Lex Fridman Podcast - #232 – Brian Greene: Quantum Gravity, Big Bang, Aliens, Life, Death, and Meaning

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Brian Green, theoretical physicist at Columbia, an author of many amazing books on physics, including his latest, until the end of time, mind, matter, and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. And now, a quick few seconds summary of the sponsors. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. First is Prisoner Wine, My Wine of Choice. Second is Blinkist, the app I used to read summaries of books. Third is Element, My go-to electrolyte drink mix. Fourth is Better Help, An online therapy service. And fifth is an eye, a company that helps engineers

Starting point is 00:00:43 solve the world's toughest problems. So the choice is wine, books, electrolytes, mental health, or the power of engineering. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full adries, as always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor that I love called Prisoner Wine. My wine of choice, beautiful artwork in the bottle, delicious taste, especially their Prisoner Cabernet Savignon,

Starting point is 00:01:20 paired of course for me with the nice steak. There are a few things I enjoy in life, as much as a great red wine with a great steak. That is happiness for me. Maybe sitting across from an old friend, talking about life, the universe, or maybe not talking at all, just enjoying the food. Go to theprisonerwine.com slash lex for 20% off plus shipping included on your first purchase. We can toast to the holidays together with the same wine if you go to theprisonerwine.com slash lex. That's theprisonerwine.com slash lex. Offer is valid on first time online orders only for US residents of legal drinking age through the end of December 2021. Other exclusions may apply. Please enjoy wines responsibly. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes They can read or listen to My recommendation here are endless Maybe the big books that popped in mind are sapiens Meditations by Marcus Aurelius beginning with affinity and by David Deutsch Obviously, I love that book and Blinkist does a great job of summarizing it. The Snowden book is on there.

Starting point is 00:02:47 I mean, the list goes on and on. I enjoy using Blinkist to remind me of the core ideas and books I've read, but I also use it to help me select the books that I'm going to read in the future. Go to Blinkist.com slash Lex to start your free, sevenday trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership. That's Blinkist.com slash Lex spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element ElectroLyke Drink Winks spelled LMNT. To do low carb diets correctly, I think the number one thing you have to get right is

Starting point is 00:03:28 electrolyte, specifically sodium, potassium, and magnesium. Element is my go-to drink. I don't know how many I drink a day, but it's a lot. It's delicious, and like I said, it's the center to the kind of diet that I practice. So both the intermittent fasting part of it and also the keto or the carnivore part of it. And honestly, it's kind of magic how much of a difference electrolytes make in a diet. So they call it the keto flu.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So if you're not feeling well, getting the right amount of salt and water in your system, it's just incredible how much of a difference that makes. Olympians use it, tech people use it, I swear by this stuff, try it at drinkelement.com slash lex. That's drink elementy.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. spelled H-E-L-P-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H- One of the best ways Practically speaking to explore the human mind is by interacting with individual people and Diving together deep into their mind. I got a little bit dissolution by psychiatry as a discipline because Drugs became such a big part of that field basically the prescription of drugs

Starting point is 00:05:01 But nevertheless talk therapy is still part of that field. And it's the thing I really believe in. So I definitely think that should be part of the tools you use in your life is therapy. Better help I think is definitely a great option to consider because it's easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. That's BetterHelp.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by an eye, formerly known as National Instruments. An eye is a

Starting point is 00:05:34 company that has been helping engineers to solve the world's toughest challenges for 40 years. Their motto, probably one of my favorite models for a company, is engineer ambitiously. They have a podcast called The Testing 1, 2, 3. They have amazing articles at ni.com slash perspectives, covering engineers and innovators, and they emphasize the power of failure through testing. So fail often and fast in the beginning to figure out what the problems are so you can solve them before you deploy the system. That is

Starting point is 00:06:09 engineering. That is what I love about engineering. It's deeply honest. You're confronting the realities, the physics of nature. Engineer ambitiously with with N-I at N-I dot com slash perspectives. That's N-I dot com slash perspectives. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Green. In your most recent book, until the end of time, you quote Bertrand Russell from a debate he had about God in 1948. He says quote, so far scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl by

Starting point is 00:07:12 still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I see no reason therefore to believe in any sort of God. That's quite a depressing statement. As you say, this is a bleak outlook on our universe and the emergence of human consciousness. So let me ask, what is the more hopeful perspective to take on the story well i think the more hopeful perspective is to more fully understand what was driving version russell to this perspective and then to see it within

Starting point is 00:07:56 a broader context and really that's in some sense what what my book until the end of time is all about in brief i would say that there's a lot of truth to what Bertrand Russell was saying there. When you look at the second law of thermodynamics, which is the underlying scientific idea that's driving this notion

Starting point is 00:08:15 that everything's gonna wither decay fall apart. Yeah, that's true. Second law of thermodynamics establishes that disorder entropy in aggregate is always on the rise, and that is indeed interpretable as this integration and destruction of our sufficient long time scales. But my view is, when you recognize how special that makes us, that we are these exquisitely ordered configurations of particles that only will last for a blink of an

Starting point is 00:08:47 eye in cosmological time like terms. The fact that we're here and we can do what we do, to me, that's just really something that inspires gratitude and wonder and a sense of deep purpose by virtue of being these unique collections of entities that happen to rise up, look around and try to figure out where we are and what the heck we should do with our time. So it's not that I would disagree with Bertrand Russell in terms of the basic physics and the basic unfolding, but I think it's really a matter of the slant that you take on what it means for us. So maybe we'll skip around a bit, but let me ask the biggest possible question then you said purpose. So what's the meaning of it all then? Is there a meaning to life that we can take from this? to a life that we can take from this. From this brief emergence of complexity

Starting point is 00:09:47 that arises from simple things and then goes into a heat death that is once again returns to simple things as the march of the second law that thermodynamics goes on. I think there is, but I don't think it's a universal answer. And so I think throughout the ages, there has been a kind of quest for some final way of articulating meaning and purpose, whether it's God, whether it's love, whether it's companionship, I mean many people put forward different ways of taking this question on. And there is no one right answer when you recognize deeply that the universe doesn't care.

Starting point is 00:10:31 There is nothing out there that is the final answer. It's not as though we need a more powerful telescope and somehow if we can look deeply into the universe, all will become clear. In fact, the deeper we've looked, but literally metaphorically into the universe and into the structure of reality, the more it's become clear that we are just a momentary byproduct of laws of physics that don't have any emotional content. They don't have any intrinsic sense of meaning or purpose.

Starting point is 00:11:05 And when you recognize that, you realize that searching for the universal for this kind of a question is a fool's errand. Every individual has the capacity to make their own meaning, to set their own purpose. And that's not some platitude. That is what we are. Because there is no fundamental answer, it's what you make of it. And however much that may sound like a hallmark card, this really is the deep lesson of physics and science more generally over the past few hundred years.

Starting point is 00:11:37 Well, there's some level where you can objectively say that whatever we've got going on here, it's kind of peculiar. It's kind of special in terms of complexity and maybe you can even begin to measure it and come up with metrics where whatever we got going on on earth, these like interesting hierarchical complexities that form more and more sophisticated biological systems. That seems kind of unique when you look at the entire universe, the observable part that we can see with our tools.

Starting point is 00:12:15 So I have to ask, as you described in your book, once again, Shroyden Gerrot, the book, What Is Life, based on a few lectures he gave in 1944. So let me ask the fundamental question here. What is life? That's particular thing we've got going on here. This pocket of complexity that emerged from such simple things. Yes, a tough question.

Starting point is 00:12:37 I asked that question even to Richard Dawkins once. And I already have my preconceived notion, which he pretty much confirmed, which is if one could give an answer to that question, that allows you to sort of draw a line in the sand between the not living and the living, then perhaps we would have the insight that we yearn for and trying to say what is so special about life. But the fact of the matter is it's a continuum. There's a continuum from the fact that matter is it's a continuum.

Starting point is 00:13:05 There's a continuum from the things that we would typically call non-living inanimate, to the things that we obviously call animate and full of the currents of life. Somewhere in there, it is a question of the complexity of the structure, the ability of the structure to take in raw material from the environment and process it through a metabolism that allows the structure to extract energy and to release entropy to the wider environment, somewhere in those collections of biological processes is the necessity or the necessary ingredients and processes for life, but drawing that line in the sand is not something that we're able to do, but I would agree

Starting point is 00:13:52 with you. It's deeply peculiar. It may in fact be unique, but it may not. It could be that the universe is such that under fairly typical conditions, a star, that's a well-ordered source of low entropy energy, that's what the sun is, together with a planet being bathed by that low entropy energy, together with a surface that has enough of the raw constituents that we recognize are fairly commonplace result of supernova explosions where star spews for the result of the nuclear furnace

Starting point is 00:14:33 that is the core of a star. It could be that all you need are those fairly commonplace conditions and maybe life naturally forms. Look, the James Webb space telescope, right, is going up hopefully in December. And one of the goals of that mission is to look at atmospheres around distant planets and perhaps come to some sense of how special or not life or leaf life as we know it is in the universe. Which part of the story of life, let's stick to earth for a second, do you think is the hardest if you were like a betting man? Which part is the hardest

Starting point is 00:15:13 to make happen? Is it the origin of life? Again, we haven't drawn the line of work. As you say, the line between a rock and a rabbit, that part is it complex organisms like multi-cellular organisms? Is it crawling out of the ocean where the fish somehow figured out how to crawl around? Is it then us homo sapiens as we like to think of ourselves special and intelligent? Or is it somewhere in between, as you also talk about, again, very hard to know at which point this consciousness emerge? If you were to sort of took a survey and made bets about other Earth-like planets in the universe, where do you think they get stuck the most?

