The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 348. Black Holes, Time Travel, and the Origin of the Universe | Dr. Brian Keating

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. Brian Keating discuss long-held theories of cosmology, from the big bang to the expansion of the universe, and why we might be totally wrong. Dr. Brian Keating is a cosmologist, inventor, author, academic, and podcast host. He focuses on the exploration of the big bang, prodding current theories, and building arrays to test them. He has published two bestselling books: “Losing the Nobel Prize” in 2018 and “Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner” in 2021. Keating is the inventor of the BICEP and BICEP2 Array, which are used to study the inception of the universe, and he holds multiple patents for components found within these systems. Keating also hosts the podcast “Into the Impossible,” which boasts Nobel Prize winning guests, renowned scientists from across fields, and a continuous top ten spot in the science category.  - Links - For Dr. Brian Keating: Podcast INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE:  https://briankeating.com/podcast Social Media Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeatingInstagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeatingFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrianKeatingUniverse Read these books by Dr. Brian Keating Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpAThink Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPWGalileo Galilei’s Dialogue: https://BrianKeating.com/dialogue AND DON’T FORGET to join Brian Keating’s mailing list! The first 100 subscribers will get a REAL 4 billion year old meteorite! Just follow the special link below! https://briankeating.com/jordan  From the Discussion: Hawking Hawking (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Hawking-Selling-Scientific-Celebrity/dp/1541618378Answer to Job (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Answer-Job-Collected-Works-Extracts/dp/0691150478

I'm looking very much forward today to speaking with Dr. Brian Keating. I met him recently in Miami, looked through the telescope at his beautiful San Diego house on the coast. He gave me a moon rock, which was very nice of him. We had a very good conversation. I'm looking forward today to talking to him about the unfolding of the cosmological landscape on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang forward. As I mentioned, he's a cosmologist and also chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego.

He is also the author of more than 200 scientific publications, the equivalent of between 60 and 70 PhDs, by the way, two U.S. patents and the best-selling books into the impossible, think like a Nobel Prize winner, and losing the Nobel Prize. The latter was selected as one of Amazon editors' best nonfiction books of all time. He received his Bachelor of Science from Case Western in 1993 and the PhD from Brown in 2000. He was later a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Caltech.

In 2007, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers from President George W. Bush for inventing the Bicep Telescope located at the South Pole and Arctica. He is also a commercial pilot and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2022. Dr. Keating, do you let's start out by telling everybody what your primary focus of concern is as a researcher and then let's delve into what you can bring to people as a consequence of that research, what they need to know about the cosmic structure, let's say. So I always ask people, what's the most important day on the calendar to them and usually I get some version of you know

Christmas or my birthday or my you know hopefully for them my my spouses birthday And it's an origin story and I think humans are fascinated with origin stories How did we come to be here because we we don't know right we come in as they say in media rays in the middle of the story And so how do you get to understand what happened before you, the prehistory and the biggest prehistory of all, is how the cosmos came to be. And my research centers on the oldest fossils of the earliest epoch in the universe.

So I'm an experimental cosmologist. You've discussed many times with more theoretically inclined individuals. I actually build the telescopes. My colleagues and I, my students and I, we build telescopes that peer back as far as possible using light. Now, the light's not light we can see with the human eye. It's in the form of microwaves because the universe has been expanding for some 13.8

billion years since A-Beg Bang, and we'll get to the question of whether or not there was more than one big bang I hope later on. And the universe, as it expands, has cooled off from a fiery, hot hellscape of an inferno to a more moderate climate that will support the existence of planets and people and all sorts of other interesting forms of matter. But the question of how the matter came to be in the first place is really the purview of what I do as an experimentalist. So my job as an experimentalist is not to prove theorists right. It's to prove everything else wrong. And then what we're left with will be a closer approximation to the truth,

which is that we live in this incredibly intricate, fascinating universe filled with the most mysterious forms of matter and even consciousness and beings like you and I. So that's the focus of the research, and the way that we do that is by building the most precise and accurate telescopes ever made and deploying them to the most interesting parts in the universe, including the South Pole and Antarctica, and the high mountain desert of the Andes Mountains in Chile, as well as into outer space. So it's kind of every, you know, boy's dream

to grow up to be a rocket scientist, to build stuff, to shoot rockets into space, to go to these far extremes, and the beauty of it is I get paid to do it. So that's my research focus. So why don't we start with a comment you made the beauty of it as I get paid to do it. So that's my research focus. So why don't we start with a comment you made right at the beginning of that explanation.

You said that you build telescopes that peer back into time. And you might want to explain to everybody, there'll be lots of people who are listening who understand that, but there'll be people listening who don't. Why is it that when you build a technologically sophisticated telescope that can peer out

into the vast depths of space that you're also looking back in time? So all telescopes are time machines of a sort. And that's by virtue of the fact that light as fast as it travels and it is the fastest propagating entity that we know about in all of science. It travels about this far, about one foot, every nanosecond. So, if you convert nanoseconds to miles, and you convert a feet to miles and nanoseconds to seconds, it travels about 186,000 miles per second, which is pretty darn fast, but it's not

infinite. So therefore, whenever you're looking at something, you're not seeing it as it is right now. You're seeing it as it was sometime in the past. And the farther away something is, the longer the light traveled to reach your eyes, or to reach our telescopes. Telescopes are just eyes of a different sort. There might be sensitive to microwaves

in the case of the telescope that I build, radio waves, gamma rays, but just like your eyeballs, your eyeballs are two refracting telescopes. They have lenses, they have detectors. And so when we look at the sun, and I'm not advocating as a professional astronomer, never look at the sun with your remaining good eye, but when you look at the sun, you're seeing it as it was.

And that period in which it was was eight minutes ago, because it's 93 million miles away. And if you convert feet per nanosecond or miles per second or miles per hour, you get, it takes about eight minutes for light to travel from the sun. That means that the sun could disappear. And we wouldn't see it. And we wouldn't know about it really for at least eight minutes and maybe even longer. So all telescopes are time machines, even the telescopes embedded in our skulls.

So how far back can we look now with, for example, with the web telescope and that's the newest large scale, deep-pair pairing telescope that was launched into space. And how far back have we pushed the horizon of view now? So yes, the James Webb Telescope is launched on Christmas Day in 2021, and it's been sending back phenomenal images. What makes the Webb Telescope so powerful is not that it can see farther back in time, although it can in a certain sense. But it doesn't have extra magnification, and that's not required to see things that are farther

away. In other words, if you use a tiny little telescope like the sort that Galileo used back in 1609 to spot the craters on the moon's surface, you could use the Hubble telescope can also look at the moon, and it won't see things that are, it'll see more detail on the moon's surface, you could use the Hubble telescope can also look at the moon, and it won't see things that are, it'll see more detail on the moon's surface, but it won't see farther than the moon because the moon is in the way. Now, if you look where there's no moon, where there's no planet, where there's no galaxies, where there's no absorbing matter whatsoever, then you're seeing back to the creation of whatever light your telescope is sensitive to.

Now, visible light has only been around for a few billion years, because before that time, because of the universe's expansion, that light has red shifted and has gone from visible light to infrared light, which is invisible to our eyes, but highly visible, and that is the quarry that the web telescope is seeking. Now, if you go farther than the infrared, then you come to microwaves, which is what I study. So the longer the wavelength, the light you're looking at,

the farther you can go back in time, not because you're impeded by something, but because the source, the very source that you're looking at has been diminished in intensity, and has been reddened by the expansion of the universe, which is a phenomenal discovery that we've only known about for less than 100 years. But because of that universal expansion,

we can only see using particular wavelengths of light. And so that's why the earliest light in the universe, there's no light that we could ever see that is more primitive than the cosmic microwave background that I and my colleagues are studying. So the web telescope can't see far back in time as we can, but that's really irrelevant. It's designed to do something very specific.

Look at the first galaxies that form the first stars that form exoplanets and other stellar solar systems in our own galaxy. And because of that, it's a phenomenal machine and is unrivaled in its capability. So what element of the... Let's have you explain what the electromagnetic spectrum is, because people are not going to necessarily know what the relationship is, say, between visible light and microwave radiation. They might not know that those are varying forms of radiation that

is very similar in its essence, and also to explain why the red shift occurs and how that was discovered, I suppose. Yes, yes. So, a spectrum is a characteristic of light. Light has three major properties that we discuss as scientists. One is its intensity, how bright the light is and the other is the color of the light. The third is something called polarization, which happens to be my area of subspecialty, not political polarization, but it's an actual useful form of polarization that has to do with the orientation of the electromagnetic field. But all forms of light. Now, people here radiation, and they get scared

to the bomb go off, is there some nuclear react? No, no, it has nothing to do with that. It's just a generic term that scientists call light of different wavelengths. So if you imagine a rainbow, which has an infinite number of colors, there's people say there's seven colors, the famous Roy G. Biv, we learned about an elementary school maybe.

But there's actually an infinite number of colors because the number that describes the color of light is called its wavelength. And the wavelength of light is a continuous number. It can be any number, can have any number of decimal places. So it's a continuous number. Therefore, there's an infinite number of real numbers. Therefore, the spectrum is not discrete in seven different increments. So now imagine you go beyond the red color. You keep going to the left of that red color. And actually, this was an experiment done by very famous scientist and in Herschel and even Isaac Newton did similar types of experiments.

Where they took the sunlight, they refracted it through a prism. So we've all seen these prisms that disperse light. And they had light of different colors coming out of different angles, and that's the property of a prism that causes it to make a rainbow from ordinary white light. And what Newton and Herschel did is they put a thermometer, they went into the red light, and they put a bulb of an ordinary thermometer, and they kept moving it until it got beyond the red. And then they found that beyond the red color, there was still something coming

in causing the mercury to rise in this thermometer. So there was clear, there was other light of a longer wavelength, they knew about the wavelength of light, and that longer wavelength is what we associate with heat. Now the opposite side, if you go past the violet side of Roy G. Biv, you come to something called ultraviolet. Ultraviolet is also invisible, and we know about that from the sun. The sunlight produces damaging UVA and UVB radiation. That's not any different except for the fact it buys characteristic wavelength. So it's wavelength is shorter than violet light, infrared is longer than red light. And if you keep going in both directions, there's photons and wavelengths of light

in all different directions, add infinitum to the high frequency or short wavelength. And it goes to infinity in the other direction, you can have infinitely long, and that would be called a radio wave. So that's the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, if you've ever listened to a siren approaching, you've heard the familiar Doppler shift.

That's interesting. Doppler, Christian Doppler, and Wolfgang Mozart grew up in the same town in Salzburg, Austria. I like to think they're enjoying the irony of that fact that they both have this fascination with sound and its phenomena. And the expansion or dilution of the wavelength of light is exactly the result of a Doppler shift, which is exactly analogous to the increase in pitch and the decrease in pitch that one hears when an ambulance first approaches you with its siren on, that pitch is increased, and that's called a blue shift, meaning it goes to shorter sound wavelengths

or it goes to higher pitches. As it goes away, the opposite phenomenon happens. And that's where you hear this characteristic rise, wang wang wang wang wang, as it moves away from you. And that's an analog of red shit. Well, the same thing happens in light. So if you're being approached by a police car and you try to get away from it,

its blue lights will seem slightly more red because it's effectively moving away from you. Now, you have to go a large fraction of that tremendous speed that I spoke about earlier to get even a tiny minute shift in the wavelength either higher or lower. So the red shift that we observed for the universe was discovered in the early 1900s.

