The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Boldly going where no podcast has gone before: William Shatner; Wonder, Awe, and Questions, Questions...

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

I first met William Shatner a little over 19 years ago when we were filming a TV inspired in part on my book, The Physics of Star Trek. The show was ultimately titled, How William Shatner Changed the World. I am not sure what I expected when I met Bill, but what I got was something completely different. After a brief period during which I felt a bit like I was being auditioned, and which I passed after we filmed a scene in which I was required to use a teleprompter to spout a long series of Star Trek technobabble, we settled in to begin to discuss the world, and I fell a bit in love. Bill reminded me in many ways of my Uncle, who had long been my favorite relative, and the patriarch of our rather small family. His humor, his confidence, his energy, and his curiosity emerged from the crumbling armor he had originally amassed to potentially protect from him what he may have expected to be a pestering nerd. (And which, for all I know, I may have been). As the days wore on (I think we spent 3-4 together in total), we began to talk about science and the world, and I was impressed not just with Bill’s intense curiosity and enthusiasm, but his native intelligence. Once again, I guess I had not been prepared for that. A decade later, and perhaps seven or eight years ago, we spent a week on a Star Trek Cruise together. He of course was the headliner, and I gave some science lectures, and ended up doing two programs on stage with him—one on the program, and one more impromptu. While perhaps billed as a dialogue, the provided an opportunity for Bill to pepper me with questions about all things physics, trade jokes, and overall have a blast. I suspect that is the norm. He invests everything he gets involved in with the same joy, and charm. So, I was over the moon, when after discussing the possibility of doing The Origins Podcast for over 2 years, Bill finally, in a weak moment, I assume, agreed. It took about 30 seconds for the same sense of fun and joy to take over, a deep friendliness to be transparent, and for Bill to basically take over. From there, I held on to my chair and just tried to enjoy the wild ride. It was fun, and informative. I had 5 pages of questions to ask him, and I managed to sneak in about 3 or 4 questions. Instead the conversation went wherever it went—most often to questions about the Universe—and it was one of the most enjoyable 90 minutes I have spent in awhile. It also gave me a chance to reconnect with Bill, and I don’t plan to wait another decade before doing it again. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. 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

Lawrence, I was just narrating about you. Isn't that amazing? Come here. It's Lawrence Krauss, top physicist. What are the chances of that? It's in the script, Bill. No. Laurie, it's me acting.

This is called acting. I'm sorry. I shouldn't know it. I'm sorry. Hi, and welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. I just finished a rollicking conversation with one of my favorite people in the world, William Shatner. Every time I'm with him, it's an experience.

And as usual, in this case, he took over the conversation from the very beginning. I had planned to talk to him about his new book to boldly go, which is somewhat autobiographical. But I knew we'd end up with questions about the universe because he always had them. I wasn't prepared with the questions right away, and we went in so many different places. It became a conversation, as he described it, a scientific exploration of the universe and our relationship. and that's what it was and more. And his childlike enthusiasm about the universe and his incredible interest is so infectious that it really is in some sense what I hope this podcast is all about,

the fact that everyone should be fascinated about the universe. It's part of our culture. It's part of what makes us human. And it's also appropriate that today we're releasing this podcast on the day, My New Book, The Edge of Knowledge, comes out because it's really about the questions we still have about the universe. and this podcast was full of Bill's questions about the universe and everything else. It was a joy to talk to him, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

You can watch it ad-free on our Critical Mass Substack site, and I hope you'll do that if you're a subscriber, and your subscription fees will go to help support the Origins Project Foundation. Otherwise, you can watch it on YouTube, or you can listen to it anywhere podcasts can be listened to. No matter how you watch her to listen to it, I hope you enjoy this remarkable man, William Shatner, as much as I did. So our podcast with William Shatner right now.

But it was the Canadian Repertory Theater in Ottawa. Hold this. Hold this, hold a thought. I thought we were recording. No, no, no, I'm going to introduce you first. No, no, no, no. That's because I would because. But Larry, that's so calm.

No, no, I'm not going to introduce you in that way. I'll do it afterwards. I'm just going to welcome you. Let me at least welcome you. You're welcoming me by telling me where you live and how you live. I know we're going to get there. I want you to come here. I want you to do that.

But I want to take a something there. You will buy something here and I will get to that, but I have to start this. Okay, Bill, thank you for you on the program. As usual, you've taken over even before I started, which is just as usual. We've never had this done before. We've never done this, but we've done two dialogues, which you don't remember, but I do. And each time I was on stage on a chip, we were on a ship together. Oh, well. And then, and then what I want to show is even the very first time we met,

and I've never done this before. I'm going to unplug the microphone from here. So to play. I actually found a clip of the first time we met. It's 18 plus years ago. Now, you don't remember it, but I do. No. It's to work. Okay. We're going to. If we get it, you've already, knowing you, you've got this thing going, you know it works. I practiced it many times, but I'm also a theoretical physicist. There's a three. reason I'm a theoretical physicist and non-experimental physicist is about to be clump clear. Okay, here, let's see if we can. Lawrence, I was just narrating about you.

Isn't that amazing? Come here. It's Lawrence Krauss, top physicist. What are the chances of that? It's in the script, Bill. No. Laurie, it's me acting. This is called acting.

I'm sorry. I shouldn't know it. I'm sorry. It's a certainty that I took over. I looked at you so fondly. I had my arm around you. You did. You were withdrawing.

No, no. I was actually, that's the first time I began to think of you as just like my uncle, who was always my favorite person in the family. But I had made the mistake just before we filmed that. This was from the TV show, How William Shatner changed the world, which I'm sad to say isn't listed on your Wikipedia page. But nevertheless, I remember it. But I told you that my family, I didn't know my name was Lauren.

this is the first time I've said this on the area until I was 12 I thought it was Lori which is what my family called me when I was going L-O-R-R-Y L-O-R-I-E and and then I discovered my birth certificate and and also Lawrence of Arabia had just come out and and it's a lovely name though oh it is well Lori has it and I told you right before we filmed that and you and you decided to call me Lori right there on the camera but anyway it was it that but you know know, the reason I did that, although it's self-aggrandizing, the reason I wanted to show that clip at the beginning was because it was the first time we met, but, you know, I didn't know

what to expect. But what I discovered, and the reason I want to have this conversation with you, the reason I've been thrilled each time we've been together, is I discovered a man fascinated by everything in the world around him, a man who was full of interested in life and everything and had questions and just, and an endless curious. curiosity. Let me ask you a question right now. Okay, sure. Are your glasses tinted? Oh, oh, they're, well, you know, they tint when there's the sun on them. And so they get a little tinted when they get darker when the sun's on them. Right, right. They're what are they called? Photosensitive or something. But there's also transition and transition. Transition. Yeah. Yeah. Are they transition? Yeah, they're transitions. And why have you got it? Why have you chosen a heavy, uh,

rim. It's actually very light. It looks like a heavy rim. I chose it. Very good reason. I mean, I'm in thick. Your wife picked it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's no question you're wearing glasses. Sometimes glasses are made so it doesn't look. I mean, you're a very handsome man. You're hiding behind the glasses. Actually, I don't even really need them, but I do. Take them off. Take them on. Take them on. Okay. Look at that face. That plumb. I knew you'd say that. It's like my man. No, the reason I need them to read, but, um, but you're not reading, you're talking. Well, I'm going to read.