Starting point is 00:16:04 Well, I would certainly see if we're gonna go all the way to conscious beings like ourselves. I would put it at the onset of consciousness, which again, I think is a continuum. I don't think it is something that you can draw the line in the sand, but there are obvious circumstances. There are obvious creatures such as ourselves where we do recognize a certain kind of self-reflective conscious awareness. And if we think about what it would require for a system of living beings to acquire consciousness, I think that's probably the hardest part because look, take Earth and recognize that it weren't for, you know, some singular event 65

Starting point is 00:16:46 million years ago where this large rock slams into planet Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs, maybe the dinosaurs would still rule the planet and they may well have not developed the kind of conscious awareness that we have. So for billions of years on this planet, there was life that didn't have the kind of conscious awareness that we have. And it was an accidental event in astrophysical history that allowed a mammalian species like us to ultimately be the end product. And so yeah, I could imagine there's

Starting point is 00:17:25 a lot of life out there, but perhaps none of it's wondering what's the meaning of life or trying to make sense of it, just going about its business of survival, which of course is the dominant activity that life on this planet has practiced. We are a rare exception to that. And I really appreciate that you lean into some of these unanswerable questions to me today. But so you think about consciousness, not as like a face shift, the binary zero one.

Starting point is 00:17:54 You think it was a continuum that human somehow are maybe some of the most conscious beings on earth. So you're so, I mean, people will dispute that. Yes, I mean, well, and it's a very hard argument. People will dispute that. Rocks probably will stay quiet on the matter. Maybe not, right? For the moment, they're waiting for their opportunity.

Starting point is 00:18:17 But I agree that, look, even when you and I look at each other, I am not fully convinced that you're conscious being, right? I mean, I think that you are. It's not to me. I mean, your behavior is such that that's the best explanation for what's going on, but of course, we're all in the position of only having direct awareness of our own conscious being.

Starting point is 00:18:42 And therefore, when it comes to other creatures in the world, we're in a similar state of ignorance regarding what's actually happening inside of their head, if they have a head. And so it's hard to know how singular we are. But I would say, based on the best available data and the best explanations we can make, yeah, there is something special about us. I don't think that there are fish walking around and coming up with existentialism. I don't know that there are dogs walking around who've developed and understanding the general theory of relativity.

Starting point is 00:19:15 I mean, maybe we're wrong, but that seems the best explanation. What do you think is more special intelligence or consciousness? I think consciousness, and I think that there's a deep connection between these ideas. They are distinct, but they're deeply connected. But look, I mean to me, and to, of course, many philosophers are actually coined a name for this, the hard problem of consciousness, you know, David Chalmers and others.

Starting point is 00:19:41 As a physicist, I look out the world, and I see its particles governed by physical law. We can name them. You know, we got electrons, we got quarks that come in various flavors and so forth. We have a list of ingredients that science has revealed and we have a list of laws that seemingly govern those ingredients and know nowhere in there is there even a hint that when you put those particles together in the right way, an inner world should turn on. And it's not only that there's no hint, it's insane. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:20:19 How could it be that a thoughtless, passionless, emotionless particle, when grouped together with compatriots somehow can yield something so deeply foreign to the nature of the ingredients themselves? So answering that question, I think, is among the deepest and most difficult questions that we face. Do you think it is in fact a really hard problem, or is it possible? I think you mentioned in your book that it's just like, I almost like a side effect,

Starting point is 00:20:56 it's an emergent thing that's like, oh, it's nice. It's like a nice little feature. Yeah. Well, I mean, when people use the phrase hard problem, I mean, they mean use the phrase hard problem, I mean, they mean in a somewhat technical sense that it's trying to explain something that seems fundamentally unavailable to third party objective analysis, right? I'm the only one that can get inside

Starting point is 00:21:20 my head, and I can tell you a lot about what's happening inside my head right now. It's reflected in what I'm saying. And you can try to you a lot about what's happening inside my head right now. It's reflected in what I'm saying and you can try to deduce things about what's going on inside my head, but you don't have access to it in the way that I do. And so it seems like a fundamentally different kind of problem from the ones that we have successfully dealt with over the course of centuries and science where we look at the motion of the moon. Everybody can look.

Starting point is 00:21:43 Everybody can measure it. We look at the properties of hydrogen when you shine lasers on. Everybody can look at the data and understand it. And so it seems like a fundamentally different problem. In that sense, it seems like it is hard relative to the others. But I do think ultimately that the explanation will be as you recount. I think that a hundred years from now, or maybe it's a thousand, it's hard to predict the time scale for developments, but I think we'll get to a place where we'll look back and kind of smile at those folks in the 20th century and before, 21st century and before who thought consciousness was so incredibly mysterious when the reality of it is,

Starting point is 00:22:27 it's just a thing that happens when particles come together. And however mysterious that feels right now, I think for instance, when we start to build conscious systems, things that you're more familiar with than I am, when we start to build these artificial systems and those systems report to us I'm feeling sad. Yeah, I'm feeling anxious. Yeah, there's a world going on inside here I think the mystery of consciousness will just begin to evaporate First of all beautifully put and I agree with you completely just the way you said it it'll begin to evaporate

Starting point is 00:23:03 I have built quite a few robots and have had them do emotional type things. And it's immediate that exactly what you're saying, this kind of mystery of consciousness starts to evaporate, that the kind of need to truly understand, to solve the hard problem of consciousness, like disappears, because, well, I don't really care if I understand or can solve the hard problem of consciousness. That thing sure as heck looks conscious. You know, I feel like that way when I interact with a dog, I don't need to solve the problem of consciousness to be able to interact and

Starting point is 00:23:46 richly enjoy the experience with this other living being. Obviously, the same thing with other humans. I don't need to fully understand it. And there's some aspect, maybe this is a little bit too engineering focused, but there's some aspect in which it feels that consciousness is just a nice trick to help us communicate with each other. It sounds ridiculous to say, but sort of

Starting point is 00:24:12 the ability to experience the world is very useful in a subjective sense. It's very useful, so put yourself in that world and to be able to describe the experience to others. It could be just the social and the merge. Obviously animals that sort of more primitive animals might experience consciousness in some more primitive way, but this kind of rich subjective experience that we think about as humans, I think it's probably deeply coupled like language and poetry. Yeah, that resonates with my view as well.

Starting point is 00:24:46 I mean, there's a scientist maybe who's spoken to him, Michael Graziano from Princeton. Yeah, he's developed ideas of consciousness that, look, I don't think they solved the problem, but I think they do illuminate it in an interesting way. We're basically, we are not aware of all the underlying physiochemical processes that make our brains and our inner worlds tick the way they do. And because of that dissociation between sensation and the physics of it and the chemistry of it and the biology of it, it feels like our minds and our inner worlds are just untethered, like floating somewhere

Starting point is 00:25:28 in this gray matter inside of our heads. And the way I like to think of it is like, look, if you're in a dark room, right? And I had glow in the dark paint on my fingers. So all you saw was my fingers dancing around. There'd be something mysterious. How could those fingers be doing that? And then you turn a light and you realize,

Starting point is 00:25:51 oh, there's this arm underlying it. And that's the deep physical connection explains it all. And I think that's what we're missing. The deep physical connection between what's happening up here and what is responsible for it in a physical, chemical, biological way. And so to me, that at least gives me some understanding of why consciousness feels so mysterious because we are suppressing all of the underlying science that ultimately is responsible for it.

Starting point is 00:26:19 And one day we will reveal that more fully. And I think that will help us tether this experience to something quite tangible in the world. I wonder if the mystery is an important component of enjoying something. So once once we know how this thing works, maybe we will no longer enjoy like this conversation. We'll seek other sources of enjoyment, but there's this is again from an engineering perspective. I wonder if the mystery is an important component. Well, you know, have you ever seen there's this beautiful interview that Richard Feynman did, you know, great Nobel laureate physicist responsible for a lot of our understanding of quantum mechanics, quantum field, and so forth.

Starting point is 00:27:09 And he was in a conversation with an interviewer where he noted that some people feel like once the mystery is gone, once science explains something, the beauty goes away. The wonder of it goes away. And he was emphasizing in his response to that. I was like, no, that's not the right way of thinking about. He says, look, when I look at a rose, he says, yeah, I can still deeply enjoy the aroma, the color, the texture. He says, but what I can do that you can't,

Starting point is 00:27:41 if you're not a physicist, I can look more deeply and understand where the red comes from, where the aroma comes from, where the structure comes from, he says, that only augments my wonder, it only augments my experience, it doesn't flatten it or or take away from it. So I'll be right. Yeah, well I sort of take that as a bit of a of a motto in some sense that that there is a Wonder that comes from a kind of ignorance I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, but just from not knowing So there is a wonder that comes from mystery. There's another kind of wonder that comes from knowing and

Starting point is 00:28:19 And and and deep knowing and I think that kind of wonder has its own Special character that in some ways can be more gratifying. I hope he's right, I hope you're right. And but there's also, I remember he said something about like, like, sizes and onion or something like that. You can peel back, you can keep peeling back. I mean, there is also, when you understand something, there's always a sense that there's more mystery

Starting point is 00:28:48 to understand. Like, you never get to the bottom of the mystery. But I think it's also different than, you know, I don't think in analogy, I say to a magician, right? A magician, you know, does some trick. You learn how it's done, it's like, oh my God, that's ridiculous when you find. But nature is perhaps the best magician

Starting point is 00:29:08 if you wanna try to make the analogy there because when you peel things back and you understand how it is that things have color and you have electrons dancing from one orbital to another emitting photons at very particular wavelengths that are described by these beautiful equations of quantum electrodynamics, part of which that Feynman developed, it gives you a greater sense of awe when the curtain is pulled back than what happens in other circumstances where it does flatten it completely. Yes, very possible than saying physics that we

Starting point is 00:29:42 is where it does flatten it completely. Yes, very possible than saying physics that we arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the laws of physics and has a very strong understanding of the fabric of reality, even like from the big bang to today, it's possible that that understanding is only going to elevate our appreciation of this whole thing. Yeah, I think it will. I think it will. I think it will. I mean, it has so far. But the other side of it, which you emphasize is,

Starting point is 00:30:10 it's not like science somehow reaches an end, right? There are certain categories of questions that do reach an end. I think we, one day, will close the book on nature's ingredients and the fundamental laws. Now, that can't prove that. Maybe it goes on forever, smaller and smaller. Maybe gradients and the fundamental laws. Now that can't prove that maybe it goes on forever smaller and smaller, maybe they're deeper and deeper laws, but I don't think so. I think that there's going to be a collection of ingredients and a collection

Starting point is 00:30:34 of basic laws. That chapter will close, but it's one chapter. Now we take that knowledge and we try to understand how the world builds the structures that it does, you know, from planets to people to black holes to the possibility of other universes and every step of the way, the collection of questions that we don't know the answer to only blossoms. And so there's a there's a deep sense of gratification from understanding certain qualities of the world, but I would say that if you take a ratio of what we understand to the things that we know that we don't yet understand, that ratio keeps getting smaller and smaller because the things that we know that we don't understand grows larger and larger. Do you have a hope that we saw that theory of everything puzzle in the next few decades?