And it was discovered that we could see these little nebula. They were first called spiral nebula. We didn't know if they were part of the Milky Way galaxy. Some said they were outside the Milky Way galaxy, but that didn't make sense, because push yourself in the frame of mind of a scientist in the 1900s, even the great Albert Einstein thought this was all there is to quote a song that the

universe was the Milky Way galaxy and that the preposterous to think about something beyond our galaxy because that would be beyond our universe. Nowadays ironically we talk about things beyond our universe and we'll probably get into some of that when we discuss the multiverse in a little bit. But the universe was found to be much larger than the Milky Way galaxy. In fact, there were galaxies outside the Milky Way Galaxy that we observed. The most famous one being the Andromeda Nebula, which is now called the Great Spiral Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy. You can actually, the farthest thing Jordan that you can see with the human eye.

If you look up on a clear night, you can see a smudge, and I'll show you the next time you're in San Diego. But I will show you a clear smudge through my telescope, and you can see it through your naked eye as well. That smudge is particles of light, photons, coming from a galaxy, and those photons set out on their journey to your eye when there were hominids walking around on the Sarangetti planes of Africa. This is the light that reaches us today, it's three million years old. It's been traveling for three million years

since Lucy was extant. So that light from that galaxy is not being red shifted or blue shifted tremendously. But if you look at every other galaxy, and we can see about 100 billion galaxies, and each one has at least 100 billion stars, and each one of those stars probably has tens or thousands of minor bodies, asteroids, planets around them.

The numbers are truly astronomical. But if you go back and you look at it and we see 100 billion galaxies, Jordan, of those 100 billion galaxies, all but 20, show their light, their characteristic spectrum is shifted to the red. Some by tremendous amounts. And that implies, just as it would, if you were at the scent, if you were in the city, and you heard all these ambulances, and every single ambulance, you heard it as if it was moving away from you.

You heard every sirens whale being redshifted to lower and lower pitches. What would you conclude? You would either conclude you're at a very special location where there was just an accident and the bodies have been cleaned up and taken away to hospital or that every part of the city is experiencing all these all the ambulance drivers are on strike and everybody's leaving. And so the interpretation that Edwin Hubble had began to make in 1929. This is not a hundred years old yet. It's incredible. The observation that every galaxy exhibits a red shift, that is, every galaxy is moving away from the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is no more

special or more important than any other galaxy. Therefore, all galaxies to high approximation are moving away from one another. And that's an astounding observation, a physical fact that we observe that when extrapolated to the future means the universe is going to become more and more dilute. And in the past, it was much more tightly condensed, compressed, and presumably began its in its infancy with what we call the Big Bang. So, do you want to explain why the farther galaxies are away, the faster they're moving away, and is it also the case that it's the red shift that explains the fact that the night sky is primarily black instead of lit up?

Am I correct in the latter assumption, and then let's go to the former question. Yeah, the latter question is related to something called Olbers Paradox, which is that in an infinite universe, populated with an infinite number of objects, stars in this case, no matter where you were, in that universe, you would look out, and your eye, your line of sight, would terminate on a star's surface somewhere.

They might be really far away, but eventually your eye would come to rest on a star. So that would mean that it's a paradox that our night sky, we have during the day, we see just one star, but even at night, we don't see any stars that are, or the night sky's intensity is nowhere near as close as the surface of the sun, let alone the infinite intensity of an infinite number of suns. And it says, if you were in a forest, imagine a beautiful boreal forest, and it's effectively infinite. The trees are a finite width, and they're spaced at some distance away from you, but there's

an infinite number of these trees. And as you scan around your local horizon, all you would see is bark. All you would see are the trunks of these trees. That's Olbers Paradox for trees. And what you're bringing up is this notion that was interestingly really encountered and proposed and even a solution perhaps by Edgar Allen Poe, the great poet, and the 1800s. He conjectured this idea that it's kind of strange that, well, we were told we live in an infinite universe

that even the Milky Way galaxy could be infinite in size. We didn't know back then in the 19th century. And so it began to be a paradox. Now, the resolution of that paradox, as you're pointing out, is severalfold. One is that the condition for the night sky to not be dark is that the universe is infinitely old, that the universe is infinitely big, and that the universe is static. These stars are not moving in that simple-minded paradox as the trees are not moving in the Olbers'

paradox analogy for trees. Those trees are stationary. The forest is infinite, and the light has had enough time to travel to your eyes because the universe is infinitely old. So if any one of those three propositions is falsified, then you can demolish the paradox as a paradox. And so the resolution, interestingly enough, comes down to all three of those, or a false. In other words, it would have been enough, it would have been sufficient to falsify one or of those three propositions. The universe is infinitely old, infinitely big, and static. But we actually know now that the universe isn't any one of those three,

at least the universe that we can observe. So now you asked about how we can think about the expansion of the universe or how we can determine that or how it was determined. Is that right? Can you remind me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and why the more distant galaxies are moving away faster? That's right. So the analogy that astronomers use, no analogy is perfect, right? We're dealing with things, not just in a three dimensions of space, but in the fourth dimension of what we call space time. So we have to visualize things that are really unvisualizable by the human mind, by our own limitations.

And so we make analogies. So one of the most common analogies is to think about, I'll give you two. One is to imagine a balloon with little dots drawn on the balloon balloon surface. The balloon surface is too dimensional. As you explode up the balloon, the galaxies move away, the dots on the balloon surface move from one another, and they move with exactly that property, that a galaxy that is one centimeter or dot, that's one centimeter away from another galaxy

or dot, will move twice as much in the same amount of inflation or expansion as a galaxy that is half a centimeter separated or dot two dots that are only five millimeters apart from one another. But that's confined to a two-dimensional surface, so it's a little bit hard to maybe project that into three dimensions in our mind. So another one that people use is, imagine baking a raisin bread, so a bread and you put in a bunch of raisins inside of it.

That too has the exact same property. If you sit on any raisin inside the bread and you watch, what are the other raisins doing? That all will be observed to move away from you. There won't be any gravitational attraction between you and another raisin. So you'll actually observe what's like a perfect expansion of the universe from your perspective. Remember I said there are about 20 or more galaxies that are gravitationally attracted to the Milky Way and they are blue shifted because they're falling towards us and will eventually combine into an enormous mega galaxy called a milk dromedus someday, but that

doesn't happen for raisins or for dots in a balloon. So the law that describes that type of expansion and either a raisin bread populated with raisins or for dots in a balloon. So the law that describes that type of expansion, and either a raisin bread populated with raisins and three dimensions, or a balloon dotted with a magic marker marks in two dimensions, those two phenomena are exactly displaying what's called Hubble's law, which is the velocity of every galaxy we see beyond a certain distance. That's a minimal distance, that we don't have gravitational interactions between us and them. That galaxy will be moving away directly proportional to what's known as Hubble's constant.

So the velocity in meters per second, miles per hour, fur longs per decade, whatever you want, will be directly linear. It's the simplest law mangeable besides just a constant. It'll be moving linearly proportionate to its distance away from you. And that's a fascinating observation. And that's the only type of observation that can produce the type of structures that we see in the universe. In other words, it could have been traveling as the velocity scaling as the square of the distance, the cube of the distance, the square root of the distance, whatever. We would live in a much, much different universe and it wouldn't have any of the characteristics that we observed.

So I think when I read Stephen Hawking's brief history of time, which is, it's got to be 20 years ago or approximate. Oh, it's 40, almost 40 years old then. Is it for God? Well, that's what happens when you get old. The dick starts to collapse. So at that point, my memory, my memory serves me properly. The standard cosmological model was that we, it emerged from a big bang and that the universe was expanding, but that at some point it would contract back on itself. And this was Hawking's idea anyways, and then collapse back down into another singularity, whatever existed before the Big Bang. But it's my understanding that over the last few decades, the evidence has accrued in an incontrovertible manner that the rate of expansion is actually increasing rather than decreasing. And I believe that's the great mystery that's propelled scientists who posit the existence

of such phenomena as dark energy. Have I got that right? And what's the current state of thought about the fact that first of all, explain why that's surprising that the rate of increase or the rate of expansion is increasing, explain whether that's surprising. And then, would you explain how that view has changed over time and where we're at now?

Absolutely, yeah. So I got to hear Stephen Hawking speak at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in London in 1995. And it was back when he couldn't speak for a very long time. So he wasn't able to actually speak in real time, but he could move his fingers and he could move his eyes and he could type on this very special keyboard, which the ex-husband of his current nurse at the time

had invented. That's a whole other story I can recommend a book by my friend, Charles Syff, called Hawking Hawking. And it was sort of the business of Stephen Hawking. And I, he could answer one question. I would take him about 10 minutes to answer a question. Someone asked him in the audience, Professor Hawking, your rumor to be the most brilliant

man alive, and yet you've written this book that almost no one besides a younger Jordan Peterson perhaps had read cover to cover. Why did you write this book? And he answered in his computerized synthetic voice because my daughter needed to pay for college. And it was just interesting that this great man, this great intellect, trapped in this body that had been robbed of all of its physical kind of maneuvering and so forth was so facile with his mind. It was really an incredible

thing to see. When Hawking wrote that book, it is true. The expectation was that the universe would eventually collapse on itself, would eventually undergo what's called a big crunch, which is essentially the opposite of the big bang. We would observe if we were living billions of years hence the story went, that we would see not galaxies being redshifted, but galaxies being blueshifted, because we're all going to combine it eventually into a collapse of an enormous, if you like, gravitational time bomb, that would probably play out over billions, if not trillions of years, so I kept advising people to keep pay their taxes.

But at the time, we didn't know about the substance called dark energy. And what's so surprising about that and what kept Einstein really flummoxed for the first part of his career. Was that we only knew of a few different forms of matter and energy in the universe. We knew of matter, stuff, the stuff that we were made up, and we knew of light. And in a universe that only has matter and light, it's impossible to not have a gravitational collapse. Just as the same is true if I take an object, a ball, or an apple, and I throw it up with some velocity,

it will still come back down, unless it reaches what's called escape velocity. And the perplexing thing about Einsteinian general relativistic gravitation that still mystifies me and experts is that when you add matter to the universe, it actually makes it expand faster, which is counterintuitive. You would think if there was more gravity in the Earth's surface, the ball would actually

fall down even quicker, which it would. But in the case of when we described the expansion of the universe, we're talking about its velocity, not its acceleration. So there's a crucial distinction. The universe can have objects moving faster away from each other, and that doesn't involve necessarily their acceleration. So, what Einstein did to counteract that fact, he was a pretty smart guy, right? He looked around and he said, well, the universe doesn't seem to be collapsing.

