Modern Wisdom - #471 - Jim Al-Khalili - Physics Is Far Stranger Than You Think

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Jim Al-Khalili is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey, a broadcaster and an author. Trying to describe reality in theoretical frameworks is no small task for physicists. But it also turns out that the implications of some theories suggests that reality might be even more bizarre than it seems. The universe is a scary, confusing place to exist, if we exist at all. Expect to learn why you can't walk through brick walls, why a tiny imbalance in the matter and antimatter just after the big bang was very important, just how fine tuned for life our universe really is, where all the big discoveries in theoretical physics have gone, why faster-than-light neutrinos can't go faster than light, why you shouldn't value opinions over evidence and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 15% discount on Upgraded Formulas Test Kit at https://upgradedformulas.com/ (use code: MW15) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Joy Of Science - https://amzn.to/383CbEr Follow Jim on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jimalkhalili  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody! Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jim Alcalele, he's a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Surrey, a broadcaster, and an author. Trying to describe reality and theoretical frameworks is no small task for physicists, but it also turns out that the implications of some theories suggest that reality might be even more bizarre than it seems. The universe is a scary, confusing place to exist, if we exist at all. Expect to learn why you can't walk through brick walls, why a tiny imbalance in the matter and antimatter just after the Big Bang was very important. Just how fine-tuned for life our universe really is,

where all the big discoveries in theoretical physics have gone, why faster than light neutrinos can't go faster than light, why you shouldn't value opinions over evidence, and much more. I love talking about physics. Neil deGrasse Tyson last week was great, and Jim is another awesome science communicator. Getting to nerd out about this stuff is endlessly interesting to me. So you're coming along for the ride. Okay, we're blasting off. Elon's bothered with Twitter and I'm saving space. I'm going to focus everyone's attention back on the space,

because I'm bringing physicists on modern wisdom and that. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jim Alcali Lee. What was Keats' problem with Newton. Ah, I mean, I guess he didn't like science. He didn't like that Newton had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow. He said, you've reduced it to its prismatic colours. You know, when Newton's work on the prism and all the different colours of the rainbow, so as far as Keith's was concerned, the rainbow was beautiful in and of itself, but if you try and explain it scientifically, somehow that makes it cold and rational or hard and no longer beautiful. And of course, Keats was wrong.

Is there not an element of that, that mystery and suspense and lack of understanding about something that sort of adds a bit of magic, or do you think that understanding it enhances it even more? No, I agree. I mean, absolutely. It's anticipating what you've got for Christmas as a kid. The presence of the yet to be unwrapped. Once you've unwrapped them, you're happy you've got what you wanted, but it's sort of from then on it's sort of downhill, right? So yeah, the mystery, the anticipation is, you know, part part of the pleasures of life, but you get that in science as well. You know, even in science, the excitement, the pleasure that we derive in doing scientific research is the journey. It's the trying to

solve the mystery. Once we've solved the mystery, once we've discovered the Higgs boson or gravitational waves, okay, tick that box, move on to something else. So I think it applies in science as well as not in science. Science isn't about reducing everything to cold, hard facts, and then that's it. The hard rationalism is no longer... No, I mean, science can be spiritual, science can be uplifting and wondrous as well. I noticed that you've sort of hinted there at a scientific version of hedonic adaptation where you are chasing after the Higgs boson and you're chasing after it and chasing after it and you build this big thing and it's underneath Switzerland and somewhere else.

And then you find it and then you go, right, okay, we've done that. Now what are we gonna discover next? So it's scientific adaptation. It is a bit like that. I mean, I should say of course, those scientists and engineers who built the large Hadron Collider and spent decades, you know,

designing and preparing for this experiment and finally, you know finally getting the data. Of course they wanted to find the Higgs boson, otherwise what you've spent how many billions of dollars building this thing. So they want, but for the rest of us, it would have been more exciting had they not discovered it. Because that would have meant there's new stuff to discover. Our current theory is missing something. Back to the drawing boards,

potential Nobel prizes. We try to find the answers, we try to seek the truth, but we sort of don't want it to come to an end. Is dark matter and dark energy at the moment a big element of that, that we have this stuff that kind of theoretically needs to be there and yet no one can find any evidence for it. Yeah, well, I mean, it's probably not fair to say we don't have evidence for it. We have evidence, so we know it's there. We just don't understand its origin, what it's made of, and so on. There was an article written by Stephen Hawking about 40 years ago where he said, you know,

is the end in sight for theoretical physics? So he was suggesting that he just needs to dot some eyes across some tees and we'll have a theory of everything explaining all physical phenomena in the universe. At the time, they were just starting to think about super string theory, this new mathematically powerful theory that describes all the forces of nature. And they thought they were nearly there, and of course it turns out, well not the string theory is wrong, but there's plenty more we have yet to understand. We are further away from a theory of everything than we thought. Dark matter we know is there. We can see its gravitational pull.

thought. Dark matter we know is there. We can see it's gravitational pull. It's in, I mean, a better name for it would have been invisible matter or transparent matter. We know it's there because it has a gravitational pull like all types of matter. It can attract things towards it, it holds galaxies together and so on. You just don't know what it's made of and that's frustrating. It's a fun kind of frustration but but it's a frustration, nevertheless. Dark energy is similarly, it's something that's making the universe, making space expand ever more quickly. So we know that's happening because you can see distinct galaxies moving away, faster and faster and faster, but we don't know what it is that's causing that

anti-gravity push of everything away from everything else. So we're a long way from having all the answers, and that's good that keeps us in work. Am I right in saying that the ratio of dark matter to physical matter is actually in the, it's suede toward dark matter as well? Yeah, I think it says it's like five to one or something like that. I think, yeah, there's much more dark matter than visible. So I can't interact with it. It's so wild. I read the five stages of the universe, which is the really, really interesting book. And they said that during the Big Bang, there were almost exactly

equal parts of matter and antimatter. I think it was one million to one million and one in the particles, but the one was matter rather than antimatter, and that one out of every one million versus one million and one ratio is that's all the matter that's left in the universe. Dude, that blew my mind. Because everything else cancels out. Exactly. But you think, okay, so how much more matter could there have been? Well, a million times more.

