Making Sense with Sam Harris - #70 — Beauty and Terror

Episode Date: April 10, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with physicist Lawrence Krauss about the utility of public debates, the progress of science, confusion about the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics, the present danger of nuclear war, the Trump administration, the relative threats of Christian theocracy and Islamism, and realistic fears about terrorism. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I am speaking with Lawrence Krauss. Many of you know Lawrence's work. He is a well-known physicist and author. He regularly writes for The New Yorker.

And he is also a famous atheist. He was in the film The Unbelievers with our partner in crime, Richard Dawkins. Lawrence does many different things. He runs the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of several books, and he has a new book out titled The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, where he tells the story of how we've come to understand the universe to the degree that we have. And he and I spoke about many things. There are not many conversations where you can get into the weeds of quantum mechanical experiment and then also talk about terrorism and nuclear war and Trump and things of that sort. So we cover a lot. of that sort. So we cover a lot. And I would say if you're short on time, the last hour or so is probably the most important part. But I enjoyed all of it. Lawrence is fighting the war of ideas

on many, many fronts. And so it was a pleasure to have him on the podcast. And without any more preamble, I now bring you Lawrence Krauss. I am here with Lawrence Krauss. Lawrence, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's great to be with you virtually, Sam. Yeah. Yeah, we're actually rarely in the same place physically. We're often on the same email thread. But I guess I last saw you at the Asilomar AI conference.

That's right. Yeah, we were at that AI meeting together. That was the last time. It's always pleasant. And it's always pleasant to think of, you know, things that may destroy humanity. Yeah. The list is growing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I get to, you know, I'm chairman of the board of the Bolton, the atomic scientists, and we set the doomsday clock. But we had a symposium every year where we'd go into that. It used to be called the Doomsday Symposium, which was always cheery. We changed the title.

Yeah, I actually want to get to that because I want to talk about some of the threats. But yeah, so let's just start with the various games you're playing because you're doing many different things. Obviously, you do science. You're a theoretical science. You're a theoretical physicist. You're an educator. You run the Origins Project at Arizona State University. You write books. You have a new book out that we will touch on. That's good. Yes. There's definitely more that I want to talk about than is in your book. And I never like

these conversations to act as surrogates for interested readers actually buying your book. And I never like these conversations to act as surrogates for interested readers actually buying your book and reading it. So there's no way that the book will be redundant on the basis of what we talk about here. And I encourage people to buy your book because you are a fine and clear writer, and this is a very interesting book. As you are. Anyway, yes. And all of that, all those recommendations were far more sincere than they may have sounded. But you also, you write in The New Yorker, which is great. I mean, The New Yorker has been,

frankly, fairly bad on science for a good long while. And it's really great to have your voice in there. You don't have to agree with me. I know you now are an employee of The New Yorker. No, no, no, no. I think I'm surprised that I can get my voice. And I only, to make it clear, I am only allowed online. I'm not allowed on the, all my pieces only appear online in The New Yorker. They don't appear in the hallowed real hard copy. You know, I didn't even know that because I read everything like that online now. Me too. I do too. But I want to make it clear in case people thought I was somehow more eminent than I am. Do you understand the basis of that decision? I think, frankly, I think part of it is that there's a different culture for the online editorials and work than there is in the magazine. I think I sympathize to some extent with what you say about the science of the New Yorker.

And I wish there could be more science in there because one of the things we may get to and one of the things I push a lot because I believe in it is that science is part of our culture and we have to integrate it more heavily. And that's part of the problems that we're experiencing now,

in my opinion, politically too. And so, you know, to the extent that New Yorker is kind of a magazine of culture, the fact that science there, you know, there are profiles of scientists periodically, but but it's not, you know, it's not treated as the same kind of, hey, interesting cultural aspect as as movies or, you know, literature or whatever. So I wish it was. Yeah, well, there's there's that problem. It's just that the problem of there not being enough science or science not being viewed as sexy or as culturally relevant as the humanities, but there's also just the problem of scientific error and anti-science being propagated.

Which is surprising. The errors are always surprising, because one thing I found about The New Yorker, and we're probably jumping in away from where you wanted to go but i'm happy to one of the things i've found is that you know i write for them they edit more heavily and fact check more carefully than any any place i've ever written for and so it is surprising in some sense that scientific error i mean pseudoscience and anti-science is different i mean they can have a slant yeah and there's a and that slant occurs a lot in in among certain people especially in in the humanities for various reasons, which you might get into. But so I can understand that. But it's sad when scientific error gets into. flavor or another. So this is just a question about how you divide your time, because it's not even clear to me how much each of these boats you're rowing in gets your weight. How would you describe what you do on a weekly or monthly basis? Yeah, well, I wish I had a strategic plan,