So, there must be some hidden form of energy that we don't observe. And that observed matter, he called the cosmological term, or cosmological energy source. We later called it the cosmological constant. And now we call it dark energy, as you proposed. What that does is by adding in matter, you get anti-gravity, or you add an energy, pure energy, you get a form of anti-gravity, almost as if, you know, it's the comic book heroes dream that you could suspend gravity, that you could freeze the motion of objects that tend to combine with one another. So he then had a mechanism, contrived as it was, to explain why the universe appeared static,

as it did in 1919 and 1919. But then, as I mentioned earlier, when Hubble observed the universe is in fact not static hair Einstein, the universe is expanding, then Einstein had the brilliance, the humility, and the confidence to say, I was wrong, and supposedly he called the insertion of the cosmological term his biggest blunder. Right. Right. So he was trying to account for the fact, let's just to just to get the chronology clear at that point, the universe appeared static and Einstein was trying to figure out why it

wasn't collapsing onto itself. And so he proposed a constant which you equated to something like an anti-gravity energy. But then the problem turned out to be even worse than it seemed to be because it was not only not collapsing and not, sorry, not static and not collapsing, it was expanding. And so, and that's the mystery that people are trying to address. Well, still today with the hypothesis of something approximating dark energy. That's right. So, the dark energy phenomenon causes not only a reversal of the collapse of the universe

is in fall of all these galaxies or raisins or that would be coming together, it not only freezes them in their tracks, it actually reverses that process. So instead of just expanding linearly, smoothly as Hubble would envision us doing, actually the universe starts to accelerate. So it says if you're pushing down on

the cosmic accelerator pedal, these galaxies are not only moving apart, but tomorrow they'll be moving apart even faster at a given distance, they'll be moving faster than they are. So I always joke, you know, it was a blunder of Einstein to call that blunder, his blunder, because it wasn't a blunder at all. And I always say, I like to throw in, you know, it's too bad that he made that blunder, otherwise he could have had a good career. But in this case, when we look at what Einstein was conjecturing, it came back unavoidably in the late 1990s through the observation of what are

called type 1A supernovae, which are just used. It's not important to know what they are. They're exploding stars and they're fascinating objects in their own right, but they're really used as the sirens on the ambulances at great distances. So in 12 rules for life, you talked about the value of precision of speech. Well, the most important thing for cosmologists is precision cosmology. When I started graduate school in the 1990s and then in the 1990s, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion years old or 20 billion years old. Now we know it's 13.824 billion years old and we have a precision of less than 1%. And we also have an accuracy. In other words, we have calibrated that number and removed systemic contamination from that

number. It's really phenomenal. I mean, at that time, we knew of objects that were older than the universe. Supposedly, there were objects called globular clusters, and they were older than the universe. That's like finding out that you're older than your mother. I mean, it's a very bizarre situation.

And quite frankly, it was embarrassing to cosmologists. Now we know it with extreme precision, but with that precision comes great power. And that power allows us to assess what is the nature of this dark energy potentially? And not only that, But with that precision comes great power. And that power allows us to assess what is the nature of this dark energy potentially? And not only that, what is it doing to our future understanding

of where the universe will continue to develop in the far far distant future? And so if the universe truly has this dark energy, chimeric form of energy, unknown completely, unlike anything we've ever had an experience with, that type of energy will eventually drive the universe potentially in a variety of different ways. None of them good, but luckily they don't come about for tens to perhaps hundreds of billions of years.

When the universe might physically rip apart, there could be aspects of spacetime that at all locations develop what we call singularities, the breakdown and all the laws of physics, and certainly long before then, we will have stopped having the ability to do astronomy or cosmology. We will no longer be able to see any other galaxies after a certain point, after the universe has expanded

so much, those galaxies will all be redshifted so far out of observational constraints that we won't even know we live in a galaxy. We'll just think this is the entire universe. So ironically, we'll be back to the way the state of affairs was in pre-1929 planet Earth's understanding of cosmology. And with the precision that I mentioned before, that we know the age of the universe, we know the expansion rate of the universe, we can do astounding things. We can go back in time and ask, just as we do with, I remember when my children turned two years old, you take them to the pediatricians office and they measure their height.

And basically, they've got this rule of thumb based on the statistics of 100 billion people that have lived on planet Earth to date, that the child will be about twice as high, twice as tall as he or she is at age two. I think I'm getting that, right? I am a doctor, but I'm not that kind of a doctor, right? So you'll have to check those numbers, but they basically extrapolate. So imagine if you went and you go to the pediatrician and then you come back in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and the kid is like 30 times

bigger than that height, or one-tenth is tall. Well, you'd say, this is crazy. There's something strange going on. Your tables are all messed up, and your actual statistical sample is not a good representation of the parent population, no pun intended. So the question becomes, how accurately can you estimate how fast the universe will be expanding today versus 13 billion years ago? And there's what's called attention because the two numbers disagree and they disagree

by a violently unacceptable amount. The measurements that we do with the cosmic microwave background radiation suggest a universe that is a billion years younger, if you like, than the universe that we see using the type 1A supernovae. And that tension is a lot. A billion years is a big difference. And so each one is precise. That's the current problem.

That's a current problem. We don't know the Hubble constants value. It disagrees at what's called five standard deviations. So there's a one part and several million that it could be a statistical fluke and they're both they're both actually the same or it could be that the physics of the early universe that I study is very different than the physics of the late-time universe that my colleagues who study supernovae studying. So okay, so let's walk back 13.8 to 4 billion years. Now, in principle, correct me if I've got any of this wrong, all of the matter and energy

that constitute the current universe visible and invisible is collapsed to a point that isn't even a pinpoint. It's infinitely small and infinitely dense. And there's a cataclysmic explosion. That's the big bang that's still part of the standard cosmological model still an accepted, let's say fact. And then why don't you walk us through

what happens as the universe unfolds from that point onward, including speculations or known facts about the difference between the early periods that you just described, maybe even in terms of fundamental cosmological laws and later periods. Now, and we might also throw in this caveat too, is that as far as I've been able to determine,

it's still an axiomatic presupposition among scientists that the laws of physics that obtained at the point of the singularity are not the same laws of physics, or at least can't be shown to be, that govern the universe as it's currently unfolding. So, let's go back and we'll walk through all of that. Actually, yeah, I'm glad you said it in those terms. It's actually better to start not with the beginning, which is ambiguous, which is hotly debated,

which is contestable, and those are all good things about the scientific process, but actually to start with today. So let's go back from today when we think we understand the laws of physics that are presented to us, and go back in time to a point before which we don't understand the laws of nature. Because if you start from a point of ambiguity and uncertainty, and then you attempt to

extrapolate forward, you're less likely to get the right answer than if you go back historically and ask, when do we lose sight of the plot line? When do we lack our understanding of the laws of nature? So starting from today, we see four forces of nature. There are two nuclear forces called the Strong and Week Force that govern the behavior of atoms and radioactive decay. And then there's a law of electricity and magnetism that govern everything from electromagnetic communication

like we're doing right now, to refrigerator magnets, to magnetic levitation and future, you know, helpful transportation mechanisms. And then there's the law of gravity, which is perhaps most familiar to us when we try to get out of bed every morning. We're fighting against the entire mass of the earth with our meager masses, hopefully, you know, maintaining the battle every day to get out of bed and make your bed in the morning.

So this phenomena, these four phenomena are familiar to us. And we can actually go back a great distance in time and even staying only in space where we are right now. Let's take the Earth back in time. We go back four billion years, the Earth condensed out of the shrapnel of a supernova that had exploded perhaps a billion years before that in our local arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Let's go back a few more billion years.

The dark energy that we spoke about earlier began to dominate, and the universe started to accelerate faster and faster. Well, that still is in the laws of classical physics and quantum physics that we understand. Let's keep going back. Now we're back, say, 10 billion years ago. The first stars that were ever made are all long gone. They've all blown up into these type of population three events that the web telescope is hopefully going to shed more infrared light on.

And then you go back even further, 100 million years before that. So now you're going back from 13.8 billion years. Let's say today, we're talking on a Friday. We go back. There's some Friday, 13.8 billion years. Let's say today we're talking on a Friday. We go back. There's some Friday, 13.8 billion years ago. Okay? If you just kept going back seven times, 24, and you just keep counting the weeks and the years and the month, you'll reach some day. And there'll be some day that three minutes earlier, the laws of physics, that we really understand no in love, gravity,

electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, that they all froze into the configuration that we can understand today. In other words, once you go beyond that, and it is a type of event horizon in a sense, and that it may be forever shielded from our vision, once you go beyond that gap, you can no longer speculate with the knowledge and certainty

and precision that we have today. So it's kind of marks a boundary, an ignorance boundary, an ignorance horizon beyond which we can only speculate. But speculation is fun and it's great to do. And I appreciate as much as my theoretical colleagues do. Remember, I'm an experimentalist. I look at the shrapnel and the fossils and what's left from the universe that we can observe today, even if it's very old, like the light of the cosmic microwave background.

It's very old, it's the oldest light in the universe. I still can use that to glean information about that period, you know, three minutes after midnight on some Friday, 13.8 billion years ago. Right. So we can't look all the way, we can't look all the way to the big bang itself. We can look some fractions of seconds after the big bang when the laws of physics spring into existence.

And we have the beginnings of the interactions between matter and energy that we see today. But there's a border there prior to that. That we can't peer into at the moment. Now, talk to people, tell everybody about what the cosmic background microwave radiation is and why you study that and how that enables us to peer back really to as close to the beginning of time as we can manage. Yeah, exactly.

So the cosmic microwave background is the leftover heat from the fusion of the very first elements on the periodic table of the elements. So the lightest elements in the universe are hydrogen and helium, and they have isotopes. Each one has a couple of different isotopes, meaning they have more or fewer neutrons in their nuclei. These are not atoms, though. These are just the nuclei of what would eventually become the chemical elements and atoms. So the nuclei are fused in the first few minutes

of the universe, of our current observable universe. I have to be very precise here. We can't say the big bang was the beginning of time. We don't know that. Most people assume that the universe with the universe's origin, with the big bang, came the beginning of time. That raises all sorts of hairy paradoxes that are really quite difficult to approach both

from the laws of physics perspective, but even from metaphysical perspectives. What was, how does time come into existence when there was a moment before that existence was even possible? Can you even conceive of such a thing? How do you get the motive change, the motive force, if you will,

to go from x to delta, x plus delta, or t plus delta t, if there was no time at the zero point. So these are metaphysical questions, and I should say there are many eminent and serious cosmologists who do speculate what would the universe look like if there wasn't a quantum singularity at the origin of time, there were no origin of time, if you will, whatsoever. And you've spoken to some of them, Roger Penrose and others. But the point being that there are alternatives to that.

Now, 99% of my colleagues don't really pay much attention to those models, but I think it's important to at least not give the impression that we know for certain the universe had a quantum gravitational singularity that sprang time into existence. As you said before, there's infinitesimal amount of space. And in that space was all the matter in the universe. Jordan, we don't know that. That is a possibility. And in fact, that's the most popular possibility amongst my colleagues. But again, I'm an experimentalist. I don't come up with these theories.