Yeah, well, you can probably work out how much more matters, because that matter and anti-matter annihilated to form energy. And so we can measure the how much energy there is in the universe as well. But the real puzzle is, why was it a million and one versus a million? Why weren't they exactly balanced, equal and opposite? That asymmetry, but the imbalance between them. That's another big, outstanding puzzle in physics. What's your thoughts about the fine-tuned universe? You've mentioned there about dark energy. I don't think, is that the cosmological constant? Is that what dark energy causes? Yes, that's that's the consensus is growing that that's what dark energy is. Okay. And that is so fine. The the the amount of push that

that causes for galaxies to move apart ever so slightly. And I think the fine tune universe theory is that you have all of these different constants and the strong and weak forces and any one of them, a knife edge either way would completely ruin the rest of them and wouldn't permit matter to exist the way it does. What's your thoughts about the fine tune universe? Well, I mean, obviously, there could be an underlying reason why these physical quantities have the values that they do. I mean, it's thank goodness they do, or we wouldn't be here talking about it. The lazy explanation, but it's still sort of appealing for most people, is that our universe isn't unique, that our universe is just a bubble within a

high-dimensional multiverse in which every possible universe exists. And so there may lots of other universes in which the constants of physics have different values. And those universes won't have evolved to develop galaxies and stars and planets and life in at least one place. And so we are the lottery ticket winners. It's not fine tuned, just that one universe had to have the right combination of constants to give rise to the structure that we see. So it's not surprising. You know, the lottery ticket is doing how?

It's so unlikely that I've won the ticket, but somebody had to win it. And it's you. It's us. Is that the, is that called the observation selection effect? I think that's the reason. I think, I think, yeah, so I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, the people talk about it as being the anthropic principle, but yes, the observation selection, I think I've, I'm, I've vaguely heard of that. I think that that's, I think that's right, because the, the point is, the only universe in which you could consider the fact that you were lucky to have been in a fine-tuned universe is the one that was

fine-tuned for you anyway. Exactly. It's kind of like begging the question a little bit, I suppose. It's a circular argument. Yes, how could it have been anything else, otherwise we wouldn't be here to talk about it? Yes, precisely. So it seems to me that science has gotten a bit of a bad

rapport over the last few years. There's pretty much no subject area where scientists and researchers aren't treated with aggressive skepticism if not outright contempt, at least by some areas of the general public. Have you noticed this trend recently as well? I think there's always been anti-science sentiments from people either who are suspicious of it for whatever ideological reason, you know, or cultural reason or religious reason. And then there's, you know, people who, you know,

you have your own biases in your own worldview and you don't like anything that goes against that. And of course, as humans, we've always had this problem, this issue, but of course, been amplified by the internet and social media. And so that's democratized the voices of everyone on the planet. And therefore, we are hearing every possible argument for or against. I don't know whether there are more people who are anti-science now. I just think they tend to shout more loudly and they do have a voice now, whereas in the past maybe they didn't, so we tend to think things are worse than they probably are.

Yeah, isn't that interesting that no one would criticize the fact that everyone's egalitarian ability to talk online, to communicate their ideas, universal good, pretty much everybody would probably say that. But the problem is, in the past, the only people that were able to get a platform to be able to reach a million people instantly were those that had very slowly over time proven their worth of being somebody that could reach a million people. Whereas now, you take the right video of your cat and there you go, there's a million views. Yeah, I mean, there's good and bad about social media

and YouTube and so on, you know, say, it's democratized our voices, so it's so, we're not just fed the information from the powerful or those with vested interests. Also, I love Twitter, because I follow the right organizations and people are going to give me the news that I'm going to find interesting. But yeah, it has meant that everyone has a say. Now the difficulty that many people have is how do you discriminate from those who've earned their stripes, who know what they're talking about, who have the expertise because this meant years studying, thinking, reflecting on what they're telling

you, and those who, you know, it's just mere opinion and sort of ideology. It's difficult for the average person to have to de-guine and investigate where is this information coming from? Is this from a trustworthy source? What is this evidence valid? And so it's still something we're struggling with as a society, how to cope with so much information coming at us all the time.

Yeah, increasingly the value or the smartest people are the ones that are the most discriminating now. You have to be because there is way more noise than signal on the internet. And again, this is not advocating for removing everyone's Twitter accounts, but it's definitely easier. If the only people that have voices are people that have earned to have voices, then it means that you don't need to be as discriminating with what you read because the gatekeeping's already been done on the front end rather than the back end.

