 90% plus can be explained by pedestrian means and they gave multiple examples of these phenomena from atmospheric effects to government to spies to drones to DARPA, all these different things. They gave examples, some of which are redacted and classified, and there's 10% left over. But that also doesn't mean, well, there's a 10% chance Elvis is still alive. You can't fault David Spurgle. You can't fault the members of this panel, which are esteemed astronomers, physicists,
Starting point is 02:57:59 military personnel. You're just fighting a losing battle. You should look for ways that you can get access to the data and then support them. And I'm not involved in that. That's not what I do. I personnel, you're just fighting a losing battle. You should look for ways that you can get access to the data and then support them. And I'm not involved in that. That's not what I do. I don't do anything related to that other than host people like Ryan and Tom DeLonge. And I'm open to it. But at a certain point, you know, there's emotions run so high with this. And I think it has to do with the fundamental, almost quasi-religious beliefs. Yes, 100%. That we are not alone because it's terrifying, Julian.
Starting point is 02:58:30 If we're alone, isn't it terrifying? It's scary. Yeah. So I think that that enemies people. I think it's scary. And I'm sympathetic to the people that want to believe, but no scientist should ever say, I want to believe. They should say, I want more data. That's the thing, though.
Starting point is 02:58:43 People aren't just looking for the truth. They're looking for the truth. They're looking for the truth. They want to be true. And that's at the core. I try to separate all the noise with this whole topic. And there's a lot of different topics I do this with. But on this one in particular, it's like, yeah, it'd be mad interesting if there were a bunch of beings like fucking looking at us or living among us no less or something like that. But I do still believe that it would be questionable to not assume that there's life out in that viciously long galaxy.
Starting point is 02:59:14 But the evidence we could have for it here, if someone came up and showed me good evidence tomorrow that nothing had ever been here, and I determined it to be better than evidence i saw to the contrary i take it you know what i mean yeah and that's that's just the nature of the beast but listen i would have a million other things that i want to talk to you about okay this was we're gonna have to do that this was an awesome conversation we didn't even get to like consciousness stuff we didn't get to any ai we only just scratched the surface of aliens right there. So there is definitely going to be
Starting point is 02:59:45 a Brian Keating part two, but I know you got to go meet with the other Brian, Brian Green over at Columbia. But before you go, where can everyone find your show? What's it called and what's it on? So it's called Into the Impossible Podcast. And on my YouTube channel, it's called Dr. Brian Keating. And we cover everything from the brain to the Big Bang, everything in between from the cosmos to the consciousness. And I am interested in basically anything scientific because I want to pay back a debt that I owe to my heroes like Carl Sagan, like Brian Greene, like Stephen Hawking that inspired me that I could become a scientist. And they inspired me not – again, not through their scientific papers papers which i couldn't comprehend until relatively recently they inspired me through their popular books and i endeavor to explain it never to dumb
Starting point is 03:00:30 down people say oh you're good at dumbing down i hate that i don't want to dump down i want to treat you with respect and say i'm going to encourage you to have that stretch goal like i say these podcasters with 3 000 subs get to tend to give me something to inspire you give me a hook give me an in once you're in you're going to get addicted. I promise you. Cause it's the best script ever written. And we just have to be actors that rise to the challenge to perform this play and the grandest spectacle of nature. You got a great way of putting things, man. I would, as I said earlier, I'd recommend the show heavily. It's an awesome channel on YouTube. So everyone go check it out. Brian Keating. Thank you for being here, sir. Thank you, brother. All right. Everybody else,
Starting point is 03:01:04 you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

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