and I did divide my time strategically. I don't. I tend to just sort of be doing something, and I like, first of all, I like to juggle lots of things. And I think it's, I think it's basically because I'm frankly lazy. I think if I'm not occupied, I tend to do nothing. And, uh, but I tend, what I do is I tend to focus on one thing you sometimes, cause I'm angry. I mean, sometimes cause I get emotional about it if I'm writing or agree to do a debate or stuff, but, um, but I, but I, and then I'll move to something else. So I, if I'm excluding something, if I'm not doing science for a while, I kind of feel like a fraud. So I, uh, uh, so I, I just try and balance it, but it really, there's no real plan. I just do as many things as I can do because,

um, uh, frankly, because I enjoy doing all of them. And I, I think, and that's really a point that I think is really important to stress that I do science, like many scientists, not because I'm trying to save the world, but because I enjoy it. And the same reason I write and do other things, but also because in my own personal perspective, I think something is worth doing. If it takes time for something else, if I think it has some background importance, I think it's worth, I do that. And to some extent, maybe it's a kind of guilt also, frankly, Sam, in the sense that the physics I do is very esoteric in general and quite, quite abstract. And I think it's profoundly interesting because it

addresses these fundamental questions about our existence, but, but from a, from, from the perspective of touching daily the lives of people or in an immediate way improving their lives, it doesn't. And so I think part of the reason I get involved politically and socially is to some extent to make up for that aspect of my life, if you understand. And so I think that's why I jump around. But yeah, a lot of hats and sometimes too many. There's no doubt about it, especially too much travel. But what I try and do is to go from one thing to another intensively. And I don't know if you've had this, but talking about it. I have no, I, I have no memory of writing it for the most part. And I wonder how the hell I did it. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I don't seem to have time for anything else, right. Anything right now. And, and so it's interesting. I think, I think, uh, book writing is kind of like having a baby in the way you, you, if you remember what labor was all about and the whole thing, you probably wouldn't have a second one. And I think it's

probably beneficial to forget the whole experience. Yeah. My problem is that I do remember what labor was all about and I keep pushing off my book deadline. Oh yeah. I've always thought you're wise. So there you go. I'm more impetuous, but anyway, so I'm lucky. And I guess the point is I, I think pop probably because again, to be quite honest and Frank, I think a number of things came over a long time of doing things with no notice for what I was doing. And so therefore, it's hard to turn down things that I think are useful or important. And I'm really working on that to try and turn down. So it's hard to say no. So I often say yes to too many things, and then I just end up having to do

them. Right. Well, so what do you think about the utility of doing debates of the sort that we've both done? I mean, I don't know how recently you've done one. Do you think they're worth doing? Do you regret doing any of them? I often regret them. I think, look, I think the debate format is a very poor format. It's a rhetorical format. It's not really meant for education or information. It's really based on, it's sort of smoke and mirrors. And so from that perspective, I'd much rather have a conversation or a dialogue than a debate. But I have found, as you probably found the same thing, it surprises me when after I've done a debate, like, why the heck did I do that? That people, I mean, you never do a debate to try and beat the person you're, or to try and convince the person you're debating.

Who you're talking to is, of course, the broad middle. And particularly the people who, it's nice to have the fans on either side, I suppose. But the real people you talk to are the people who've never thought about the issue. And who you think would be swayed potentially by a smooth talking huckster. And it's, and so if you can reach those people who haven't really thought deeply about it and, and, and influence them to start thinking about it, um, then that, that, then I think it's worthwhile. And I've been surprised even the debates that I've afterwards gone and say, Ooh, I just had this sick feeling, really awful, why did I do that? That people afterwards have said, you know, I watched that and that impacted my thinking. And so I guess it's useful. The big problem is that

there are people who want to debate, people with a relatively high profile, say, because of course it, when the minute they're on stage with you, they get a validation that they wouldn't have otherwise. And it's hard to know how to deal with that because you want, you don't want to validate them often. And Richard Dawkins has done this often. He'll refuse. He'll say, I refuse to even debate this person. And it's great then that a person has a, goes on stage and has an empty chair and all that. But the way I, I sometimes try and get around it and it's very difficult to be the bad guy on stage, but there were one or two times where I think these people, you know, I don't mind debating people who I think are honestly in error, who believe what they say and, and one can have a discussion with them about it. But the people that really upset me are the people you know are real hucksters

who are just lying because they can and they have a smooth stick and they want to sort of fool people. And those people, what I've done in a number of debates, and it's not easy, is attack them, is basically point out how they're lying. And it's difficult to do, because people come to an event, they want to be people of goodwill, and they want it to be sort of collegial in that sense. But sometimes I think it's important to expose that, too. I did three debates with this guy, William Lane Craig, in Australia that I really didn't want to do. And it was sponsored by a Christian, large-scale Christian group, which is why I decided to do it. Because I thought, here's a person who's not honest.

