The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - A dialogue with Brian Keating, at the San Diego Air and Space Museum

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

In mid October the Origins Project Foundation ran two public events in California. The second event was held at the Air and Space Museum in San Diego. I had asked my colleague Brian Keating, who teaches at UCSD and is a Trustee of that museum, whether he might be interested in doing a public dialogue together that we could later both broadcast on our respective podcasts. He and I have each appeared before on each other’s podcasts, and I knew that we could have the kind of comfortable, informative, and fun conversation that might appeal to a live audience, which would make for a different kind of podcast. I am happy to present here the video record of that live-audience podcast, and the Q&A with the audience that was recorded right after it. Brian and I discussed many things, from forefront cosmology, to the nature of teaching and doing research, as viewed by an experimentalist and a theorist respectively, as well as broader questions associated with science in society today. The questions afterwards were equally interesting. I hope you enjoy both as you listen to or watch the podcast. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. Earlier in the fall of last year, the Origins Project Foundation ran two public events in California, in Orange County and subsequently in San Diego at the beautiful Air and Space Museum there. We've already aired the event at Orange County, which was a lecture by me. We have aired it as a special guest event on January 1st. And now I'm very happy to air the second event, which was a dial. with the physicist, the astrophysicist, and podcaster, Brian Keating. Now, Brian's been a guest on my podcast and I've been a guest on his,

and we decided to do a public event in his home stomping ground and then co-posted on both of our podcasts, which we're doing now. And we followed up on our early discussions, and it was a fun and fascinating discussion, as it always is with Brian. We discussed areas of astrophysics and cosmology, science more generally, the difference between being a theorist and an experimentalist are different perspectives, and also perspectives on science education more generally. And then that was followed up with a really interesting question and answer period from the audience.

All of that's included in this podcast, which I hope you'll enjoy. You can watch it commercial free, as always, on the substact site Critical Mass, and proceeds from that go to help support the nonprofit Origins Project Foundation that produces this podcast. And of course, you can also see it on our YouTube channel, the Origins Podcasts YouTube channel. I hope you'll consider subscribing to that as well. Now, however you watch it or listen to it,

and of course you can listen to it on any podcast site, I hopefully enjoy it. It was a lot of fun. And I hope you'll also consider supporting the podcast through the Origins Project Foundation, which produces the public events, the podcast, and also other travel experiences. So happy 2024 with our essentially our first official podcast of the year.

And I think I'm looking forward to many more interesting discussions over the course of the coming months. Take care and enjoy this, I hope. It's great to be here. I'm really thankful for the museum and for Brian. When the Origins Project decided to do some events in California, the last one we did was in Orange County a few days ago. And I contacted Brian. I thought it'd be great to come down here. And Brian, because he's on the board, said, you know, I have a great place, and he arranged for this to happen.

And so it's the first time I've been here, but it is truly an amazing place. And what a place to have this joint podcast, in a sense that we're doing. The Origins Project does do public events every now and then, and this is just a wonderful venue. So I want to thank you and the museum. It's been great. And of course, Andy Orndon, who organized it and helped set up the venue and the VIP reception. It's been a great chance to meet many of you. So it's fun to be with Brian here, and I hope we'll disagree and in chat about science.

And since it's his home turf, I'm going to turn it back to him for the moment. Yeah, one of the things I'm most excited to talk to you about tonight in our signature kind of way where we debate things. I am a what I call a practicing agnostic Jew, which we can get into what actually that means. Lawrence is a devout Bible beating Christian, as you all know, can't get enough of it. We'll talk about religion, we'll talk about politics, all the stuff you're not supposed to. But really, it's soft science with a person who has had a considerable influence, both not my career and my thought process, but on a generation of young people. And I want to start with something that, you know, you can deny paternity, maybe, but I want you to talk about this mysterious substance, which I'm told fills the universe almost without par. And it's called dark energy.

And it's something that you and our friend, mutual friend Mike Turner, really invented, discovered. Let's talk about the scientific process. How do you think of this creation and the fact that it will someday rip all of our molecules apart? How do you? By the way, I appreciate what you say, with the news that you said, I cast a long shadow on science, because I thought that was an interesting way of putting it.

But so dark energy is the biggest mystery in, I think, in fundamental physics, it is the fact that when you take space and get rid of all the particles and all the radiation and everything and just have empty space there, it weighs something. And we don't know why.

It is true. that Mike and I had proposed that it existed. Mostly I did, anyway, and I think I convinced Mike that I was being erratical, because at the time we looked at the data, and all the data of cosmology didn't agree with our picture of cosmology, the standard and rule of cosmology. We knew, we theorists knew way before the observers, and he's an observer, and he's an experimentalist, I'm a theorist.

We'll get into the difference, and there are differences. But we theorists were virtually certain that the universe was flat. That means it's, and the other day in Orange County, I don't think I got to explain what flat was, so I should explain here. It's not flat like a pancake. A flat universe is just one in which the X, Y, and Z axes point in the same direction throughout all the space. If you follow them up, they keep going in straight lines. a curved universe is one that you might imagine

the X, Y, Z axis point here, up there, but somewhere in the distant part of the universe is over here, over there, and over there, and in a say in a closed universe, if you look far enough in that direction, you'll see the back of your head. There are good theoretical reasons, and maybe we'll get to them,

why we thought the universe was flat, but there was a big problem. The observers, being difficult people, did not, weren't finding the universe to be flat. Well, they weren't flying enough matter to make the universe flat because the geometry of the universe depends upon the stuff in it. And you have to have a certain amount of stuff to make a flat universe. And it wasn't the right amount of stuff within a factor three.

And then we looked at all sorts of other observations and it wasn't just not agreeing. And then we realized it in order to make it all agree, you'd have to fill up the universe with another kind of energy, the energy of nothing. And that was so absurd and ridiculous. That's why I love the idea of proposing it. But more important, I did it, and this is really important because we'll probably get to some current issues. At the forefront of science, results are often wrong,

not because the experimentalists are doing, they're doing difficult work. And it's very difficult to measure things, and sometimes the first measurement isn't quite right. And so I was convinced some of the measurements were wrong, and this would be a message for observers to review their data and get it right. And some of the observers, one I remember a guy named Saul Promeuter said,

well, you know, we'll prove you wrong. And it turned out, much to my surprise, more than anyone, that what we predicted was exactly right, that 70% of the energy of the universe resides in empty space. We don't know where the energy came from, why it's there, but it's right. It's exactly the amount we predicted. and those guys won the Nobel Prize for the observation,

which is fine because... No, it is, because the people who convince the world of things are the people who actually measure things. You know, we can talk. I can say it's flat, or I can say there's dark energy, but no one's going to believe it unless the observers in some ways confirm that. And so physics is an empirical science.

It's an experimental science, and it's led by experimentalists. I say that as a theorist. But in any case, so it turned out to be right, and I was very surprised, but we don't know if it's constant, if it's going to stay there. Brian said it's going to tear us apart.

Only, see, if the dark energy is there, one of two things can happen. It could just stay there, which is my bet, by the way, just stay there, not change. And then it would be something that's akin to something Einstein invented called a cosmological constant, a fundamental lowest energy state of the universe.

or it could go away one day and we talk about how that's happened earlier in the history of the universe, something very much like it, or it could increase. Now if it increases, then dark energy has this weird property that it's gravitationally repulsive.

All of you who studied physics know that gravity sucks, okay? It always pulls in. If you put energy in empty space, it blows. Okay, and it causes the expansion of universe to accept. And that's what the observers saw and others looking at supernovae first measured. But if it's constant, it causes the universe to accelerate.