Starting point is 00:31:25 So there's been a bunch of attempts from string theory to all kinds of attempts that are trying to solve quantum gravity. It'll basically come up with a theory for quantum gravity. There's a lot of complexities to this. One, for experimental validation, you have to observe effects that are very difficult to measure. So you have to build effects that are very difficult to measure. So you have to build, like, that's like an engineering challenge. And then there's the theory challenge, which is like,

Starting point is 00:31:52 it seems very difficult to connect the laws of gravity to quantum mechanics. Do you have a hope or are we hopelessly stuck? Well, I have to have to have a hope. I mean, it's in some sense, but I devote at least part of my professional life toward trying to make progress on. I'm glad you used the phrase quantum gravity. I'm not a great fan of the theory of everything phrases

Starting point is 00:32:16 because it does make other scientists feel like if they're not working on this, what if they work? And I'mans like, there's not much left when you're talking about the theory of everything. But all of of a sudden, he's just a small decent, right? Yeah, right. So it is really trying to put gravity and quantum mechanics together. And since I was a college kid, I was deeply fascinated with gravity. And as I learned quantum mechanics, the notion of physicists being stumped on trying to blend

Starting point is 00:32:45 them together, how could one not get fired up about maybe contributing something to that journey? And so, we've been on this, I've been on this for 30 years since I was a student. We have made progress. We do have ideas. You mentioned String Theory is one possible scenario. It's not stuck. String Theory is a vibrant field of research

Starting point is 00:33:06 that is making incredible progress, but we've not made progress on this issue of experimental verification validation, which is you know it is a vital part of the story. So I would have hoped that by now, we would have made contact with observation, if you would have interviewed me back in the 80s when I was, you know, a wild, bright eye kid trying to make headway working 18 hours a day and this sort of stuff, I would have

Starting point is 00:33:34 said, yeah, by 2021, yeah, we're going to know whether it's right or wrong, we'll have made contact. I would have said, look, there may be certain mathematical puzzles that we've got to work out, but we'll know enough to make contact with experiment. That has not happened. On the other hand, if you would have interviewed me back then and asked me, will we be able to talk about detail qualities of black holes and understand them at the level of detail that we actually, I would have said, no, I don't think that we're going to be able to do that.

Starting point is 00:34:05 We'll have an exact formulation of strength there in certain circumstances. No, I don't think we're going to have that yet we do. So it's just to say you don't know where the progress is going to happen. But yes, I do hold out hope that maybe before I move on to wherever, I don't think there is an after, but I would love before I leave this earth to know the answer, but science and the universe, it's not about pleasing any individual,

Starting point is 00:34:36 it is what it is. And so we just press on, we're gonna see where it goes. So in terms of strength theory, if I just look from an outside perspective currently at the theoretical physics community, strength theory is a theory was as a theory has been very popular for a few decades, but it has recently fallen out of favor, or at least it's been like, you know, it became more

Starting point is 00:34:59 popular to kind of ask the question, is strength theory really the answer? Where do you fall on this? Like, how do you make sense of this puzzle? Why do you think it's falling out of favor? Yes, so I would actually challenge the statement that's falling out of favor. I would say that any field of research went into new and it's the bright, shiny bicycle that no one has yet seen on that block.

Starting point is 00:35:26 Yeah, it's going to track detention and the news outlets are going to cover it and students are going to flock to it, sure. But as a field of matures, it does shed those qualities because it's no longer as novel as it was when it was first introduced 30-40 years ago. But you need to judge it by a different standard. You need to judge it by is it making progress on foundational issues, deepening our understanding of the subject, and by that measure, string theory is scoring in very high. Now at the same time, you also need to judge

Starting point is 00:36:05 whether it makes contact with experiment as we discussed before too. And on that measure, we're still challenged. So I would say that many strengthers, myself included, are very sober about the theory. It has the tremendous progress that it had 30, 40 years ago that hasn't gone away, but we've become better equipped at assessing the long journey ahead. And that was something that we weren't particularly good at back, say in the 80s. Look, when I was just starting

Starting point is 00:36:39 out in the field, there was a sense of physics is about to end. String theory is about to be the beehive and all final unified theory, and that will bring this chapter to a close. Now I have to say, I think it was more the younger physicists who were saying that. Some of them were seasoned, even if they were pro-string theory at the time. I don't know if they were rolling their eyes, but they knew that was going to be a long, long journey. I think people like, you know, John Schwartz, one of the founders of string theory, Michael

Starting point is 00:37:11 Green, no relation to me, founders of the theory, Edward Witten, you know, one of the main people drive in the theory back then and today, I think they knew that we were in for a long haul, and that's the nature of science. Quick hits that resolve everything few and far between. And so if you were in for the quick solution to the big questions of the world, then you would have been disappointed. And I think there were people who were disappointed

Starting point is 00:37:42 and moved on and worked on other subjects. If you're in, in the way that Einstein was in, for a lifetime of investigation to try to see where, what the answers to the deep questions would be, then I think string theory has been a rich source of material that has kept so many people deeply engaged and moving the frontier forward. Does a few qualities about strength theory, which are weird? I mean, a lot of physics is just weird and beautiful.

Starting point is 00:38:14 So let me ask the question, what do you as most beautiful about strength theory? Well, what attracted me to the theory at the outset, beyond it's putting, grabbing quantum mechanics together, which I think is, it's true claim to fame, at least on paper, it's able to do that. What attracted me to the theory was the fact that it requires extra dimensions of space. And this was an idea that intrigued me in a very deep way, even before I really understood what it meant. I somehow had, I mean, talk about sort of the emotional part of consciousness and the cognitive part, and some,

Starting point is 00:38:53 perhaps you call it strange, in some strange emotional way, I was enamored with Einstein's general relativity, the idea of curve space, and time before I really knew what it meant, it just spoke to me. I don't know how else to say it. And then, when I subsequently learned that people had thought about more dimensions of space than we can see, and how those extra dimensions would be vital to a deep understanding of the things that we do see in this world. Four or five, six dimensions might explain why there are certain forces and particles and how they behave. To me, this was like amazing, totally amazing. And then when I learned that string theory embraced all these ideas, embraced the general

Starting point is 00:39:37 theory of relativity, embraced quantum mechanics, embraced the possibility of extra dimensions, then I was hooked. And so when I was a graduate student, we would just spend hours. We, I mean, a couple of other graduate students of myself who had a sort of worked really well together. It was the Oxford in England. We would work these enormous numbers of hours a day trying to understand the shapes of these extra dimensions, the geometry of them.

Starting point is 00:40:04 What those geometrical shapes for the extra dimensions would the geometry of them, what those geometrical shapes for the extra dimensions would imply for things that we see in the world around us. And it was a it was a heady, heady time. And and that kind of excitement has sort of filtered through over the decades, but I'd say that's really the the part of the theory that I think really hooked me most wrongly. How are we supposed to think about those extra dimensions? I was supposed to imagine actual physical reality. Or is this more in the space of mathematics

Starting point is 00:40:34 that allows you to sort of come up with tricks to describe the four-dimensional reality that we more directly perceive? No one really knows the answer, of course, but if I take the most straight forward approach to string theory, you really are imagining that these dimensions are there. They're real. I mean, just as you would say that the three space dimensions around us, you know, left right, back, forth, up, down, yeah, they're real.

Starting point is 00:41:03 They're here. We are immersed within those dimensions. These other dimensions are as real as these with the one difference being their shape and their size differs from the shape and size of the dimensions that we have direct access to through human experience. And one approach imagines that these extra dimensions are tightly coiled up, curled up, crushed together, if you will, into a beautiful geometrical form that's all around us, but just too small for us to detect, with our eyes too small for us to detect, even with the most powerful equipment that we have.

Starting point is 00:41:42 Nevertheless, according to the mathematics, the size and the shape of those extra dimensions leaves an imprint in the world that we do have access to. So one of the ways that we have hoped yet to achieve to make contact with experimental physics is to see a signature of those extra dimensions in places like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. And it hasn't happened yet.