I debated him as well. He really is just a professional Christian debater. That's what he does. Maybe he does other things, but this seems to be what he does a lot of. And he, exactly. And what he does is he tailors his notoriety to the people he debates. So he wants to be at people so he can say, look, I debated X, Y, and Z. And I, I actually originally agreed only if they wouldn't put it online because I, I just assumed that they would use it for that purpose. And, and then there was a, then they said, could we, could we film it for our own archival purposes? And they were very nice people.

It was a really nice religious group, I should say this. They were really earnest. And I said, you've chosen the wrong person. I told them, I think you could choose more honest people and we could have an interesting discussion about science and religion. But they did. And by the way, afterwards, I will tell you

that they said to me, they agreed, they'd made a mistake. But what happened was his people found out about the fact that things were videotaped and then said, I was censoring it. I didn't want the public to know about it. So we put it all, it was just a typical kind of thing. But, but so I think those kinds of things can be useful if you expose, if you can expose certain people and not take them seriously. And the other thing, I guess the very first, one of the very first big debates I did was back, and what got me into that sort of area maybe, was in the early days when they were trying to introduce

intelligent design in the classroom, and the Discovery Institute was just beginning its efforts to try and do that in 2000 or shortly after. And so the Ohio State School Board basically asked for a debate between these two guys from the Discovery Institute and me and Ken Miller, who you may know, is a Catholic, a religious Catholic evolutionary biologist whose texts are used in high schools. And it was like 2000 people attended as well as the school board. And and it was really a very emotional event. as well as the school board. And it was really a very emotional event.

But what I tried to say at that point was, this is inappropriate because the problem with debates is it always makes it look like he said, she said. It makes it look like there are two people with equally valid views who are discussing this and it raises the profile of people sometimes whose views are nonsense. So I just pointed out that if it was an appropriate panel, there'd be 100,000 scientists on one side of the table and two people from a

marginal religious lobbying group on the other. I think because journalists do this too. They always try and make it seem as if there's two sides to every story. And to some extent, a debate validates that because it makes it appear as if both sides are valid. So I won't, for example, do debates that say, you know, science versus creationism or evolution versus creationism because the very premise of the title suggests they're at equal footing. What I would in the old days when I did more of this, those kind of debates, I would debate the question, should creationism be taught in science classrooms? And that's a question that I would have to debate, but not, you know, which is right, evolution or creation, because there's no question of it. And I remember once I was doing a debate in, I think, St. Louis with what at the time the head of the Intelligent Design Network, who, by the way, was one of those guys who earnestly believed what he was talking about. He was deluded, but he, he was earnest. Yeah. And, um, but the day before they changed the title

to evolution versus, you know, creationism, which is right or something. And I, and I said, I would back out of it. And the St. Louis paper had a big story about it. They changed the title back again, but I think it's really important if we're going to debate that we try very carefully to make it clear what questions are worth discussing and which questions are not even worth raising. Right. Right. Yeah, I think there are a variety of problems here because it's I mean, you've delineated it pretty clearly, but there are insincere performers where it's really you can't even believe that they believe what they say they believe, but they are pushing a certain view for whatever reason. So that's the ultimate case where the person you're talking to is really unreachable and you just have to decide whether it's worth

trying to embarrass this person publicly for some greater effect. Which reflects badly on you, by the way. Automatically, half the audience say, what a prick that guy is. Yeah, yeah. You know, anyway. But even when someone sincerely believes what they're espousing, it is, again, the optics are often weird because you're dignifying completely unjustifiable claims just by giving them a fair hearing in that context.

And what's even worse about debates often, and this bothers me about political debates, is that the value of humor is so enormous that the person who gets a couple of laughs often wins, right? I mean, so like that bonds the audience. And so that's, and you know, you and I actually occasionally get laughs. So that tends to work in our favor.

But yeah, I know, I like to make jokes, so I benefit from that. I mean, I make jokes anyway just to amuse myself, but yeah. But it is unfair. It certainly isn't fair. As I say, it's smoke and mirrors. It's rhetorical. Debates are really entertainment. Right.