Yeah. And now you're right. It is, and this is what's leading to the polarization of so many views and opinions on online. Those people who know enough about a particular issue also probably know where the weaknesses are in their arguments, also know what they don't know. And also they're probably less prepared to get into a shouting point scoring match. And so they tend to retreat and they just leave that forum for the two extremes that are just lobbying missiles at each other. And one of them may

be more right than the other, one of them may. But it's led to this black and white, no room for nuance, no room for someone to say, well, you know, you've got a point, but you've also got a point. You can't say that. Look, if you're not 100% with me, you're against me. And the people who know about the subject know that it's more complicated than that. And so because they're not prepared to say, I am 100% or one side of the other, they retreat. And of course, that's the danger. Then you've left it just to the extremes.

Yes. Yeah. There's so many interesting things here. One of them being that, especially on the internet, any acceptance of either a lack of understanding or a lack of knowledge on your part, which would be, I guess, like intellectual humility, or a concession around somebody else's point,

even if it's not all of it, but a little bit of it, that's seen as a weakness from the opposing side and a lack of commitment from the most extreme people on your own side. Yeah, I mean, it's something we've seen all along in politics, for example, you know, a politician will not admit a mistake or they won't admit that they were wrong about something or very rarely anyway. And it's also so far removed from the way we do science. In science, admitting your mistakes is a strength. It shows that you are doing good science,

that you're prepared to say, well, I thought that. Now I think this. But you're right, you know, in so many parts of wider society, that is seen as a weakness. You know, when scientists have said at the early days of the pandemic, in order to protect yourself from the virus, you just have to wash your hands. You know, I guess you might know, Chris, in the UK,

the mantra was, wash your hands while singing happy birthday twice over. I didn't hear that. No, thankfully I was saved from that atrocious suggestion. That was a thing. That was a thing. Apparently, that was the way to tell the stupid public that you need to spend a good few seconds washing your hands thoroughly.

Sing happy birthday through twice, and that's enough ridiculous notion. But anyway, a few months later, of course, we discover that the virus is mostly transmitted through aerosols through the air. And then what you best do is make sure you invent related rooms, open windows, social distancing, masks, and so on. And a lot of people said, oh, hang on a minute,

you told us, we just had to wash our hands and we be protected. Now you're telling us this, you know nothing. I don't believe anything, therefore you say. The problem is not understanding how science works, that science could, you know, you can only base your ideas and your views and your hypotheses and theories on the evidence

and observations that you have available at that time. With more data coming in, you learn more, and that may mean you have to change your mind. It may mean you are more confident about your hypothesis, but it also may mean that you were wrong. Getting that message across and maybe exporting it to wider discourse in society, I think would be absolutely beneficial for it to be, so if you're not, you know, I'm going to say, actually, no, I think you've got a good point there. I think I was wrong about that.

I now understand where you're coming from. For that not to be seen as a concession, as a weakness, would be wonderful. But I mean, that may require changing human nature, which is, yeah, maybe, it might be a bit much, but there's definitely some low resolution thinking going on here. Yeah.

And I do think that it's in big part due to people wanting simplistic answers as a solution to a world which is becoming ever more complex and difficult to discern. So you say science, unlike politics, is not an ideology or belief system, it is a process. But people say trust in science, like they say trust in God. And then when you have something that occurs, like,

you know, in the start of COVID, the people in power really didn't make a good showing of looking like competent human beings. And neither did some of the researchers either. So you go, okay, you don't know what you're talking about, but the point is at what point do you now accept that that was maybe bound within one type of issue? Maybe it was bound at that particular time with how much information they had. Maybe they don't actually know. Maybe COVID is a little bit too complicated

for them to actually fully understand what's going on. Maybe it's pandemics overall, maybe it's the entire scientific method, and this is the slippery slope, where people kind of get co-opted in with some like easy gateway drug that, you know, they didn't know what they were talking about to do with masks. And before you know it, some people with certain thought patterns can be flat earth lizard people in around the world and I understand the compulsion to do that and I'm just wondering about how you put a pattern interruption in to stop single or isolated cases of scientific negligence, malfeasance, ignorance, stupidity, mistake, whatever, cascading down into something that's a bit more serious.

Yeah, I mean, it was difficult with the pandemic, I guess, because everyone was so scared in the early days, and those scientists, the epidemiologists, and those who were, you know, trying to sort of study and give advice on how we should behave, one can argue overreacted, but that overreaction was understandable given how frightening. I mean, what do you want to under-react? Like in a world where you don't have all of the information

about a potential world ending in the pandemic, do you want the scientists to under-react? This is something that no one really ever says. You're like, look, maybe, maybe being locked down in houses was an overreaction, maybe the masking, maybe the social distancing, maybe the, you can't see Grandmaren, people dying in hospitals and stuff like that. And maybe it was held on for too long, maybe it was too conservative and the it was held on for too long. Maybe it was too conservative and the price should have been updated. But in the first instance, you say, well, is it a, is it totalitarian overreach from a government that's trying to take away your rights and prove, or is it just that the people in power didn't know how bad it was going to be and they didn't want people to die?

Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot to be said for the precautionary principle, you know, if you are not sure about a particular course of action, but not doing it could potentially be catastrophic, then you better do it just in case, you know, if your doctor tells you there's a 60% chance that if you don't give up smoking, drinking or changing your diet, you'll be dead next year. You don't think 60% come on, that's almost 50, 50, you know, I'm not going to give up. You say, that's enough. You may be wrong, there's a 40% chance you're wrong, but just in case I'm going to something.