But it really only impacts on the evolution of the universe on the largest scales. That's why we never observed it before. You have to look at the motion of distant galaxies. But if it's increasing, its effect becomes more and more important on smaller and smaller scales. So right now it's pulling apart galaxies. The galaxies aren't being pulled apart. our galaxy is the same size and it's not growing

even due to the expansion of the universe but if the dark energy increases eventually that repulsive force will blow apart the galaxy and then if it keeps increasing it'll ball part the solar system and then it'll blow apart planets and then it'll eventually blow apart atoms

and it eventually will blow apart space itself it's called the Big Rip a former student invented the name it's a nice name I think there's no I would say there's no theoretical reason to expect that at all. There's no theory that suggests that that dark energy will increase. It's a cute thing that the, you know, captured a lot of people's imagination,

but it's not likely. The likelihood is it either it's staying the same or quite possibly it may not be a fundamental energy of empty space. There may be somehow energy being stored in empty space and it may go away and that would change everything, including our lot, well, including life. Yeah, but this won't happen for several billion or perhaps trillion a year or so, keep paying your taxes. And do show up tomorrow and Saturday night. You don't know because we don't understand it. It could happen tomorrow.

The great thing about it is if it happens, we won't know it. We won't know it until it hits us and we won't be there afterwards. The effect will happen at the speed of light. And so we will go away before we even knew we got hit. So it doesn't matter. Enjoy life. Have it, you know. Yep.

Get your tickets tomorrow for Saturday night. So thinking about that, and actually we're going to have a lot of friends. That's Southwest 237 flying overhead. We'll wait a second here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you think about the differences between observers, experimentalists, theorists, I find like a lot of my students don't really comprehend the subtleties between those.

But I think one thing is, you know, right over there, they put up a great image of Earth's nearest neighbor, the moon. and that's a view that humanity never had for thousands of years until some Dutch guy took his spectacles and broke him in two and put one in front of the other and then Galileo, or my hero, at least, I'm sure you're also beholding to him for intellectual debt.

He turned it to the moon, and no one had ever done that before. Never looked up with a telescope until Galileo, essentially. And he saw up... Yeah, that's right. Well, yeah, I mean, my neighbor was quite, quite attracted. Anyway, looking at the most... And even now, you can see it. You can use something built by a human being. You can observe something. Then you can take that observation and use it to test a hypothesis. One hypothesis that Galileo tested was whether or not that ball was actually perfectly smooth and crystalline and ideal in its form. And when he saw it wasn't that it had mountains and it had valleys and it had holes in it and all sorts of crazy stuff, he could use that to formulate a hypothesis. And he said famously, I love this quote. He said, a scientist should measure. what is measurable and then make measurable what is not yet so.

I've always been curious. What do you think is the minimum amount of knowledge that, A, an educated layperson, and some of you are brilliant laypeople, but what do you think an educated layperson should know about science? And two, what should a theoretician, like those that you train, know versus, say, an experimentalist, such as someone in my laboratory, building telescopes? Now, let me preface this by saying, physics being the most advanced of the sciences in some ways is probably, is one of the, is not the only science, but one of the only sciences where

it's so complicated, there's so much intellectual baggage that it has, in most areas of physics, separated into theorists and experimentalists, because what you need to do to be a good experimentalist in terms of the cutting edge technology that you have to master requires a great deal of time. And similarly, the mathematical baggage that you need to understand fundamental science and physics is also extreme. So you don't see theorists and experiments. In my opinion, the last great theorist experimentalist was Enrico Fermi, who at University of Chicago. If you saw that movie Oppenheimer, you would have seen Fermi. He's a huge hero of mine. And he was a theorist. In fact, and an experiment list equally well, and he proposed the fundamental theory, one of the fundamental

theories that later ended up describing one of the forces of nature and then did experiments on it and won the Nobel Prize, I think, for his experiments. But anyway, that was the last time you could sort of do that, so it's sort of separated. In terms of the fundamental stuff that people should know, I really think that what we really to teach is not the stuff that you should know, but the process by which you know it. And that's the one thing that I think is most important for people to carry on. You know, the details of science are fascinating for me and you. And I think for most people, once they realize it's science, you know, a lot of people don't realize they're interested in science because they don't know

it's science. That's one of the reason I wrote the Star Trek book, okay, because, you know, I go to a party and say, I'm a physicist and they go, how about those Yankees or something? And then, and then I'd say, talk about time travel or warp drive, and people are fascinated. But so that's great. And it really is amazing. And I guess people should, of course, the basic things people should understand about the world is that there was a big bang. The universe is expanding.

Evolution happened. Basic stuff like that. But more important, the process by which we get that information, the process by which we test it, because that's the tool, those are the tools that people will carry with them in all of the areas, aspects of life. And if we just used the scientific method, then politics and, well, even religion, but politics would be more sensible and more rational because people would test the ideas of politicians. And I say, are they telling the truth?

But politicians might also develop policies based on empirical evidence and also be able to change their minds. Do a policy. It's not working. We're going to change our minds. Wouldn't that be wonderful? So I think that's the kind of thing that we really need to teach. I wish, as a theorist, I've, of course, come to appreciate experimentalists much more than I did when I was a student. Theorists, you know, like Oppenheimer, right? It's the sexy stuff. It's Einstein.

And so somehow theorists have captured people's imaginations and the tinkerers, if you wish, aren't usually the heroes of the movies, but they're the heroes of science. And I kind of wish I as a student appreciated that. I more. I actually did a degree in mathematics and a degree in physics. And I did that for a variety of reasons. But one of the reasons was so I could get out of the laboratory requirement in physics. Okay. And so, but over time, of course, I've come to appreciate that.

And as a theorist, actually, I used to be a very mathematical theorist when I was a student, a graduate student. And then a friend of mine who, you know, Sheldon Glashire, who won the Nobel Prize, I remember when I was a student, he once said to me, there's formalism and there's physics, and you have to know the difference. And from that time on, I've always, in my physics, tried to tie it to things you can measure and see.

And that's become fundamental to me and to try and understand what observers can do and experimentalists can do. And in my life, I've tried to propose new experiments because it's fascinating to learn about new technologies because every time we open a new window on the universe, we're surprised. So I think if people realize the significance of that, that would be very important.

But it's not the facts. It's the process, it's the tools. And I do think everyone should, the problem with you know this, if you're in a physics lab, it's just like first year physics is boring and all. Anyway, it's things sliding down inclined planes. But experimentally, it's also these recipe things. you know, here's the stuff and you do this.

And it's not, it would be great if we could design experiments that people could discover, not know what the answer was going to be, discover, because that's really, when you're playing, that's what's really, really, but I think, you know, sometimes I you'll hate this praise, Lawrence, I know, but I think we should teach the controversy. And by that, I don't mean what you're thinking about, but I mean, you just mentioned this boring, rolling down an inclined plane.

Well, you know who came up at the formalism for that. It's my hero. We already mentioned him, Galileo. It was his final book. He was discussing relatively, timidding. He was discussing how things in relative motion cannot determine who is truly moving and who is stationary. If you're a fish in the ocean

next to a boat and the boat has an aquarium on it and there's a twin fish of yours and they're swimming, you cannot tell relative motion who is moving. He also used a genius trick by using this inclined plane that we call it to slow the force of gravity. Back then

they didn't have clocks. You couldn't measure things. You had your pulse, you had an hourglass. You you know have been I've been not only have been a conference

hosted a conference in his prison house and that's the controversy because I want to say that if you talk like the museum

that the science everyone goes to the art museum in Florence but go to the Museum of Science of Lawrence

they have the inclined plane they have a little telescope which you just cannot see how he did

and I think they have his finger that's in a different museum but yes it's his middle middle finger I was about to do it but I won't do it

just to that plane making noise over it What I'd say is imagine you taught people this, that Galileo's manuscript was smuggled out under penalty of death. That that manuscript that we talk about, if we told out to freshmen and sophomores when we teach the first-year students, I think it would make it more engaging. I think we do a terrible job. We've been given the greatest script ever made. I mean, the greatest story ever ever told is your book, right?