I've made so many notes. You wouldn't believe I'm so. There are notes that. No, no, no, but there's, you know, scientific. Well, it's not. It's just, it's just a matter of having backup in case. Well, because actually there are notes to things that you've said.

And so I want to, I want to remind me of things you said. So you should be really happy that I, that I have them. I'm going to quote you a lot. I'm really happy talking to you. It, as, you know, I was really looking forward to this. And as I said, we've been, I know, we've been together then and, and then one other time, many years later, a decade later, we were on a cruise together, a Star Trek cruise. And I was lecturing the physics of Star Trek and you were being you with your extended family. And I have now come to realize how important that is to you.

And you had them all there, generate three generations. And we hung out. They invited to me, for me to be on a cruise. and they paid me good money just to, you know, talk like you and I are talking. And I said, well, I want to bring, I think there were 15 people. Yeah, 15. I mean, when you say extended, I mean, that was an extension. And they said, okay, bring up.

So I had my whole family, my whole immediate family being indulged in. And all I had to do was have the joy of talking to people like you. It was great. And I remember sitting down with your family at dinner a few times. And we did twice on stage. We did a planned dialogue and then you, and then much to my pleasure, you were giving, you did another evening event and then you called me up and we started talking about the universe. And as we had when we first met, when we were filming that show in between the takes,

I remember we started talking, I had written the physics Star Trek and we had a great conversation and I was totally unexpected except I told you then and I still do you. My uncle was my favorite person of my family and almost immediately you reminded me. Does that mean I'm your favorite person? Well, you remind me, you're among my favorite people. There's no doubt about it. Remind the monkling, and that's a great thing. Among is, first of all, it's the name of an African tribe.

Yeah. And then secondly, it suggests large groups of people. No, I'm very particular about that. Hello, among all you. I love my uncle. Like, I feel like very few people in the world. And you wrongly remind me of my uncle. He was a pharmacist in Toronto.

He passed my mother. He passed away before my mother. He passed away when he's 93, 90, no, 94. My mom, as I say, was 100. Well, I would suggest that you're going to be doing a lot of good work well into. Well, I hope so. You're a role model, of course. But I'd like to say about my mother, who's different, I think, than your mother.

I want to get back to your, I want to start with your origins. But I always say about my mother that the first time I was happy to share, with her was when she was about 90 and totally with it. Because up to that point in my life, she was married five times. She was an interesting woman. And I was usually embarrassed by her. But then when she was with it and she was with it right until just shortly before she passed away at 100. She moved here with us and-

How did she die? Just passed away quickly. Basically, she just... Were you there? We moved her because I moved to Canada. Canada, that's the other thing I wanted to tell you. I mean, you have to come here. This is Prince Edward Island. And if you never, you've never, have you ever been to Prince Edward Island? Yeah. You've been in Nova Scotia. I know, I read that.

Nova Scotia, yeah. Yeah, no, but Prince Edward Island is prettier. And in fact, I have to tell you this, you're going to come here. We talked about that. I'm going to get property here. And then I got to get something near the ocean, but it has to be above because we know the ocean's going to rock. That's right. That's why I look down. I'm, I'm 30 meters above the sea level here. And 20 meters and and and I have a river here that's a 60 feet ocean you're 60 feet yeah that's enough for that's a cliff you're on the edge of a it's just a downhill it's just downhill it's just a gentle right down into the ocean and this goes this is a river and it's a mile away the ocean I take my boat the dock here and I want to do that that's what I want to do

Larry I know you're going to be my neighbor the house next door is selling I don't want to buy house I want a fair size piece of land yeah I have four acres but I don't know how much how many acres you want that sounds right okay there you go and I to build for this extended family for you know at the end of time Larry I want to ask you a question okay two questions that I that are so puzzling to me that only somebody like yourself could answer and I've sought this answer the first one's going to be a little more complicated than the second one. Okay. Okay. First question is I've I've uh, I've uh, indelibly imprinted on my memory that 13.8 billion light years away is the

farthest, uh, galaxy that we have, that the, that the, uh, that the, that the, the, the new one or the Hubble? Yeah, well, I think it was the old one. Yeah. Okay. So, so that's 13.8. So, so my, here's my, here's what my sentence is that I've kind of, this is my sentence. Well, it was 13.8 billion light years, but speed of light. And it, the, the photon, whether it was a particle or a wave, and I have no idea what I've just said. Okay. Reaches my retina, 13.8 billion light years away. Yeah. Okay. So now I said, oh my God, the red shift, that's 13.8 billion light years. What's happened to that galaxy in the intervening time?

Well, in fact, you got it. It's traveled. In fact, it turns out the far end of our universe is actually, even though our universe is 13.8 billion years old. And therefore, if you look back in time, you're looking back 13.8 billion years. Because of the expansion of the universe, the actual visible universe is closer to 50 billion, light years across because it's been expanding. Well, but, but, but, but, so that's what we can, that's what we can see. But, but, but, but what's happened to that galaxy?

Wait, Lori, what's happened to that galaxy during the interim? intervening 13.8. It's gone someplace in 13. It's actually, no, it's been at rest like a surfer in a wave. As the universe expands, it's been at rest. And we've been at rest. And we've been moving apart from each other, but we're just sitting at rest, like in a stream that carries us apart from each other. But it's been evolving and it's had maybe. So when you say the galaxy is not 13.8, more like 50. Yeah. Because that's three times the, the, the, the, the balloon of the universe has expanded three times since then. How do we know? How do we know what the speed of the universe is when we got all this dark matter? Okay. We got a lot of questions. What's the laughter for? Like,

indulgent you? I was going to wait halfway for the questions, but as usual, let's say you take over. So it's fine. Well, the point is we can measure speed by that redshift fact. The fact that you, I noticed you mentioned in your book, because I wanted to say, last two days, I pleased myself by reading your recent book, who's made my, boldly going, I think it's called. Yeah, oh, go. Boldly go. And I read it off, cover to cover. Because I thought. Really good way. But yeah. And so, but you talked about the fact, and you made. not remember that you talked about in the context of music, I think, but that when a car is moving away from you, this gets stretched out. When it moves, the sound gets, gets those hard when it comes

back. Same with light. And so by seeing how what the red shift, how the stretching of light is, we can see effectively how far away those things are and how fast they're moving away from us. But they're at rest in the... Those infinitely small degrees of change? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Red to red to red. We measure red shift.