So I think a precautionary principle means that lower levels of confidence in our understanding are allowed if the results, the repercussions of not doing anything are greater. And I think that's what happened with the, you know, the similar sort of thing is facing us with climate change, that, you know, we're not 100% sure that we humans are destroying the planet, but the evidence is accumulating all the time, and it's more the point that if we don't do anything and we're right, then well, we've lost. So let's hope we're wrong, but just in case we do something about it. So I think it's inevitable that people will have

come in hard with something as unknown in terms of what it could do to humanity as the pandemic in the early days. What's the story about faster than light neutrinos? Right, so in my book, in the Joseph Science, I talk about how scientists we can never be certain that something is right. We always have to say there's a possibility that the sun won't rise tomorrow, or our particular understanding about something isn't right, we've missed something. But there are levels of confidence. There are degrees of confidence that our ideas and notions are right.

And you get to the point where you say there's certain things that are, you know, we're very, very sure about, me 100% certain, but never quite. And one of those, I use this example from physics that Einstein tells us, and his special theory of relativity, that the speed of light is the fastest possible speed in our universe. That it's basically woven into the fabric of space and time. It's not just a number that Einstein plucked out of the air and why not something a little bit faster. That is, that's the maximum speed possible in our universe, and light happens to be able to travel at that maximum speed.

Well, we're all confidence about this. A decade or so ago, there was an experiment where particles called neutrinos were produced at CERN in Geneva. And these particles are very light. They are very weakly interacting with the rest of matter. That means that they can travel through matter, through the earth itself, as though the earth isn't there, because they're not bumping into anything.

They don't do much bumping. And so the beam of these neutrinos was fired in a straight line from Geneva to this mountain in Italy, where there's a laboratory, the Grand Sassou Laboratory, under a mountain in Italy. So because of the curvature of the Earth, they're actually traveling slightly underground to follow, I directly, a straight line. The experimentalists who captured, they managed to capture a few of these particles at the other end, and they measured, because they knew the distance precisely, they knew the timing of start and finish, they calculated they had got there

by traveling slightly faster than the speed of light. And, you know, it's of press release and, you know, the world media was excited. They, to their credit, the scientists said, tell us where we've gone wrong, because this is crazy, you know. But most physicists, including myself, didn't believe it. We said, no, we are so confident, we're not certain Einstein could be wrong,

but we are so confident that the speed of light cannot be exceeded, there must be something wrong with these results. And you know what? And you know, some people said, oh, see, this is, you know, you arrogant scientists, you think you know it all and we say well look now We in fact it'll be great in fact if we can fuck these new children of us like that means out how understanding your physics will be wrong We have to rewrite the laws of physics chances are we would we it's it's wrong because so many other experiments that confirm the speed of like being the maximum They do have to have been explained away somehow. I on Twitter I said, if the speed of light really is exceeded by these neutrinos, then I will eat my boxer shorts live on TV. And forgetting that there are journalists who follow me on Twitter and so before I knew I found myself on BBC news one evening where they interviewed me about this and I had to repeat this thing

about box. So I had to go through this really embarrassing, you know, pretending. I knew a day in advance. So I had a spare pair of shorts with me. So I had this made this sort of act of, you know, sort of, and then pulling out my boss, and I would eat my, they said that'll make great telly, so I believe them. And I was getting, you know, recipes, people saying how to cook your boy, you know, what dressings to put to, if you cook your rocks or shots. Anyway, it turned out that, I can't remember how much later,

but the experimentalists in Italy realized there was a loose connection behind one of the timing devices in their instrumentation. And if that was clicked into place properly, suddenly the timing between start and finish was different, and in fact these particles traveled slower than the speed of light. So Einstein lives to fight another day. So I just use this as an example that, you know, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. You can't dismiss something like Einstein's theoretativity

just because, you know, you've got an idea or because you've carried out one test. There's a lot has gone in to try and knock Einstein's Theoretativity of its pedestal. And we want to, we want to knock it down because that means there's more for us to discover. And yet it has survived. And so gradually, because we've tried to disprove it and we haven't been able to, we gain more and more trust in it. And that's when we talk about we have a theory in science that we all trust. It could be Einstein's theory, it could be Darwinian evolution,

it could be plate tectonics, it could be the germ theory of disease. We are so confident that they're right, they might as well be facts. That doesn't mean we are certain, it's just highly unlikely that we're wrong. Explain to me how something can pass through the earth, like a neutrino. What's happening there? Well, matter is ultimately mostly empty space.

So, you know, the earth is made of minerals and various compounds involving silicon and oxygen and so on. Ultimately down at the atomic scale these are individual atoms. And individual atoms are a tiny nucleus with electrons buzzing around the outside. But most 99.99% of the volume of the atom is just empty space. So when I slam my hand down on my desk, which you can't see, it's just out of a shot, but I'm sure you can imagine, the reason it comes to a stop is not because solid matter has hit solid matter. It's because the electrons in the atoms on the surface of my hand are feeling the electric repulsion, negative charge, of the electrons

in the atoms in the surface of the desk. And it's electromagnetic repulsion that is giving matter the sense of civility. That's why you can't walk through brick walls. But if you turned off electromagnetism, then there's nothing to stop those electrons from passing through. And that's what neutrinos are doing. They have no electric charge. They are electrically neutral. And so they don't feel the electromagnetic force. They feel what's called the weak nuclear force. There are two forces that operate inside atomic nuclei, and that's the only way neutrinos could interact with matter.