I try to prove these theories wrong. So one of the things that I'm doing with the cosmic microwave background, because it is the oldest light in the universe. And because if you think about the motor homunculus of a human being, we get most of our attention, our cortex, our brain pays attention to light the visual cortex and also our hands and our motor system.

You know this infinitely better than I do, Jordan. But light is such a powerful tool that we should do everything we can to exploit all the information and these precious few photons that are still left over. They're still coming to us. They're still saying, hello, here I am. I am a relic fossil and I've traveled through time like a time machine to get to your telescope here in Chile or in Antarctica.

And I'm gonna tell you about what it was like when I was born. Now, that's enough for me to kind of, just stretch my imagination, build new instrumentation. But of course, it's fun to speculate on what happened before. So I just told you, these are the oldest particles of light. So the only thing you can say right now is that we can't use light to find out what happened before these photons were born.

These cosmic mercury background photons came to be. So that doesn't mean that there's nothing we can use because nature is clever. And there are many different forms of matter and energy that we can use to trace the early universe phenomenon, if indeed, if and only if there was a universe prior to say the big bang or prior to the formation of these these these ancient relic photons. So one other form of radiation, it's not electromagnetic radiation, it's called gravitational radiation. Gravitational radiation arises whenever there is matter in motion and whenever space time reverberates.

So famously it was discovered by three friends and colleagues of mine and their team called the LIGO experiment in 2015 and September 2015, they caught the spiral of two black holes, each one 30 times the mass of our sun. They were moving at a fraction of the speed of light, a very high velocity. They eventually coalesced into one fused, exactly the analogy is, I like to use this fused into a giant black hole, but that black hole had a mass of, say, 59 times the mass of our sun. So where did that extra one mass of the sun go?

Well, it went into shaking up the fabric of space time itself, and that reverberation of space time is called a gravitational wave or gravitational radiation. Gravitational radiation penetrates everything. When I shake my fist here in San Diego, you feel it there on the East Coast. But it's minute and it's overwhelmed by a multitude of other sources of local gravitational field distortion. But as these waves of gravity travel through space time, they affect all matter and they go through all matter. And so we would actually weigh slightly heavier and then alternate, we'd

weigh slightly less as a gravitational wave came into the room that we're in right now. That's the effect. Is that propagated at the speed of light? Yeah, it propagates at the speed of light. It also has the virtue that they don't decay. There's nothing for a radioactive, there's no radioactive decay of gravitational radiation. They're just like light, except they go through everything. So if the universe produced an enormous amount of gravitational waves capable of being detected, a billion light years away from these two black holes that I described before, they were

located one billion light years away in a galaxy. We don't know exactly which galaxy they were in, but they crashed together in a galaxy far away from the Milky Way galaxy a billion years ago. Those waves of gravity traveled at the speed of light for a billion years. They entered into two different telescopes on Earth and they displaced those telescopes by less than the diameter of an atom. And these incredible researchers were able to detect this and they've done it a hundred times since. So it's a precision science, just like Galileo first using a telescope to look at the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, et cetera. That opened up a whole new regime of astronomy, not just to look at the moon, but to look

at the entire universe using optical telescopes. They revolutionized that. Now Jordan, if indeed all the matter in the universe was, as we know, at one point the universe was far, far smaller. It was at least a thousand times smaller than it is now. And every dimension, that means it was a thousand, thousand, thousand, or a billion times smaller, in volume than it is now, when the cosmic background radiation was released or produced about 380,000 years after the initial singularity or after the origin of our current observable universe.

If two little measly black holes, you know, if just they're crashing together, can cause a lot of gravitational radiation. Think about all the matter in the entire universe, all the black holes that would ever be and all the stars, all of our matter that made us up, all the light, all of it coming into existence at a certain time. You would expect that that would make an enormous amount of gravitational radiation,

and you'd be right. And so that gravitational radiation would then propagate through the universe, and eventually it would encode and encrypt its behavior on what's called the polarization of the microwave background. Remember I said light has three properties. We talked about the three properties, the intensity, the brightness of the light,

we talked about the color of the light or its spectrum, well the third and least known of properties of light because our eyes are insensitive to it is the polarization state of light. Now turns out- Turned angle of travel, essentially. It's the oscillation. If light's a wave, like you and I holding a rope

and oscillating a rope up and down, it's the plane that the rope is oscillating in. It could be horizontal, it could be vertical, it could be any angle between. It turns out that gravitational waves have a beautiful propensity to turn the polarization of the microwave background in a very particular orientation.

And we can, by mapping the orientation of the microwave background and its polarization, we can divine the existence or lack thereof of waves of gravity called gravitational radiation. And if detected, that doesn't prove a theory that we can get into called inflation, which is the most popular, a cosmogenesis model that we have, but it gives very, very, very strong circumstantial evidence for it. But again, I'm an experimentalist, so what do I do, Jordan? I try to kill other theories. Well it turns out our good friend Roger Penrose, he has a theory that there should be no polarization

of this kind. In other words, Jordan, if I observe, my team and I observe this particular polarization configuration, it doesn't prove somebody right, it proves Roger wrong, it proves other colleagues wrong as well that have alternative hypotheses. And what are those alternative hypotheses? Well, they're very fascinating because they do not involve inflation, but they also do not involve a singularity at the origin of time. There is no origin of time in most of these alternatives. So by observing this signal, we kill those models off, and what's left

is a closer approximation to the truth. And did you observe this polarization? Yes, we did. And then, yes. That's a hangover. If I've got this right, that's a hangover of events that occurred before the light itself that you're measuring, which is the microwave radiation, electromagnetic radiation, that it was extent about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. And so it's been oriented in a manner by something even earlier than that. That's right. I read some, I read a counter theory, I think, when I was investigating your work for our podcast, that is it the case that there are people who claim that the polarization that

you detected was a consequence of the interaction between light, the light you're observing and dust that spread out in the cosmos, and not a consequence of this early gravitational of these early gravitational waves. Yes, so this is a very, very important chapter not only in my life, but it will be talked about in future years as an example of how science actually gets done. And it's the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. And it's the story of how that a scientist can become obsessed. In this case, the scientist is me.

It's a memoir of my career trying to detect these early reverberations of the universe's space-time structure in order to see whether or not inflation or an alternative took place to ignite the hot big bang that we do observe and have stacks and reams of evidence to support. So the existence of matter, the existence of the CMB, the existence of galaxies and expansion, those all support the fact the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state early on in its history, but they don't provide the mechanism by which that came about. Now, I always say it's like this, Jordan, when somebody says, you know, we're going to take

biology class, on the first day of biology class, when you were in college, they don't start off with the origin of life in the universe. They don't even start off with the origin of DNA, right? It's almost as if the origin of the universe is outside or metacosmologically related to the expansion and the properties that we observe as cosmologists. So it's almost expecting too much of us to say, well, we also know how the universe came into existence. But again, it's super duper fun to speculate about things that you can't observe and maybe will never be observable.

So I wanted to do this. I wanted to observe the early universe and its infant state. I wanted to do that for two reasons. I've always been fascinated by the biggest possible questions. I grew up, I'm Jewish, but I grew up as a Catholic, a young man, I was an alturboying the Catholic church, I never had a bar mitzvah. And so at the time when I should have been having a bar mitzvah, I was in the Catholic church, I was interested in the origin of the universe trying to know if God existed and trying to

understand our place in the cosmos. And I didn't care about kind of the stand collecting aspects of life. I didn't care about parties and all sorts of other things, status, sports. I just wanted to understand math, science, and use my telescope. And those were my real fascinations as a young man. Later in life, I became, I said, I was Jewish, both my parents were Jewish.

My father was a great scientist. His name is James Axe. I don't have the same last name as him. He divorced my mother and father got divorced, and I live with my stepfather, who became my stepfather, and he adopted me. And I lost touch with my biological father for many, many years, for 15 years, I didn't see him.

And in that period of time, I knew he was a great scientist. He was a great mathematician. He was the youngest tenured professor of mathematics at Cornell in their history, and I think he still holds that distinction. He went on to have a great career, and I didn't see him, and I actually was adopted by my stepfather.

And I kind of had this rivalry with him, Jordan, and you can psychologically diagnose it as you like, but just as a boy might want to be a better football player or a wrestler than his father, I want to be a better scientist than him. As great a scientist as he was, he never won the Nobel Prize. And I realized I could, you know, kind of one up this old man who had abandoned me and my older brother decades earlier, and I could do what he did not.

And best of all, I could do it by having the most, doing the most fun thing I could possibly imagine, building telescopes and studying the biggest picture topic. So this became my obsession. I became obsessed with this. And later on, I proposed an experiment with my mentor and friends at Caltech, where I was a postdoc, to go back in time as far as we could go back, building a telescope called Bicep, which I coined the name. It means background imaging of cosmic, extra galactic polarization.

But it's a plan, words, because that polarization signal I told you about Jordan, the orientation is called a curl. So it's called a curl tight motion. So it's very funny. Bicep, there's a profound nerd joke for you. It is, yeah. I've got a lot to catch that one. Before I got to being a, yeah,

purveying dad jokes, I was purveying nerd jokes. So that experiment did detect, we detect, we claimed we detected the impromatura of inflation. In other words, we claimed that we saw the twisting, roiling, uh, pattern of polarization is called curl mode polarization. That was thought to be conclusive if circumstantial evidence for the inflationary origin of the universe. Now, George, so these are kind of like eddies in the stream, right?

Exactly. And so, yeah, these are remnants of things that happened extraordinarily early on. You're looking past theoretically, you're looking past 380,000 years. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, let me lay out for everybody who's watching and listening, just a brief schematic of time,

because you never know there's all sorts of people listening, and you never know what people know and what they don't know. So let's just take a walk through numbers. So everybody understands a thousand, and people generally know that a million is a thousand thousand. But then things get murky at the top end, past then. So a thousand million is a billion. And so we're looking at 13,000 millions, or about 13 and 13.3 in your estimation.

And right now we're speaking about a time that's 300,000 years after the events of the Big Bang. But you're looking back even farther than that by looking at the events of the Big Bang. But you're looking for, you're looking back even farther than that by looking at the effects of the gravitational waves on the microwaved background. And that's what you built the telescope for in the South Pole. That's right. So I'm mentioning you're in a room right now. You're looking around your room, you have a horizon beyond which you can't see. It's called the walls of the room that you're in. But if something happened outside, let's say somebody lit off a firecracker outside of the room that you're in, you couldn't see it with light, but you could hear it with sound.

So in other words, you can see things that are farther away, and as we initiated our conversation, something that's farther away, we're seeing light from when it was more primitive, when it was older, when it was more distant, means it translates by this finite speed of light to an older, more primitive existence. Right. If the explosion was loud enough, even if you were deaf, you could detect the movement of the walls. That's right.