Starting point is 00:42:05 It doesn't mean it won't happen, but that would be a stunning moment in the history of the species. If data that we acquired in these dimensions gives us kind of incontrovertible evidence that these dimensions are not the only dimensions. I mean, how mind-blowing would that be? So with a large header and collider, it would be something in the movement of the particles or also the gravitational waves potentially be a place where you can detect signs of multiple dimensions

Starting point is 00:42:36 like with something like LIGO but much more accurate. In principle, all of these can work. So one of the experiments that we had high hopes for but by high hopes I'm actually exaggerating. One of the experiments that we imagined might in the best of all circumstance yield some insight. We weren't with baited breath waiting for the result. We knew it was a long shot. When you slam protons together at very high speed as a large Hadron collider, if there are these extra dimensions, and if they have the right form and that's a hypothesis that may not be correct. But when the Proton's collider, they can create debris,

Starting point is 00:43:12 energetic debris, that can in some sense leave our dimensions and insert itself into the other dimensions. And the way you'd recognize that is, there'd be more energy before the collision, than after the collision than after the collision because the debris would have taken energy away from the place where our detectors can detect it. So that's one real concrete way that you could find evidence for extra dimensions. But yeah, since extra dimensions are of space and gravity is something that exists within. In fact, is associated with the shape of space,

Starting point is 00:43:48 gravitational waves in principle can provide a kind of, you know, cat scan of the extra dimensions if you had sufficient control over those processes. We don't yet, or perhaps one day we will. Does it make you sad a little bit, or maybe looking out into the future, you mentioned Ed Witten, that no Nobel Prizes have been given yet related to strength theory? Do you think they will be? Do you think you have to have experimental validation, or can a Nobel Prizes be given? Which I don't think has been given for quite a long time for purely

Starting point is 00:44:26 sort of theoretical contribution. Yeah. It's certainly, as a matter of historical precedent, has been the case that those who win the prize have established, investigated, illuminated a demonstrably real quality of the world. So gravitational waves, the prize was awarded after they were detected, not the mathematics of it, but the actual detection of it. The Higgs particle, it was an idea that came from the 1960s,

Starting point is 00:44:59 Peter Higgs and others, in fact. And it wasn't until 2012 on July 4th, when the announcement came that this protocol had been detected at the large Hage Run Collider, that people viewed it as eligible for the Nobel Prize. The idea was there, the math was there, but you needed to confirm it, indeed. The prize ultimately was awarded.

Starting point is 00:45:21 So I'm not surprised. In fact, I would have been surprised if a Nobel prize had been awarded in the arena of strength theory, because it's far too speculative right now, it's far too hypothetical. In fact, I am sympathetic to the view that it really shouldn't be called string theory. It degrades the word theory because theory in science, of course, means the best available explanation for the things that we observe in the world, the things that we measure in experiments about the world. And string theory does not do that at least, not yet. So it really should be the string hypothesis, right? We're at an earlier stage of development.

Starting point is 00:46:06 And that's not the kind of thing that Nobel Prize it should be awarded for. What do you think about the critics out there? Peter White, he's from Columbia, to think Sabine Havanstader. Is that a healthy thing or should we sort of focus on sort of the optimism of these hypotheses? Yeah, it's actually a good way that you frame it because I'm always somewhat repelled by views of the world that start from the negative. Try to cut down an idea. Try to say that's the wrong way of thinking about things and so on.

Starting point is 00:46:48 I'm much more drawn, maybe because I'm an optimist. I don't know. I'm much more drawn to those who go out into the world with new ideas. And don't try to cut down one idea, but rather present another one. That might be better. And so you make the first idea, maybe string the irrelevant because you've come up with the better approach to the world. So, do I think it's healthy? Look, I think having a wide range of views and perspectives is

Starting point is 00:47:19 generally a healthy thing. I think it's good to have arguments within a subject in order that you stay fresh and you stay focused on the things that matter. But in the end of the day, I think it's a more vital contribution to give us something new rather than to criticize something that's there. Yeah, I'm totally with you.

Starting point is 00:47:42 But it could be just the nature of being an optimist. And also just a love of engineering. It helps nobody by criticizing the rocket that somebody else built, just build a bigger, cheaper, better rocket. And that seems to be how human civilization can progress effectively. We've mentioned the second law of the dynamics. I've got to ask you about time. Yeah. And do you think of time as emergent or fundamental to our universe? I like to think of it as emergent. I don't have a solid reason for that perspective. I have a lot of hints of reasons that some of which come out of string theory and quantum gravity that perhaps you were talking about. But what I would say is time is the most familiar

Starting point is 00:48:41 quality of experience because there's nothing that takes place, that doesn't take place within an interval of time. And yet at the same time, it is perhaps the most mysterious quality of the world. So it's a wonderful confluence of the familiar and the deeply mysterious, all in one little package. If you were to ask me, what is time? I don't really know. I don't think anybody does.

Starting point is 00:49:06 I can say what time gives us, it allows us the language for talking about change. It allows us to envision the events of the universe being spread out in this temporal timeline. And in that way, it allows us to see the patterns that unfold within time. I mean, time allows us the structure and the organization to think about things in that kind of a progression, but what actually is it?

Starting point is 00:49:37 I don't really know and that's so strange because we can measure it. I mean, there are laboratories in the world that measure this thing called time to spectacular precision. But if you go up to the folks and say, like, what is it that you're actually measuring, I don't know that they can really articulate the kind of answer that you would expect from those who are engineering a device that can measure something called time to that level of precision. So it's a very curious combination. What do you make of the one way feeling of causality? Like is causality a thing or is that too just a human story that we put

Starting point is 00:50:24 on top of this emergent phenomena of time? I don't know. I can give you my guess and my intuition about it. I do think that at the macroscopic level, if we're talking about sort of the human experience of time, I do think at the macroscopic level, there is a fundamental notion of causality that does emerge from a starting point that may not have causality built in So I certainly would allow that at the deepest description of reality when we finally have that on the table We may not see causality directly at that fundamental level But I do believe that we will understand how to go from that fundamental level to a world where

Starting point is 00:51:05 at the macroscopic level, there is this notion of A causes B, a notion that Einstein deeply embraced in its special theory of relativity where he showed that time has qualities that we wouldn't expect based on experience. You and I, if we move relative to each other, our clocks tick off time at different rate. And our clocks is just a means of measuring this thing called time. So this is really time that we're talking about. Time for you and time for me are different

Starting point is 00:51:34 if we're in relative motion. He then shows in the general theory of relativity that if we're experiencing different gravity, different gravitational fields are actually more precisely different gravitational potentials. Time will elapse for us at different rates. These are things that are astoundingly strange that give rise to a scientific notion of time travel.

Starting point is 00:51:55 So this is how far Einstein took us in wiping away the old understanding of time and injecting a new understanding of its quality. So, there's so much about time that's counterintuitive, but I do not think that we're ever going to wipe away causality at the macroscopic level. At the macroscopic level? I mean, there's so many interesting things at the macroscopic level that may only exist at the macroscopic level. Yeah. Like we already talked about consciousness that very well could be one of the things.

Starting point is 00:52:27 You mentioned time travel. So, I mean, according to Einstein, and in general, what types of travel do you think our physical universe allows? Well, certainly allows time travel to the future. And I'm not talking about the silly thing that you and I are now going into the future second by second by second.

Starting point is 00:52:48 I'm talking about really the version that you see in Hollywood, at least in terms of its net effect, whereby an individual can follow an Einsteinian strategy and propel themselves into the future in some sense more quickly. So if I wanted to see what's happening on planet earth, one million years from now, Einstein tells me how to get one million years from now.

Starting point is 00:53:18 Build a ship, I gotta turn to guys, you know, who know how to build stuff. I can't do it like you. Build a ship that can go out into the universe near the speed of light, turn around and come back. Let's say it's a six month journey out, a six month journey back. And Einstein tells me how fast I need to travel,

Starting point is 00:53:35 how close to the speed of light I need to go, so that when I step out of my ship, it will now be one million years into the future on planet Earth. And this is not a controversial statement, right? This is not something where there's differences of opinion in the scientific community. Any scientist who knows anything about what Einstein taught us agrees with what I just said, it's commonplace, it's bread and butter physics. And so that kind of travel to the future is absolutely allowed by the laws of physics. There are engineering challenges, there are technological challenges.

Starting point is 00:54:13 There's a speed of light part. Yeah. And there are even biological challenges, right? There are G forces that you're going to experience. So there's all sorts of stuff embedded in this. But those, I will call the details. And those details, notwithstanding, the universe allows this kind of travel to the future. And in the fact of pause real quick, you can also, at the macro level, with biology, extend

Starting point is 00:54:39 the human lifespan to do a kind of travel forward in time. If you expand how long we live, that's a way from a perspective and an observer, a conscious observer that is a human being, you're essentially traveling forward in time by allowing yourself to live long enough to see the thing. Yes. So that's in the space of biology. What about traveling back in time? Yeah, that's the, that is a natural next question, especially if you're doing, if you're going on one of these journeys, is it a one way journey, can you come back? And the physics community doesn't speak with a unified voice on this as yet, but I would say that the dominant perspective is that you cannot get back. Now having said that, there are proposals that serious people have written papers on regarding

Starting point is 00:55:34 hypothetical ways in which you could travel to the past. And we've seen some of these. Again, Hollywood loves to take the most sexy ideas of physics and build narratives around them. This idea of a wormhole, like a Jody Foster in contact went through a wormhole, a deep-space nine-star. I'm sure there are many other examples where these ideas that I've probably never even seen. But with wormholes, there's at least a proposal of how you could take a wormhole tunnel through

Starting point is 00:56:03 space-time, manipulate the openings of the wormhole in such a way that the openings are no longer synchronous. They are out of sync relative to each other, which would mean one's ahead and one's behind, which means if you go through one direction, you travel to the future, if you go back, you travel to the past. Now, we don't know if there are wormholes

Starting point is 00:56:23 in the world. They're possible according to Einstein. Correct but they're possible according to Einstein correct They are possible according to Einstein But even Einstein was very quick to say just because my math allows for something right doesn't mean it's real him He famously didn't even believe in black holes Yeah Didn't believe in the big bang, right and yet the big the the black hole issue has really been settled now we have radio telescopic photographs of