The red shift of the farthest galaxies we see now is something like around nine or ten. That means that the light is shifted by a factor of 10 or 11. Its wavelength is 10 or 11 times longer. It's not infinitesimal. It's actually... So, that's why the James Webb Space Telescope was built to detect... Inferred because the light, which was visible when it was emitted, by the time we see it,

it's stretched out and become infrared. And that's why we need an infrared telescope to look at the earliest galaxies. I understand that completely. So you're saying that the relative distance remains the same between Earth and that far galaxy. No. No, it expands. It's getting further away from us. It's getting further away from us.

And we can measure, we can think of the redshift as telling us how quickly it's moving away from us. How quickly is it? And so, and what Hubble discovered, to his great surprise, it's linear early on, is that the velocity of objects is proportional to their distance. So the farther things are away from us, the faster they're moving away from us now. And the really weird thing, the really weirdest thing, which I thought we'd get too far later, is that, you know, the universe isn't slowing down and speeding up. Oh, this is speeding up, yeah. Yeah, which was a big surprise when it was first, actually, I'm happy to say I was one of the people who predicted that, but anyway.

But it's contrary to every to, to do logic. Well, it's, yeah, but you know, that's what's great about physics, though, and the universe is it doesn't care what our logic is. It doesn't, and that's what's great about something. But we should fashion our logic. It would, we should fashion our logic. Absolutely, but you know, like we were as, I think, gave in Roan here, Richard Dawkins once said, we evolved to escape lions on the savannah. We didn't evolve to do quantum mechanics or understand.

And so it's non-intuitive. It's strange. You question everything. Doesn't because we're logically looking for fruit off a tree and how to escape the tiger, that our brains are incapable of encompassing? Well, it turns out to be a side benefit. Who knew that the same evolution, that evolution, traits that would allow us to learn how to avoid predators would also eventually allow us to discover

mathematics, language, and quantum mechanics, and relativity. And so it's not surprising that some of these ideas are strange and non-intuitive. And in fact, the fact that the universe is speeding up is really non-intuitive, because all of us are used to gravity slowing things down. They're pulling you down. And- No, expanding is non-intuitive. And the Hubble must be a mistake. that's what many people thought initially and then but it turned out as I say it turned out to to be required to understand the universe but we still don't understand why and you know and you talked about my but Larry we then we're into forces that we have no idea like 90% of what's happening we have no idea isn't that great isn't that fantastic no I'm dying to know

Well, so am I, but that's what, it's worth asking questions. I mean, and I will plug the new book, but the first sense of the new book is the most important thing in science. You almost say it in your book is the phrase, I don't know, because it's an invitation to discover. You've made a whole bunch of TV shows about that. I know, I know. Knowing is less exciting than the mystery of not knowing because it means there's more out there. I'm thrilled by the mystery of not knowing. I get goosebumps and the hair on my arms.

when I think of the things I don't know and I talk to somebody like you and they say, well, proportionately it's this, no kidding. I get a piece of information that I didn't know before. Like Larry, Lori, what the hell is a difference between a wave and a particle? Well, they behave differently when they, bottom line is waves are extended, particles aren't. aren't particles? Wait a minute. Waves are extended. But a wave doesn't exist.

Isn't it a measurement? I mean, this wiggle. You got it, you got a good point there. It's not quite there. A particle is something that goes from here to there. And it exists. When I watch waves in the water here near me, the water isn't going from here to there. A disturbance in the water is going from here.

That's what I'm, that's my logic. It's good logic. So what's the explanation? So, so what you can think of, and the, and it's, And quantum mechanics, which is weirder than anything in the world, tells us that fundamental levels... But there's got to be a unifying theory, right? There's got to be a unified.

It's got to be unified. Yeah, but we don't know how to do it, but we do. But as far as we can tell, quantum mechanics is pretty fundamental, and it tells us that two things that appear to be totally different are both true. Things that appear to be... Like quantum mechanics tells us that not only does a particle behave like a wave,

which means if you detect it, it's here, but if you don't detect it, it has the properties of an extended object, which is weird. But it also tells us that it's doing many things at once, that that little particle isn't like a billiard ball that when that electron goes from here to there, it's taking every trajectory in the world, it's going to the moon and back. Okay, okay. This is incredible. Does the particle have any properties to it?

Yes, you can measure its mass. It weighs. It has mass. It has mass. It has mass. Each particle, each elementary particles, a modified mass. Gravitational? Yeah, oh, yeah, it's gravitationally.

In fact, we can even measure elementary particles falling in a gravitational field now. We're sensitive enough to be able to do that. So we see that, and then it has electric charge. So is it a building block? Well, I mean, those electrons are certainly parts of the building blocks of atoms and protons are, although they're made up of quarks. And they're the building blocks of everything here. Although the weird thing about atoms is even though solid matter appears pretty solid,

most of its empty space. I understand that. And the reason, you know why you know why when you're, you and I are sitting on these chairs, we don't fall through to the center of the earth? Because the molecules are compacted, more close. Sort of, but it's really the not the molecules are touching, but it's really the electric forces. It's just electric forces that are holding us up against the earth, most of its empty space. Doesn't that compact the molecules closer and therefore it feels dense?

Why are you doing, well, maybe, what is that? No, because you know why? It doesn't, it doesn't contract them much. And the reason is that gravity is the weakest force in nature. What? Yeah, I'll explain this to you. Please. It's really simple.