Yes. I've heard that people in the FBI, they use the vibration of windows, bouncing a laser off the windows because people inside the room are talking, it's causing a reverberations of the glass, and they can read out and transduce the sonic vibrations of the air molecules using the reverberations of glass and bouncing a laser off it. Exactly like that.

We can see back. Probably what they're doing right now while we're talking. Sadly, that's space. I hope so, it would be a good use of their bandwidth, right? So if you look back to that first, as I said, we can go back from Friday today, 13.8 billion

years, that someday we can go back and that first three minutes of that day formed the elements, all the hydrogen that's in your body's water, all the hydrogen that's in the oceans of the entire planet and all planets, perhaps, all of the hydrogen was formed in that first three-minute period. But we can go ahead and start it. So let me, okay, let me ask you a question about that, because I want to get this exactly right. And it also relates to something metaphysical that I wanted to ask you about. So when we go back extraordinarily close to the events of the Big Bang, when things are

super hot and super dense, we don't have any of the elements that currently make up the universe of matter as we know it. We have a state prior to the elemental state. And so, what's the initial state? Can you walk us through the sequence of unfolding? Now, people should remember that the material world that we see around us is made out of 114 elements, some of which are man-made, not easily found in nature. So let's say 100, just as a rule with them. And those elements differ in the complexity of their atomic structure. And so the simpler elements have, you have neutrons and protons and electrons that make up an atom.

And the simpler the element is, the fewer of the neutrons and protons and electrons are in the atomic structure. So they're more and more complicated clumps of subatomic particles, of atomic particles to make up the elements. Now, they appear in a sequence, right, as the universe unfolds. And so, but before before even hydrogen, which is the simplest elemental structure, before hydrogen appears, there are other states of matter and that sequence is all the way back to the big bank. So can you unfold how the periodic table emerges and then what happens before that? And then we'll go back to the microwave and gravitational wave story. Yeah. So the famous Pul scientist, Carl Sagan,

said, we are all made of stars, we're all star stuff. And it's actually not really true, we're actually cosmic stuff. We're actually, most of us is water, right Jordan? So most of water is hydrogen, and most of that hydrogen, if not all of it, was formed during these first three minutes after the Big Bang, or again, I'll say that as a shorthand for the period of time before which we lose information

and we become ignorant. But that period of time leaves fossils. And those fossils are the hydrogen, the helium that we see in the universe and their isotopes. So there's really only six or seven different things that are made, but without those things, they become the ingredients of the first generation of stars. Those generation of stars become nuclear fusion reactors, taking hydrogen, nuclei, and isotopes, and fusing them together to make helium. After all, Helios, the name of the sun, the element helium was discovered not on Earth on

the sun. I always joke with my cosmology students, the scientists had to go at night, you know, for their own safety. But helium was discovered not on Earth, but it was discovered on the Sun via its chemical spectrum, its chemical fingerprint. So the first elements, hydrogen and helium are formed in the Big Bang. Much more helium is formed later on in stars, then that helium makes heavier and heavier elements, and we start marching up the periodic table to fill out the rest of those 100 or so elements. Okay, so we have the Big Bang and the initial particles,

or electromagnetic waves that emerge, are how do you characterize them? Is it how long after the Big Bang do you have the initial hydrogen and its variant isotopes? And what's there before that, before it's even hydrogen? Yeah. So it doesn't become hydrogen until 380,000 years later when the universe is cool enough that a proton can meet an electron and fuse together if you like or condense to make

a actual atom and the first atoms in the universe are formed then. Then afterwards, you get hydrogen combining to make helium inside of the sugars. Okay, so before that, it's just protons and electrons. Just protons. They're not hanging out. It's exactly right. They're in what's called a plasma. So a plasma is the fourth state of matter. It's what happens when you heat beyond a gas.

You ionize, you break apart the atom into its constituent nucleus nucleus and its electronic content. So you get, the nucleus is positively charged, it's made of protons and neutrons, and the electrons are just separate individualistic particles. And there's another type of particle, which is very important, but we won't get into called the neutrino. And that's actually the only form of dark matter that we know for sure exists. So you've heard about dark matter, We've never observed any other dark matter

in the universe besides a neutrino, but they're not relevant necessarily for either life or what we have, right? So going back, you have this plasma, you have this plasma of protons electrons that aren't associating with one another. Now that's a relatively uniform field of protons and electrons. It's super

hot. Now it's only relatively uniform and correct me if I've got this wrong, but I looked into this a while back. So it starts to clump together. And the reason it clumps together is because of gravitational attraction, right? Clumps together in material, in material well, clumps. And the reason that that happens is because of, I believe it's because of quantum uncertainty. It isn't a hundred percent uniform. And so some particles, some of these primordial particles are a little bit closer to others than others are. There's a slight non-uniformity about it.

And now you get clumping. And as the clumping occurs, the bigger the clump that emerges, the more likely it is to a creed additional matter. And then that keeps happening until you get the beginning of clumps of matter that are large enough to be stars. And then the stars have enough gravitational force to produce additional nuclear or atomic transformations. And the stars start to generate the rest of the periodic table of the elements. Correct so far?

Yep. Yeah, so let me, let me, yeah, go ahead. Well, no, no, that's okay. Okay, get from there. Okay, and so we can, we can talk about how the rest of the elements come into being as well. Yes, exactly. So I'll get to your point about curvature, which is the crux of everything that you just said relies on a very short word, curvature that we have to delineate. But

first, I want to take a slight detour if you'll indulge me with your patented forbearance, Jordan. There is a lot of talk in the zeitgeist about artificial intelligence and the dangers at which artificial intelligence will pose to humanity, some say it's worse than nuclear war, Elon Musk has said such things. Others worry about more pedestrian, but still more important things like loss of jobs and meaning and so forth as very important to human psychology. I'm not so worried about artificial intelligence and I'll tell you why. The reason relates to this famous gentleman Albert Einstein, we mentioned him three or four times already. I don't know if you're familiar with it, Einstein called his happiest thought, Jordan. Einstein called the Gdanken

experiment, a thought experiment that he alone did for the first time and the following was conjectured by the great Einstein. He said that somebody, if he was falling, if he was in an elevator and the cable broke, God forbid, and the elevator start to fall, that person would experience no gravitational force. It's called the Einstein Equivalence Principle. He called that the happiest thought of his life. Now, what does that have to do with curvature? Well, it turns out and artificial intelligence.

Let me first lead to our back to artificial intelligence. Jordan, can I ask you, how do you expect a computer or an artificial general intelligence could interpret these two phenomena? Freefall, the visceral human-centered experience of freefall A and B have a happiest thought. I want to ask you, actually, I'm sorry to turn the tables on you. For me, that gives me great comfort because it really is occurring in the human mind, a human brain, another thing that is of infinite complexity, and possibly forbidden to our understanding behind an ignorance horizon, like the Big Bang.

But, Jordan, does that give you any solace? Because to me, it's a great comfort that it took a mind, something trapped in the wet supercomputer, if you will, on top of our shoulders, operating at room temperature. How can a computer experience a visceral sensation, if possible? And how could it ever associate happiness with it? Yeah, well, that's a good question. I don't know how artificial intelligence systems

will mimic emotions. I'm afraid that might be more crackable than we think because I've been talking to Carl Friston, for example, who's great neuroscientist and one of the things he pointed out, I'd figured out already because I had done some work that was parallel to Friston's on the entropy management front.

And one of the, you can, you can, you can characterize anxiety as the neurophysiological response to the unexpected emergence of entropy. So it's the redock, it's the expansion of a single specified pathway forward. It's the expansion of that to multiple pathways. So for example, if you're driving down the freeway and your car breaks down, the reason you get anxious

is because your car has been expanded from the simple object that will move you from point A to B to a set of a complex and currently unsolvable problems. And that's signified by negative emotion. That anxiety is proportionate to the degree to which entropy is emerged. And that's on the negative emotion front. And then on the positive emotion front, if you're moving towards a valued goal, with each successful move forward, you decrease the entropic distance between you and the goal. And that's signified by positive emotion. And it's possible that AI systems will be able to at least model this conceptually.

Now, that's different than feeling it qualitatively, right? This is the feeling of the anxiety, exactly, whatever that feeling means, and that seems irreducible in some sense. But I think it can be modeled mathematically, and that means that AI systems should be able to conceptualize what constitutes the basis for positive and negative emotion, even if they can't feel it, feel it. But that's a mystery too, because we don't know what the hell feel me. Right, yeah.

So getting back to, and actually, I'm glad that you brought up entropy, because that reduction in phase space states is exactly what Einstein effectively did in this thought experiment. He's saying, right, that's right. That's why he had positive emotion. That's exactly right.

Because exactly. Yeah, yeah. And in the context of the physical, so I promise I'm absent-minded professor, but I'm not that absent-minded. Going back to the curvature conjecture that you mentioned before, everything hinges on curvature, everything hinges, you nailed the crux of the issue. It hinges on curvature, where does that come from? In Einstein's conceptual general relativity, he had two great, so many, many great ideas.

Obviously, but special relativity has to do with the finite speed of light and things conceptual general relativity. He had two great, so many, many great ideas, obviously, but special relativity has to do with the finite speed of light and things that travel near the speed of light and the properties of such paths through space and time. And then gravity is when you are general relativity is when you add in mass and gravity and what that does to space time itself. So it turns out that there's the what the effective gravity is to do is to curve and warp space time. Now we experience that on Earth when we launch a, say you have a cannon and you shoot a cannon ball horizontally, it will eventually impact the Earth's surface. But it will travel in a curve parabolic arc for a little bit of time.

But if you shoot it with enough velocity, it can actually go into orbit around the Earth. That's also a curve path that it's taking. Those are called geodesics. And it's actually tracking the shape of the space time that it's traveling through. You can feel that if you're on one of those merry-go-round, those kid merry-go-round. That's right. You try to move your feet towards the middle, you can feel the centrifugal force, you know, move your legs as you yeah, but that's actually just and if you're mature in space time, that's local. That's right. Or if you've ever been here to see world here in San Diego, or you've ever been on a car moving slightly faster than maybe

you should and you go over a bump from moment you're suspended in space time and then you come back down, it feels like that. Of course, you're actually traveling on what's called a geodesic, which is an intropically minimizing. so it's quarter producing, is producing a translational map through space time that minimizes your path length, just like if you travel from Miami to London, you don't take a straight line, you take an a geodesic path that brings you closer to the North Pole than you would ordinarily expect. But as you experience that, that is the manifestation on Earth of the mass of the Earth.

But remember what you're trying to figure out is how did that mass come to be in the clump that we call the Earth, and how did the galaxy that surrounds us come to be in the place? Well, that means that there had to be some place for matter and mass to agglomerate, to fall into, to coalesce,

to eventually make the galaxy that has the sun in it and the sun to have the material that orbits around it that we call the Earth. Those fluctuations in the background, otherwise perfection of spacetime uniformity, I would say if everything was completely perfect, we wouldn't be here having this conversation. Right, right, right.