But the greatest script ever handed or bestowed upon humanity is the story of science. And we are the worst actors on any stage imaginable, I feel. We need to do a better job. Well, everything I know, I need to be... No, I agree with you. I actually require my students, especially the non-science students, to read Galileo. I always, you know, would photocopy because he doesn't have the copyright anymore anyway. I'd photocopy parts of the book.

And I, because it read, I've often said this, it's, we force these students to read like James Joyce. But Galileo is easier to read and funnier and poetic. And so I really, I'm a huge fan of Galileo's, and I do think it'd be great for students to me because you see how these things which see, as you say, seem boring out, how he was thinking and seeing the thought process. And when he was wrong, and when he was wrong too, great scientists, great women, great men make great mistakes, brilliant blunders, right? Yeah, no, no. So it's, but you're absolutely right. The reason we do in Climb Plains is because it's too hard when you drop something. it travels. It accelerates so fast. That's why Aristotle thought, you know, things immediately got

their final velocity. And he said, well, if I do it on a climb plane, it'll slow things down, but I can watch them accelerate. And it was the basis of modern science. And, yeah, he's at the top. I wonder if there will be new, not only new teachers for upcoming students, but new students and new ways of thinking, and I'm thinking particularly of large language models, of artificial intelligence. You talk about this in your latest book, The Edge of Knowledge, hold it up so people can go to Amazon, you know,

when they're not getting my book. You were going to have the flux, dueling plugs. We'll see. We'll see. And that is artificial intelligence. And I wonder how you react to this state. When I think of what Einstein, who was a successor

to Galileo in many, many ways, not like that prick Newton, who you written about as a real juror. And I learned that from your writing. But Einstein said, yeah, that's right. The only thing that could shut me out. So, good old Albert, he said that he had his happiest experience, his happiest thought ever, was that somebody in free fall would experience no gravitational force. And that led him to construct the Einstein equivalence principle and everything in GR follows from that. But you know, what people don't realize is that he said that, but he said that the only time his heart ever had palpitations, and this is what's important. I mean,

I think Einstein was sort of working this vacuum. They all think, you know, theorophysis are alone at night just coming up with things, but he was tied to observation and experiment. And the moment that he wrote down this beautiful theory, but that didn't give him palpitations, even though it was beautiful. And he once said, you knew it couldn't be wrong because it was so beautiful. But although most theorists say that

about their own work and most of them are wrong. But he said, when he did the calculation for general relativity and discovered something called the perihelion of Mercury, Mercury's orbit sort of rotates

very slowly, a few seconds of arc per century. But no one could understand that Newton's laws didn't give it. And he did the calculation in general relativity and it came up with the exact number that people had observed.

that's when he said he had heart palpitations and almost fainted. It was realizing that he, you know, it agreed with observation. And that, so physics isn't done in this vacuum. It depends on the observations at the time. Very, very rarely theorist lead, but, you know, even Einstein wasn't, was certainly a product of stuff. And his earlier theory, special relativity, people, I hate the way it's taught in schools. And I've written in my books of different ways of teaching it.

because of planes. Tried to get that to reroute traffic just for tonight, but they said we're too loud. But, you know, everyone says, okay, the speed of light is a constant. In fact, I got asked by someone the other day, and Orange County, what if we find the speed of light isn't constant or something?

He didn't just say, oh, the speed of light is constant, and therefore the world is crazy. What he realized was two things. In fact, it's good you mentioned Galileo. Galileo told us just what you just said, Galilean relativity. If you're on a plane and the windows are closed, need to show up a ball, you don't know you're moving.

We don't know. We think we're standing still, but we're moving at 30 kilometers per second around the sun. We feel like we're staying still because Galileo told us there's no experiment you can do that will tell if you're moving or standing still, if you're moving in a constant velocity or standing still. I say you're moving, you say, I'm moving it doesn't matter.

That's Galilean relativity. It's true. It's been tested. James Clerk Maxwell developed electromagnetism, this theory of electromagnetism, and for reasons I won't go into right now, but I could, but I'm not going to. It turns out the theory of electromagnetism

is our prototypical, most beautiful theory we have in physics almost. It was inconsistent with Galileo. You couldn't have Maxwell and Galileo at the same time. And it was thinking about that that forced him to the theory of relativity. The only way

to make Galileo and Maxwell consistent was to do crazy things to space and time. So he was driven to it by thinking, about the observations of the time. So if Einstein had been born, you know, Maxwell was like 50 years before Einstein, if he'd been born 80 years earlier,

he wouldn't have been Einstein. Okay. One of my favorite anecdotes about Einstein is that he was offered the presidency of Israel. And can you imagine what kind of a career he could have had if he was the president of Israel? But I wanted to be one point about this and get your reaction to it.

So here's Einstein, he's saying you're free fall, you can't deal. deal this gravitational force that you're in motion. And it was this delightful, visceral experience that he had, how can my iPhone running chat GPT, as it often is, how can it experience heart palpitations? How can it have a happiest thought? How can it visualize the sensation of free fall? What I'm getting at, can we have, and I asked this of your friend, Nomschomsky, when he was a, you know, Can you have creativity of a physical variety that without embodiment? Well, no, in fact, again, I was talking about this the other day.

I think it's quite likely, and I talk about it in the new book, I think it's quite likely that systems, AI systems, if they ever could be self-aware and conscious, will not be able to do it unless they have feelings, and feelings will require sensors that can sense the outside world and the internal state of the system. That's what's developed in us. It's a homeostatic system. We can start at sensing pain and pleasure, but beyond that, we sense the world.

And then those physical feelings turned into emotional feelings. And I think it's quite likely that you won't see a chat GPT or a static regurgitational system that can't sense the world. Now, can you sense the world through the internet? Maybe at some level. But I do think that, that consciousness, that self-awareness, requires that, that, that, um, connection to the world. The interesting question is whether it'll become an emotional connection or not.

And, and who knows? Can you have emotions or emotions independent? If you could choose between one or the other emotions or visceral sensations, what would you treat out? I mean, it's, we do know that amoebas don't have, you know, don't feel. That's Stephen Hawking and it didn't have the ocean thing. I debate this, you know, uh, we don't. with some neuroscientists, my dog. And I was just, actually, tonight there's a podcast

dropping with Robert Sopolsky on our podcast from his new book about free will. And Sibolsky agrees with me. Our dogs, you know, have emotions and feel bad and good. I'm convinced of it. Not just Levi, but hold on. Well, who knows what cats are thinking.

They were bigger, they would eat us, right? Are, yeah, you can't tell what cats are thinking. So what if you were a beginning, Right now or smart undergraduate. There's some here tonight, and there's even some, you know, pre-freshment over there. I see some of the young people over there. The youngster, the future is right there. What excites you about science nowadays?

You were starting off. Somebody asks you, what would you do? A 20-year-old started getting into science, brilliant, smart, whatever, has the gifts, privilege, whatever. What do you advise them to do? Well, you know, of course, I advise them to do what they like to do, which is the first thing, because they're not going to be good at unless they enjoy it. But one thing is that I, one of the things I would tell them to think about, which I unfortunately, well, I did what I did,

but when I was growing up, my mother wanted me be a doctor, of course, and I thought I was going to be a doctor, and I took biology in high school, and I dropped it after two weeks, because we dissected frogs and memorized the parts of frogs. Wait, wait a second. A Jewish mother wanted you to be a doctor? Old?