Of course, there's also the force of gravity, but the neutrino is as near as dammit massless. It doesn't have any mass at all. So forget gravity pulling it one way or the other. So it travels through the earth, zipping through the empty space through all the atoms. And only if it were to interact directly with, say, an electron or within the atomic nucleus, will it be stopped in its tracks, which is highly unlikely? That is wild. That's wild. Talk to me, we've mentioned about about string theory and general relativity at the moment. Can

you explain what the challenges of coming up with a grand unified theory at the moment? Why, why can't we get things to fit together? Yeah, I mean, usually in physics when we talk about a grand unified theory, we tend to mean a theory that still excludes gravity. So it's a theory that encompasses the other three forces that we do have theories for, the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces. You don't have one for gravity at the moment? We have a theory for gravity, which is Einstein's general theory of relativity, but it's a very different kind of construct. It's a theory about the curvature of space time. It's not a theory of subatomic particles

bumping into each other, or a theory of the quantum world. And so when we talk about grand unified theory, what we mean is one theory that covers all the building blocks of matter down at the subatomic scale, but without the force of gravity. When we bring gravity in, we start talking about a theory of everything. Okay, that's what I meant. What's the problem of doing that? So quantum mechanics has been tremendously successful in explaining the microscopic world. We have now, well, quantum mechanics developed in the 1920s, then evolved into what we call quantum field theory,

quantum field theory explains all the interactions of matter and light and the building blocks of atoms beautifully. But gravity is the old one out. And, you know, gravity on the cosmic scale, gravity is the old one out. And you know, gravity on the cosmic scale, gravity is the daddy. You know, it's the most important phenomenon. It shapes the structure of the entire universe. But you bring it down to the level of atoms and gravity is much, much

weaker. You know, two electrons will repel each other because of their negative charge, but they have masses. So you might think, well, don't two masses pull together? Well, they do, but it's so tiny, it's so weak, it's negligible. So we have Einstein's general theory of relativity, which gives us the structure of the cosmos, tells us about the Big Bang, about how the universe is expanding, the structure of galaxies and so on. It's our best theory of gravity, it's our best theory of the nature of space and time, but it's very different from the quantum world and the theories describing the quantum world. So we need to unify, we want to unify the theory of the small quantum

mechanics and the theory of the small quantum mechanics and the theory of the large general relativity, but because they're very different structures, we don't know how to mesh them together. And most physicists working in this area say, well, there must be a way of doing it. You know, there's, we can think of examples in the physical universe where both theories will apply, for example inside a black hole, or just after the big bang. But we don't know how to bring them together. So that's sort of the holy grail of physics to find a theory of quantum gravity. String theory is one of the candidates for such a theory. But we don't know for sure if it's right. Now,

the physicist working in string theory will say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're pretty sure it's right. We're just going to working through the maths. There are physicists who are working in other, on other potential candidate theories, who say that string theory is a load of rubbish. Then there are other physicists who would argue that too many bright people have devoted their lives to string theory and all it is is neat maths. It's very powerful maths but it's not telling us something about the real world that we live in. And so stop wasting your time guys and my research, because I want to do something that's not string theory.

So it's a bit of a, you know, what camp you're in is almost like, you know, ideological views as soon as you four or against string theory. Yeah. It's interesting. I had to meet Shio Kaku on the show last year. And, you know, it's interesting hearing somebody that's dedicated so much time to one particular type of theory because for all that scientists try and update their priors and you know they're Bayesian agents and all this stuff, you do think, look man, if you've dedicated

a 50 year career to one particular type of theory, your ability to say, you know what it is, this isn't working, guys. We're up to 11 dimensions, we're kind of wrapping the theory around itself in order to be able to make it fit something to do with what we're seeing in the real, is it possible that the theory of the big and the theory of the small simply don't blend together or would that be impossible? Do they have to be able to mix?

I used to think that that was a possibility. Maybe we just have to live with one willing compatibility. Mutual and compatible because they apply different scales entirely and therefore that never the train shall meet and we never have a scenario where we worry. But you can imagine a situation where you have two electrons, you know, that we can describe the interaction between them using quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, but electrons have mass and mass Einstein's theory of relativity tells us mass and energy shape space time. So space time will also be affected where those two electrons are sitting.

So what happens not only has to be described by ultimately, by quantum mechanics, but we also need to just use general relativity to describe the very tiny curvature of space time around those two electrons. It's a tiny, tiny effect that's negligible, but that's a limit. It's happening. There must be a theory that incorporates both as an umbrella, both generativity and quantum mechanics. How wild is it that there's something that so many people, so many smart people have dedicated so much time and resources to? And yet, you kind of not really got anything that's that compelling.

You've got plausible potentials, and not anything that people are up in arms is, yep, there we go, Science Seal delivered. Yeah, and a lot of physicists, you know, until about 10, 20 years ago, a lot of physicists were very confident that we were nearly there, you know, whether they're working in superstring theory, M theory, loop quantum gravity, you know, they were quite bullish about the fact that, yeah, you know, this is definitely the right way. It's very powerful. We'll get there. But it has stagnated over the last decade or so. And we haven't made the big advances, you know, the the last really truly surprising advance in physics was back in 1998 when we discovered dark energy. You know, the stuff that we've done in the 21st century, confirming the Higgs boson, discovering gravitational waves, well, they were both expected.

They were both ticking a box confirming what we suspected anyway. So there weren't big surprises. So we are in a situation now where the frustration is growing at the Large Hadron Collider. They've not discovered any more particles after the Higgs boson. They were hoping to discover a whole host of family of particles called supersymmetric particles. What are they? Well, they would be particles that would help explain what I was talking about earlier about a grand unified theory that unifies the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong force into one all-encompassing

theory. If you want such a grand unified theory, even before gravity, then one candidate is that that theory has to have this mathematical property called supersymmetry. And if supersymmetry is a property of our universe, then that means there are supersymmetric particles that they don't hang around very long. They're very unstable, but given enough energy in a particle, et cetera, you can create them for fleetingly. And we've thought we've had the conditions to create them and we've not seen anything.

