Radiolab - The Trouble with Everything

Episode Date: June 13, 2013

The desire to trace your way back to the very beginning, to understand everything -- whether it's the mysteries of love or the mechanics of the universe -- is deeply human. It might also be deeply flawed.

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before June 19th, 2013. That would be a Wednesday, next Wednesday. Then you will find us if you're a Reddit person. We're doing an ask me anything for the Reddit folks on that day. 3 p.m. Eastern. So if you want to join us there.

Yeah. And as the name suggests, you can ask us whatever you want and we'll do our best to answer. Details are on our website, radialab.org. Okay, beta business number two, which we're really excited about,

is we're very close to announcing our next live tour, which is going to happen later in the fall. We're going to go to 20 cities. It's going to be awesome to checkradioLab.org for that too. And now to the podcast at hand, we are going to be considering two very different takes on everything. Later, we'll get to physicist Brian Green. But we're going to start with a woman whose name is not Brian.

Hello, hello, hello. Hi. Hi. Is this Jenny? any chance? It sure is. Her name's Jenny Hollowell. She's a writer, an author, and here's the setup. So we were recently

asked by the show Selected Shorts to curate an evening of stories just to select a couple for people to read. Well, that turned out to be really hard for us. We could not agree. We argued. It got kind of ugly internally. I'm not going to go there. But the one story

that we all agreed on instantly. And we never really looked back. Yeah, was the story from Jenny Hollowell called A History of Everything, including you. So we called her up, and we asked her to... Well, I kind of gushed a little first. Oh, yeah. There was the fawning.

There was the falling. I mean, I know that people are going to hear this, so they're not going to read it, so they won't be able to dwell on just the incredible tensions in these very short and specific sentences that you've written. But I'm just wondering, how long did this?

It's about five pages to hold in your hand. how many decades did it take for you to write this? Well, it's one of those stories that defies most of my experiences with writing stories, which is that it came out very quickly. And I always hate hearing other writers say how quickly something came about because it's a rare occurrence, and you're always kind of full of envy for those moments. This is the one story I think I've ever written in a day. Really? Wow.

But then, you know, the revision process is definitely a time. Would you mind reading it for us? And we can talk more on the back end? Okay, sure. A history of everything, including you. First, there was God, or gods, or nothing. Then synthesis, space, the expanse, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion, and fusion. Out of the chaos came order.

stars were born and shone and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses, and the elements combined and became. Life evolved or was created. Cells trembled and divided and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs and fins and hands and antennae, and mouths and ears and wings and eyes, eyes that open wide to take all of it in,

the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe. Eyes opened and closed and opened again. We called it blinking. Above us shown a star that we called the sun, and we called the ground, the earth.

So we named everything, including ourselves. We were man and woman, and when we got lonely, we figured out a way to make more of us. We called it sex, and most people enjoyed it. We fell in love. We talked about God and bang stones together,

made sparks and called them fire, we got warmer, and the food got better. We got married. We had some children. They cried and crawled and grew. One dissected flowers, sometimes eating the petals. Another liked to chase squirrels. We fought wars over money and honor and women.

We starved ourselves. We hired prostitutes. We purified our water. We compromised, decorated, and became esoteric. One of us stopped breathing and turned blue. Then others. First we covered them with leaves, and then we buried them in the ground.

We remembered them. We forgot them. We aged. Our buildings kept getting taller. We hired lawyers and formed councils and left paper trails. We negotiated. We admitted. We got sick and searched for cures.

We invented lipstick, vaccines, Pilates, solar panels, interventions, table manners, firearms, window treatments, therapy, birth control, tailgating, status symbols, palomony, sportsmanship, focus groups, Zoloft, sunscreen, landscaping, Cessnas, fortune cookies, chemotherapy, convenience foods, and computers. We angered militants and our mothers. You were born. You learned to walk. and went to school and played sports, and lost your virginity, and got into a decent college,

and majored in psychology, and went to rock shows and became political, and got drunk and changed your major to marketing, and wore turtleneck sweaters and read novels and volunteered, and went to movies and developed a taste for blue cheese dressing. I met you through friends and didn't like you at first. The feeling was mutual, but we got used to each other. We had sex for the first time behind an orange,

art gallery, standing up and slightly drunk. You held my face in your hands and said that I was beautiful. And you were too, tall with a streetlight behind you. We went back to your place and listened to the White Album. We ordered in. We fought and made up and got good jobs and got married and bought an apartment and worked out and ate more and talked less. I got depressed. I got depressed. You ignored me. I was sick of you. You drank too much and got careless with money. I slept with my boss. We went into counseling and got a dog. I bought a book of sex positions and we tried the least degrading one, the wheelbarrow. You took flight lessons and subscribed to Rolling Stone. I learned Spanish and started gardening. We had some children, who more or less disappointed us, but it might have been our fault. You were too indulgent.