Not only if she wanted me to be a doctor. doctor I think I've told this story I might when I got my first job at Harvard which was the best job in the country at the time my mother phoned up my my first wife at the time that day when I was out of there and said he can still become a doctor and anyway she was for a long time but anyway so I went in the biology class and it was memorizing the parts of a frog and I aid the reason I like physics is you don't have to memorize anything in principle and and and so

So I feel cheated in a way because, of course, DNA had been discovered, you know, I was a child of this, at that age in the 60s, and DNA had been discovered a decade earlier, but of course in high school, it usually takes 20 to 30 years to get into the books. And I didn't realize what an incredibly exciting field it is. So nowadays, in fact, when I was doing my PhD, I did at MIT, as one does, I think, and because when I hope one does, I got discouraged many times. I think students should get discouraged. If they're not getting discouraged, then they're not really pushing the edge of the envelope.

And I thought of doing, and my mother would have been thrilled, I thought of doing a joint MD PhD, which you could do at Harvard, MIT. And so I went to the cousin of a friend of mine who was a chair of cell biology, I was going to do biophysics. You know, I liked fundamental physics, but I was getting so discouraged. So I went to see him, and this was in 1980, 81, maybe late 70s, early 80s. And I said to him, you know, should I do this? And he said, don't do biophysics. And I said, why?

And he said, because it's not of interest to biologists and it's not of interest to physicists. That was true in 1979. But now it's really one of the most exciting forefront areas of physics, because biology is becoming an area where physicists are learning to study physical processes. And, of course, the tools of physics are being used. in biology. So it's an incredibly exciting area. So I would not, I would say, you know, and of course genetics and genomics and combinatorics and genetics and we're along with AI, an incredibly exciting area. And the disciplines of the 19th century disciplines are disappearing. So the interface

between physics and biology is disappearing. And so I would argue that there's a whole spectrum from biology to fundamental physics, and in the kind of physics that, if you ask me, what are the sort of growth areas? One is manipulating quantum systems. We can manipulate quantum systems like we could never do before. Some of it involves quantum computers. Some of it involves making new materials

that might do just what you wanted to do. Of course, astrophysics and cosmology are growth areas because we have all these new tools. But ultimately, though, I think, you know, I would come back and say, What, well, I would say try a bunch of things. When students ask me whether they should go to graduate school, I often say, go to a school that has a lot of different programs

so you can see what you might like. And I often say it's more important who you work with than what you work on because your advisor and you develop the relationship. Since we're in the Air and Space Museum, the best one in the world, I want to run a topic by you. This is a sign called the Von Carmen line, which is loosely defined. People are here more expert than me, but it's loosely defined as a boundary between space and the Earth's atmosphere.

And it seems to me that, you know, kind of the most pressing problems that are being approached by physicists, and you worked on some of these, all happen below the Von Carmen line. And I'm talking about nuclear war. I'm talking about pandemics that spread their atmosphere transmission, and climate change. So you've written books on at least two or the three of these things. I await your biophysics book, which is undoubtedly being worked on as we speak.

But of these things, can you rank them as, does what you were, I should say, the chairman of the board of atomic science, of the bulletin of atomic scientists, which is one of the foremost agencies founded by Oppenheimer and the self. And what keeps you up at night? I mean, I often say, you know, the problem with physics is that we save the world. You know, we created the atomic bomb. But that's not clear of it. I'm deeply regretted it. Oppenheimer had some regrets.

It's not really clear exactly what he regretted. You and Shelley Glashow written about this. Pandemics. Let's talk about that. I mean, science has made the world a better place. To deny that, I think, is ridiculous. People this audience are alive who would not be alive to be here 100 years ago, if a word for science.

And more people eat and are able to survive and live a higher quality of life because of science. We could do amazing things. We can communicate around the world. We can experience things. We could never experience. Someone with a phone in even a poor village and in Africa experienced parts of the world they never could experience before. Where most people in the world never, for most of human history, never walk more than 10 kilometers from where they live. So, yeah.

And of course, along with technology. technology can come problems. And how we address that is unfortunately not a scientific question. It's a political question. So the politics of dealing with these questions is much harder than the scientific ones. The technologies of dealing with climate change are much easier to consider than the politics of implementing it. I don't, I never rank things. And all of those things concern me.

I think nuclear war is still, in my mind, the, the, the most immediate and and it gets poor, well, maybe now it's not, but it, it, it amazes me that people sort of don't, well, I'll tell you how it happens. Every time, as you, as you know, I may know, you know, I wrote, I written for lots of newspapers over the years. And every time I wrote an article about nuclear war or nuclear weapons, it had the least response of any of any of the pieces I wrote. I think people don't want to think about it, but people don't realize that there are it right now at least a thousand warheads in the United States and Russia that are on trigger hair alert, ready to be launched if a perceived signal of another launch is perceived. And that also,

as people did learn when that guy was president a few years ago, that the commanding, the, the command and control infrastructure in this country, such the only person who can issue a launch for, order to launch to go because this is the president. And no other organization, no, it doesn't have to go by anyone else. There's no other individual who can, who could override that, unless they decide the president's crazy. But in the actual organization, there's no, there's no, other people, it's going to say, hold on. So I do think it's amazing. It's amazing that we've been around for 70 some odd years. without the use of nuclear weapons and maybe mutually assured destruction

is part of the reason, but it's a problem, and it's a problem we can address, but it's a political problem. But, you know, saying that scientists create the problem, you know, Steve Pinker had a great analogy. He said it's like,

it's like blaming architects for Dockhal. You know, he had to have architects to design the concentration camps. Is our concentration camps a necessary product of architecture? No. And so I think it's really, you have to think about it carefully before you point those fingers. Before, I want to ask you a question, though, for a second.

You asked me what people should know. People should know when to stop talking about. But my wife tells me that all the time, actually. But what do you think people should? As an experimentalist, do you think people should, you know, what do you think people should know in, in some of science in school? I mean, I think for me, the most important things that people should have as a scientist, first of all, I don't speak to that first, is humility. But I don't think you can only have humility. I think you need a little bit of, I call it swagger, maybe it's arrogance, that you

can actually attempt to take on problems that even Einstein was unable to solve. And hopefully, you know, maybe even people in his room can approach and solve it. It's not an exclusive sect of a high priesthood that can't be approached except by the ordained members of a certain sect. But I also think that we should also not fool ourselves. We're mostly wrong. I mean, it's amazing how much we've been

able to do, you know, to gum. And in a few decades to, you know, from the first transistor, if you look at the first transistor in bedded in 1956, the first practical transistor, Shockley, Bardeen, etc. It looks like the following, say, go and get some bazooka bubble gum,

chew it up and go down to the dry cleaner and get a wire hanger and stick it together on a piece of rock. And that's exactly what it looks like. And now each one of you has 14 billion of them in your pocket right now, except for maybe the kids, but maybe, you know, maybe they even do now. I probably do. And they know how to use it better than you do, actually. That's right. When I first got worried about technology when one of my kids was looking at me and I was just staring into her beautiful eyes. It was only a three-year-old could have this perfect, innocent thing.

and then she reached up to touch me. And I was welling up to tears and then she tried to swipe and change that, change my image. But I think that we should know that, you know, you need to be, we need to be humble. We're often wrong, but the progress gets made, you know, exponentially. And we just are not capable of thinking with our linear limited brains of the pace of change. And I think that is the hardest thing. I think scientists, the public should know that a good scientist should often say,

as your tutor, as your mentor, Richard Feynman said. You know, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the knowledge, not the wisdom, but the ignorance. That actually Lawrence wouldn't have been able to create this concept of dark energy. Had someone gotten to it first or been right that there actually is no such thing as dark energy, so you've doubted that person, it was Einstein at one point, and you proved that wrong or you conjecture that he indeed may be wrong. I think that's incredibly powerful that you have to,

realize science is done by people and human beings despite the contrary, right? Yeah, and I, you know, the first, I said it the other day, the first three words in the book are the most important words in science or I don't know. But actually what we really should get across, you've made a good point. Most ideas are wrong. Most experiments are wrong when they're first done. And that's okay. The press never gets that. I was, I was castigating the press the other day. Because they all, you know, someone gets an absurd result and their university press office sends it out.