Starting point is 00:56:46 the black hole in M87 was in newspapers around the world just a couple of years ago. So, so it's just to say that just because it's in Einstein's math, it doesn't mean it's real, but yes, it is the case that wormholes are allowed by Einstein's equations. And in principle, you can imagine, you know, putting electric charges on the openings of the wormhole, allowing you to tow them around in a manner that could yield this temporal asymmetry between them. Maybe you tow one of the mouths to the edge of a black hole, in principle you can do this, slowing down the passage of time near that black hole, and then when you bring it back, it will be well out of sync with the other opening, and therefore it could be a significant temporal gap between one and the other. But people who study this in more detail question, could you ever keep a wormhole open? Assuming it does exist. Could you ever travel through a wormhole or would there be a requirement to some kind of exotic matter to

Starting point is 00:57:47 prop it open that perhaps doesn't exist? So there are many many issues that people have raised and I would say that the general sentiment is that it's unlikely that this kind of scenario is going to survive our deeper understanding of physics when we've rightly have it, but that doesn't mean that the door is closed. So maybe it's a small possibility that this good one day people. That's such an interesting way to put it. It will not this kind of scenario will not survive deep understanding of physics. It's an interesting way to put it because it makes you wonder what kind of scenarios will be created by our deeper understanding of physics. Maybe, sorry, to go crazy for a second, but if you have the pan-psychism idea that consciousness permeates all matter, maybe traveling in that, whatever laws of physics, the consciousness

Starting point is 00:58:44 operates under something like that in that view of the University of We somehow are able to understand that part. Maybe traveling is super easy. Yeah It does not follow the constraints of the speed of light Something like this. Yeah, so look I have I have a definite degree of sympathy with the possibility that consciousness might be more than what we described earlier is just the byproduct of mindless particles. You just made the rock happy. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:59:17 So it isn't the approach that feels to me the most likely, but I see the logic. If you've got the puzzle, how to mindless particles build mind, one resolution might be, the particles are not mindless. The particles have some kind of proto-conscious quality. So there's something appealing about that straightforward solution to the puzzle. And if that's the case, if we do live in a pan-psychist world where there's a degree of consciousness residing in everything in the world around us, then yes, I do think some interesting possibilities might emerge where maybe there's a way of communing with physical reality in a deeper way than we have so far. I mean, we as human beings, a vital part of our existence is human to human communication,

Starting point is 01:00:09 contact. We live in social groups, and that's what it's allowed us to get to the place where we've gotten. Imagine that we have long missed that there's other consciousness out there and some kind of relationship or communion with that larger conscious possibility would take us to a different place. Now, do I do I buy into this yet? I

Starting point is 01:00:29 don't I don't see any evidence for it, but do I have an open mind and allow for the possibility in the future? Yeah, I do. So if that's not the case and you have these simple particles that at the macro level emerges some interesting stuff like consciousness. Another thing you write about until the end of the time book is the thing that it seems to emerge at the macro level is the feeling like there's a free will like we decide to do stuff. And you have a really interesting take here which is no there's not a free will like we decide to do stuff and you have a really interesting take here which is

Starting point is 01:01:07 no there's not a free will, I'm just going to speak for you and then you can correct me, no there's not a free will but there is an experience of freedom. Yeah. Yeah. Which I really love so where does the experience, where does freedom come from if we don't have any kind of physics-based free will? Yeah, and so the idea follows naturally from all that we've been talking about. Let's make the assumption that all there is in the physical universe is stuff governed by laws. We may not have those laws, we may not know what the fundamental stuff is yet, but everything we know in science points in the direction that it's physical stuff governed by universal laws. And that being the case or that being the assumption, then you come

Starting point is 01:01:57 to a particular collection of those ingredients called the human being, and that human being has particles that are fully governed by physical law. And when you then recognize it, every thought that we have, every action that we undertake is just the motion of particles. When I'm thinking thoughts right now, of course, at this level of description, it is the motion of particles cascading down various neurons inside of my head and so on. And every single one of those motions collectively and individually is fully governed by these

Starting point is 01:02:33 laws that we perhaps don't have yet, but we imagine one day we will. That leaves no opportunity for any kind of freedom to break free from the constraint of physical law. And that from the constraint of physical law. And that is the end of the story. So the traditional intuitive notion of free will, that we're the ultimate authors of our actions, that we're the buck stops, that there is no antecedent, that is the cause for our decided to go left or right,

Starting point is 01:03:00 choose vanilla or chocolate, live or die, that intuitive sensation does not have a basis in our understanding of physical world. So that's the end of the free will of the traditional sort. But then your question is, what about this other kind of freedom I talk about? And the other kind of freedom, if you focus on it intently, I think is actually the true version of freedom that we feel, and that freedom is this.

Starting point is 01:03:30 You look at inanimate objects in the world. Rocks, bottles of water, but either. They have a very limited behavioral repertoire. Why? Their internal organization is too coarse for them to do very much. You have to, you try to have a conversation with the glass of water, you send sound waves, it doesn't do much. You may vibrate a little bit, but the repertoire of responses are incredibly limited. The difference between us

Starting point is 01:03:57 and Iraq, or a bottle of water, is that our inner organization, by virtue of Ionza, evolution by natural selection, is so refined, so spectacularly ordered, that we have a huge repertoire of behaviors that are finally attuned to stimuli from the external world. You ask me a question that's a stimulus and all of a sudden, these particle processes go into action and this is the result. This answer that I'm giving you. So the freedom that we have is not from the control of physical law. The freedom that we have is from the constrained behavior that has long since governed inanimate objects. We are liberated from the limited behavioral repertoire of rocks and bottles of water To have this broad spectrum of responses.

Starting point is 01:04:46 Do we pick them? We do not. Do we freely choose them? We do not. But yet we have them. And we can marvel at those behaviors. And that's the freedom that we have. The complexity and the breadth of that repertoire is where the freedom emerges.

Starting point is 01:05:02 Is there something to be said about emergence? I don't know if you know I've looked at much about objects that I seem to love with more than anyone else, which is Celia Hattam. Yeah. Like game of life type of stuff. You know, from simple things emerges beautiful complexities. And so that's that repertoire. It's like it seems if you have enough stuff, just beautiful complexity emerges that sure as heck to our human eyes looks like there's consciousness there, there's free will, there's little objects moving about

Starting point is 01:05:40 and making decisions. I mean, all of that, you could say it's anthropomorphization, but it sure as heck feels like their organisms making decisions. What is that, that emergence thing? Is that within the realm of physics to understand? Is it within the realm of poetry? What is that complex systems, emergence? What is that, will that ever be understood by science? So here's the way that I think about it.

Starting point is 01:06:09 So there are clearly qualities of the world that emerge on macroscopic scales, our sense of beauty, wonder, consciousness, all these kinds of qualities. Do I feel that they ultimately are explainable from the laws of physics? I do. There is nothing that's not ultimately explainable with the laws of physics, from this physicalist perspective, which is what I take. So you got the particles, you got the laws, and you have things that emerge from the choreographed motions of those particles.

Starting point is 01:06:46 But is that the best language for talking about these emergent qualities? Usually not. If I was to take something even more mundane, like a baseball flying through the air, if I was to describe it in terms of the quirks and the electrons. I'd give you this mountain of data with, you know, 10 to the 28 particles and all of their coordinates and spaces of function at the time. I hand you this mountain of data. You're like, I don't know what this is. And then if you really were clevering, looking, oh, it's a baseball just described in the

Starting point is 01:07:20 least economical way possible. It is much more useful and insightful to talk about the baseball flying through the air. Similarly, there are things at the macroscopic level like human experience and human emotion and human action and the sensation of free will that we undeniably all have even if it itself doesn't have a basis in our understanding of the physical world,

Starting point is 01:07:45 it's useful to talk about things in this very human language. And so yes, it's vital to talk about things in the poetic language of human experience, but do not lose sight of the fact, and some people do, they say, oh, it's just an emergent phenomenon. Don't lose sight of the fact that emergent phenomena are emerging from this deeper understanding that comes

Starting point is 01:08:06 from the reductionist account of physical law. And there's a lot of insight to come from that such as the freedom that you thought that you had, the freedom of will that you thought you had, it doesn't have a basis in that reductionist account, so it's not real. So speaking of the poetry of human experience, you mentioned the images of the black holes. How did it make you feel a few years ago when that first image came out? It's truly amazing. A sense of, I guess the feeling was, both amazing and there's a little sense of jealousy's

Starting point is 01:08:41 not quite the right word, but a sense of longing. I think that's a better word because here's a subject that started with Einstein back in 1915, right? Einstein the equations of the general theory of relativity, and then there are scores of individuals over the decades, starting with people like Carl Schwarzschild, who analyze the equations, see the possibility of black holes. People develop these ideas, John Wheeler, all these greats of physics. It's still a hypothetical subject.

Starting point is 01:09:12 It gets closer to reality through observations of the center of our galaxy, stars whipping around in a manner that could only really be explained by there being a black hole in the center of our galaxy, but it was still indirect. To actually have a direct image that you can look at, what a beautiful arc, narrative arc from the theoretical to the absolutely established. And that's what we hope will happen with other areas, for instance, string theory, right?

Starting point is 01:09:41 I mean, holy mathematical subject at the outset, and still pretty much a holy mathematical subject today. Yeah, do we long for that image where we can look at and say, string, it's real. How thrilling. How thrilling to be part of that journey, to be part of that step that moves things from the abstract to the concrete. Yeah, so I'd like the image of the DNA, the early images of the DNA, for example. But there is something, so the problem with strings is they're tiny, so it's harder to take a picture. In the following sense, when you think of a black hole, I mean, you have a swirl of, I guess, what is, I don't even know, it's dust, whatever, light.

Starting point is 01:10:28 A greeting on to the event horizon. And then there's darkness, center. And you just imagine, so that picture in particular, I guess, is of a gigantic black hole. So you just, I mean, is it terrifying? Billions of times a man to the sun. Yeah. So it's both exciting and terrifying. I mean, I don't, I don are times the mass of the sun. Yeah, so it's both exciting and terrifying. I mean, I don't, I don't know where you fall in the spectrum.