and I was too critical. We love them anyway. One of them died before we did, stabbed on the subway. We grieved. We moved. We adopted a cat. The world seemed uncertain.

We lived beyond our means. I got judgmental and belligerent. You got confused and easily tired. You ignored me. I was sick of you. We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails.

We got tender. There was that time on the porch when you said, Can you believe it? This was near the end, and your hands were trembling. I think you were talking about everything, including us. Did you want me to say it, so it would not be lost? It was too much for me to think about. I could not go back to the beginning.

I said, not really, and we watched the sun go down. A dog kept barking in the distance, and you were tired, but you smiled and you said, hear that? It's rough, rough, and we laughed. You were like that. Now, your question is my project, and our house is full of clues. I'm reading old letters and turning over rocks.

I bury my face in your sweaters. I study a photograph taken at the beach, the sun in our eyes, and the water behind us. It's a victory to remember the first. forgotten picnic basket and your striped beach blanket. It's a victory to remember how the jellyfish stung you and you ran screaming from the water. It's a victory to remember dressing the wound with meat tenderizer and you saying I made it better. I will tell you this. Standing on our hill this morning, I looked at the land we chose for ourselves. I saw a few green patches and our sweet little shed.

That same dog was barking. A storm was moving in. I did not think of heaven, but I saw that the clouds were beautiful, and I watched them cover the sun. A history of everything, including you, by Jenny Hollow. Jenny, can you talk a little bit about what you were thinking when you were writing this? Like, where did this come from? Oh, well, the story kind of came from that impulse to kind of trace back. I think maybe I was in therapy at the time.

And, you know, they always ask you about your parents or their parents. And I felt myself a little frustrated by the idea that it's traceable, like whatever sort of position you find yourself in life that you can trace back to the origin. You know, if you follow that logic, then you're eventually going to end up in a, you know, a protoplasmic sort of situation. And I think that's why. Because on the couch, the guy said, so tell me about your parents, tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents.

It's one of those kind of things. Kind of. I mean, where does it end? At some point, you're talking about some caveman's emotionally unavailable parents. And to imagine one of the conversations you might have had with your therapist, I know you were once very religious and then you've kind of lost your faith. I mean, was that part of this? Did that happen near or in the neighborhood of writing this story?

It was probably about two years before the writing of the story, but it was still a very fresh experience. I was sort of in the thick of it at that time. And was there something of that struggle or fall from faith that kind of got infused into the storytelling? I think so, too. I mean, I think that definitely is a part of, you know, the searching that I was going through at the time. Just that desire to grasp what might be the grand, you know, a heart of it. at all. So the story was a little about that wrestling experience, trying to explain how I'm here, how we got here, how we ended up in this moment. And the logic of that is having lost a narrative, a given to you narrative of how things began, you were thinking, okay, so let me see if I can work my own narrative from the ground up? That's definitely where I was, just sort of maybe mourning the loss of that narrative a little bit

and in making one of my own to just give me something to think about. I definitely don't feel like I stumbled across any solutions, but I felt like the comfort of narrative is definitely something

I believe in, and the story sort of is an extension of my process about thinking about the beginning of everything. Well, as creation stories go, it's really, really nice. I have to say. You're going to be hearing from Talmudic rabbis and Koranic scholars and Christian saints.

Have you ever thought about getting a church and starting one up? You need to get a church. Start one of your own. Wow. That feels like a can of worms baby. But thank you. That concludes the fawning portion of the podcast. We're going to come up and we now have the bickering portion coming up in just a moment.