And then simply because most papers don't have enough money to have science reporters anymore, the science reporters just take the press release and publish it. And it's nonsense. And you read it as a scientist and you know it's nonsense. And then it's wrong, but no one ever writes that story later on. They just show another result that disagrees with it. And it gives people the idea that science,

is fattish, it's hard. If it was, if it was, if, if you weren't wrong most of the time, anyone could do science. I mean, that's, but, but anyone can do science, right? I mean, it shouldn't be this exclusive thing that's only populated by Einstein. And it doesn't mean that you guys can all go out there, you know, Einstein says a lot of things, right? One of the things he says was imagination is more important than all. But, you know, I don't know about you.

When I go to my, you know, gastroenterologist, I don't want to say, I'm going to try this new procedure I've been waiting to church. Would you mind if I imagine it on? No, but I do think it's, it is important to have, we don't want, people mistake this. They, they, everybody, have you heard famously, Eisenhower's farewell address where he warned about the dangers of a, what did he talk about?

He talked about military industrial conflict. That very same farewell speech, he warned about the dangers of a technological scientific elite that would do things to promote their own interests and keep a shield. And I often say that you and I, as every scientist who's paid by the public, has a moral obligation to share what he or she does, not to be professional communicators like, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or, you know, Mitch Oku or whoever you like, Jan 11 or somebody, but but should give back to some proportion of what they receive from the public. I wouldn't say it moral. I might say ethical. I might maybe a political responsibility.

But, you know, look, I've spent a lot of my life explaining science. and I enjoy doing it. But I don't think, I think, I actually think what young science, because the young people who want to do what I'm doing say, say how can I do what you're doing? And I always say to them, do good science. If you're a young scientist and you're a good scientist, what you should do is spend your time on science.

Now, if you're interested in reaching the public and explaining things, the more science you do, the better, more opportunities you'll have to then reach out. But I think most scientists actually do. do want to but feel uncomfortable. It's very the first time you talk out. Academia is a very safe environment. People that pretend it isn't, but it is.

It's an ultimately self-invain, it's the safest environment. And so when you go out in the public, it can be terrifying, and I understand that. And so I don't think everyone should be in fact, I remember with the National Science Foundation once had some requirement. When I was chair

of case, where you went, young faculty have come in, they'd apply for these awards from the National Science Foundation, and they'd have to have a part of their plan, which was an outreach plan. Now, I'm a big believer in outreach. But this was nonsense, because these people were post talks. They'd never been involved in outreach. They were really interested in doing their work, and they'd come up with these cockamamie plans, none of which ever happened.

And I think forcing them to do that is crazy. There are people who are talented at it and naturally like to do it like anything else and we'll do a good job. But there are many my colleagues. I would far prefer not have a, the public would be better off if they didn't hear them. So we talked about a lot of things. A few more minutes, the two of us can check about. Pre-requisite for most podcasts, talk about AI, but also talk about something that has those two letters, AI, and that's aliens. I haven't talked to you about this very much.

I'm going to do, I'm going to doing an event in New York on December 1st, not debating because I stopped debating UFO people, but I'm having a dialogue with a guy named Nick Pope. Isn't he the inspiration for someone on the X-Files or something? I mean, I may have been Maldor Scully. I hope it was, I hope it was Scully and not Moldar, but anyway. Well, let's talk about that. So one thing that's always bemused me, maybe, is the fact that the public's fascination did sort of start to, you know, initiate around the time of the attack. atomic bomb program right after and it was in the same part of the country. Roswell is not far from Alamagordo and from Los Alamos. So what do you make of this recent resurgence given, what do you make of the testimony in the Indiana?

And one of my friends is here tonight, a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy who did a podcast with another fighter pilot who claims to have encountered certain things or have eyewitness reports about that. What do you make about it? Well, I'll tell you what Feynman said, and I've always subscribed to this, He said, I think, you know, UFOs are aliens, UFOs being attributed to aliens. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. So you see something up in the sky, you don't know what it is, it's immediately aliens.

Okay. Now, let me give two aspects that. What Feynman said is I think UFOs are more likely, and the other day I was explaining the audience that physicists say more likely or less likely. But UFOs are much more likely due to the known irrationality of humans rather than the unknown rationality of aliens. And he said that because if you think about it, and I guess one of my books, I think beyond Star Trek, I talked about this a great length, almost anything you can think of, regardless of how absurd it may seem as an explanation of what people may see out there is more likely than its aliens coming here to Earth. So almost anything you can think of is more likely the laws of physics are such, the known laws of physics, forget the unknown laws of physics. forget the unknown laws of physics. The known laws of physics put constraints

that make it so unlikely that anything you could think of as like the magic bullet and the Kennedy assassination. Anything is more likely than it, that it's aliens. And the way I like to think of it this way, to come for an alien spaceship

powered by fuel inside the spaceship, to come here from a distant star, a nearest light speed, would require harnessing essentially the power output of a star. I have a hard toned I'm thinking they come all the way here to abduct patients of some Harvard psychiatrist and do kinky experiments on them.

I mean, it just seems like a big waste of time to me. So it's almost 8 o'clock. Yeah, let me ask you one question. It's almost 8 o'clock. We should end. I keep losing my microphone. Okay. I do want to ask you one question, an experimental question, because you got to ask me a bunch

here, but I did want to say, what experimentally, and it gives you a chance to maybe talk about your own work too, but what experiment? experimentally do you think is the next, what technology is going to be most useful in your area physics or in physics in general that you're aware of? Yeah. So, you know, I'm a experimental cosmologist, which means I build universes in the Labrida. Now, I don't build universes. We build telescopes that have technology to do it like Galileo did with the telescope to reveal things deeper and farther and more exotic than what we could perceive close to home. And the project that I'm privileged to be leading is called the Simon's Observatory, which is a $100 million

bus experiment in the high Atacama Desert of Chile, where we are going to attempt to be the first instrument to do something that's never been done before, which is to measure the actual spark that ignited the Big Bang and ensure some properties in common with dark energy that Lawrence mentioned earlier. But it could provide a whole host of cosmic observables that would answer a lot of questions that cosmologists and late people have had. And one of my philosophies as an advisor to my students is reach, you know, reach for the stars, as Casey Kaysen said, but keep your feet on the ground. And that to me means do something really ambitious, like measure what actually banged,

who banged, she bang? No, no, I don't know if she banged. But, yeah, we'll keep it clean. It's her famous pops on. But the question is, is there something safe that you also get no matter what? And for us, that's measuring the mass of these ghostly particles called nintrinos that we've known about for 100 years. This is neat, but I would like you, but what I really would like you to do because these are, you see now people say this is great. But why don't you say how you're going to do it?

I think that's really neat because, you know, what technology, you know, I know, but I think it's worth explaining what you're, what the Simon's observant. So I'll do a little demo here. So I brought a handy dandy flashlight, which you can hopefully see in the back. I won't blind you. It has a blinding mode, which is kind of cool. If Lawrence gets out of hand, I'll blow. Sorry, I didn't mean to blast you. So if you have a light source, you can use that light source to illuminate everything,

not only about where the light source itself was created, but everything it encounters along the way. Here it's my finger or here it's this vodka Coke. No, no, it's just plain Coke. And so you can learn about it by knowing something about the source of life and its primitive state, and then how it has been transformed by the medium, the material along its path. If you can detect it.

So we build the most sensitive detectors ever made that can see literally this flashlight on the moon in appropriate units from here on the planet Earth. We don't have to launch a satellite. It's not like the Webb telescope. It's much less expensive, although pretty expensive. And we cool down these ultrarsensitive detectors instead of your eye, Galileo's eye,

looking through a telescope, We look through telescopes with very, very sensitive, highly sophisticated quantum devices called superconducting ballometer. And we build those here in San Diego. We ship them down to Chile. They just set up their first astronomical image of the moon. And if you saw it, you'd be hardly impressed because it just looks like almost like a bell curve, and that's about it. But that's the first wispy indications that we are on the right track to actually unveil both the properties of the extremely early universe and then the late universe, neutrinos. exotic particles, forces, fields, energy, and matter.