But, you know, when I really do agree to do it, I would think now, as usual, I've thought about the answer after I've said things. Now, as usual, I've thought about the answer after I've said things, but when I do agree to do debates now, and it's rare, it's usually because it's an audience that I don't think ever gets to hear the other side. Yeah. So I agreed to do this debate for this Christian organization, and I recently did a debate for a Christian organization in Toronto with Stephen Meyer, who's another huckster from the Discovery Institute. And he has a PhD, I think, in history of science or something. And so he has the veneer of legitimacy. But that was a Christian group. And then, as you probably know, I've debated at least twice and one time in a very emotional way in London, an Islamic group. And I did that because I really thought that it's no, you know, winning a debate isn't fun if you're really,

I mean, if you're talking to people who sympathize with you already, it may be good for your ego, but it's not particularly useful. But if you can read, if you can at least raise the questions and provoke people to think, and maybe there'll be two people in the audience who'd never even heard the counterpoint. If I recall, the best thing about that debate was your refusal to go on stage unless they integrated the audience because they had segregated women from men in a university audience. Isn't that correct? Yeah, yeah. I didn't. It made a lot of it got a lot of attention and I didn't attend it to. But I, yeah, I went, I did this and the group seemed earnest. People told me events that they're going to segregate. So I wrote to them and I said, you know, I'm not going to appear for this.

They said, don't worry, they won't. And then I arrived in the auditorium and of course it was segregated. And, and what, and then I went down to the hosts and I said, you told me it wouldn't be. And they said, oh, it's not, this is just suggestions. So I went to the microphone and I said, it's just suggestions. You can sit wherever you want. And then two young men went to move into the section that was listed for women and were about to be thrown out because of it.

And then they called for me to sort of help them because the guys who were going to throw them out were pretty scary looking. And that's when that was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. And that's when I backed down and said, I'm not doing that. And then what happened, of course, is nowadays you can't do anything without someone filming it. And someone in the audience had a camera. And it really, as my friend Steve Weinberg, who's an atheist, would say, I was doing God's work because it turned out to have

a really good purpose in the end. So this person filmed it. And, of course, I knew while I was half hoping the debate wouldn't happen, I knew they'd put too much emphasis and, and publicity and not to have it. So they desegregated the group. And by the way, the people who were the most angry, and we can get to this, the people who were really upset were the, were the, all the women in, in, in their bags. And, and, uh, and, and, and there was hate, hate, and one of them spoke up afterwards. But the good thing that happened from it in the end, you know, I was sort of surprised it got all this attention in all these British newspapers, is that the university, it shouldn't, I mean, it was a secular, it's a

university, that should not be allowed. And the universities learned about this and basically said that, banned that group from having events at a university. And, you know, when this when a woman when one of the women came up at the end, there was a question and answer period and chastised me for for forcing her to sit near men. I said this is a you shouldn't have come. I said this is a secular environment. You could see it online. If you're I understand if you're uncomfortable or men, that's that's That's your business, and I sympathize with it. But you have to realize that you're living in a society that's a secular society. And therefore, if you choose to come to an event like this, you have to—or go to a baseball game, you might be subject to sit next to men.

And moreover, if you didn't like it, you could have moved. All the women in their bags. Let's hear about that on Twitter. Yeah. I'm making friends left, right, and center as we proceed. Anyway. Let's touch your book briefly only to move on to more controversial topics. But your book is really this great history of the development of our understanding of the cosmos. At one point, you debunk the great man portrayal of science, this idea that, you know, one lone genius goes into his room and comes out with a change in our scientific worldview. But you can't help but tell the story in terms of the contributions of the most famous scientists and how they have changed our worldview really in these

punctate ways. There are some cases where the caricature is true. I mean, Newton is pretty close to that, where he went into his room to avoid the plague for about 18 months and came out with calculus and the laws of motion and universal gravitation and the field of optics. Well, yeah, well, Newton is an anomaly in human history. I mean, he would not have survived today. I mean, he was a crazy man. Say more about that. He would have been hospitalized. He spent very little time on physics. Most of the time, he was decoding secret messages from the Bible, which he felt were given only to him, and the rest of his time doing alchemy. He was far more interested in those subjects. And I think I said the other day that, you know, if only he'd

spent more time in physics, he could have been famous. But he was obsessively solitary in many ways. He never, to the extent we know, he never was with a woman in his life or a man, as far as I know. And he was a very remarkably interesting character. And one of those people, some of my friends who are distinguished physicists, we point out that when you read certain people's work, like, for example, Einstein, who's obviously a great physicist, you can see, you can say to yourself, ah, I see how if I was thinking along those lines, I could have gotten to where he got. But there's some people like Newton that it's just a mystery. I mean, you know, it's just like, where did this come from? And he really was

an anomaly. And again, one of the things I try and point out there to get back to the religious thing a little bit is that people often point out to me, they say, well, Newton was religious, and, you know, Darwin initially was religious. And my point and counterpoint to that is that, of course, they were because that's the only game in town at that time. The church was the National Science Foundation of the of the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. And and you couldn't go to university. All universities were religious. So the fact that scientists were religious was not surprising as a product of their time. But he was much more obsessed with the secret messages of the Bible, which and maybe Leonardo, too, was. But anyway, he was a wild and crazy man.