For you. No, no, it'll be, you'll just say afterwards, you say, oh, of course, you'll tell me that, I promise. Okay. So the fact that, you know, we're, I'm being pulled down to the earth. earth, okay? By the entire earth, all of the gravity of the entire earth is pulling me down. Yes. I feel that with all. But it's the electric forces between the electrons in my butt and my chair, just those little ones that are holding me up against the entire pull of the whole earth. Is it repelling the

It's repelling. Yeah, the electric forces, the electrons are negative. It's a negative. Well, they're both negative, negative repels. And that's what's holding me up against the earth. Right. Electricity is 40 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, electromagnetism. Gravity is so weak that it's negligible except on the scale of the universe. We ignore it in elementary particle scales because it's so, so weak. And that's why, that's why. And yet it is the force that holds the universe. Five forces of nature and probably predominant, isn't it? Well, on the scale of the cosmos, the thing because of the mass of the cosmos. It is on the large, on scales larger than our solar system, even larger than the earth,

gravity is what matters. But on the scale of the cosmos, the scale of the cosmos, the thing. of the Earth, you and me, you know, gravity may seem like it's important when you try and get up in the morning, but it's... I understand. It doesn't gravity. That's called age. But you know, but age is produced by electromagnetism, right? Because it's electromagnetism that's responsible for chemical reactions. And chemical reactions are what's responsible for age. So, electricity isn't even important. I'm sure you're aware. How old are you? I'm going to be 69 next month. Just to... That's almost 70. I know. I'm going to be 70 next year.

hesitate to tell me your age. Yeah, I know because, you know, I'm soonly, I'm getting older than you. I was so much younger when we first met. Can't come to grips with 70. What are you going to do on your 70th birthday? I am, I'm going to, I'm going to go next door and see you and have a beer. When I was 40, I apparently have long since forgotten. I apparently went to bed for three days. Like 40 is a pivotal moment. Yeah, 450 was for me, I think, but 42, yeah. Well, because you're youthful in face and figure and... So are you.

I have to say we both don't look our age, I think. I mean, you don't, for sure. Oh, you certainly don't. By the way, I told you my mother once said, claimed, I told you this first time I met you, my mother, who now I realize was eight years old and you, claimed that when she lived in Toronto, you asked her out when you were an actor there.

I don't know if it's true, but but I'm sure it is her name. Well, it was title or Taylor. I don't know. She went by a whole bunch of different names. Anyway, knowing my mother, she would have asked. It could have been because I was, I went through a lot of activity in Toronto when I was 20 something. Well, there you go.

Anyway, just want to say, so maybe we're related. Anyway. That's possible. Anything is possible given the, given the I don't know where we're going to get because we've already struck on way off. I have to get.

Don't you understand? This isn't the scientific treaties. This is a conversation, right? You're right. Exactly. It's a conversation. Who knows? Who knows where that exploration takes us?

That's what's a designated, a pre-designed. Absolutely. That's what makes it exciting. Exactly. It's a scientific exploration into our relationship. Exactly. I agree. And as I say, let me, speaking of our relationship, speaking of scientific exploration, I do want to go back. Even, I know that the world for you began when you met me, but still there was earlier times. Yeah, that's good stuff. It gives us insight until.

But I want to go back because you grew up in Montreal. I want to ask some questions I'm renewed by. So I knew you grew up in Montreal. Your father was a clothing manufacturer at a store, was he a wholesaler? or was he a wholesale he made he made he he I believe he started off as a salesman and in the what we call the schmada trade yeah and and then he went into business for himself so he made you know modern modestly priced men's suits which he then would take out to the surrounding villages around montreal he would travel four or five days a week going out 30, 40, 50, 100 miles outside of Montreal and going to men stores and selling them these, these, or he also went into whatever you call it, tailor-made, where people would take measurements and send the measurements onto my father, and they would make the personal... Did you have to speak French to do that, to go outside of Montreal, or did... Oh, yeah, but he spoke very little French. But in those years, years and the reason the whole French Revolution in Quebec took place was people like my father, English-speaking people, said, well, the French better learn to speak English as against

the three million people who lived there and for so many four years longer than the English, it would say, why you part French? We're here for five, uh, five hundred, five hundred, a year, an year, uh, thanks a year, uh, thanks a year. Thanks a year and a, perhaps, what's the possible? Because, because, what's because? What's because? Uh, POSCA.

because we have what's defeated? I'm at a, oh, oh, my. You have not Gagne, but the opposite of Gagne. Pell de, we have to have the Gulf, the straits of Abraham or the- You were there at Strength of Abraham in Quebec City, well, close to where you were. I've been on the plains of it.

Well, but that's true. So the French felt, and it gradually became a whole movement, as you know, the French in Quebec said, this is not fair. This is our land. What's the printed on the license plates? Jimis-Suvienne. We remember. And what do they remember? They remember. Exactly. They remember losing or at least losing that. And yeah, no, it certainly was a big deal. When I was growing up, it was in in Ontario. And I moved to Ottawa, mostly so I could look at French and my brother actually moved to Quebec and and went and was a law professor there and and only spoke French he dissimulated completely yeah I know it was a big

my uncle was a lawyer was a judge in Rouen oh yeah oh yeah I've been up there I've been yeah yeah yeah was a judge yeah but anyway so who knew who knew that was taking place when you you were living there among the fish you thought you swam with the fish and then one day you know it is unfair that you didn't have to speak french when you were growing up everyone around you but i had friends in the in the on the french street on the streets of montreal um i lived on a street called marceil in the west end of Montreal and there were french families all around and so the kids would play in the streets and we spoke french and english that's how i spoke oh okay oh that's part of you probably never heard of

the marcile gang no no i did That was a half a dozen kids. And Betty Beck, who was this beautiful, in my eyes, blonde 10-year-old or something, that we'd play football on the streets. I'd try and tackle her all the time. And sometimes you did. Anyway, that's a different story. But, okay. So your father, you've, but I learned your grandparents were in. It's like mine were from Eastern Europe. But your parents were. But your parents who are, you. both been born in Canada? My mother was. My father came from Austria when he was 13 or 14. Yeah, Austria. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my mom moving to his little. My mother's mother, my great, my grandmother, I think she was my grandmother or was my great-grandmother, lived in Lithuania. He was born in Lithuania. And I did a show for a couple of years called Better Late Than Never. And so they asked me, where would you like to go? Would you like to go

where your grandparents? I said, yeah, let's go. So we ended up in Lithuania in Vilnius. Okay. And I took a trip from Vilnius to the birthplace of my great-grandmother, which had been on the edge of a farmer's market. When the Nazis bombed Lithuania, when their march into the Baltics, they destroyed this square and my mother grandmother's a great-grandmother's house the square was subsequently rebuilt after 45 and it became a park so what when the mayor of this town of this little town was taking me around is well here's where there was this is where all the farmers would come and the and the people in the in the town would um would buy and sell the meat and the vegetables for the weak supply.