And what's really fun is we get paid to really, not to prove people like Lawrence right, but to actually prove everybody else wrong, perhaps. And then the last woman or man standing, that theory is the one that for a provisional period of time is entitled to enjoy some attention until some other theory comes along and experiment to supplant it. So to be, it's the most exciting time to be.

There's many other telescopes, Severe Rubin, Nancy Grace observatories, either space and ground, respectively. The theorist, I mean, this would happen, as I say, well after I graduated. But the other thing that's worth important saying to the students and everyone else, too, is I certainly learned a lot more physics after I got my PhD than I did before. And I learned a lot about experimental physics because to me it fascinates me. And I remember before you were even a student at case, talking, about the importance of billometers, and we proposed billometers to look for dark matter, and it was amazing to me to see what you could do with superconducting technology and billometers. But by the same token, that's why I'm a theorist, because that was 40 years ago,

and then all the experiments that have to work for 40 years, and I just have to write the paper in 1985, and I could go do something else. So we're going to break for a little bit. So this is actually from an 11-year-old who asked, a good question. are any of the meteorites you handed out radioactive? And do you don't have any thoughts about that?

So meteorite radioactivity. Well, what's interesting about it is that they were sort of formed thanks to a nuclear processes, a radioactive process, well, not radioactive, but nuclear processes. Now when a star of a certain size, a certain girth gets to the end of its lifetime, it no longer can support its massive body that it's built up over billions of years. and something called a type 2 supernova occurs where the material that makes up the outer layers no longer is supported by the pressure,

the weight of the outer material, no longer is supported by the heat, the heat pressure, keeping the nuclear fires going. And that happens when it makes iron. When the star makes, fuses two lighter nuclei together to make iron, silicon, I think, our silicon oxygen, you make iron 56,

and that is no longer exothermic, doesn't give off energy, and then the star collapses and then explodes back in the most luminous explosions since the Big Bang and these could be seen from across the entire universe essentially. So this material is billions of years old because it's a material that was made the last thing the star ever did.

It's like, what's the last thing that goes through a flies vine before it dies on your windshield? It's bud. Get it? Okay. Anyway, this material is mostly iron. So it's not radioactive. and it is a pristine material that shares something in common with your blood because the iron in your blood came from the same supernova process that produced these iron meteorites.

So this stuff is magnetic. It is not radioactive and you should play around with it if you're so inclined and you will not get endangered. My word is a doctor, I'm a doctor, by the way. Well, let me make a slight correction there. Everything is radioactive. And so there's radioactivity coming from your big toe. Small amounts of it, trace amounts of reactivity everywhere. One of the big problems in making particle physics,

new experiments to look at things like dark matter, is to get rid of the radioactivity. It's really hard because we're looking for events that are so, so rare that if there's a little bit of radioactivity in this big tank, then it'll overwhelm the thing we're looking. looking for. So even if, and I think I once, a book I wrote again, well, yeah, before you were an undergraduate. I are, in fact, we were looking for things in dark matter detectors, we're looking for events that are a beta, but a million times smaller in rate than the

radioactivity in your big toe. And so there's a little bit of radio activity and everything, and that's okay. Even if it's just impurities. It depends on, uh, on, um, on things and so, you know, and there's also stuff coming from up there, cosmic rays, so I have a little Goghia character I like to take with me around places to see when I was up at Greenland looking and stuff. But anyway, so there's a little bit of radio activity,

but nothing, but this is iron, which in general is not a radio act. The dominant stuff here is the, is iron, which is the most stable, in some ways, the most stable of the heavy elements at all. Okay. This one we can both answer too, I think. Maybe I'll start. Brendan asks, if aliens were to exist, how much more intelligent than us would they be,

or could they reach us even with less intelligence? The answer to the first question is we don't know. We have no idea if they exist, whether they're more intelligent or less intelligent or intelligent. The ones were, if they're far less intelligent, we have much less likely. of finding out about them, because the way that other aliens would find out about us and why most of the universe doesn't know we exist is they'd look for the radio transmissions that we've emitted. And we've only been doing that for 100, 150 years. And that means since it traveled to speed light, if you're more than 150 light years away from us, which is most

of the galaxy, you know, there's nothing special about the earth. So we might learn about other kinds of life, but in telling life we'd require to be at least technological, at least as technological as us. Now, one might say, and I'm going to only talk a little bit, because you can add, one of the things we'd say is, look, our sun is only four and a half billion years old. Our Earth is four and a half billion years old, our solar system. And the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. So you might say that most stars are a lot older than our sun. and a lot of them are. And therefore, civilizations could be billions of years older than us.

And that's true, maybe, but the problem is, in order to have the iron that Brian was just talking about, stars have to explode. In order to have all the materials that make up the earth, stars had to explode, and it takes time. And so in the early history of our galaxy, there wasn't, there were many heavy elements that would make up rocky planets. It takes time. and there are many you can argue that

most of the atoms in your body went through maybe 10 different stellar explosions before the one that may have produced us now and that takes time so it could be that there aren't many more civilizations that are as old as us because it took 4 billion years

for intelligence to arise on Earth and so we but the neat thing is we don't know and in a situation like that the only way to find out is to look and let the universe tell us. And if we don't, as Carl Sagan would say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It just means you have to build a better experiment. And Brian knows all about that. Not seeing something often means you just have to do a better job. And technology improves at a great rate so you can. Anyway, you can add to that. Yeah, I mean, I would just say if you plotted the history of the universe and you plotted intelligence, even on Earth, there was a long, maybe dominant portion of Earth's history

when dolphins were more intelligent than the Denisovans and Australopithecai and all sorts of other things, or their predecessors maybe, because they've been around longer than human beings or homo sapiens, sapien, have been around for. So the question is not maybe more or less intelligent, but technological. Because no matter what, the dolphins can keep evolving, but you're not going to do, you know, build a falcon heavy underwater. You're not going to do melergy. You're not going to have technology without the opposable thumbs that we have.

So they may be even more intelligent things than us in the universe, although there's zero evidence for that right now. I think that's the best thing we can say. We don't know. But these things that manipulate space and time to get here, they are subject to the fundamental laws of physics, thermodynamics, et cetera, which we have great confidence will never be overturned. But I think there is a fallacy that because there's so many stars out there,

you and I've talked about this, there has to be life. And I told you, and you've been to Antarctica or Canada, I don't know which one is colder, you're from Canada, but I've been there. There's very little life there. Well, there's a lot of the extreme. What we've learned is there's life in extreme environments you'd never imagine there'd be life yet.

In acid, in boiling water, and coal. Life seems to be able to fill every niche that's possible. So, in fact, I suspect strongly, now this is an intelligent life, that there's microbial life elsewhere in our solar system. I would be surprised if underneath the oceans of Europa or Enceladus we didn't find evidence of microbial life. And it would be very fascinating.

And we can be back here and see if he's right in five more years. Yeah. But yeah, we'll find it. I will say as a pessimist, which I am in general, although I, yeah, see, there's a reason to be a pessimist. My late friend, who's a writer named Cormnick McCarthy, was a very, wrote very dark books that some of you may have read or seen movies based on his book. When I first met him, he was very cheerful guy. and I asked him how he could be so cheerful. And he said, I'm a pessimist, but that's no reason to be gloomy.