Also not a very nice man. He was an incredibly vindictive character. Yeah. His statement about I've only gotten where I have by standing on the shoulders of giants was a was a vindictive statement because his, one of his great competitors was a dwarf. Yeah. And, and, and, and of course, as you know, when later on, when he became, I don't know if it was chancellor of the exec checker, but he was head of the, of the treasury. He loved hanging. One of his greatest joys was hanging, uh, counterfeiters. He loved, he went to every one and he just enjoyed it. But so he was a,

he was a, he was really a weird character, but, but not all, but, but, you know, that's unfortunately a stereotype that some people have that you have to be a solitary genius. And it's certainly not that way. And I do try in the book to show that things are baby steps. And while I reflected in terms of the people who've had perhaps in one way or another, the biggest impact, some of it is due to the fact that these people got it wrong. They actually had a huge impact on science by affecting the field and moving it in what ultimately turned out to be the wrong direction. And one of the reasons I call it the greatest story ever told, because it is a human story. It's a story full of twists and turns and crises, But the science manages to drag scientists along. The science, the process of skeptical inquiry, basing your results on empirical evidence,

testing, looking at many sources, that manages to take people, even when they're deluded, eventually in the right direction. And there's lots of times in this story where you want, I hope, the reader, because I certainly felt like shaking these people and saying, you've the right answer it's right here if you weren't so pigheaded and willing to just focus on this fad at the time uh or or something that interests you it doesn't one or the other then you could have the progress could have been made much more quickly it is a human story and it's it's the greatest story because it isn't driven by just human imagination it's driven by nature.

And nature keeps surprising us and taking us to places we literally would never have gone. And it is this community process where, sure, people drive it, but the whole community is affecting things. And sometimes the ideas come out of left field. And it's that story that I find so wonderful. And, of course, the most important part of the title for me is the so far part, because, um, unlike that other supposedly greatest

story ever told, which was, you know, written down by our age peasants who didn't know the earth orbited the sun, this story changes and it gets better and tomorrow it'll be better than it is today. And it changes because we learn and that's what's what's so, and it's surprising. And yeah, I was gonna almost pull a Richard Dawkins and read a quote from the book, but I won't. It's just, it seems to me you have a choice when looking at this human story in the universe. You either put us in the center because it makes you feel better

or you're willing to say the universe evolves sort of independently of us. And if you do that, you check to see if your story's wrong. And you also are willing to be surprised. And that's what makes it, to me, so interesting. rationality generally, but science is the most focused and disciplined version of that, certainly, is that the incentives are aligned in a way where it is self-purifying. I mean, everyone is trying to prove everyone else wrong. You're constrained by the way the world is, however it is, and your professional reputations even improve if you prove yourself wrong. Well, and that's the hardest thing to do, as Feynman would say, the hardest, the easiest person to fool is yourself. And that's a lesson. I mean, there's lots of object

lessons that I think, even though the book is really about the forefront of physics, and I think it's so fascinating, and the intellectual journey is really the greatest ones humans have taken. But I think it has moral, or at least object lessons, not moral lessons, but object lessons for everyday life. And one is that the person you have to question the most is yourself, because you're the easiest person to delude. We all want to believe. Yeah, but the crucial difference here between, let's say, it's often pointed out, to believe. Yeah, but the crucial difference here between, let's say, this is often pointed out, as you said, that scientists are merely human, they're biased, they succumb to wishful thinking, and there's even scientific fraud occasionally. Yeah, sure. But the antidote to that is always

more science, better science, other scientists getting involved, that kind of self-purifying context of scientific discourse. And you cannot say that about religion. You cannot say that about any backwater in the humanities where dogmatism is moving completely unconstrained by any truth testing. It's just, you know, kind of a faddish set of ideas that get foisted on a generation and stay there. And there is no, there's no feedback mechanism. There's no testability of anything.

It's the feedback that's important. Cause I don't want to give the illusion. I don't think you have, but some of the listeners may get it. That's not a scientists are better. They're not, no, no, but it's, but it's really the fact that we are lucky enough to be able to rely on nature. That, that, that, that, you know, if you spout nonsense long enough, you come up with things where nature just proves you to be ridiculously wrong. And so it's self-correcting because you have that tool. You know, and it's been a problem to some extent in physics in the last bunch of years, where when I was, I talk about what I think is actually the most, one of the most exciting periods of physics. And it's a surprise, I think, I talk about what I think is actually the most, one of the most exciting periods

of physics. And it's a surprise, I think, for some people that most people think the period 1905 to 1925 in the 20th century was the greatest time in the, because relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics. But as I, I point out the period from 1955 to 1975, which is largely unheralded now may in the future by historians of science be viewed as one of the most revolutionary periods of the 20th century, because we went from knowing, you know, one force in nature to understanding three of the four forces and understanding the fundamental mathematics that was behind that. But it occurred because of the fact that nature kept pushing people in the right direction, that there was a lot of misconception and other things, but experiments were driving things.