And here is a pipe that leads into a aquifer where they washed all the vegetables and the and cleaned the chickens and all that. And I thought, you know, my great-grandmother probably what then, and this isn't the scientific principle, but I'd love for you to go with it anyway. that water is well water is the most magical yeah thing in the universe isn't it yeah it's almost miraculous if you almost miraculous if you're almost miraculous it's a physics teacher was one of the proofs of god although he's tongue and cheek but right well it it is i mean oxygen and and and and and hydrogen combined makes i mean you'll help me with uh when i just finished a sentence you'll help me understand why water has so magical properties. But there is a photographer in Japan

who claims that he can take pictures of the crystallization of water and see the crystals changing shape when there's love or harm or is. Okay, yes, yes. The scientific mind goes, okay, but the romantic goes, of course, of course, okay? So I washed in the water. that had the memory of my... Look, you know, I was going to save this for later, but I'm going to make you feel even better. Well, it's later. Later.

No, there's no later. It's now. It's right now. Not good at any moment. I know. I'm not going to say it again, but I, but I, you talk, you talk a lot about connectedness. It matters to you and you love Carl Sagan's line about we're all-star stuff. And I, and I've written that too.

I want to talk to you about string theory. No, but we'll get there. But hold on. I want to tell you something that I want, that is really important to you right now in life. Yeah. Because you talk, I mean, you. You. You. I know I'm very important right now in your life. For the moment I am, but but also so your family and your grandchild, you, you dedicate the book to Clive, who's your grandchild and and you and you talk about the future. And although, you know, although you're 92 and you have many, many, many, many years left ahead of you. You do talk about

the, about the legacy and memory. And I want to tell you something really neat that will even, And although I don't buy some of the stuff you say about connectedness, here's something that's going to make you more connected. I don't know if I've ever told it. We'll have an argument about that. But first I want to change. I want to tell you something that will be so wonderful. If you don't know it, I forget if I've ever told it to you. So you are more connected, not only you were made of the same atoms.

And not only, and I want to tell you something, but when you are washing that water, okay. Take a deep breath for a second. Take a deep breath. Hold it in. two yeah and let it out slow let's okay let us slowly now i could show you and when we're together next time i'll show you that every time you take a breath you're breathing in atoms that were breathed out by almost everyone who ever lived you're breathing in at least 10 atoms from julius caesar um when aristotle what about aristotle and aristotle and you're all but that's

great you're you're you're and frank sonatra and the neat thing is aristotle aristotle Aristotle better, but Einstein, also Hitler, but you don't have a choice. It's all there. And when you wash your hands, it's quite likely some of the water that you're washing your hands from. Adams of that were the same atoms that your grandmother was drinking. Came from a meteorite. But since then, Lucy, you know, three, three million year old little girl might have been drinking water from. And every time you drink water, my mom used to say, when I picked up, she'd say, don't touch that. You don't know where it's been. She would have been really amazed because literally every time when you were washing your hands,

it's quite possible that some of the atoms, quite likely that some of the atoms are atoms that your grandmother actually drank. Oh, what do you mean we're not interconnected? We are interconnected, but let's not make it too new agey. That's all. I don't want to be coming. What would it mean new agey? I'm writing a book.

I'm writing a children's not right. Robert Sherno and I, and Dan Miller was writing the music. We've written a book called Bill, which is out there now. We're writing right now, right in front of me. It slipped down there somewhere. Are 10 songs that we have written for children about how interconnected all of nature is. The extraordinary things, you know, termites and elephants,

and elephants and things like that. Oh, yeah, you talk about that, the termites building the mound that the elephants then rub against. And what about sucker fish? And what about what about fungi and the way it, I mean. We know it's, they connect, connections are amazing. And we work with everything. Yeah, everything.

Everything. And our atoms, as you say, what about what about what? Adams came from your left hand, atoms from your left hand probably came for a different star than your right hand. It's amazing. Exactly. So what about what's his name who talks about string theory? Doesn't that a valid thesis?

Well, string theory is it's got a lot of play and a lot of press because it, one hoped, it would be the first theory that would unify two central pillars of modern physics, quantum mechanics, which we briefly mentioned, and relativity, gravity, Einstein's theory of gravity. Those two things don't work together mathematically. We can't combine them into a simple theory that makes sense. What doesn't combine? General relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. Right.

Is that Newtonian? Is that Newtonian physics? What was that? No, it's path. Newtonian physics. No, no. Even Newtonian physics was Newton. Einstein changed Newton and said that gravity is due to the curvature of space.

Okay. Just things falling. So Einstein changed the world. And you need general relativity to, to explain the way the universe works on the largest scale. So we tested all the time. One of the predictions of general relativity is that if you shake something, you produce waves,

we were talking about waves, waves in space and time called gravitational waves. We detected them with an amazing detector. I know, with a big, the LIGO detector that was just amazing what it had to do. So what did that prove, by the way? What did the, this thing? Oh my God, we saw gravitational waves.

Why was everybody so excited? Well, first of all, it was. it was a central prediction of Einstein's sphere of general relativity that had never been that had never been measured over the last eight years. But the other thing was that it proved to us that the only things that you could, gravity is so weak when I'm moving my hands around, even though this camera is moving around because it's got a mind of its own. But when I'm moving my hands around, I'm creating gravitational waves. But gravity is so weak that we could never detect those waves, those ripples in space. You need humongous, dense, massive things to create enough gravitational

waves to detect them. So there were these two super massive black holes, 50 times the mass of this. One was 30 and one was 25 times the mass of the sun. Huge things. The 25 times the mass of the sun, but the size of Manhattan, I mean, just unbelievably dense. When those collided 1.8 billion light years away, they produced enough gravitational radiation that we, We could detect it. And you know, and this was amazing. This is the, this is how amazing technology is. So the LIGO detector, it's got two arms at right angles. And when a gravitational wave comes by, when a gravitational wave comes by me here, this, my arm here gets shorter a little bit and that arm gets longer. And then this arm gets shorter and that arm gets longer because it really literally stretches space out.

You could calculate how what would the difference. So LIGO has two arms, four kilometers long apiece. And you could calculate when those two black holes collided and produced gravitational waves, 1.8 billion light years away, what you'd need to be able to detect, to be able to detect those gravitational waves, was a change in the length of each of those four kilometer long arms by a length equal to one, one thousandth the size of a proton. Wow. And but they did it. And, but what it did was it told us that in fact, it told us about the existence of black holes and it's a wave. Did that shock shake the universe?

Is there a quake? One second long quake, and it went by the earth. And you know what's really neat about that? They turned on the detector three hours earlier that day. And it was still being tested. And they weren't going to take data, but the graduate studies were data. And if they'd waited three hours later, then that thing, which is traveling was over a billion years.