With Brian Green, Professor of Mathematics. and physics at Columbia University. Bicker, bigger, bigger, bigger. Yeah, well, we'll continue in a second. Hey, it's Naley Miranda from Dallas, Texas. Radio Lab is supported by Squarespace, dedicated to providing a simple way to create websites for those who are growing a business,

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space.com slash radio lab. Hi, this is Josh Goldstein calling from Bend, Oregon. Radio Lab is supported by Undercurrent, a consulting firm in Lower Manhattan, thinking about Bitcoins, Holocracy, and Burger Making Robots. More thoughts on how complex organizations thrive in a digital age at undercurrent.com. We're back. We just heard a story by Jenny Hollowell called A Brief History of Everything, including you, five pages kind of encompassing the entire universe.

Everything. Can we do this in a completely different way? Yeah. Part two. Okay, so this is about what you do for a living. You know that I have this neighbor and friend, Brian Green. Brian Green, Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University. Yes, I do know that. And the thing about Brian is he is a theoretical physicist. Now, theoretical physicists say that it's theoretically possible to know everything there is to know in the universe. So one day they'll be able to explain not only how you could send a rocket to the moon, but the laws that govern space and energy and time and gravity, everything. The whole universe, one day they think might be totally understandable,

using logic and mathematical equations. Now, you can't take that too far. None of us really imagined that if you ask the equations, what are we going to have for dinner tomorrow night? The equations will spit out, fried tofu and spring rolls or something like that. But at the level of the fundamental ingredients, the particles that make up the universe, their properties, the hope and the goal is that the theories that we work out will apply everywhere and tell us about everything. You just said everything. Yes.

As in everything. Yes. That's the big, big goal. This is like playing poker. You're helping me. I don't know what you're going to do. All right. We'll take it the next step.

Wait, so what are you up to here, Krollovich? All right, so, if you think that's the fun thing we do. Sure. But unlike him, my position has always been that it's going to be very hard to answer all the puzzles in the universe. And frankly, it's not a bad thing if some mysteries remain mysterious. Yeah. That's my view. But because Brian's so smart, when I tell them, how do you know this, whatever?

He always wins the arguments. But a few months ago, this is the thing that got this whole thing started, I was reading Harper's magazine, and I found an article written by another physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman. And I thought, oh boy, this is going to drive Brian Bats. Because Alan says there is a group of physicists, and Brian happens to be one of them, who've embraced a very exciting idea with an unfortunate effect. If this idea turns out to be true, Alan writes, it will then be impossible for physicists to know everything, which I thought, ah, excellent. What is the idea? It has to do with more than one universe. You know, you know this, we've talked about it before,

there is a vogue now for the idea that instead of one universe encompassing everything, there might be more than one. Right, so there actually are a number of ways that physics comes upon this idea of other universes. Maybe the most intuitive is to think about the Big Bang, that sent space rushing outward, than matter could cool and yield to stars and galaxies, that wonderful picture that we've had with us since the 1920s. We have, in the interim decades, come to the possibility

that the Big Bang may not be a one-time event. That is, there may have been many Big Bangs, there may continue to be Big Bang-like events, each spawning its own universe. If that were the case, then our universe would then be viewed as one of many in this grand collection emerging from all of these Big Bang-like events. Now, in this view of things, there could be not just one universe or three or 19.

There could be 10,000, there could be trillions, that could be an infinite number. And here's the crucial thing. Each and every one of these universes can be different from its neighboring, vastly different. That's right. So when we study the equations for the production of these universes, we see in the mathematics that the other universes could have different features, different particle compositions, different masses of the particles, different forces.

Some of them might have atoms. Some of them might not have atoms. You could have a universe with lots of stars, some with no stars, some could be made of monster cheese. I don't know, the fundamental properties of each universe could be very different. That's exactly right. And that's the key to Alan Lightman's argument.

Well, then, going back to the beginning of our conversation, If a physicist job is to explore everything, that is the universe, now the universe has just been demoted to a sub-universe, then when you get your diploma from a great university, the president of the universe says, my friends, we are gathered here to meet the people who have earned the credentials to describe the sub-universe, a little bit of what we could know. It's like you've been demoted. You thought that you were going to get to learn about everything, your words, And now it doesn't know that everything is very sub.