Anyway, this is a quick question, but I have to answer because it comes from a nine-year-old who I know, Arnie, who said, how did you know that the card I was thinking of was the six of spades? And the answer is, I tricked you. Angela asks, well, this is probably a question for me, but is dark energy, potential energy or kinetic energy? If it's one of the two, how is it measured? That's a really good question. Energy, if you took high school physics, energy comes in a bunch of different forms. At one form is the energy of motion.

You know, if I throw a ball at you and it hits you, it's got energy and it can do work on you, knock you over. That comes from kinetic energy. If I lift the ball up in the air, it's got the potential to do work. If I let it go by falling on you, that's potential energy. And if you were going to say that, dark energy is more potential energy. It's not due to motion. In fact, there's nothing to move.

That's the weird thing. It's the energy of empty space, so there's nothing there to move. So it's potential energy. But how it's measured, well, there are different ways, and we're looking, and one of the things, you know, Simons might do may help on that. The way was first discovered was the fact that dark energy, as I said, is gravitation-uripulsive. and it causes the universe to expand ever faster.

And by looking at distant objects and seeing how fast they're moving away from me, us as a function of their distance and therefore the time we look back in the history of the universe because it takes light, finite time to get to us, we can map out the expansion rate of the universe and discovered to the surprise of the observers that the universe is speeding up. And the amount by which it speeds up is directly related to the amount of dark energy. is. And that's the first way to measure it. There are other ways, and one of the other ways is to, again, always looking at the history of the universe, kind of doing universal archaeology,

which is really kind of what Brian does, is to look at state by state and try and look at how individual objects are evolving like galaxies. And all of those things depend on the expansion rate of the universe. So lots of different measurements are trying to be performed to see if that dark energy is really constant, which I'm convinced it is, but we'll need experiments to see. Do you want to add anything into that? Okay. Here's one we could both talk about, although we, anyway, I'm not sure we have much to say, but how advanced is AI versus what is used by the public? I think you're meaning how advances are there secret AIs that are much more advanced than they're used by the public? I actually don't think so. I mean, because the AI systems are,

are really produced by companies that are hoping to make money. And so they're using, they require a lot of money and they have to use the publicly available information. They mine the Internet to try and figure out, to predict what the next word you're going to say is or the next word they should say to you. That's all they do is they just try and predict the probability of the next word,

at least the AI that most of you're familiar, the chap GPI. And it's pretty basic, although it's quite amazing what it can do. And in fact, I don't know what, it's okay to say, Brian, when I talked to him earlier by email about what he was going to ask me, he asked chat PT the questions he should ask me. And I said, I didn't think they were as good as the questions we could come up with. But they're still pretty good. Yeah, on my website, I put, I made a Brian bot. I took all every, all of my books, all of my podcast, transcripts, solo episodes with you, me, Joe Rogian, and every. And I put it all into there. and now I no longer have to tell my kids bedtime stories. So I would go home, check in in a few minutes.

No, but one thing that they are doing that we don't really do, we meaning normal people, the coders and people actually doing sophisticated, you know, software engineering, computer science and someone, they are using, you know, they are extracting more information. I think than I do when I ask it, you know, what are the, you know, the top 10 reasons that you should become a cosmologist or so forth? or the questions to ask a renowned physicist Lawrence Krause. I find it very enjoyable.

I think it's really fun and useful, but I'm worried that they're actually going to get dumber with time and it's a phenomenon we observe in high-performance computing. The better the computers get due to Moore's Law, the more people want to use those really powerful computers, and that saps their efficiency at putting out new data analysis, new papers, and so forth. What's happening with AI until just a week or two ago, chat GPT wasn't trained on the Internet before 2021.

And I always seem, why not 2021? And that's when GPT1 came out. So now they're actually training, these are crawling the web, and they're processing things written by AIs. And that's kind of going to bring up maybe kind of like what happened with mad cow disease, except mad bot disease. They're going to start to really get kind of hallucinogenic. And it could be reduced their efficacy.

So we'll see what happens. Yeah, and I will say to promote, I'm not sure when it's going to come out, but I recorded a really fascinating episode with one of the most remarkable, computer scientists, I know, a theoretical computer scientist named Scott Erinson. And he's now got interested in AI safety and doing some really neat things. And we talked about it, so it'll come out in the next month or two. He's a really neat guy, really deep, a very deep thinker.

I'm very impressed with him. Okay. Kim says, I read somewhere that quantum entanglement could be key to teleportation. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see this becoming a reality? Has it already? and I just missed it.

That's kind of a Star Trek question. I remember when I first heard about quantum teleportation. I mean, it was brilliant. It was brilliant marketing of the physicists who did it because every journalist of the world would then, well, a lot of them in time called me because of the Star Trek book, but the quantum teleportation and teleportation are two very different things.

In fact, the fact that we can do quantum teleportation is the very same reason that we can't do people teleportation. Okay, quantum mechanical systems are very, very special. It takes a lot of work to observe quantum mechanical properties. You have to very carefully prepare systems, very, very carefully. Experimentalists have to do a lot of work, which is why they won the Nobel Prize last year for the work they're doing to isolate the quantum properties,

the weird quantum properties of quantum systems. And they're weird because we don't see them. And one of the reasons we don't see them is we're not isolated systems. I'm interacting with you and the light in this room and all the particles my body are interacting, we are the worst possible, we're not in a nice, simple quantum mechanical state.

So for certain very simple quantum mechanical systems, we can do something that looks like teleportation, like we measure the properties of a particle here. It instantaneously affects the properties that you will measure of a particle over there. It sounds like information is being processed faster than light. That's not true.

It's just happening. There's nothing, there's no message you could ever see. from here to there that would be faster than light. But it's only possibly because it's a very, very carefully prepared system. And you don't allow it to interact with the environment all the way in between.

And so we are not carefully prepared quantum mechanical systems. So we are not going to be teleported. And it's not going to happen. And as much as I'd like it to happen, and I especially as I'm on planes a lot, I love to be able to be teleported, but it's not going to happen. Do you have anything else?

No, just that we wouldn't know if you were actually from the future, teleporting back in the past, just to play a trick on Kim, which we pre-prepared that quantum question. Nothing else to add. Let's see the next one. Okay. I'm not going to talk about time travel I did the other day. This is one I think you can, well, we'll both answer, but I think you could probably address it interestingly enough. You just mentioned the Simon's thing is $100 million. It happens he funded by individuals, as well as the government.

Anyway, the question is, how should one respond to inquiries about why the public should fund costly physics experiments? Well, I mean, I think one statistic that, you know, GPT told me, and I assume it's true, is that the budget for NASA is less than what you ladies and maybe a few gentlemen spend on lipstick every year. It's a very small portion. And people are confused by that because they see all the great things NASA. Look at the moon. You know, we've been on there and there's other NASA things. the Apollo thing that you guys were in for the VIP earlier. So it seems like this huge, you know,

they must be costing in tremendous amount. It's actually quite small. And increasingly, more and more are private individuals and foundations coming up with large shares of it that then become partners with the government to reduce the government's risk, but take advantage of the agility of a private foundation and the risk, you know, tolerance that they might have

compared to a government panel where we literally will have, you know, 30 people reviewing it for 10 or 15 years and rightfully so. But I guess the main thing that scientists could do is share their, you know, the one place that we, you know, we differ maybe is that I believe that we actually should require some amount of training, outreach, you know, how to communicate with the public, both for the benefit of the public who will learn more about science, but for science itself. Because if science coasters themselves, we coister ourselves in our ivory towers,

I was doing special things with specialized people and specialized tools. You guys are going to lose interest and say, what the hell? I mean, if I worked, I used to work in a kitchen in a American restaurant, you know, style restaurant, New York State. And if my boss came in, he said, what are you doing?