So that's a frustration. Dark matter, we don't know what it's made of yet. We just thought we'd have figured that out by now. But experiments after experiment has found no evidence, because we know it's there, but no evidence of what dark matter consists of. There would have been a nice explanation, which is that dark matter is made of a type of super symmetric particle, which would have been sort of tick-to-tick.

So the convenience, yeah. Very convenient. But, you know, in science, it's not always the convenient, just because you want something to be right or true, doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be so. Who has got the most pressure on them at the moment? Is it the theorists or the experimentalists who need to work that game? Theorists never have pressure. Theorists just, you know, will come up with ideas, as I say, we, only because I'm a theorist, but I don't work on those sort of foundational questions.

And you know, if there's a suggestion that it's wrong, that there's something missing in the maths or an experiment, just with it, fine, we move on. That was yesterday's there. There are physicists working at the foundations, the very borderline of what we know, who very often then even bother publishing their papers in peer review journals.

They'll write them as preprints, so they stick them up online just as a temporary measure for others in the field to read them, because they know in six months from now they'll have moved on to some other idea. So unfortunately it is the experimentalist who are dealing with the real world, not with just, you know, pretty maths, who sadly have to up their game because after all physics ultimately is an empirical science and it relies on observations and evidence and data. So we've just got to be cleverer as experimentalists to design the experiment that points us in the right direction.

What's the next big experiment that's coming? Is there a super large Hadron Collider? Is that happening? They're still talk. That's still something that's in the planning stages, but which countries will be involved, what it would actually look like, where it will be built, is still something that is being discussed. After the large-hedron collider took a couple of decades to be built, and it hasn't reached the end of what it can maybe able to deliver. Maybe upgrading the Large Hadron Collider will be regarded as a much cheaper way. And there'll be reluctance from governments to fund something that's going to run into the many tens of billions of dollars.

If they look at the Large Hadron Collider, so well, it delivered the Higgs boson, which we sort of knew was going to be there anyway, how can you promise us lots of new physics with something much bigger? So what is it? Is there anything coming up experimentally that's interesting? Any new I don't know, telescopes or detectors? Well, I mean, the big excitement at the moment, there are certainly new new terrestrial telescopes that are being I mean, the big excitement at the moment, there are certainly new, new terrestrial telescopes that are being built, but the big excitement, the moment, is the James Webb space telescope. So this is the success as to the Hubble space telescope. So the James Webb telescope has been launched, it's going to be providing us with information about the universe in far

greater detail than we've ever had before. It might tell us something about the structure of matter, about dark energy. It might tell us give us some hints as to whether there's a signature of life on on exoplanets. So a lot of certainly in the world of astronomy, a lot of careers are being built on what's going to come from the James Webb telescope. In particle physics, the other big science, in physics, things aren't quite as rosy because the Large Hadron Collider hasn't, I guess, lived up to its promise. And there'll be particle physicists who will hate me for saying that But viewed from the outside, you know where the headlines are That we haven't seen the new breakthroughs and the discovery of new particles that have my blood to break throughs

What area of research do you wish more funding was put into what do you think would be an interesting Area to have more funding was put into? What do you think would be an interesting area to have more funding given to? Well, I mean, the area that's exciting and fast moving at the moment, I guess there is funding going into it, is in quantum technologies, developing quantum devices that rely on the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics. Now, and I say weirder quantum mechanics, in the sense, it's by weirder, I mean counter-intuitive and more profound, because of course, the fact that we are talking, recording this podcast over Skype, is thanks to quantum mechanics, because without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have had any of modern electronics, we wouldn't have understood how to,

the properties of super inductors and chips and so on. So the 20th century technologies, everything from lasers to the start of smartphones is all thanks to quantum mechanics. Now in the 21st century, we're developing a new generation of technologies like quantum computers, like quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation, they're very clever, clever quantum sensors that rely on these strange ideas and quantum mechanics of two particles

being separated and yet entangled with each other so that one, the fate of one, just affects the other and so on. And so I think this is an area that is rapidly developing. More funding should go into it, but I guess, you know, it'll be driven by once a science has an application in the marketplace, then capitalism comes in. Capitalism kicks off, yeah, exactly. has an application in the marketplace, then capitalism comes in. Capitalism kicks over. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Did I see that quantum computers had managed to do 2 plus 2 equals 4? Yes, amazing, isn't it? So they've confirmed that. I mean, IBM and Google, the big guys are making impressive progress in quantum. We are still away yet from having a desktop quantum computer, but they are starting to get incrementally more and more good at what quantum computers do. And what computer computers, they're not going to replace our

everyday computers or super computers, but there'll be certain tasks that they can do Much, much more quickly than the most powerful computers we have. Have you got any idea what they would be useful for? Well Things like Sifting through lists and sifting through data sifting through lists, sifting through data, solving the certain problems in mathematics. I mean, people will argue that a quantum computer will be able to decipher encrypted codes, you know, out what the public key access, the reason why it's safe to put your credit card details online. Essentially relies on the fact that multiplying two large numbers together is much easier than breaking

up their answer into the two numbers that you had to myself, the prime factors of large numbers. Quantum computers will be able to crack that much more quickly than fantastic. Quantum computers can brute force their way into my email account. Yeah, but luckily in line with that, we will also be developing new techniques of encryption using quantum mechanics as well. To an arms race. So it's an arms race between quantum encryption and quantum, you know, key cracking, code cracking. But yeah, I think there are lots of,