Starting point is 01:10:48 I think it's exciting at first. Like the longer I think about it, every time I think about it, the more terrifying it becomes. So it always starts exciting and then it goes to terrifying. And both are feelings, very human feelings that I appreciate. It's like terrified awe Yeah, how it's still beautiful. That's a good way of saying it I think I kind of share that that reaction because there is a way in which

Starting point is 01:11:13 When you work on this subject like all the time I teach it I teach about black holes right the equations on the blackboard the ideas Reside in a very cognitive, I don't know, mathematical portion of the brain, or at least for me. And it's only when you like sit down and it's quiet and you start to contemplate, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, this isn't just like a mathematical game. There are these monsters out there. Now, I don't, not in a sense of, I fear for my life, but it's a sense of how extraordinary

Starting point is 01:11:52 is this universe. And so it is breathtaking. How powerful nature is. Yeah, how stupendously powerful nature is. And so there is a deep sense of humility that I think this instills if you really allow the ideas to sink in. Well, I have to ask about the most stupendously powerful thing to have ever happened in our universe, which is the Big Bang. What's up with the Big Bang? So we can, I mean, with gravitational waves,

Starting point is 01:12:26 the hope is, you have more and more accurate measurements of the gravitational waves, you can crawl back further and further back in time towards the Big Bang. Do you have a hope that we'll be able to understand the early spark that created our universe? Yeah. You know, that and the deep interior of a black hole, the early spark that created our universe. Yeah. You know, that and the deep interior of a black hole, I think,

Starting point is 01:12:50 the biggest mysteries that we hope, the melding of quantum mechanics and gravity will reveal, will illuminate. And, you know, what question could be more captivating than why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there a universe at all? And will the theories that we're developing take us to an answer to that? I don't know. Even if we truly knew what the big bang is, and that's a big question in its own right,

Starting point is 01:13:19 one would still be left with the question, well, okay, so you've explained the process by which a tiny nugget of a universe, a tiny nugget of space time can undergo some kind of growth to yield the world around us. But presumably in that explanation, you're going to involve mathematics and some ingredients like quantum fields or matter or energy or something Where did that stuff come from you know, can we get to that level of explanation? I don't know but it is remarkable that if you ask what happened a Millionth of a second after the big bang. It's not really that controversial Any longer right even though there's a lot of

Starting point is 01:14:07 argument in the field, and it's very heated right now, I should say, regarding what is the right theory of the Big Bang? What is the right theory of early universe cosmology, where I mean early, much earlier than a month of a second, a lot of dissent, a lot of heated arguments about that. No pun intended. Yeah, right, exactly. But you go like a millionth of a second after that. And we're pretty firm-grant. Isn't that amazing? To understand what happened from that point forward. But to go back is controversial. So there is this theory called inflationary cosmology, which I would say has been the dominant paradigm since early 1980s. So what does that mean? Roughly 40 years now, it's been the dominant cosmological paradigm. And

Starting point is 01:14:57 it makes use of a curious feature of Einstein's general theory of relativity, his theory of gravity, where Einstein shows us mathematically that gravity can not only be attractive, you know, the kind of gravity that we're used to, things pulled together, but it can also be repulsive. And that fact is then leveraged by people like Alan Gooth and Andrade Linde, and at the time Paul Steinhard and Andreas Hallbrett and others to say, okay, if we had a little nugget in the early universe, which was filled with the stuff that yields this repulsive gravity, well, that would have blown everything apart. It would cause everything to swell. Beautiful explanation for what the bang in the big bang was. And then people mathematically analyze the

Starting point is 01:15:41 consequences of this idea and they make predictions for tiny temperature differences across the night sky that in principle could be measured. You send up balloons, you send up satellites with very refined thermometers, and they measure the temperature of the night sky, and the statistical distribution of the temperature differences agrees with the mathematical predictions. I mean, it's amazing.

Starting point is 01:16:07 You just sort of have to stand in awe of this insight. So you think, aha, the theory has been established, but scientists are an incredibly skeptical bunch and some scientists, including one of the people who helped develop the theory of the outset, Paul Steinhardt, comes along and says, well, yeah, it's done, this theory's done pretty well so far, but there are aspects of this theory that are making me lose confidence. For instance, this theory seems to suggest that there might be other universes. Like, how do you make sense of

Starting point is 01:16:40 a theory that suggests there are other universes, or there are others who come along and say this theory seems to talk about length scales that are miniscule even by the so-called plank length, the sort of shortest length that we can imagine making sense of in a theory of quantum gravity, how do you make sense of that? And so on and so forth, they develop a list of things that they consider to be chinks in the inflationary cosmological theories armor.

Starting point is 01:17:08 And they develop other ideas which they claim yield the same predictions as inflation and cosmology for those temperature differences across space, but don't suffer from these problems. And then the inflationary cosmology folks, even they don't know, hang on, you know, your theories suffers from different problems. And so the arguments goes to it's a healthy debate talk about real debates and science. So when you ask what's up with the big bang, I don't know right now. If you would have asked me five years ago, maybe even less than that three or four years ago, I said, look, inflation at cosmology has some issues. But the package

Starting point is 01:17:46 of explanations it provides is so potent. And the issues that beset it are seemingly solvable to me that I would imagine it's going to in the end win out. I would still say that today, but I wouldn't say it is loudly. I wouldn't say it has confidently. I think it's worth thinking about alternate ideas, and it could be the case that the paradigm, at some point, shifts. Does a dark matter and dark energy fit into the shifting of the explanations for those? Yeah, certainly. So dark energy in the inflationary, is kind of a big mystery. So dark energy is the observational realization in the last 20 years that not only is universe expanding, it's expanding ever more quickly.

Starting point is 01:18:37 Something is still pushing things outward. And the explanation is that there's like a residual version of the repulsive gravity from the early universe, but it's such a strange number. When you write that amount of dark energy using the relevant units and the ethereum quantum gravity, it's a decimal point followed by like 120 zeros and then a one. We're not used to those kinds of numbers in physics. We're used to a half, one, pi, e squared, two. Those are the kinds of fundamental numbers that emerge in our explanations of the world. And we look at this bizarre number,

Starting point is 01:19:17 decimal point, all these zeros, and in one, we say, something's wrong there. Like, where would that number have come from? And now there are people who suggest resolution choices. It's not like we're totally in the dark on it, but those people like Paul Steinhardt, who have alternate cosmological theories, cyclic cosmologies as they call it claim, that they have a more natural explanation of the dark energy that it naturally feeds into a cyclical process that is their cosmological paradigm. So yeah, if the cosmology should change, it's conceivable our view of dark energy may

Starting point is 01:19:55 change from deeply mysterious to deeply integrated into a different paradigm. That is possible. I think it's Roger Peneros that think that information can bleed through from before the big bang to the after the big bang. Yeah. Is that, is the big bang like a full-erasure of the hard drive or is there some information that could bleed through? Yeah, I mean, so Roger is among the most creative thinkers of the last 100 years, rightly won the Nobel Prize for his insights into singularities and spacetime

Starting point is 01:20:27 that we know to afflict our mathematical solutions, a black hole in the Big Bang and so forth. And he has an enormously fertile imagination. And I mean that in the most positive sense. And so he has put forward this idea, this conformal cyclic cosmology, I think is the official title, although I could be getting that wrong.

Starting point is 01:20:52 I can't say that I've studied it. I have seen lectures on it. I don't find it convincing as yet. It feels like it's being built to find a solution as opposed to sort of more naturally emerging. Maybe Roger would say otherwise, and I don't mean to, in any way, cast aspersions on the work. It's vital and interesting, and people are thinking about it. I don't consider it as close a competitor to say the inflationary theory,

Starting point is 01:21:23 as for instance, the stuff that Paul Steinhard has put forward. But again, you've got to keep an open mind in this business when there's so much that we don't yet understand. I mean, it is wild to think that information could survive something like that. Just like it is wild to imagine that information could escape a black hole, for example. It just seems like by construction, these things are supposed to not bleed out anything. Well, one of the challenges in all these theories is when we talk about a singularity,

Starting point is 01:21:53 has this real sexy term, the singularity. Yeah. But a singularity is in more ordinary language, a physical system where the mathematics breaks down. It's nonsensical. It's like taking one divided by zero, you put that into a calculator and it says, e error, it does not make sense, it doesn't compute. And so it's very hard to make definitive statements about things like the big bang or about black holes until we cure the mathematical singularities. And there are some who claim that in certain regimes,

Starting point is 01:22:29 the singularities have been cured. I don't by any means think that there's consensus on these ideas. So when one talks about information, sort of bleeding through the Big Bang, you've really got to make sure that the equations have no singularity. You talk about cyclic cosmology.

Starting point is 01:22:44 You've got to make sure that the equations don't have any singular You talk about cyclic cosmology, you've got to make sure that the equations don't have any singularities as you go from, say, one cycle to the next. Now some of the proponents of these theories claim that they have resolved these issues. I don't think that there's a general sense that that is the case as yet, but it could be that, look, life is so short that I haven't had the time to deeply delve into all the mathematical intricacies of all the ideas that have been moving forward, but did that I haven't had the time to deeply delve into all the mathematical intricacies of all the I did it move forward, but did that I'd never do anything else, but that's what the issue is. And of course it's just math. There may be holes. There may be

Starting point is 01:23:16 There may be gaps in our understanding in the way we're modeling physical. Well, that's the point in fact when you said I was about to jump in and say modeling, but you got there first, and it's exactly the right point. You're talking about the universe here. Right. And how do you, how do you talk about the universe with a straight face, mathematically? And the way you do it is you, you simplify. You throw away those characteristics of the universe that you don't think are vital to a full understanding. And so we're going to get to a point people are starting to where we've got to go beyond those simplifications. And so cosmology has for a long time modeled the universe in the most simplest terms, homogenous, isotropic.