Oh, I wouldn't describe it like that at all, as you might imagine. Rather than view this as an incredible loss of understanding, the right way of viewing it, I think, is to recognize that certain questions that we were asking, when we thought there was just one universe, were the wrong questions. Meaning what? Well, he says here's the way to think.

about it. This is how it always goes. We've seen this before in the history of science. Take Kepler. Johannes Kepler was an astronomer and a kind of mapper of the solar system. He was trying to figure out where the planets were and the nature of their orbits and stuff. And Kepler spent a long time trying to find an explanation for why the Earth is 93 million miles away from the Sun. 93 million. Kepler thought that has to be a really important number.

a key to a deeper mystery. But we now know that he was barking up the wrong tree. Why? There isn't just one planet. There are many planets. In fact, many planets around many stars, and the distances of those planets from their host star varies over a wide range of possibilities.

Mars, for example, is 141 million miles from the sun. Jupiter, 483 million. And when you start comparing the different distances of planets from the sun, you realize that the fact of the Earth is 93 million miles away, it doesn't seem like a deep law of the universe anymore. It just feels kind of arbitrary. And then that forces you to change the question. Not why 93 million?

Now, why are all these different planets at different distances from the sun, and yet they all stick around the sun? They're all trapped in the neighborhood. That question puts you on the road to a deeper thought. The theory of gravity. The point is, says Brian, if you're focused on one thing, you're going to think that one thing is the key to everything. When your one turns to many, then you think, well, the one thing really wasn't so special. But the way Brian sees it.

That is progress. That is understanding. And then it frees you up to ask other kinds of questions, such as, what's the law of gravity? What is the equation that allows us to understand how the sun form? So those are real questions. And when you can toss out the ones that are red herrings that you thought were deep, but they're actually just asking. asking the wrong question, that frees you up to make progress. And Brian says you can make the exact same kind of progress if you compare universes.

So instead of asking, why is our one universe the way it is, now you can ask, well, what do all of these universes so different one from the other still have in common? That would be pretty heavy and exciting to describe the underlying laws that govern all universes, regardless of their detailed features and what it would be like in the world. that universe or that universe or that universe way over there. But there are an infinite number of them. So if I told you that you could write anything down and it might be a universe, black universes, white universes, green universes, soft universes, hard universes, muscular universes, teeny universes,

teeny universes, huge universes. Then the only one you know intimately is your own. It seems to me that what do you know about those other universes other than that they might be very different. In other words... We don't know very much observationally. Sure. Well, you can't see them. We don't know very much experimentally. So they're definitely on a very different footing from that perspective. But Brian believes that one day we might be able to experimentally detect these other universes

and somehow, you know, kind of pick up their distant vibrations, kind of like the way you hear your neighbor's music is just emanating through the walls. We might be able to listen in, he says, and take a couple of measurements. Which would be quite wonderful. And in that case, at least there's a chance. that we'd get observational evidence of the existence of these other realms. And at that point, I would begin to say, hmm, maybe there's something really to this. So the physics you're doing says, I can't go there, I can't observe it, at least for the moment. All I have is my brain and my math.

And I say from my brain, I'm going to just assume certain things are always true. There's always going to be gravity to say there's always going to be some particle. or wave that creates matter, there's always going to be, I don't know, what else. Are there things that they're always going to be? What are they? That are always going to be? The things that you were describing need not always be the case, yes. What would be the case is that the fundamental governing equations, the mathematical laws, would be the underlying architecture that governs what happens in those places. But environmental details can, change things fairly dramatically.

Gravity is an environmental detail? Yes, well, that's actually something you know at some level right now, right? On the moon, you could jump a lot higher than you can here. So if you didn't realize... But I do think that two bodies do attract each other. That's right. So there is a fundamental law of gravity that manifests itself in different ways based on the environment. All right, so let me say that again.

I ask it again. Are there fundamental laws that you think operate in all universe? Yes, yes, absolutely. And why do you think that? That is the starting point. When we come upon this possibility of other universes, it's not a crazy idea that we dream up late at night when there's nothing else to think about. These are ideas that emerge from the fundamental equations that we use to describe the things that we do see in the world around us and we follow the equations and the equations suggest to us that it might be these other universes. So we have equations, we analyze them, and we interpret what they're telling us about reality. those are the very equations that come to this possibility of other universes, then those are the equations that govern those other universes. The starting point is let's assume that these are the fundamental... It doesn't sound an awful lot like, why is God three and one? Or why was the world

made in seven days? Aren't we getting close to some sort of... You're believing in certain things to be always true the way religious people believe certain things are always true? Not because you've seen it, or it's just because you can't, you have a faith in it. I couldn't disagree with you more. I thought not. It has absolutely nothing to do with faith. The reason why we trust the equations is because we've got centuries worth of observational and experimental evidence that the equations take us in the right direction.