I said, listen, boss, you can't understand what I'm doing. What I'm doing is so specialized, so intense, so intelligent. They would say, absolutely, you're out of here. We don't need you anymore. You're arrogant. And I think signs of the whole. does this, and the excuse is always, I'm not good at it. Well, I'm sorry, Lawrence, but you weren't born knowing quantum

electrodynamics. You had to learn that from your teacher Feynman and from other people. You put effort into things that you deem worthy and valuable, and I think we need to teach students at a young age. There are college students and high school students here. Make a YouTube video. Do something. It'll read down to your benefit in ways your future self will thank you, public will thank you, science will thank you. Well, you know, I don't disagree with you in the way you think because, um, I don't think they should be required, but I think what we need to do is include communication in the training of scientists more. And it's, and for many reasons, not least, first of all,

most students who are taking classes in science aren't going to become scientists. But, you know, I spent a lot of time when I had case, which is largely an engineering school, talking to engineers. And the engineers who succeeded are the ones who could communicate best in their company. And so I was once, many years ago, MIT asked me to be on an advisory board. And interestingly enough, the idea was to include writing in the science courses. Because at MIT, they all had to take a writing class. But it was from some writing instructor that none of them had any respect for. But if the professors that they had respect for required them to write in the class,

then they'd spend time doing it. And I think you're right. It's a skill that's important for anyone. And if we train more students to do it, In fact, when I was a graduate student, I never once, I was amazed, all the time I was a graduate student, do my PhD at MIT, never once was asked to give a presentation. The first one I gave was after I got the job at Harvard and I was down at Princeton. It was really amazing to me. So I think it would be a good thing.

But regarding the cost, I do want to take a little time because they don't cost much. That's the point. $100 million in the scheme of things is not much. Even $10 billion, the large Adirond Collider or the Hubble Space Telescope, spent over 20 years, is less than the cost of a sophisticated, certainly much less than the cost of an aircraft carrier. It's like the cost, the Xerox costs of the Defense Department,

maybe, are 10 times as big. And so it's really not much. And therefore, you have to ask yourself, are we so poor as a society that we can't do that. And my favorite line of this comes from Robert Wilson, who was the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and when it was being built, he testified for Congress, and they asked him if it would aid in the defense of the nation.

And he said, no, but it'll help keep the nation worth defending. And I think that's really important, because if we are so poor that we have to stop asking questions about the universe, which is one of the driving things that keeps humans human, then we might as well just give up. Anyway, okay, Mario asked for both gentlemen,

what is your opinion on how the government is handling the UFO situation? Do you believe the videos are solid proof? I'll start. No, videos are not solid proof. I can give you videos. Every movie is not, watch a good movie and you'll see you're being tricked.

You've got to watch out about being tricked. Okay? And magic I like because it's honest lying because I'm telling you I'm tricking you. But so videos and eyewitness evidence is the worst kind of evidence. Unfortunately, they use in court cases, but it's not good evidence and you have to be skeptical. So that there's been no, there's not a single piece of evidence, not one piece of evidence. I repeat that. There's not a single piece of evidence that anything that we haven't, we don't know what we see. And there are lots of things we don't know what we see.

There's not a single piece of evidence that the scientific community would say is solid of anything related to aliens. Okay. And that's no matter what people say, there's no evidence about that. As far as the government's handling it, I actually think they're not doing as bad a job now. They're trying to be more open. And I watched the press conference from the NASA committee that talked about it. And I think they buried the lead, as we say in the newspaper business. Because it was laid in the thing where they said there's no evidence of aliens.

There was a long preamble and most people didn't get it. But, you know, the idea is to try and be open about it. But the notion of me, to me, the most unrealistic thing about aliens and UFOs is the idea that our government could have this incredible conspiracy of secrecy for 60 years. I mean, come on. Nothing can be secret. And just think about it. If one person who had knowledge by this could make a gazillion dollars if they could speak about it,

you know when that's the case, there's no way that's going to remain secret. So to me, the most unrealistic thing about all of this UFO conspiracy is that the government can keep secrets. Yeah, I mean, I would only add that, you know, the two of us up here and other scientists that are here tonight

are represent incredibly conflicted people in that there's no one more than us that we scientists who would love nothing more than to discover the existence of an emancipitalization. in it mastered the laws of time travel, physics, and interplanetary wormholes, correlation, whatever,

and able to do these speeds of technology, simply because of the venal reason that we would get to have thousands of Nobel Prizes, that we'd get to skip ahead in our understanding of science by many centuries. And so I kind of get a little bit annoyed when my friends in the UFO pro community say things like, oh, you're just covering up,

or you have a vested interest in us not being correct, And big astronomy, I love it if big astronomy could control anything, even, you know, for self-interested reasons. So, anyway, we have a vested interest, and we are saying we haven't seen this. We would like nothing more than it to be true. But as Lawrence's friend, Carl Sagan, used to say, you need to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. And you have to hold them to the same standards, our friends in the UFO community, just because you can, you know, see things that you, you know, I wouldn't. this report, like Lauren said, it's really not rising to the level of data analysis, etc. So I largely agree, but just to add, I would love it to be true. I want to have evidence.

I say, I don't want to believe as Mueller or skull. Fox Muldar said, we want to believe. We all do want to, yeah, well, and the problem is most of us do want to believe, and what scientists have to remind themselves is that they want to believe in their own experiments, in their own theories, and what science is good at telling us, is that recognize that you want to believe. And as Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. Because you know what you want your theory to be right. You want your observation to be right.

You constantly have to second guess yourself. And that's really something that's a lesson from science that really, you know, can be so important. One last thing. So there are people in science even. I've interviewed them. Steve Coonan was on my podcast. So Lawrence has written a book. Steve Coonan wrote kind of an opposition book that could be an unsettled science.

And I just want to say that all of us agree, even if you're a climate change skeptic, that reducing CO2 and the Comiton pollutants will redound to the benefit of human health. I don't think anybody, even the most ardent opponent of climate change regulation or technology, will argue against that. But just the same way with UFO technology and the supposed technology of his day, I think it could also benefit humanity by making aerospace safer, by having better communication. freedom of information and transparency with the government. I think that's always a good thing.

So I think no matter what, it's a net good, but again, let's keep our, let's keep scientifically approaching it, and I think that will eventually red down to the benefit of everybody. I won't, because of time, I won't, but if you, Carl Sagan's last book, The Candle, Science is a Candle in the Dark, is a masterpiece, and it's wonderful to have him, read him talk about UFOs because he points out what a cultural phenomenon it is. used to see the same things 100 years ago and call them fairies. I mean, it's a property of the culture at the time.

And so why were UFOs being seen 500 years ago? Because they were attributed to something else. So each culture of its time has their own version of UFOs. And, you know, just like the fact that most people who believe in God, happen to believe the God that their parents believe in,

should make you suspicious. You should also be suspicious to the fact that these things are a property of time. And I'm not... I wanted to last question because I want you to get home to your kids and it's a simple question what's your favorite thing or topic to talk or BS about doesn't have to be science related and why is it so fascinating or enjoyable to you well living here in San Diego it the thing that I turn to for relaxation are the San Diego Padres and I always say the easiest job in the world is to be a

meteorologist here in San Diego this is typical weather for us and the hardest job is to be a sports chemistry because we've never won a single championship. So for me, it's, uh, it's relaxation is that. I, and I get a lot of enjoyment sitting on the couch with my kids and my wife and just watching the Padre's Lose. I add the rest of us to enjoy watching the Padres Lose too, but, but, um, uh, uh, I think for me, I would say it's movie. I liked, I like, I think we like, I liked, or, you know, things I see and I don't really watch TV. So for it's movies or documentaries, but BS thing about movies I like, and I make some movies too. And so I've always been fascinated by movies because they also inspire the imagination. And in fact, as Stephen Hawking

wrote in the forward of the physics of Star Trek, science fiction helps inspire imagination. And so anything that helps inspire imagination excites me. And I get the same excitement for movies as science because they both tick on my mind. Thank you very much. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century

and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit OriginsprojectFoundation.org.