So if you believe that there's no coincidence. Well, no, what I believe is there are... Wait, wait. Okay. No coincidence. Do you agree with that? No. There are coincidences.

You say in your book, for example, there are too many coincidences. What I say is they're just right. There's just as many coincidences as you'd expect. There's not more or less. You don't think that it's magical. Those guys said, you know, let's go for a coffee. And the other guy said, no, let's turn it on. I'll turn it on.

why there's nothing and you turn it on and three hours later they get proof yeah yeah exactly but if they turned on a month later they've got a different proof maybe so but here you know hasn't happened again since then you don't know it has no no now they detect about one a week oh really yeah yeah it's amazing it's my thesis is just going out the window that my my my work is done here then no you know what richard you've never met him you would have loved him richard Feynman. Did he probably, he was a wonderful. But he was the mathematic guy. He was, he was everything.

I've seen his name so often. He's a, I wrote a book about him. He's just an amazing, it was amazing guy. But what he used to say, when he was talking to people, he'd say, you won't believe what happened to me today. You won't believe what happened. People say what? He'd say, absolutely nothing. And, and what he meant by that is that we only, the reason coincidences jump out is we remember those things that seem significant. Like you have a dream every night. And every night, most of the time it's nonsense, but one night you have a dream that you're, that your daughter is going to break your leg and then you find out you get a phone call that she broke

her arm in a car accident and then you say oh my god it's causing but you forget all of the millions and millions of dreams you had that don't know i understand that but i bet you mathematically that the coincidence of the guy turning on the thing just prior to a major uh reverberation wonderful coincidence and i think coincidences are fantastic and the coincidence of you and i being here you point out although i think again it it's you were quoting someone else says it that's a mathematical possibility that impossibility that you and i even exist right given all of the all of the the sperm that had to you know they could have connected with the right egg or the fact that your parents would met or the fact that your parents parents met or there's 100 000 generations before them

It's amazing than any of this happens. Why? What is the coagulation of matter? What is the basic building? What is holding us all together? What is the basic building block? Electrician magnetism. That's the thing, everything around us.

What is that? What is that? Well, what is that? What is it? It's one of the four forces of nature, electricity. What is it? What do you mean? I'll tell you how I can explain it to it.

what it does, explain it to me. How can I explain to you without explanation, right? Hold on. How can I explain to you without telling you what it does? Well, tell me what's the definition. What was the explanation without telling you? I mean, how can I explain you? No, no.

Explain to me what I mean is, don't make your explanation. It does. I want to know what it does and why. The strange things is that elementary particles, like electrons and protons, have this property called electric charge. And when you have two electric charges together, there's a force and the force falls off

as a square of the distance between them. And when you have positive charges and positive charges, they repel. When you have a positive and negative charge, they attract. And that's that attraction. What causes individual atoms to bind together. It's the electrons in those atoms that are,

and that's important matter. How does it work? Why is it, why does it do that? How does it do that? Now, that's the right, there you go. See, I've, I've written once in one of my books that there's why questions don't really have a meaning because they presume purpose. How? How is the important question? Because whenever you say why, you really mean how, don't you? Yeah. And I mean, you really mean how. I did end up saying how. You did. I was impressed. And, and, and you get, and I do want to impress you. Yeah, I can, I know, that's what you live for. But anyway, but how it works is even stranger because, That's where we needed quantum mechanics. Because, okay, let's, here's an elementary lesson in physics. You know what I love? You know what I love? If I were playing you, you know, here's what I would do. Well, here's what we. Let me. Let me. That's a question. Well, it's exciting. Anyway, it is exciting. That's, I know you like that. And that's why many things I like, reasons I like you. But so the weird thing is, So let's picture a classical atom, which has got a pro, let's say a hydrogen atom.

It's got a proton in the center, positive charge, and electron orbiting around it. That's the classical picture of an atom as it was. It doesn't orbit, does it? I mean, it exists, but not an orbit. Well, well, classically, we see it was. When I went to school in orbit, it. Well, exactly. It doesn't orbit anymore.

That's right. So classically, it orbits. But there's a problem with classically orbiting. And here's the problem. If you take an electron and run it around in a circle, it emits radiation. It accelerates and it loses energy. It emits photons. Wait a minute.

The electron exudes radiation? Yeah. That's why the... What is radiation? My lights are working. The radiation. What was that? I thought the electron was the radiation.

No. The radiation. What's radiation? Well, no. Radiations is photons, it's particles of light. And electrons interact with particles of light. They absorb them and they emit them. Is that a basic thing?

That's the basic principle electromagnetism. Electrons interact with... But you just, before you said a photon of light has attraction. No, no, no. I said protons, protons. No, in our previous conversation, a particle of light has attraction. Oh, it does, in fact. It has gravitational attraction.

What is that attraction? It's got energy. Therefore, it asks- What is it? Why does it interact? Because Einstein told us that everything that has energy, has a gravitational field around it and either attracts or a- What is that gravitational field? It's the curvature of space. So a photon that has energy curved space around. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What the hell is it? You mean that curvature, that curvature. Little thing, curved space a little teeny bit. Is what? And you curve space around you. Right now, space is current. around you because you have math. What does that mean? That means that if light, if I send a beam of

light, hold on, let me finish my sense. Not what it does. What does it mean? It means that you and I can have this conversation. I don't understand what the attraction is. What is the photon of life giving off that attracts? Okay, well, the photon of light is giving off, is emitting other particles called gravitons that convey the gravitational field. Okay. Okay. So now then a graviton has to have some explanation as well, right? Well, it's in fact, in the quantum theory of gravity, which we don't have a full theory of,

but in general relativity, we predict the existence of these particles called gravitons. Just like in the quantum theory. Well, we understand. We have never yet measured what the gravitational pull is of a photon. We've never detected an individual graviton. because gravity is so weak, we've never been able to do it. But if you put a lot of gravitons together, you know what happens? They form a gravitational wave.

And that we've detected. Just like we can detect now individual photons, individual particles. Let me just first. Wait a minute. Your student has a question here. Okay. Okay. So we do with theoretical gravitation, graviton.

Yeah. But if we put enough of this theoretical gravitons together, it forms a gravitational wave. But that's theoretical as well because you start. No, no, because we measured them. Well, then what is it? It's still longer theoretical. A gravitational wave is a ripple in space and time. It's a, it's an undulation in space and up.