There'd be no place to distribute it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, it'll be a very boring universe. So people often in science Jordan are driven, and my scientific colleagues are driven by a notion of beauty, and beauty as symmetry, and symmetry as a manifestation of underlying order and perfection. Well, I say to them,

the universe would be incredibly boring if the universe was actually driven by symmetry. It's actually the deviations from symmetry, the variations of perturbations that lead to all the interesting phenomena that we know and love, right? You've seen this experiment. Interesting. So just that tiny, that's so interesting that it's a tiny, reminds me of a Buddhist minimal start, you know, where there's an art piece where everything is perfect, except for one thing that's left in disarray.

And there's a whole art form, a whole Japanese art form that's associated with that. And so, why do you believe that it was the curvature that was there at the beginning of time that was responsible for the lack of homogeneity rather than quantum uncertainty in relationship to the location of the particles? Or is that the same thing? Or are there alternative theories? marginality rather than quantum uncertainty in relationship to the location of the particles. Or is that the same thing, or are there alternative theories? They're related. So the overarching framework by which curvature provides the primordial seeds for later matter to agglomerate to then collapse and have nuclear fusion ignition and then the movie plays for it as we described it.

Are you described it before? So the initial conditions, how did those curvature perturbations get there in the first place? Well, if the universe was smaller than an atom, even though we don't manifest these large-scale perturbations today in a quantum field, we don't sense quantum mechanics in any discernible sense, on the scale of an atom, if we were atom-sized, then we would see quantum effects all the time. We would see the input and output of virtual particles, which later become things like Hawking radiation, all sorts of other things.

But in the early universe, this would manifest itself as departures from perfect homogeneity by one part and 100,000. So let me give you an idea. You ever go bowling, Jordan, and you have a bowling ball. The surface of the bowling ball is more rough than the surface, if you like, of the smoothness relative to its characteristic scale. In other words, the fluctuations of the bowling ball surface relative to its radius are far smoother than the uniform, or far rougher than the universe and was at this extremely early time. Fraction of a second before what we then produced the elements that we spoke about before.

Now that surface to the bowling ball is pretty smooth, unless it's my bowling ball, which has all these dens in it. But the point being, the universe is incredibly smooth, and so you only have to manifest tiny little perturbations. But that's what inflation does. Inflation says, I didn't get to this before, but when we made this detection in 2014, that's described in my book, Losing the Nobel Prize. We claimed, we detected these waves of gravity.

That's as close as scientists think we can get to detecting the smoking gun. It's actually the smoke from the gun, if you will, of the initial inflationary expansion of the universe. Now, with inflation can comatotly, unavoidably, inextricably linked is the notion of the multiverse. You cannot have inflation, which means you cannot have these quantum perturbations that you're describing, which means that the framework then collapses once you go forward, unless you have a multiverse. So the law, so let's work people through what inflation is first and then talk about the relationship between now and the multiverse.

So, so, yeah, explain it, explain inflation and explain why it was necessitated as a theoretical and then an experimentally validated construct or experimentally investigated. So we live in a quantum universe. We don't detect it because we're kind of these macroscopic creatures, right? We're sort of, you know, a couple meters characteristic scale. We live for, you know, tens of decades, hopefully. But we don't live, you know,

we don't observe things at the nanosecond or picosecond scale. We don't observe things at the femtometer size scale. So it's kind of hidden to us by an averaging process that our brain, you've spoken about this many times. We have a foveal attention that we pay to objects and beyond which we can't really say anything other than

vague notions about. We can only focus on the foveal analogy to us, is that we are focused on things that are our size. It's natural to think about that. We don't see quantum tigers coming out of the vacuum and then disappearing, right? So our mind has to work and make analogies. So we analogize the universe today

as being filled with quantum fields and then the particles are just instantiations of those quantum fields. So there's a proton field over here that's making this dust particle or this air molecule. There's a photon field, there's a particles of light, et cetera, et cetera.

The imagine the universe, et cetera, et cetera. Imagine the universe, the cosmos, as you know, it is filled with an infinite tapestry of potentiality. It can be a photon over here. There may not be a photon over here. It depends on the value of that quantum system. So that's so interesting, that idea of an infinite expanse of potentiality, because potentiality is a very strange, what would you call it, scientific, materialist concept,

because only what's real can be measured materially. But we need this hypothesis of something approximating an infinite potential. And you know, I don't know if you know this about, I would say my work, but it's not just my work, it's the entire corpus of symbolic thought. As in so far as that's been interpreted, let's say, by psychoanalytic thinkers, there is a hypothesis,

cosmological hypothesis that permeates religious speculation that the cosmos that's inhabitable, so the structured material world is a manifestation of a multi- what, a multiplicitous potential. That's chaos. That's the, that's the infinite chaos, right? And so in Genesis, for example, there's a process that looks to me to be akin to communicative consciousness that interacts with something approximating an infinite potential. That's Tiamat Teoam or Tohuvabohu. Tohuvabohu, yeah. Exactly that.

Exactly that. And it's that the order that is good is extracted out from this multi-dimensional, it's not multi-dimensional. Multi-potential, field of potential, as a consequence of the action of some structuring force. And that's the cosmologically generative principle. And so it's very interesting to me that in the realm of physics itself,

which people consider the queen of sciences, that there is the notion of this expansive potential. And you associated that with quantum fields and also with the multiverse. And so yeah, let's walk through all of that. It's even deeper than that, as you're saying, the potentiality is something intrinsic to not only the existence of our universe, but there's a mirror universe that you, I know, have been equated, you know, familiarized with with Sriracha, and that's the anti-universe, the fact that we have anti-matter. And is possible to look at the work of D'Arrak.

We talk about the D'Arrak C, where there's an infinite set of potential states that are filled and occupied or occupied and depending on their potentiality versus their actuality, when do they get instantiated, when do they get commanded into existence to use a very overburdened phrase, right? So this and what's called solid state physics or condensed matter theory, we have, imagine you have a bunch of people, a crowd on a regular grid, and they're all moving. And then one guy gets teleported by some aliens that we'll have to talk about some other time. So one guy gets teleported out of this infinite grid of people marching as soldiers, right?

And then the soldiers kind of get nervous, so they start moving to fill in that hole. So one moves to fill in the hole where the soldier has been extracted or rendered out of existence. And then that produces a hole in another place where that other soldier was, right? So there's a sea of the, and I start to see this hole moving, but is the hole real, Jordan? I mean, the guys are real, right? But now that one guy left, and so they're filling in. So now there's this other thing called a hole, and it's moving, and there's

an exact analogy between that and what's called condensed matter physics that are called phonons, not photons, but phonons, and how they propagate, and they have properties. They travel at some speed. So now you're talking about the absence of something, the potentiality of that, which was, and it is propagating in a sea of possibilities as well. So, I'm not going to say this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, we were contemplating the horizon of possibility, because I think that what consciousness does is confront a horizon of possibility. It's not something driven in an algorithmic, deterministic manner by the states of material objects at the current time.

It contends with the sea of probability, but it also appears, and maybe this is a consequence of the principles of existence itself, that that sea of probability is structured in a normal distribution of probability. So, for example, the most probable next event in our conversation is that one or the other of us are both will utter a word, but there's some non-zero probability that there'll be a cataclysmic earthquake and I'll be swallowed up by the ground, right? Now, it's relatively low probability of that. Thank God, but it's not zero and it's not entirely predictable. Not in San Diego.

Probability. It's more higher probability of means. Exactly, exactly. While in the cataclysmic events in our life occur when something that we deem of relatively low probability in this set of infinite potential actually makes itself manifest. And the more unlikely that event, according to our conceptual schema, the more anxiety is associated with it. But is there a sense among physicists that this infinite sea of possibility, you described in relationship to direct thought? And I didn't know about that. Is there some notion that some of those states are

more likely to emerge given the current state than others? And is that a way of conceptualizing some alternative to determinism? Yeah, we actually had, you know, a concept that, you know, we could turn to probably another topic, but Richard Feynman, one of the Titanic physicists of the last hundred years, came up with this kind of sum over histories or a path integral description by which particles get from A to B by sampling all paths in which they could possibly take,

but going the opposite way too, and those get weighted with different or lesser probabilities to use the language that you were just saying. But I want to touch back one more to what you said when you said, who fanman development. That's right. That's right. And so when you spoke about this anxiety, I want to, I do, you know, because I can't resist Jordan as a podcast or myself to, you know, how often do I have the chance to interview somebody like you, even though this is your conversation, I wanna continue with your questions.

But there's something that you said, and I hope again, you'll indulge me with your forbearance. You mentioned anxiety and entropy. I wanna ask you right now, how many different ways could I make your life twice as good? Like, or 10 times as good. How many ways could I do that? I mean, there's a very limited number of ways. Yeah, exactly. And there's, well, that 10 times is good. How many ways could I do that? I mean, there's a very

good number of ways. Yeah, exactly. And there's a, well, that's a very good observation. That's, that's part of, I think, why we're also weighted towards waiting negative emotion more significantly, is that the number of ways things can go wrong is near infinite. Whereas the number of ways things can be improved is, that's the, that's the straight narrow path, right? That's also, by the way, the boundary between order and chaos in the Dallas conceptualization of the world. It's a very narrow pathway to make things better. It's not impossible, but it's very difficult. It's not to make things, but I think Jordan and I want to run this by you.

My theory is that you should lean into that which would devastate you. In other words, you and I are both parents. You've met my children. You know that the greatest fears, I don't even have to speak it, you know, God forbid. But anyone who's had brought a life into existence has organized entropy, has reduced entropy, has invested so much into this beautiful creature miracle that we call a child. And that's just one example of how your life could be made, not twice as worse or 10 times worse, it could be made infinitely worse. But I like to invert that and use that as a guiding principle

and get your impressions about that because it seems to me that we should be doing those things and making those network and tropic connections that we should have as many of them that they would, if removed, would devastate us. In other words, you can find out what you should be doing. Well, I will. Okay, so one of the, I would say that that's

one of the most fundamental contributions of new testament thinking to old testament thinking. It emerges in part as a consequence, you could say a narrative consequence of the conundrums that are brought forward in the book of Job. So the book of Job is a narrative description of the infinite numbers of potential ways you can profoundly suffer. And so Job is not only ill in the most terrible ways and innocently ill, but he's ill in a way that loses, and

he simultaneously loses his wife and his family, and then his friends make fun of him for being ill and, and accus him of being sinful. That's the reason for his illness. And so, he's at the bottom of the deepest possible pit, and he has, he contends with God as a consequence in some ways attempting to negotiate with the divine to understand why it is that he's been condemned to suffering. Now it turns out in that story that God made a bet with Satan of all things that if Satan tortured Job or Job that lives in faith, Job would lose his faith. It's a very strange story, but Carl Jung wrote a great book called The Answer to Job that takes that apart in great detail. But what happens in the Christian story is a strange inversion of the story of Job because

the hypothesis in the Christian story is essentially that the best way through the absolute catastrophe of life is to voluntarily take on the deepest possible set of catastrophes as if they're an encouraging challenge. It's something like that. You can think about that metaphysically as the invitation to the cross. And so the notion is analogous to the notion that you're describing, which is the best way to inoculate yourself against catastrophe is to confront it voluntarily. And it's the same idea, by the way, as the notion that the larger dragons horde more gold and the dragon gold story is a very, very old story. And the notion there is that the best,

what you could find that would manifest itself as the best in your life is likely to be found as Jung said, in stir-quiliness, infant and tour, which meant that what you most need will be to found, be found where you least want to look. Right. So the cave that you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