And one of the concerns for some of us, and one of the reasons I'm labeled somewhat incorrectly as a critic of string theory, is that there was a period in physics of almost 50 years, 40 years, where accelerators weren't giving us information about where our theory should be going. And as I used to like to say, under sensory deprivation, you begin to hallucinate. And that's fine. I mean, I get paid to hallucinate. But what used to decide what was great physics was, was it right? And it still should, and it still does. But for a while,

what was making the decision was, is it elegant? Is it beautiful? Is it complex? And many of us were concerned because those are the same kind of requirements in some areas of, say, literary deconstructionism that are similar, where the internal complexity of the argument makes it seem as if it's somehow better. And that's a worry. And physics thrives, as all of science does, when experiment thrives and when it drives the discussion. And of course, we're in many ways living in a golden era because every time we open a new window on the universe,

we are surprised. Let's touch that topic briefly. Do you think that string theory is a dead end that has captured the attention of a generation of physicists, or are you still holding out for it? No, I don't think it's a dead end. No, I don't, well, I don't think it's a dead end. It's very well, string theory was very well motivated in where it came from. It just had pretensions which haven't been met. And it hasn't been, it has not, I repeat, it has not been successful in doing what many people thought or claimed would be possible in the 1980s, that we would have a theory of, quote, everything, which even then was a poor name because it was a theory of very little.

gravity with quantum mechanics and the other forces, but it hasn't done that. And it hasn't demonstrated that it has any direct relevance in its original form to the real world. In fact, strings aren't even the most significant thing in string theory anymore. So it's called M-theory because now these things called brains are important. Now, all of that should not be argued against it in the sense that when you're doing physics at the forefront, it's difficult, it's complex. And what's most important to realize is you're often wrong. And these, the people have been working on are very many, very bravely trying to do the right thing. They're trying to understand the theory and get it to apply to the real world and see if it makes predictions that are useful. So it's well motivated. And, and, but the problem is it

did get an incredible amount of hype and indeed draw many people into the field when it was much more heat than light, in my opinion. Now, string theory mathematically has produced incredibly interesting bits of mathematics, which have not just been interesting to mathematicians. It has driven fields of mathematics forward in profound ways. But the tools that have been developed and strength that have been used in other areas of physics to great effect to try and solve problems that could not be solved otherwise. So it's had utility. But what it hasn't done is demonstrate that its original purpose is validated. But that's okay because you and you asked if I had a hope. I think most ideas are wrong. That's why anyone could do it if it wasn't that way. And so most of my ideas have been wrong.

And nature gets to choose. And so the likelihood that any proposed theory in advance is right is very small. And people should recognize that, especially when they read the papers. Because the newspapers try and be largely at the fault of universities to some extent to try to publicize work and therefore get grant funding or other things, you know, make every new little development sound like it's the next Einstein and it's revolutionary and it's changing everything. And most of the time it's wrong. And what sort of upsets me is that not only do the newspapers get hooked into basically becoming public relations outlets for the universities.

But when it's shown to be wrong, it's not discussed later on. And then people will later on read another article with sort of a new theory that disagrees with the other one. And the sense is that science has no objective reality. And that's a real problem. One of the things, there's a few things I try and talk about at length in the book. And one of them is the big misunderstanding that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before them. And that's exactly wrong. That's exactly wrong. What's true today will be true in the future. What survives the test of experiment today will have to be a part of whatever theory there is in the future. And so, you know, people now think, well, you know, everything we think today is going to be

proved wrong, so why should I learn science? And that's part of this problem, which I'm sure we'll get to, which is this alternative facts. It's like, well, it's just a bunch, it's going to be proved wrong. I have my own set of facts. You have your own set of facts. And what they don't realize is that science is not a set of facts. It's a process for discovering facts and, and to, and to, I'll be a little self-serving, but I really believe what I'm about to say, that I think one of the things I think is important in my book that I try and do indirectly at least, and in my lectures lately I've been doing it more directly, is that there's an object lesson. That science, the process of science, showed us that the universe we see is an illusion. It's a complete, at a fundamental scale, it's a complete illusion. And it cut through the layers of illusion by using this scientific method. And I think that is an essential tool that we need in our society today to cut through the illusion that we're