Oh, ripples. Undulates, just like a water wave undulates up and down. How do we know that? If we measured it with LIGO, we measure the undulations. Wait, remember this? Wait a second. Wait a second. The photon of life.

is a particle of energy which has the enough energy to travel. What's what's pushing it? No, no. In fact, what Einstein sort of showed, first of all, something doesn't need. Einstein knew everything. Well, he did know everything, which is that. Well, that's the point. It's like, I was going to say like Freud, which is slowly being disproved.

Well, Einstein so far hasn't. But what, but what he showed, but first of all, actually, let's go back. Let's go back to Galileo. Good old Galileo, one of my heroes. Looking up, the sun goes around. Gallo is hysterical. You should read him. He was very funny.

He was a real, he really, his book on the two new sciences is hysterical to read. Anyway, yeah, probably one of the reasons the church hated him. But anyway, so Galileo was the first one to show, you know, you don't need anything to push something, have it keep going. You need to apply a force to stop things. If something's moving, it'll keep moving forever unless you stop it. It's got his impetus from somewhere. Yeah, you gave it a kick, but once it's moving... I didn't, you didn't. What gave it its kick?

Okay, now the weird thing about photons is, and this is the really strange thing, is because they're massless, photons have no mass. Right. They have to travel at the speed of light. They can never travel slower or faster. Photons are always traveling at the speed of light because they're... All right, I'll accept that. Why is it... What's the little engine?

What's the... Where... There's no engine. They just travel the speed of light. No, no. You can stop it by putting something in front of them. Just like, look, you turn off the engine on a locomotive and it'll keep going, right? Unless the boiler was heated up in the engine.

Okay. To begin with. Okay, well, I'll give you a kind of answer that may please. No, I want an answer. When the electron emits the photon, it gives it an... When the electron emits the photon. When electron emits a photon. When it's an electron emits a photon.

Wait a minute, we didn't say that before. I did. I told you when electric goes around, it's radiation. And a photon is a particle of radiation. A photon is the quantum. You didn't mention that before. You weren't listening. It's so, Larry, it's so mysterious. It's so, you know, I'm reading a lot of history.

And I'm really like the battle of Action, which was the battle that separated. did Anthony Cleopatra from... I love reading Roman history myself, yeah. Right. It's fascinating. It reads like a read it's like a novel. Yeah, it's amazing. Then she went, and then he did, and they got escaped, and they went. So science is like

that as well. It's like every discovery is like a new chapter. You're like, no kidding. And then then she, then the folk down did what? And then there was the logarith. And it's like just, it goes on and on. is an ever-ending novel. The never-ending part is what's really neat because each time we discover something new,

we produce a new question. And the new question drives us further. It's like cosmic job security. Does anybody else say we don't know? Like, for example, I love the word graviton. So the electron going around the molecule, going around the photon, going around the proton,

emits photon. Yeah. But now, and it gives it energy. Has weight and mass? No, no, it has no mass. It has energy. Just energy, no, but you said to that.

No, no, it has gravity. No, no, it has gravity. Einstein told us you don't have to have mass to produce a gravitational field. You just have to have energy. That's the first big discovery. What's energy? Oh, that's a good question. I'll give you an answer and you'll hate it.

Energy is a source of gravity. That's called elliptical. But it's a problem. That's what I mean. See, because I haven't gotten anybody to explain space time to me. Oh, yeah, time is space. It takes time.

It goes to space. So then why isn't it space and time? Because here's 13.8 billion light years. That's time. Here's one of the reasons no one can explain to you because you won't let them talk. Oh, is that one? I know because I'm the same way.

But anyway, here's look. Look at me now. I'm going to turn here. Now I'm fine. What a great profile. I know. And so the point is, what's weird is that when I turn around this direction, let's call the direction of my nose sticking out as the X direction. When I turned around here, it's suddenly the Y direction.

Okay, you okay with me there? Yeah. You know, it's turn around. Okay? So I can turn, I can, the thing, The thing about spaces, I can rotate. I can go from one direction to another, right? Just by turning around. I can look around this room and I rotate.

The weird thing is that Einstein eventually told us, although he didn't realize it was his teacher, Minkowski, who first realized it, that in fact, space and timer that way, you can rotate one person's space is another person's time. If I'm moving with respect to you, what you would call a space interval, I would call a time interval.

And so I sort of, so space and time are connected, just like the X and Y axis are not quite the same. The mathematics is a little different. Larry, that totally escapes me. You're gonna have to. I'll show you, I'll give you an example. Take my pen. Yeah.

Damn, it's moving very fast, close to the speed of light. Right. Well, if it is moving very fast with respect to you, close to the speed of light, you will see my pen and it looks shorter. It'll instead of being, say, six inches, it'll be four inches, okay? It'll be four inches and you'll measure it going past. You'll say it's only four inches long. Okay, so it's shrunk in space.

That really happens. That really happens. When things move close to the speed of light, relative to other people, other objects, their length shrinks. I thought that was, I thought that was time that shrunk. No, no, no, time dilates. It goes in the other direction. Well, dilates shrinks.

Dylation is shrinking. No, dilation is expansion. But hold on, forget the word. Let's forget the word. Your eyes dilate when you take up your eyes dilate Dylation is getting enlarges. Okay, okay. But anyway, here's the opposite of dilation.

So, but what's the opposite of dilation? Shrinking, I guess. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

As is my argument. But anyway, so this, so this pen is now smaller when it's moving very fast, convince me the light. But the really weird thing is that if I have a little clock on either end of my pen, and I set them up so they're exactly the same time. When this ticks 12 noon, this ticks 12 noon. When it's moving very fast with respect to you, this clock is ahead of that clock.

So the pen has shrunk in space, but it's got extended in time. It used to be that this and this had the same, where it's instantaneous. But now, when you look at it, it's smaller. But if you look at this clock and this clock, you'll say, no, this clock is behind this clock. This one's a second faster than this clock.

So it will extend, extend in time, and contract in space. Just like, here, watch this. Watch my pen. See how it got shorter? It got shorter because projected to you, the amount of the pen that you can see perpendicular to this, or to the screen right now gets smaller and smaller and smaller

until the pen looks very, very short indeed. But that's a function of sight. That's just, but it's a function of... Artists worked with that... Exactly. It's a function of sight, but the reason that's sight, it's a function of three dimensions. It's the fact that I can rotate in an extra dimension.

If that extra dimension was there, I couldn't rotate into it. But in fact, the pen is the same length. It is. It is my instruments. My instruments are measuring it incorrectly. No, they're not. Well, no, they're measuring it correctly. They're measuring the X component of the, and we know there's a Y component.

Okay, but your instruments like this, like this camera, can only measure the X component of the pen. It can't see in the other direction. But if I had a camera right here, it can see in the other direction. And we know, so we know we're smart enough to know that length of the pen doesn't change.