Here. Here. And it's those very same equations that work here that we are following to their logical conclusion to see where the mathematics takes us. So if you remember the train of reasoning here. You might have just projected here into there. That's faith talking, no? Because you can't go there.

All you can do is say, well, what works? But my deep understanding of here has to be there. I don't know why it has to be, but that's what you just said. No, it's actually the reasoning goes to somewhat reverse order from that. We build mathematical equations to describe here. we then follow those equations and say, oh my goodness, those equations that we develop to describe here are telling us that there is something over there. And then we're like, wow, the equations do a great job of describing things here. And the equations have this feature that they tell us there's another place over there.

Maybe that's possible. The key thing also... This is logic in your mind. Logic. This is not belief. This is just logic. Aren't you worried, though, that there's another Brian Green in universe number 3,790,000, 208, 6,0405, who was sitting there talking to another radio reporter in another university, and he's saying,

well, we know all about the other universes because we're assuming that the math here is the same as the math there in that other place. But as it turns out, their math and math aren't the same, so that they will not, you may just be wrong. Oh, that's always the possibility. In fact, it's likely the possibility. In fact, 99.99% of everything we do is wrong, not from the point of view we make a mistake, but the wrongness is a deep wrongness. You somehow are somehow feeling that the math is a clue that everything follows your math. If at some point the maths collide and then the universe is collide, then that would be very unsettling

to both of you, I would assume. In terms of whether the math is somehow contradictory or you and coherence. Yes, your tools of learning are not working. Yes, that would suggest that we were both wrong and that there's a deeper, overarching framework. I mean, I hate to use the word faith, but the one point where I'll give you faith is this. I do have a deep faith that the universe is coherent.

And by universe, call it multiverse, whatever word you want to use, the whole thing. I do believe that it's coherent. Now, whether that means it follows mathematical laws, I don't know. it could be the case that, you know, when we talk to those aliens that we encounter one day and they say, okay, show us what you got. We bring out our equations and they kind of laugh at us and say, oh, you guys are still stuck on math. You know? And they said, yeah, you know, 10,000 years ago we were doing math too, but here's the real way of describing it.

Now, what they'd be showing us with the real way of describing it, I have no idea. I can't even imagine what it would be. That would be non-mathematical. So I do have a deep faith that it's coherent and the only tool that I I know how to encapsulate that coherence are mathematical equations. So if Zantar, Brian, and Brian here come up with equations that collide with one another and don't work, to me it just means that both were wrong and there's some bigger overarching coherence that we've yet to find. That's it. I don't even, I can't even begin to figure out if you, did you just win? Did you lose?

I can't tell. Wait, so this all came from Alan Lightman's article. Right. So... Do you think he beat the objections in the article? Did he beat the article? Well, I thought it would be fair to ask the author of the article. So I called Alan...

Yep. ...who happened as it turns out to be in Nampen, Cambodia. I make all of my international calls on Skype. And I sent him the interview with Brian. He listened. And I asked, well, what do you think about Brian's argument? Well, I don't think that he's wrong, but I think that the problem is philosophical. more disturbing than what he is confessing.

He said, well, I think it's going to be much harder than Brian thinks to actually sense or encounter or measure these other universes if they exist at all. We don't even know whether the other universes exist in the same space and time that we do. And there are other physicists who feel that these universes are, even in principle never, never observable by us, that we will never be able to have any physical evidence of their existence. And that possibility is what I find disturbing. It may be that this is the way nature is. What does that mean? Well, I mean, it may be that we've done as much explaining as is possible.

and that we'll never ever really understand everything yes in other words we may be we may have pushed the human mind as far as it can possibly go so is that everything I think we can say about everything I think that's everything all right okay we should however thank Brian Green professor of physics and math at Columbia University Alan Lightman up at MIT who

whose essay, the accidental universe, will appear in a book of the same name coming out this fall. So if you want to read the essay, you'll buy it in book form soon. Thanks also to Jenny Hollowell, of course. We'll link you to her short story from our website, RadioLab.org. And meantime, we'll just say goodbye. Bye. Bye. I'm Lindsay Freitas from Santa Clara, California.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I just recited that from memory because I'm a radio lab junkie.