I think Campbell's. Exactly. Well, you know, in your life, one of the things you pointed out, and we will talk about this maybe in daily wire interview. You know, you had to deal with the loss of your father in which was a very dark thing to lose, very dark thing to contemplate. And, you know, you said to deal with the loss of your father, and which was a very dark thing to lose, very dark thing to contemplate. And, you know, you said that one of the things you did as a consequence of contemplating

that relatively forthrightly was develop a certain kind of radical ambition, both in terms of enthusiasm, because you were interested in it, but also in terms of the magnitude of the problem that you were setting out to challenge. And so you simultaneously solved the psychological and metaphysical problem by delving into the structure of the real at the place that looked darkest and most mysterious to you. And I think that is, it's something everyone should know. I'd be lecturing to my audiences as I go around the world more recently, talking about how destiny makes itself manifest to people. And it does that by inviting you with opportunities that sees your imagination. But it also does it by calling out to you certain problems that be

set you that happen to be your problems, whatever that means. You know, because it's not like it's not like you're obsessed by an infinite number of problems. You're obsessed by that set of problems that happen for whatever reason to be your problems. And you might say, well, I wish I didn't have any problems. But then you don't have any mystery. The reverse of that would be to say, well, I'm going to take the worst problem that besets me and delve into that most decisively.

And I think the evidence is quite clear on the clinical front that that's how you find the great adventure of your life. I think that's a universal truth, by the way. Yeah, I think this, and I see this with scientists, the issue that most people don't really recognize that science is done by scientists. We're not walking automotons that have no feeling and have nothing invested in it. And that's why I think it was sort of like almost

like a coming out feeling must be. I'm not familiar with it, but liberation. When you recognize your own particular dragon, if you're willing to solve it. Look, I mean, you mentioned the mystery in what perplexes you. So if your car breaks down in the analogy used before it causes you anxiety,

but you know exactly what you have to do. You have to get a jack and you have to put a tire on and you have to get on your way. And hopefully you'll be there on time. But you know what the path is, and it's not that mysterious. I've been thinking about scientists. We're confronted with an infinite spectrum of mysteries on a daily basis. And the rabbi Jonathan Sachs, I don't know if you ever met him. He's the one, one of the guests, a few guests that I never got to have on my podcast. But Jonathan Sachs was a chief rabbi of the

United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. And he has this kind of brilliant take. He wrote a book called The Grand Partnership about the reconciliation and the comity between religion and science. And one of the things he would speculate on was, you know, why is it that scientists are the least religious? You know, I actually happen is it that scientists are the least religious? I actually happen to think that scientists are incredibly religious. Yeah, it's more like some, we should talk more about that because I'd like to know why you think that. Yeah, we'll get to that before we part here.

Yeah, let's do that. So thinking about scientists, we are confronted with mysteries on this daily basis. But getting back to the ultimate mystery of why are we here? Scientists aren't used to answering why questions. It's almost like it's beyond our domain, but we don't like that, Jordan Wright. Scientists, I think you can correct me again if I'm wrong in any way, but I think there's a narcissistic trait behind scientists. That's a good thing.

We have this concept in Judaism of a Yates or Hara, an evil inclination, and a Yates or Hatov, a good inclination. But it's like the Yin Yang, there's a little bit of each in each one. In other words, your evil inclination, your desire for glory and the Nobel Prize. They can actually cause you to transmute that into gold and do things that are good for you. And likely the positive qualities you want everybody to think the right way or whatever that means. You want everyone to get a vaccine or you can think you're doing good and that can actually

not be good, right? So the point that I'm trying to make is if you don't channel the propensity of a scientist to think solidistically and narcissistically, if you don't do it and I don't channel the propensity of a scientist to think solidistically and narcissistically if you don't do it, and I don't know how to do it with my students, right? I'm supposed to teach them the what questions, but I don't get to teach them the why questions. Well, okay, so there's a couple of things here. We'll go back to the scientists are more religious than they presume they are. They partly because they believe in the presumption of redemptive truth.

They believe there is a logos in the world an order that can be discovered through rational apprehension and experimentation and empirical experimentation. But they also believe that the truth will set you free because otherwise you wouldn't do science. And that was the way in that I used when I was trying to train my graduate students

to be ethical researchers. So, now, as you said, a science, someone who does science is a person, a scientist, and so a person above all, and then a scientist. And the consequence of that is that that person has to be concerned with such mundane realities as formulating a career. And that isn't only self-promotion because there's no bloody point in discovering something unless you communicate it to people, unless you have a network that you've developed, you can't communicate it. And so it's part and parcel of the scientific endeavor. But then you might ask yourself, well, what should be paramount, right? The promotion of your

career and the communication of your findings, in which case you get false research findings all the time, or the truth. And part of the answer to that is, you know, if you're not as siguous in your pursuit of the truth, then you could easily, so if I have a student who does a master's or a PhD piece of research and they pee hack, so they claim that they found valid results when they didn't, because they muck about at the micro level with this dedication. Replication. because they mock about at the micro level with this identification. Then, well, then as they swallow that lie, they're going to convince themselves that what they discovered was actually true.

And then they're going to convince other people. And then there's going to be a whole set of them that are going down an entirely pathological and false road. And so part of the reason that even if you are interested in promoting your career, which you should be, to some degree, the reason you should abide by the truth is because you have to ask yourself whether

or not you want to spend your entire life investigating something that doesn't exist merely to inflate your status among your peers. And with anyone sensible, because you could have your cake and eat it too, you know, you could look at where you're wrong as a scientist and find the interesting stumbling blocks and the interesting mysteries. You could dive into that. Then you could discover something real and you could have status among your peers and be acclaimed as someone who had a genuine contribution and build a communication network. And that's a way better plan than being that what would you say than falling prey to falsehood and warping the entire field.

That's all an ethical, that's all an issue of fundamental ethics. Which we never teach to our students. No, we never teach that to our students. I mean, at least, sorry, in the physical sciences, I mean my law school colleagues, my medical school colleagues,

even my business school colleagues, I don't know about you, Jordan, but I was never taught to teach, right? So this is my job. And I think for you too, I think, you know, on your tombstone may it be at age 120, Jordan, but I think it'll say, you know, father, husband, teacher, some order like that, because I think the essence of who you are, like, I'm a pilot too. I fly little tiny planes and Southern California, little sessions around, okay?

When I became a pilot, it changed who I was. I started to think about the world, look, I'm not only a physicist or a pilot, whatever, I'm a pilot, and it's a part of a core identification. I also felt that way as a professor, and I know that you felt that way as a professor. Even if you're not teaching on a daily basis, and we can get into your, the Traveils, the awful way that you've been brutally kind of set about by monsters in your own right some other time. But I just want to point out that we never get taught how to teach.

We never get taught at least in the physical sciences maybe. And we almost get these ethical conundrum that you just mentioned. We get the barest minimum of kind of ethical training in a one-page sheet that you sign and maybe you watch a two-minute video that some consulting firm was paid $80,000 to May. But the point is that you do have the tendency, and this is in part what my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize is about. It's about wanting to discover something that's not only viscerally connected to you and

your career and making a living for yourself and your family, which as you said is by no means a trivial thing. I mean, we're human beings. We have to support, and there's a lot to be said about good honest work and the work that colleagues and I are engaged in. But we were confronted with the discovery of a lifetime. And that would not only mean, as I said before,

that we had discovered gravitational waves, which had never been observed in this fashion. And in 2014, when we made this announcement at Harvard, that we had discovered the aftershocks of the inflationary epoch, but that we had discovered evidence for the multiverse. And yet, what did it get undone by? The most humble meager makes substance in the whole world, which in the universe, which is called dust. And I thought it was so ironic, but it's a teachable thing.

We succumb to what Feynman, the great Feynman that we mentioned before, he said, the first principle is that you should not fool yourself. And the second principle is that you are the easiest person to fool. And that speaks of what's called confirmation bias, the P hacking. And so that's downstream, as you said, the P hacking, the replication crisis in your field. And by the way, it's starting to become a crisis in my field.

And things like most discoveries aren't real. If science progressed at 5% a year in real fact, and so 95% of it was tripe, we were still progressing, 5% knowledge increment a year, that's a great. So what happened on the dust front, and then I wanna tell you a little story from Exodus, and then we should wrap up this section.

So what happened on the dust front? So on the dust front, we were so consumed with this notion. And I want to speak mostly for me, although I know that it did afflict colleagues involved with this. For me, as I said before, it represented the greatest idol, the talisman of all, not just of society, not just of science, Jordan. You have to imagine when people run to be president of the United States, they always get, whoever's running on the Democratic side gets a letter from 70 Nobel Prize winners about why the Democrat should be president. When there was the COVID vaccine, sorry, the gain of function research was being sponsored

by the eco-health alliance, by Peter Dazic and Fauci, 70 Nobel Prize winners wrote to President Trump to say, this is wrong, you shouldn't cancel the gain of function research and people can invest. In other words, Nobel Prize carries weight punches way above its weight class. It doesn't just affect egghead boffins in the laboratory. It does. It does affect my funding probability and how many people we can hire in a given field and what the direction of the field may be.

It percolates to the front page of the New York Times as well. So it's the most, you know, kind of highest example of an idol. And I always look back, you know, when we talk about Exodus, maybe we'll talk about the the sin of the golden calf, which is a very natural thing. But when you actually see Jordan that that will give their it teeth and they will literally bow down to the king of Sweden and accept a gilding grave and image. I mean the mapping of the symbolism could not be more perfect if you wrote it in a Hollywood script, but it comes directly out of Exodus. And in our case, in my case, this idol that I had worshiped

and set so much of my being, my psychology towards, that it could be undone. It came, it worried me, but it didn't cause me to pull the plug and to not go forward or to say, over my dead body are we gonna publish this. And what ended up happening is we saw the pattern of polarization called curling polarization.

This whirlpools, these eddies that you spoke about earlier. And that speaks of the inflationary origin of the universe because if the universe were filled with a quantum field at its earliest moments and perhaps in perpetuity via what's called the inflaton. This would then be the field in which reverberations could take place. Those reverberations are the curvature perturbations that you asked about a while ago. Those provided the nucleation sites for matter to collapse, condense, agglomerate into, which then ignited the stars, which then made the supernova, which then made us.

So the story is an incredible story. It hinges on inflation being correct. Inflation hinges upon a quantum field called the inflaton. And the inflaton hinges upon a super arching structure called the multiverse for it to be filling. In other words, inflation didn't just happen once Jordan. It didn't happen twice. It happened an infinite number of times, and it's happening right now, and it's unavoidable because it cannot be sort of superseded, it cannot be shut off.