in science, that there's the hope that quantum computers can help us understand certain structures in physics and chemistry, for example, down at the quantum atomic scale, the world it behaves quantum mechanically. And we, to understand it, we try to, we create simulations, models on our computers. Well, it's far better to create a quantum simulation of a quantum process using a quantum computer than not really a quantum simulation using a non-computer. So lots of chemists and nucleophysism and condensed matter physicists will be very keen to use

quantum computers to study matter down at the quantum scale. Do you think that the mission to Mars to try and live and set up a base on Mars is a good use of time and resources. That's a difficult one. I think there's still a lot more mileage in sending non-human missions to Mars and the other planets. Our development of robotics and AI, which is another fantasticly exciting area of science technology, is developing so quickly that I don't think, I mean very soon it's going to be very hard to justify sending humans to Mars. The added experience, if I worked in that area I'd be arguing passionately that you need humans on the ground to be digging, but especially standing away from it, I can imagine many, you know, we could fund many

more projects to Mars and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter without human intervention, then far fewer projects where we're sending people to those planets. So, it'll come. I mean, you know, we're not going to be stuck on Earth forever. Provided, we don't wipe ourselves out, and we solve climate change, and we don't start a nuclear war with Russia and all that business,

they will come a day when of course we're going to be, you know, populating the solar system and beyond. But at the moment, I think there's more mileage in terms of the limited scientific research funding that we have to send unmanned spacecrafts out to the solar system. That's an interesting way to look at it. If we dance through the minefield that is existential risk appropriately and we miss artificial, misaligned artificial general intelligence and we evade engineered pandemics and so on and so forth, one of the problems is that you kind of have another arms race going on, a literal race

between the amount of X-risk that you are prepared to deal with at home on Earth and the number of other options that we have outside of that, right? And slowing down the speed of technology production, the earn of potential black balls that Nick Bostrom talks about each time that you create a technology, it could be white, good, could be gray, kind of good, kind of bad, or it could be black, which is totally terrifying and can kill us all. That means that there is a degree of urgency because we can't take a God's eye perspective and just slow down, which would be my, if we had the option, I would say,

look, let's just slow technology down by 100 times and let's go super incremental with everything that we do. Because if you take a very, very long civilizational time frame with this, you think, well, what's the rush? The only rush for us to get somewhere else is to counter the risk that we're creating because we can't have global coordination around the development of technology. I want every single line of computer code to be tested for whether or not it's malicious, step by step by step.

In the ideal world, of course. I mean, it's that sort of happened in things like in areas like genetics, you know, where scientists in most countries, not everywhere, have, you know, taken out a sort of moratorium on gene editing, germline editing, and so on, you know, where, in ideally, it could be a wonderfully powerful tool where you could go in and and snip away mutations and combat genetic diseases, but of course in the wrong hands it can lead to all sorts of horrific scenarios. So yeah, I think so. A lot of scientists are saying, hang on a minute, step back, let's think about this, let's examine the ethical and moral implications of what we're doing. But it won't happen everywhere and it's not happening in other areas.

The artificial intelligence is another example. We're not slowing down the pace of development in robotics and automation and machine learning so on. It's happening and coming out as very quickly We're not you know, it's not like terminator terminator and sky net are just around the corner but We don't seem to be able or the powers that be have no appetite for slowing down that technology. So the best we can do is get talking about it, get that conversation going and try and keep the ethical and moral debates about what we should and shouldn't do in the same race. Yeah, with the technology. If we can't slow the technology down, we better speed up our

conversations. Yeah, I like that. I wonder whether or not the intention is going to be to air gap Mars from Earth, but that seems like a complete waste as well. You go, look, what are we going to Mars for? Are we going to Mars because we want to have a second cradle of humanity in which we are protected from any of the potential concerns. But then if one of those and one of the big four runners, you know, it's whatever one in six chance over the next 100 years that AI is going to destroy civilization based on Nick Toby-Ords book, if that's the case, if that's one of the real, real reasons that we're going, then you need to be

air-gapped from the Earth. You need to be able to have nothing be sent to Mars. No signals, no communication, no nothing. You go, okay, we're also there to do research to be able to improve our quality of life here on Earth. So you can't have both. So what we may need to do is there's going to have to be a trade-off made here. Look, what do you want? You want to be able to go to another planet and use it for research and for sending back information and for scientific testing and stuff like that. Or do you want it as the ejector seat emergency backup system for civilization? Because I don't think think you can do both. We are not looking that far ahead to see Mars as that ejector seat,

the escape route if things go to pot here on earth. We are taking the calculated risk that we will resolve and solve the problems here on earth and that we are not going to design a virus that's going to kill everyone. We're not going to mutually nuclear destroy the world. We're not going to be hit by Amiturite. And I think it's, you know, climate people say, well, you're going to go to Mars because we're destroying the Earth's climate. Well, however bad climate change affects our planet, it's still many orders of magnitude more preferable

than the environment of Mars. We're not talking about terraforming Mars at the moment. We're not talking about seeding, giving it its atmosphere back again and so on. So it's still a long way from being a place where any more than just a handful of researchers who are well-trained go over there to do research. It's not somewhere where we can go and live. It's so far in the future that we're not prepared to put in that sort of, we didn't even put money into pandemic preparedness.