seeing in the political world, to cut through the nonsense and garbage. Part of the problem is we teach things like science and schools as if they're a bunch of facts or a bunch of things you have to memorize. Instead of teaching them, teaching science as a process and deriving students' inquiry with questions rather than the answers. So I think there's a real, if people ask me, how can we overcome the alternative propaganda we're seeing in Washington. Part of it, I think, has a very deep root in our educational system. And I think while, of course, we need to resist and combat in a very real way and speak out and write and et cetera, I think we have to look at the educational system and hope that we can train children differently. Because when I was growing

up, schools were repositories of information. But right now in my iPhone, I have more information than I could get in any school, but I also have more misinformation. And what we have to train students to do is to develop a filter. And for me, the scientific method is a wonderful filter. And that's the kind of thing we should be teaching them in school so that when they become adults, they're able to deal with a world in which they're going to be barraged by much nonsense or maybe more nonsense than sense, and they have to be able to make sense of that. misleading at best. And so people think, for instance, that, as you said, in each generation, our scientific worldview is completely overturned without remainder and nothing thought by your father or grandfather is any longer valid. So people have this picture of just wholesale changes in our understanding. And it's easy to see how they have that. I mean, you have people

like Thomas Kuhn who have more or less said that that's how science proceeds. But you just have a very different picture when you move from Newtonian physics to relativity, say, and then quantum mechanics and the fact that those theories are as yet imperfectly reconciled. And the thing that would reconcile them may look completely different as a structure. And so that gives a picture of just radical change. And yet, as you said, the data that Newtonian mechanics were conserving have to be conserved by the new theory. And just to take one, this is an example I often go to because it's very easy for people to get, And just to take one, this is an example I often go to because it's very easy for people to get. We could witness wholesale changes in our understanding of biology, say. But the idea that DNA has something to do with the physical basis of heredity is not up for grabs. Whatever new theory of molecular biology is coming down the pike, it will have to conserve what we know about DNA. The probability that DNA is somehow totally irrelevant is extraordinarily low. And if, in fact, that were realized, whatever new construal of how we were wrong about DNA comes to us, it will have to conserve all of the data

as we know them, right? And that's, there's very little room to move now, given how much data there is. Exactly. The point is that, that our underlying pictures change tremendously, but that, so when we subsume a theory, you know, our underlying understanding of the universe does change, which is great. It's one of the things I celebrate in the book. And one of the things we all celebrate as scientists, that we, that our, that our pictures change. And that's why I think, by the way, science is like art, music, and literature. The greatest benefit of science is to force us to reflect upon and potentially change our view of our place in the cosmos. But as you say, DNA, you know, DNA, what survived the test experiment, it works. You can do

experiments and you can show that it is responsible for the transmission of information. And Newton's laws, a million years from now, when I have a theory, if there's a theory of quantum gravity, if I let go of a baseball, it's going to fall. It's going to be described by Newton's laws. Whatever we learn at the edges of science, which may at a fundamental level change how we think about the universe, nevertheless doesn't make Newton not true. Newton will be true now and a million years from now.

And one of the great, what I spent a lot of time in the book showing, because I get a lot of email from people, and most of it, it always begins this way. Everything you think you know is wrong. Half of that refers to my politics. The other half to my science. And then they say, you know, everyone thinks I'm crazy, but everyone thought Einstein was crazy, therefore, and they try and make that connection because they think Einstein did that. And one of the things I work really hard to do in the book is to show that Einstein did exactly the opposite. Yes, he revolutionized our understanding,

ultimately, of space and time, although the really key revolution didn't really come from him. It later on came from his math teacher, Nerman Minkowski. But what he did do was show the two pillars of physics, both of which had survived the test of experiment, and therefore both had to be true. You couldn't have a theory that violated. One came from Galileo, and one came from Maxwell. They were the pillars of our modern theory of the physical universe, but they were inconsistent with each other. And what did he do? He didn't throw not to throw things out, but to rather recognize the beauty of what worked and keep that and force

his beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality. There's another point of confusion that often surrounds Einstein's work, which is this phrase, everything is relative, which derives from the word relativity. Well, it should be called the theory of absolutes in the end. And it was really, as I say, it was his math teacher, Herman Minkowski, that showed that. It is true that Einstein reconciled these two things by saying that, in fact, observers measure different things. They measure time differently and length differently, depending upon the relative state of motion.

And that's remarkable and true. And that's where the word relativity comes from, the fact that your measurements of time and space are relative to your circumstances. But the beauty of the theory is an underlying theory showing that we live in a four-dimensional universe in which space and time are connected. And in the underlying theory, there are things that are absolutely conservative. In fact, there's something called a four-dimensional space-time length, which is invariant for all observers. That's the beautiful aspect of nature.

We now understand that we live in a four-dimensional universe, but we don't see it. We see three-dimensional slices. It's part of the story of learning that the universe at its fundamental scale does not resemble what we see. What we see is a myopic slice of that. So in some sense, the relativity is related to our myopia.