And yet, and yet, because we live in a galaxy, a galaxy is a very, very dirty place. It's a place filled with asteroids and subatomic particles and charge particles, and it's filled with the most humble substance that's left over. And thank God, thank bloody God, as you might say, that dust exists because we are, as Carl Sagan called the Earth, a moat of dust riding on a sunbeam. In other words, the Earth is a giant block of dust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecule that powers your body right now

came from that supernova that produced the dust that obscured and mimicked with perfect fidelity, the signal that I was hellbent, and my colleagues were hellbent on detecting. It mimicked the curl mode polarization signal to a T. And we saw what we wanted to see. And best of all, it meant that we had seen the multiverse. People on the front pages of every headline, every newspaper from San Diego to New York to CNN, we have detected the first physical evidence for the multiverse. Okay, so let walk me through that because I still, I don't quite understand it.

So you talked about the fact that the initial quantum perturbations that existed prior to our ability to detect the background radiation were a consequence of gravitational waves. And we talked a little bit about the fact that those perturbations could be mimicked by the cosmic dust, the perturbation induced polarization could be mimicked by cosmic dust. So was the polarization you detected a consequence of the quantum fluctuation?

Or was it a secondary consequence of the polarization by this widely dispersed dust. So when you came to visit San Diego, I gave you some chunks of rock. They look like ordinary chunks of rock, but they're actually meteorites. And actually, I give them away on my website for free. You know, I have these giveaways where people can get. It's a meteorite. It's actually what you see as a meteor shower.

When some of the material in a meteor shower reaches the Earth's surface, it's called a meteorite. And that meteorite that I gave you and I give away on occasion to people who go to my website is a chunk of iron. And it's iron, it's cobalt, it's nickel. I also will send people the chemical assay of it as well because it's just so cool to see that this chunk of rock is 4.3 billion years old. It predates the earth formation and it shares a lot in common with the earth. One thing it shares in common with the earth is that it has a magnetic susceptibility. If you take that little meteorite that I gave you and you put it next to refrigerator magnet, it'll suck onto that like a parasite sucking on a brain, okay?

That such is due to the magnetic properties of iron, which is a ferromagnet, and that will attach to a magnetic field, just like the earth does. Those magnetic fields are not confined to the earth Jordan. The galaxy has a magnetic field. The universe as a whole may have a magnetic field. But what happened was, there's these particles of meteorites in our local region of the Milky Way galaxy through which we are always looking like a dirty window, like looking through a dirty window, there's unavoidable. We live in a galaxy.

So we'd have to go outside the galaxy, which is technologically and almost theoretically impossible, and go outside to get away from this dust. So we're stuck inside this dusty cloud, this dusty region. Again, thank God for it because without it, there wouldn't be blood in our veins and there wouldn't be a planet for us to sit on. So it's a chimera. It gives and it takes away. In this case, it took away the Nobel Prize because the magnetic field of our galaxy

can cause the same twisting, curling, eddies of the emission from these meteorites or these dust particles as well. And that provided the chimeric illusion that we had seen exactly fidelitus to the origin if the universe began with inflation, the exact same pattern. It's almost devilish. It's almost satanic because it exactly mimicked it. And of course, we knew about it. We weren't babes in the woods. We didn't make a blunder.

We didn't put our thumb in the front of the lens cap, but we did our job, but we de-weighted that probability. We assessed it. We said, it's not as likely as the explanation that we found. Of course, the opposite is true, right? To say that the universe began out of a spawned nucleation site within the multiverse, providing curvature sites for agglomerations of, that's a much, much wilder story to believe in retrospect than, oh, we detected dust from

our galaxy. But I don't want to condemn myself too much, too harshly, or my colleagues, because we immediately tried not only to falsify that hypothesis, but we worked with another team, which was our competitor, which is a billion dollar satellite called the Planck satellite, and they had been hot on the trail of the exact same signal as that. Science is very competitive. You know, you mentioned all these different traits

of scientists all the time. Yeah, I always say scientists are like children, right? We're curious, we're playful, we're whimsical, but just like children, we don't like to play with others. We're jealous, we're petty, we have all the good qualities of children, but it's a double-edged sword. We have some of the negative.

Some of those are the desire for credit and for affirmation and for attention. I'm speaking for me specifically here, but this is a very common affliction, especially when the stakes are as high as they are to say that we live in a multiverse, which is the direct conclusion of this discovery if it had held up, which it did not.

So the results were accurate. So what's the status of the quantum fluctuation field agglomeration theory now? You didn't provide evidence that it was the case. Right, is that still the extent theory in relation to the initial agglomeration of matter? It is. It is an entity that theory. No, no, no, no.

In fact, it's your claim to have provided evidence for it. Exactly. And we made the most precise detection ever of this type of signal, it's just the interpretation was wrong. We didn't make a blunder. We didn't say there's faster than light neutrinos or what. We made an exquisitely precise measurement of dust in our galaxy, which is useful, by the way, because what we see, we'll never see

a unit, as I said, until we get out of the galaxy, which won't even happen with trillions of dollars of funding, it's physically impossible, right? So we're always going to be measuring a combined signal, a potential cosmic signal plus an actual dust signal. So now with other experiments, including the experiment that I lead with my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania at Princeton at Berkeley and Chicago called the Simons Observatory funded by Jim Simons at the Simons Foundation and Maryland Simons, and that project is a $110 million project in the Otacomit Desert of Northern Chile, which has as one of its

tools, as one of its pieces of apparatus, Jordan, has a dust detection experiment. So the only way to get rid of a systematic experiment, a systematic contaminant, is to dedicate a whole new experiment to it. Imagine you've got your thumb on the scale and you're pouring your coffee beans in. You're going to get to a few coffee beans. Oh, I do another experiment in this trivia. I saw my thumbs on the scale. For us, we have to do a separate experiment. We have to dedicate some of our extremely, exquisitely produced detectors,

my colleagues, Suzanne Stags at Princeton, makes these, no one's ever made anything like what she's been able to do with her group. And they detect that the faintest possible microwave signals from the Big Bang, but they can also detect dust. So she's dedicated, some of these. She's in control for it now. Exactly.

So she has channels that only measure dust, which if you had told me 25 years ago, you're going to be measuring dust, I'd say, I thought I was interested in the biggest questions. If I want to study dust, I can follow my teenager around, right? I don't need to build a $100 million. No, we measure the combined total signal, we'll subtract the dust signal, what will be left is the cosmic signal, and we hope to have first light or first microwave of that instrument

in the coming next year. Oh well, congratulations, oh not. So let me close this up with this exit of the story, because I think it's relevant to, well, the metaphysical speculations we've been indulging in, but also, I think it's biographically relevant. So, when Moses, before Moses emerges as a leader of his people, he encounters the burning

bush. And that's a very interesting story, because what happens is Moses is basically out for his stroll, and something attracts his attention. Now it's not a burning oak tree, it's not a volcano, it's something that flickers and glimmers on the edge of his perception, you might say. And it tracks it. So, it attracts his curiosity, and he decides that he's going to investigate that which attracts his curiosity. Now, the burning bush is a paradoxical manifestation because it's being, and that would be the bush or the tree, the small tree, that's alive, that's being, but it's also becoming because fire is an agent

of transformation. And so the burning bush is a symbol of the paradox of existence, which is that things are and are becoming at the same time. And so Moses is attracted by this, and he decides to investigate it, to inquire into its nature. And the consequence of his inquiry into its nature is that the voice of being itself speaks to him. Right? And that's basically how God announces himself. He says, I am that I am or I am that I will be or I was that I am now. It's it's a statement of the essence of being. And the idea behind that story is that if you asidiously pursue that which attracts your attention, the essence of being. And the idea behind that story is that if you assiduously pursue that which attracts your attention, the voice of being

itself will speak the ultimate truth to you. And that's a hell of a thing to understand. And so when you're trying to teach your students ethics, you can say, look, you can subjugate the search for truth to your venal ambition. But the cost of that will be that if the voice of God beckons to you from the unknown, you'll miss it. And if you think about that for like 30 seconds and you have any wisdom at all, there isn't a chance and hell that if you were the least bit wise,

that you would put the exigencies of your ambition, even if they're Nobel Prize-oriented, above the possibility that the structure of reality itself could reveal itself to you as a consequence of you having the delightful opportunity to pursue what most effectively attracts your interest. There isn't a better deal than that. And scientists who are real scientists are imbued by that desire, and they believe it, too, because they do believe that if they investigate something, no matter how trivial, dust, let's say, no matter how contemptible, that the consequence of that will be that they will be able to appear into the furthest expanses of what would you say. The sacred fundamental realities of existence itself, and all of that seems to be true.

So that's a good ethical lesson for students to know. Well, that is, yeah, to be open to what your eyes can see, right? The Torah speaks about being able to hear the schma, the catechism of the Jewish faith is here. Not see, don't follow after what your heart leads you astray. It actually says to prostitute, prostitute yourself after what your heart wants. No, here, here is a passive, but you can be sensitized to it. No, I absolutely appreciate that, Jordan. I appreciate that. Yeah.

Well, that's also a matter of, of, of rather than thinking and imposing your desire onto the phenomena, which is what you said you were tempted by and you described why, is that you have to let the phenomena speak for itself. And phenomena, by the way, mean shine forth. That's the original derivation of the term. So a phenomena is something that shines forth, right? And it does, in way, mean shine forth. That's the original derivation of the term. So a phenomena is something that shines forth, right? And it does, in fact, attract your attention. And if you pay enough attention, then well,

you'll be rewarded for what you pay. And you'll be rewarded by a glimpse into the structure of things. And that can help you reconcile yourself to the catastrophe of existence itself, right, by peering into that underlying structure. And to feel as a structure, and to feel, as a consequence, in some manner, in harmonious relationship to the cosmos itself, and there isn't

a better prize than that. No, there isn't. That's right. All right, well, for everyone watching and listening, that was a brief walk through the entire structure of cosmological reality, at a relatively low resolution, but in a very interesting manner. And so thank you for taking us on a 90 minute long 13.8 billion year trip. It's much appreciated. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today and to answer all my questions. And to everyone who's watching and listening, your time and attention is always appreciated

and not taken for granted. And to the Daily Wire plus people for making this conversation possible for facilitating it. That's also much appreciated. They bring that all to you, all of you who are listening on YouTube. That's all courtesy of the Daily Wire. That's a big deal on their part, a real public service, as far as I'm concerned. And to the film crew, here in where the hell am I. Oh yes, I'm in Miami, I'm in Miami in Florida. And so, and doing this podcast, I'm gonna continue to speak to Dark Keating for another 30 minutes on the Daily Wire Plus platform

about some of the autobiographical issues that we described. And if you guys are interested in pursuing this conversation further in a more psychological direction, then jump on over to DailyWire Plus. And if you don't have a subscription, consider supporting them. And in any case, thank you very much, Dark Decading. It was wonderful talking to you and to everybody who is listening and watching. Ciao. We'll see you again. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest

Hello everyone, I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.