Even despite so many people saying, pandemic, a pandemic could come at any moment, guys. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And sure enough, it did. And no one's got any PPE or sanitiser or toilet roll a couple of weeks in. And that was a real, you know, a real possibility. So, I mean, think with, with Mars and, and using that scheme, it's so far in the future that people just aren't, it's not on the horizon at the moment. Yeah, you're right. I would weigh

sooner, take a hot earth over a cold Mars, you know. Indeed. So one of, one of the best quotes that you've got in your new book is that you won't reach a clearer understanding of what's going on by valuing opinion over evidence. One of the problems that we have is when there's so many conflicting claims about what the evidence is and what it says, that's very difficult to work out. And I also think another element of this is, which has been facilitated by the cult of personality slash social media is increasingly we follow people not ideas now. So Elon Musk, 80 million Twitter followers, like SpaceX, 4 million Twitter followers, Christiana Ronaldo, 40 million Instagram followers, Christiana Ronaldo, 40 million Instagram followers,

Ray El Madrid, 8 million, right? We follow people, we don't follow things, right? Our ideas. And when you're not going to value opinion over evidence, and there's way too much conflict around what that evidence is or what the opinions are, and then because we have this sort of natural seduction for people, all of that mixed together, I think think it just creates a very difficult landscape for people to do

sense-making in. Yeah, again, I mean, this is, in a sense, I mean, apart from the size of the problem, it's not a new one. You know, we've always had profits and... Cassandra. Cassandra's, yes, we've had, you know, those who will lead, those who will be listened to, those who have the strength of personality that is going to attract followers. It's just that the internet and social media has allowed anyone to try their luck at this.

And of course, there's gonna be those who, for whatever reason, whether because they're multi-billionaires or because they're great at sport, or simply because they got lucky and for whatever reason, you look at some of the influences on Instagram, I think, what is it? Where's your talent? Where, how come people are listening to you?

And there is doesn't seem to, it just, it has happened. I don't think we've yet come to terms with how to deal with how social media in particular has amplified what are problems that have always existed in humanity. The same with things like conspiracy theories and the same with things like ideological, you know, in the past, you know, generation or two ago, you got your views from a newspaper that you read. And that, and because it aligned with your political opinions, for example, and that was fine. And we all had, we all lived in our confirmation bias, echo chambers, it was fine. The internet and social media haven't created a new problem. They've just amplified a problem that is part of human nature

and we haven't yet figured out, you know, maybe that we restrict the voices to those that we as a society decide know what they're talking about. But we haven't figured out the right way of doing that, that people can agree on that seems to be fair. Yeah, well, I was thinking, as you were talking earlier, about a new type of verification system, you know, you've got your blue ticks, but maybe, maybe a gray tick or a yellow tick means that this person has reached a particular level of that this person has reached a particular level of a number of citations on their work within their specific field or whatever, because it is becoming increasingly effortful. And there is no solution to this to just cut through the noise and find a little bit

of signal. And what you get after a while, and I see this in myself, I just kind of check out of discussions to sort of apathy sets in. So I go, well, I don't know, if I can't work out what's right, or what's wrong, and if any time that I try to find it out, I'm told that I'm a cook, serve, or a chill, or a, you know, whatever word you want, it's sheeple, grifter. You go, Whatever. In the case, I'm not going to engage. And that's even worse. People simply not engaging because it's either too effortful or daunting for them to go

ahead and do it. Yeah, but if you know it's not going to lead to anything, if you know neither there's not going to be any compromise. And at least in a bar with friends or whatever, when you're face to face and you probably, you know, you're not going to see them again, you know, your paths are going to cross in the future. You tend to reach some sort of compromise very often. You know, it might get into a chat too much. But on social media, because everyone is invisible from everyone else and it's so instantaneous and you don't have to think about it. You know, you can put a really good argument against something,

but what comes back is, you know, they've ignored that and they've taken a different direction, but it's just a strident. So it is soul destroying and a bit of a, I tend not to. There are certain debates that I won't get into at all. I mean, the transgender debate, absolutely polarizing society, mainly a generational issue, but no one's allowed to say trans rights are important, but I can understand why some women feel uncomfortable. To say that, one

side will say you're transphobic, the other side will say you're your anti-feminist, misogynist, and so there's no nuance in many debates on social media, and so you're right. It's not just if you are arguing from one side and not getting anywhere with the opposing view, it's also if you realize that actually this issue is more complicated than either side would admit because they've narrowed it down to memes and tweets and no one wants to listen to nuance, then you also pull yourself away and say, well, okay, there's no point. If I'm in the middle, both sides are going to attack me. So, one has to say nothing. Yeah, being out on the extremes guarantees you agreement

from at least one, but being in the middle guarantees disagreement from both. From both. Exactly. And most issues are more complicated than we'd like to think. And as we discussed earlier, the experts, the people who know about this particular issue, know about the subtleties, know about the nuance, and therefore, inevitably, we'll find themselves somewhere in the middle ground. I'm not saying in the middle, if it's an argument between an arsty person and a nice person, someone who's tolerant

with someone who's a bigot, then clearly the in between, the right place to be, is very much closer to the tolerant person. But nevertheless, those are the people who know will inevitably step away from these debates. Jim Alkalili, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out your stuff online, where should they go? I have a website, jamealculele.com, without the hyphen. Actually, no, it does have the hyphen.

Tell people the wrong address. You can find out about my books. I'm still an active researcher working at the University of Surrey in England and teaching students, or I also do a lot of science communication. So some other stuff you can find on my website. Jim, I appreciate you. Thanks for today. My pleasure Chris. Thank you. you