Now it's a real fact that we have a myopic that are, well, it's a real fact that every measurement we make about the universe depends upon our circumstances. And Einstein was brilliant enough to realize that, that measurement is what determines reality for people. It's not what they think, but what they measure. And therefore, if two people measure different things, they're just as real for even if those two things are different. But the underlying reality shows that those two very different things

are different sides of the same coin. And that's the other, in my mind, a much greater hallmark of progress in science than what Kuhn might have talked about. The real great hallmark of progress in science is when two things which on the surface seem very different are shown to be different reflections of exactly the same thing. And that, at least in physics, and it may not be so much in biology, although that's what Darwin did too, in a sense. He showed that the diversity of life came from simple beginnings and in a very well-defined way. But it's the beautiful aspect of that, discovering that these things that look very different are really the same. That is the hallmark that I try and talk about from Maxwell through Einstein and then Feynman and then right to the discovery of the Higgs particle.

There's a beautiful continuity that you can ask, when has progress been made? And pretty well universally, that's an indicator of it, in my mind, in physics. There is a tension, however, between a merely operational view of scientific theory and a realistic picture of the way the world is. So one thing that I think people find troubling is that it's easy to talk about these different ways of describing reality, Newtonian, relativistic, quantum mechanical. And if they all have their utility, you know, at certain speeds, at certain scales, but they all suggest a very different picture of what's actually going on. And like in quantum mechanics, you have

the many worlds view, you have the Copenhagen view, you have other views, which suggest a radically different picture of what's going on. And yet, you're using the same equations to make the same predictions and account for the same measurements. I mean, there's a yearning, and I think this yearning must be shared by most physicists, to get past the merely useful, merely instrumental, merely, yes, we have made a measurement, to what does reality actually look like? Doesn't it matter to you whether the truth is that there are a functionally infinite number of copies of ourselves having more or less identical conversations in parallel universes,

or something that doesn't entail that at all, which conserves the data in the same way? Well, you know, that's a really good question. I think a lot of it comes from, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of scientific truth. Science proves absolutely what's false. It doesn't prove absolutely what's true. Science presents models of reality, and those models get better. While we tend to often equate the model with reality, it's dangerous to do that because there's no scientific theory. And one thing string theory wanted to do was be different in this sense. But it's really important to point this out. There is no scientific theory that's absolutely true. Our best theory of nature right now is something called quantum electrodynamics. It allows you to compare predictions to observations to 14

decimal places. There's nowhere else in all of science you can do that. But that theory only applies over some small scale, not that small, but some limited scale of length and time in nature. And it breaks down and it has to be replaced by another theory, the electroweak theory, which is it unifies electromagnetism with this weak interaction. And so we have to realize that, that, that mathematics may be the language of nature, but it's a great way to model nature and it works. That's why we use it. I mean, that's ultimately the result is the reason mathematics, we use mathematics. It's not that we necessarily have a, you know, we like it more than English, but it works and English doesn't. But there are certain areas where we have to

recognize that that model takes us beyond, well beyond the things we can intuitively understand. And in those cases, we all create pictures for ourselves because we use them to guide us. And sometimes our intuition is better than others. And, you know, that's happened with scientists too. But things like quantum mechanics, for example, all of these different quote unquote interpretations, in my mind, suffer from the fact that what they're trying to do is explain a universe that at its fundamental scale is quantum mechanical in terms of a universe that we experience, which is classical. And any classical interpretation of quantum mechanics is going to be incorrect at some

level. It's going to, as my late friend, Sidney Coleman, who was a brilliant physicist at Harvard, used to say, we shouldn't be talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. We should talk about the interpretation of classical mechanics, because the quantum mechanics is the way the world works, as far as we can tell. Now, we may be wrong at some scale. Maybe quantum mechanics may break down, but no one's seen any place that that happens. And so the world really is quantum mechanical, and classical mechanics arises in some sense as this illusion, once again. And to try and impose this illusion on the fundamental world the way it may work is to always produce descriptions that that that seem crazy at some sense and are

limited at some sense and and that's true not just for quantum mechanics but that's as i said that's the reason we always have these myopic views so i'm worried of course what i want to do is get a better picture of how nature works but do i want. But do I ever have the expectation that I'll have a complete understanding of how nature works? Not at this point. Nor do I need it. Nor do I need it. It's not so much the dissatisfaction that comes with incompleteness. I guess it's the dissatisfaction that comes with two equally valid, in the sense that they conserve the data, pictures that are totally irreconcilable.

They're not irreconcilable in terms of measurements, because the measurements are the same, and they're not irreconcilable in terms of the math, because the math is the same as the pictures. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.