Starting point is 01:23:59 It has just a few parameters that describe it, the average density of mass and energy and so forth. We have to go beyond those simplifications and that will require putting these things on computers. We're not going to be able to do calculations there. So much as astrophysics has gone beyond many simplifications to now give really detailed simulations of star systems and galaxies of Earth, we're going to have to do that with cosmology and people are starting to do that today. Yeah, I've seen some interesting work on simulation, most simulation cosmology, by the way,

Starting point is 01:24:30 it's just awesome, but you know, just like simulation of the early formation of our solar system, don't understand how the like the or cloud and just, I don't know, the whole of it the how earth came to be yeah like how Jupiter just the Protect us protects us and then there's like weird like moons and Volcanoes and and like modeling all of that the formation of all that Is faceted yeah because that Naturally, he's the question of how does life emerge and these kinds of rocks? How does a rock become a rabbit?

Starting point is 01:25:10 But speaking of models, there's an equation called the Drake equation. We were talking about life Have to ask when you at the highest level first when you look out there How many alien civilization do you think are out there? Well, it's zero, one, or many. So, if you say civilization, I would bring my number way down. It could be zero. If you talk about life,

Starting point is 01:25:43 I think it could be many. As we were saying before, I think the move from life to consciousness, the kinds of beings that would build what we would recognize as a civilization, that may be extraordinarily rare. I hope it's not. You know, as a kid, I love Star Trek. I just love the idea that we would be part of some universal community where, look, experience on planet Earth suggests it doesn't always go so well when groups who are separated try

Starting point is 01:26:15 to come together and live in some larger collective. But again, as an optimist, how amazing would it be to converse with an alien civilization and learn what they've figured out about physics and cosmology and compare notes and learn from each other in some wonderful way. I love that idea, but if you ask me the likelihood of it, I would err on saying it may be so improbable that the conditions conspire to allow life to move to this place of consciousness that it might be rare. It might be oversimplifying things, but just observing the power of the evolutionary process, I tend to believe, and like you read different theories of how we went,

Starting point is 01:27:06 how homo sapiens evolved. It seems like the evolutionary process naturally leads to the homo sapiens or creatures like that or much better than that. So to me, the several scary scenarios. So, okay, the positive scenario is life itself is really difficult. So that origin of life is difficult. That's exciting for many reasons because we might be able to prove that wrong easily in

Starting point is 01:27:38 the near term by finding life elsewhere. Sure. The scary thing to me is if life is easy and there's plenty of conscious intelligent civilizations out there and we have not obviously made contact, which means with intelligence and consciousness comes responsibility and ultimately Destruction so with power comes great responsibility and then we end up destroying ourselves. That's the the scariest the positive I guess version is that Maybe we're being watched sort of like there's a transition to where you don't want to ruin

Starting point is 01:28:24 sort of like there's a transition to where you don't want to ruin the primitive villages out there and so there's a protective layer around us. Yeah, they're watching So where where do you and these possible explanation to the Fermi paradox? Why haven't we contacted aliens? Do you do you land on well? I think the most straightforward explanation is that there aren't any I think the most straightforward explanation is that there aren't any. Now there are many other explanations too so you can't be dogmatic about things that are just sort of gut feel. But you know one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes on a camera saw this one where the zaline civilization finally comes to planet earth and gives us this book that they really want us to have and to hold.

Starting point is 01:29:08 It's in this foreign language. You don't understand it. The cryptographers, they desperately try to decipher it as humans are going to visit this other alien planet. They're all sending back postcards, how wonderful it is and so forth. They finally decipher the title. It's to serve man. Everyone so thrilled of their here-to the title, it's to serve man. And everyone's so thrilled, they're here to service, it all makes sense.

Starting point is 01:29:29 And then just as one of the final cryptographers is going on to the alien ship, his helper runs and says, I've deciphered the rest of the book to serve man. It's a cookbook. You know, so yeah, is that a possibility, sure. And so could they be watching us and just sort of waiting for us to get to a mature enough level? I don't know. It strikes me.

Starting point is 01:29:57 Well, I think it'd be better to have this conversation after the James Webb telescope. I mean, I do think that if we look at the atmospheres of many planets, I mean, there's now an estimate now that there's on order of one planet per star, on average. So even long known that, you know, the galaxy, hundreds of billions of stars, numbers of galaxies, hundreds of billions of galaxies, that we're talking about, hundreds of billions of billions of planets. Oh my. And if we start to survey some of these planets, and one after the other after the other, we just sort of find no evidence for any of the biological markers.

Starting point is 01:30:36 It could be, of course, maybe life takes a radically different form. It would be hard to know that. But I think, you know, that would at least give us some insight on the life question. But I just don't see how we get insight on the civilization or consciousness question without, you know, the direct connection. And it strikes me that if consciousness is ubiquitous, let's say life is, I'm willing to grant that. If consciousness is also ubiquitous, then I don't understand why they haven't been here or why there hasn't been sufficient because presumably they should be much further ahead of us.

Starting point is 01:31:13 How unlikely would it be that we're like of all consciousness in the universe, we're the most advanced. That'd be such a special place for human beings that it's hard for me to grant that as a likely possibility. Rather, I think we're kind of running the mill, and there are many who are far more advanced

Starting point is 01:31:30 than us. And I don't think that they would expend the energy to hide themselves. So I don't think they care enough. And so, see, that's actually what I believe that there's very large number of civilizations that are far more advanced than us, but my sense is that humans are exceptionally limited both in our direct sensory capabilities and our physics, our tools of sensing, that just like with the strength theory and the multiple dimensions, we're just not like, it's like, I honestly believe that could be stuff in front of our nose that we're just not seeing

Starting point is 01:32:09 because we're too dumb to too much hubris and I mean a bunch of stuff and too ignorant as the To the fabric of reality all of those things. Yeah, we're young Yeah, in terms of intelligence, but I guess what I say like, I'm on board with all of that as a real possibility. But then it does strike me that we are sufficiently able to observe the unit. Look, we can look back to, you know, a fraction of the duration from here to the be just a fraction is left that we are unable to see. So however young we are, we have been able to sort of pierce the

Starting point is 01:32:54 universe and it just strikes me that there would be some signature but maybe maybe that's coming but but look having said that I do, look, I certainly note the fact that it's rare that I stoop down while walking in Manhattan and sort of dig up some ants in the bushes on the side of the street and talk to the ants, right? Because it's just not interesting to me. So if we're like the ants on the cosmological landscape, then yeah, I can imagine that the super advanced aliens would be like, like, whoever, you know, but I feel like we're sufficiently advanced that there should be some

Starting point is 01:33:31 signal signature of that, but maybe it's coming. I think the deeper fundamental problem between us and the answer is that we don't have a common language. It's not the interest. It's that we don't even have a common language. And so the aliens, civilizations don't even know how to come. Like we humans have convinced ourselves we're special because we developed the language. And you talked about the importance of language to the intelligence, but it makes you wonder like how very niche is that club that we've tried,

Starting point is 01:34:03 we've created of language and linguistic type of systems that are very specific to our particular kinds of brains and we share ideas together. We're all super excited that we can understand the universe because we came up with some notation and math. I wonder if there's some totally other kinds of language that communicates on a different time scale with different very different mechanisms in the space of information that's just not it's a little... Sure. Everything is lost in translation.

Starting point is 01:34:29 Yeah, and it could well be. It's a look. I mean, I think part of the reason I go toward the possibility of the sole intelligence is there's a certain kind of romantic appeal to looking out in the cosmos and it's just quiet and it's just eternal silence. There's something that appeals to me at an emotional level that way, but yeah, I mean nobody knows and it's certainly conceivable that where there's just a radical mismatch between the kinds of things that we are able to observe and sensitive to versus the kinds of structures that permeate the universe in

Starting point is 01:35:13 a manner that simply we're unable to detect. Well, if we are alone, that is exciting, and one of the ways it's exciting is that it's up to us to become, to expand out into the universe, to permeate consciousness out into the universe. So that's where space exploration comes in. Let me ask you as somebody who's a screen theorist, a physicist, do you think space exploration, a colonizing space, is a physics or an engineering problem?

Starting point is 01:35:47 What would you say? Yeah, I think it's fundamentally an engineering problem if we're not trying to do things like build wormholes the way they did say an interstellar to get to a different place or trying to travel near the speed of light so that we would actually be able to traverse interstellar distances. I mean, without that, our colonization will happen in a very, very slow rate, right? But one of the beauties of relativity is if you do travel near the speed of light, you can actually go arbitrarily far in a human lifetime. People say, how's that possible?

Starting point is 01:36:24 You can't go billions of light years old. You can actually, because as you can do this blade of light, the way in which space and time change allows you to go in principle arbitrarily far. That's very exciting. But if we put that physics side of the issue and the manipulation space and time to the side, yeah, I think it's a deep engineering problem.

Starting point is 01:36:44 How do you terraform other planets? I mean, how do you go beyond our local neighborhood, say without using the ideas of relativity? So I think it's all quite exciting, and I think the ideas, using solar sails that people have developed and trying to take that first step tomorrow. I think that's a vital and valuable step to take. But yeah, I think these are fundamentally engineering challenges. Or extending the human life span through biology research or maybe reducing what it means to be a human being into information and uploading certain parts of it, maybe not all the

Starting point is 01:37:24 full resolution of a human life, but maybe the essential things like the DNA and be able to reconstruct that human being. But I have to ask about Mars, do you find the dream of human stepping on Mars, stepping foot first, but also colonizing Mars. One that's worth us fighting for? Yeah, hugely so. I mean, I think what we have long been, not always in the best way, is a species of explorers in the literal sense of traveling from one part of the world to another or in the more metaphorical sense of trying to travel through our minds to the quantum realm, we're back to the big

Starting point is 01:38:11 banger to the center of black holes. So I think that's fundamentally part of the human spirit. So I do think that's a vital part of our heritage brought forward into its next incarnation. That's who we are. Do you think there'll be a day in the future where a human being is born on Mars and has to learn about his or her human origins on earth like they'll have to read in a book? Yeah, I don't think it'll be a book at that stage. It'll probably just be uploaded into the head or something or imprinted into the DNA and then they just sort of sense it. But yeah, I think there's, well, look,

Starting point is 01:38:57 the issue you raised before is divided one. Is it the case that any sufficiently advanced civilization destroys itself? Is that sort of a commonplace quality? I mean, that's the other potential answer the case that any sufficiently advanced civilization destroys itself. Is that sort of a commonplace quality? I mean, that's the other potential answer to the Fermi paradox. Why aren't they here? Because by the time they got to the technological development where they could travel here,

Starting point is 01:39:15 they blew themselves up, they destroyed themselves. And that's an unfortunate, but not hard to imagine possibility based on things that have happened here on planet Earth, but putting that to the side. I think that's the big obstacle, but putting that to the side, we will resolve the engineering challenges. And I should probably modify my answer from before.

Starting point is 01:39:41 When you said it's engineering or physics, it's really both, right? So we will surmount the engineering challenges and that will then make the physics challenges relevant. It'll make it relevant to figure out how to travel near this beat of light. It'll make it relevant to learn how to manipulate the shape of space time and so forth. So I think it's a multi stage process where it is engineering and ultimately physics and if we stick around long enough, those are the kinds of challenges I think it's a multi-stage process where it is engineering and ultimately physics. And if we stick around long enough, those are the kinds of challenges

Starting point is 01:40:08 I think that we're ultimately gonna surmount. And then the physics side is figuring out how to harness energy enough to travel outside the solar system, which seems like a heck of a difficult journey. But even Mars itself, I don't know, maybe because I was born in the Soviet Union and was born with the,

Starting point is 01:40:28 you know, looking up at the stars in that dream of like the highest of human achievement disability to fly out there to, you know, to join the stars, I really liked the idea of going to Mars and not just stepping foot on Mars. And it wasn't until, maybe misinformed, but for me personally, it wasn't until Yal Musk started talking about the colonization of Mars. Did I realize like, we humans can actually do that. And the first of all, the importance of somebody saying that we can do these seemingly impossible things is immeasurable because the fact that he placed that into my mind and

Starting point is 01:41:16 into the minds of millions of others, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe billions of others, young kids today, I mean, that's going to make it a reality. I, for some reason, am deeply excited, even though my work isn't AI, that echoes all of this. I'm excited by the idea that somebody would be born as we were saying on Mars and sort of look up and be able to see what the telescope Earth and say, that's where I came from.

Starting point is 01:41:45 I don't know, that idea, scale to other planets, to other solar systems. Yeah. That's really exciting. And hugely exciting. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the vital thing is to dream, right? I mean, and it's down hackneyed, but it is so important

Starting point is 01:42:04 for young kids for the next generation to think about the things that are seemingly impossible. I mean, that's what makes them possible. And this is one which is concrete enough. I mean, this is something that's going to happen soon in terms of actually going to Mars. And then the next step of establishing some presence, some semi-permanent or permanent presence,

Starting point is 01:42:28 this is not something that's gonna wait to the 25th century, I mean, this is something that's gonna happen relatively soon. So, I mean, it could well be in your lifetime, unlikely mind, but possibly in your lifetime, that that kid will be born and have the experience that you describe. So, yeah, it's spectacularly exciting. And I actually, I would love to go on Mars on one of

Starting point is 01:42:50 the early you would. Yeah, it would have been one way. I'm happy. I don't really. Wow. And I'm single. If there's leaves out there, I want to start that family. Let's go out to Mars. No, I think, so you have to tell you something. You spoke about terror, thinking about like black holes. If I actually think about going to Mars and being on Mars and put myself in there fully, that's terror inducing. The idea of to be in this foreign world where you can't come back, where you've made this choice that can't be reversed.

Starting point is 01:43:25 Oh, you know, at some point, it may be, but, but in that guys, that to me carries a deep sense of terror. You know, I feel that sense of terror every time. Kerak, Jack Kerak talked about this on the road, is, you know, when you leave a place, if you're honest about it, like life is short. And when you leave a place, you move to a new place, and you think of all the friends, maybe family you're leaving behind as you drive over the hill, that really is goodbye. Like we sometimes don't think of it that way when we're moving, but that really is goodbye to that life, to the person you were, to the old people. Maybe if it's close friends You'll see that maybe 10 15 more times in your life, and that's it

Starting point is 01:44:09 And you're saying goodbye to all of that and so in the same way I see this way more dramatic when you're flying away from earth and it's like it's goodbye To Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks and it's good. It's good by to whatever, I don't know why I picked those, but some all those things that are special to Earth, it's good by, but that's life. I suppose more would excite me about that kind of journey, is it's a distinct contemplation of your mortality, acceptance of your mortality.

Starting point is 01:44:42 You're saying, just like when you take on any difficult journey, it's accepting that you're going to die one day. And might as well do something truly exciting. Yes. I mean, I will, you know, I'm with you on that. I'm a strong believer that deep underneath human motivation is this, this terror of our own mortality. Yeah, there's this wonderful book that had a great influence on me called the denial of death by Ernest Becker. And when you are aware of the ways in which our mortality influences our behaviors, it really does add a different slant, a different kind

Starting point is 01:45:26 of color to the interpretation of human behavior. Yeah, it's funny that that book had a big influence on me as well. Was that right? And Terra management there and I, again, from an engineering perspective, I don't know how many people that book influenced. Because I talk to people about the fear of death and it doesn't seem to be that fundamental to their experience. And I don't think on the surface that's fundamental to my experience, but it seems like an awful, in terms of talking about models and strength theory and theories, in terms of theories of this macro experience of human life, it seems like a heck of a good theory

Starting point is 01:46:06 That the fear of death is that the kind of is the warm at the core. Yeah Well, I mean and the terror management theorists that you make reference to I mean the this is a group of you know psychologists, social psychologists who devise these very clever Experiments real world experiments with real people, where you can directly measure the hidden influence of the recognition of our own mortality. I mean, they've done this experiments where they have group of people, egg group of people

Starting point is 01:46:36 be, and the only difference between the two groups is that group be, they somehow reminded them in some subtle way of their own mortality. Sometimes it's nothing more than interviewing them with a funeral home across the street. You know, an influence is there, but it's, but it's silly. You don't even think you take note of. And they can find measurable effects that differentiate the two groups to a high degree of statistical significance and how they respond to certain challenges or certain kinds of questions that shows a direct influence of the reminder of their own mortality. And I've read a number of these studies and they are really convincing.

Starting point is 01:47:17 And so yeah, I would say that the reason why so many people would say that, yeah, fear of mortality, it's not front and center in my worldview. Yeah, I don't really think about it. My system really matters. The reason why they're able to say that is because this thing called culture has emerged over the course of the last 10,000 years. And part of the role of culture is to give us a means of not thinking about our mortality all the time, of not living in terror of the inevitable end, which faces us all. So it's completely understandable,

Starting point is 01:47:49 but that's the response, because that's what culture is at least in part four. It's at least possible that the fear of death, the terror of your mortality is the creative force that created all of the things around us at this human civilization. Yeah. And I think about from an engineering perspective, this is where I lose all of my robotics colleagues, is I feel like if you want to create intelligence, you have to also engineer

Starting point is 01:48:21 in some kind of echoes of this kind of fear of, you know, fear is such a complicated word, but kind of like a scarcity, a scarcity of time, a scarcity of resources that creates a kind of anxiety, like deadlines get you to do stuff. And there's something almost fundamental to that in terms of human experience. Yeah, well that's an interesting thought. So you're basically in order to create a kind of structure that mirrors what we call consciousness. You'd better have that structure confront

Starting point is 01:49:03 the same kinds of issues and terrorism that we do. Consciousness and suffering only makes sense in the context of death. If you want to, I feel like, if you want to fit into human society, if you're a robot, if you want to fit into human society, you better have the same kind of existential dread, the same kind of fear of mortality, otherwise you're not gonna fit in. Right. Right.

Starting point is 01:49:29 It might be wild, but at least, like we're talking about all the theories that are at least worth consideration. I think that's a really powerful one. And definitely one is resonated with me. And definitely seems to capture something beautifully, like real about the human condition.

Starting point is 01:49:57 And I wonder, it's of course sucks to think that we need death to appreciate life. But that just might be the way it is. sucks the things that we need death to appreciate life. But that just may be the way it is. Well, it's interesting if this robotic or artificially intelligent system understands the world, and understands the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, even in artificial intelligence

Starting point is 01:50:20 we'll realize that even if it's parts are really robust, ultimately it will disintegrate. I mean, so the timescales may be different. But in a way, when you think about it, it doesn't matter. Once you know that you are mortal in the sense that you are not eternal, the timescale hardly matters because it's either the whole thing or not, because on the scales of eternity, any finite duration, however large, is effectively zero on the scales of eternity. And so maybe it won't be so hard for an artificial system to feel that sense of mortality, because it will recognize the underlying physical laws and recognize its own finitude. And then it'll be us and robots drinking beers looking up at the stars and just, you know, having a good laugh in all of the whole thing.

Starting point is 01:51:17 Yeah. I think that's a pretty good way to end it talking about the fear of death. We started talking about the meaning of life and ended on the fear of death. We started talking about the meaning of life and ended on the fear of death. Brian, it's just an incredible conversation. Thank you. I really, really enjoyed it. It has been a long time coming. I'm a huge fan of your work, a huge fan of your writing. Thanks for talking to me, Brian. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Green. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. to support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from Bill Bryson.

Starting point is 01:51:48 Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity. But so far, all we have is a kind of elegant messiness. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you

Lex Fridman Podcast - #232 – Brian Greene: Quantum Gravity, Big Bang, Aliens, Life, Death, and Meaning

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