It's just the X component changes. And so does the Y component. And the two always add up. The X component is the ability to measure the speed. Yeah, okay. But what Einstein told us is everything is measurement, right? And that's, if we want to look at the world around, the world is what we measure.

And I'm telling you that when I move this pen very fast, it's like it's rotating into an extra dimension of time so that it's length that we measure it. The measured length is smaller and the time spreads out and the measured time spreads out. The thing that remains invariant is not the length of it, but what we call the space time length. The thing that remains invariant is not length or time. Length and time are relative. That's why the theory of relativity is called relativity. What's invariant is a certain combination of length and time. And one person's length can rotate into another person's time.

And that's why... Depending on the viewer. Depending upon the viewer and their relative motion. That's why reality is relative. Your clock, when you went up in space for a little bit for 10 minutes, when you came back down, your watch was about a 10, one 10 millionth of a second slower it was late for that appointment you're late for dinner you can wait a minute but wait a minute but wait a minute but wait a minute the measurement that you just

offered that the clock in front is a little bit ahead of the clock behind yeah gives us a question of what the future what is the future if that pen the front of the pen is already anticipating the future that the clock and back doesn't know about. Well, for you, but for me, if I'm sitting on, if I'm riding along with this, they read exactly the same time. But I thought that simultaneously in there that the astronaut is time is

slower to get younger. All the clocks, this one is ahead of that one, but it's even weirder, all the clocks are ticking slowly compared to the clock on your wrist. And that, all of that weirdness. That's incomprehensible, man. Yeah, but the universe doesn't care. It's true.

I thought that was... We can measure that. We've been able to measure it by using atomic clocks. In fact, here's another thing, which I wrote about. And maybe you... If you don't know this, it'll blow your mind, I hope. Okay, you drive around L.A. You talk about how you'd like to drive around a lot.

You use GPS in your car to find, you know, use Google... When I need to. When I need to. wouldn't work if we didn't know about general relativity and special relativity. Because you know how GPS works? We have these satellites orbiting above the Earth surface, and then they triangulate. So there's a signal the satellite sends down to your car in another satellite, and you measure the difference in time between the two.

And if you know, you know, where those satellites are and how long it takes the light to get from there to there, the difference of time tells you where you are. Right. Except because those satellites are going around the Earth, they're moving very fast. And you can show that each day, if we didn't take into account for the fact that those clocks are slowing down due to relativity, then about 30 microseconds, they lose 30 microseconds a day compared to the clock on your wrist. And if we didn't take that into account and correct for that, then within an hour, you'd be within actually three minutes, you'd be a kilometer away from where you thought you were supposed to be. Every day in GPS, we use, we rely on that weird fact the clock slow down. How is it corrected?

We know the formulas of special relativity and general relativity. Oh, you don't correct the satellite. You correct the measurement. Yeah, we have to. Because if it wasn't, isn't that amazing? Eventually, you've got to go to another satellite. You'd be using another satellite. But I want to even make it weirder for you.

It's not just, the clocks aren't just going slowly because they're going around like that. It turns out, Einstein also told us if you take a clock in a gravitational field and you lift it up, it's the speed, the rate at which the clock ticks will be different. So in fact, because those clocks are high up and farther away from the earth in a gravitational field, they're actually ticking a little faster due to general relativity. And we have to take that effect into account as well. So we have to take the fact that gravity changes time and speed changes time. It's very esoteric, but it's so damn normal that without it, you wouldn't be able to get around Los Angeles.

And you're conversing with that. You know that is like I know. Yeah, and the engineers who built it had to be conversing with it. Otherwise, you wouldn't get to where you wanted to go on. Literally, those satellites would put you a kilometer away. I tell you what is mind-boggling and sad. Yeah. Like people like myself, lacking understanding, that magic. I don't know if that's sad so much.

Look, we all can't be experts on everything. What's sad. You don't have to be sad. That's an incredible fact. That's like the apple falling. Oh, the apple falls. I think it's so important that I like to scream it from the treetops. That's why I write books, because I think these are some of the most fascinating ideas humans have ever developed.

People should be interested in them. Is that what's your book talks about? Yeah, sure. All 12 of them. What's your book called? The new one is called the Edge of Knowledge. And I'll mail you a copy right after this. I think you did.

Oh, I give you a PDF. That's an electronic copy. If that's good enough for you, that's fine. I'll mail you a physical copy if you want. But what's really sad to me is not so much that people don't understand it. That's sad, and I'd like people to at least appreciate that these things are out there. What's really sad is how many people just don't care. And, you know, that aren't as excited as you are.

That's why it's such a pleasure to be with. You know what? I can't believe that. I have to believe that humanity, the brain, as we were said earlier, getting the fruit from the tree, comes down and said, my God, you know, how did that fruit grow on that tree and not on that tree? So at some point, the mechanism must have garnered that thought. You know, who thought of it when the apple fell on his head was Newton, right? But I think he asked those questions, and then they stop asking those questions. Well, that's my theory that you've got to cultivate that child of what do you mean?

I mean, it's just everything is magical. Everything. Everything on earth is phenomenal. It is phenomenal. It is phenomenal. And I remember you, you know, one of the, there's so much, so many of your statements in your book that I resonate with that I love, but I remember you talk in your book about

looking out at sunset from your house, I guess, is it for San Fernando Valley? Is that what it is? And you say, you know, it's beauty, it's miracle of tectonic plates of organic, original volcanic material that's hardened million years ago, like the sugar on top of a creme brule,

then it shook even just a little and slipped and became a mountain. So every time you look out at the sun, you see the you those the miracles of nature and they are miracles in the sense that they seem miraculous are something that you get excited about and that's why that's why it's important that you write these things because a lot of people care about you and they seem like you're excited excited what what you know it's just acquisition of knowledge the acquisition of knowledge is the voyage of humanity isn't it it certainly is it it's certainly is it

than the Columbus. Yeah, and it's a shame to think that some people might want to stop that in one way or another, because it's what, it's what, actually, one of your sentences reminded me of the last sentence. I brought it an old book of mine by Stephen Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, who was a mentor of mine, but probably the greatest theoretical physicists of partly close to the second half of the 20th century. He was the one of unified, helped unify two of the four fundamental forces of nature. But let me read you the last paragraph. Did he do the strong and weak?

He did the weak and electromagnetic. The weak and electromagnetic. The electro-week theory. I have no souless. I have no idea what I've just said. It's all right. It's okay. It sounded good.

Not okay. I'm mouthing words like a child does Latin. But it's easy to do. But then you ask the questions why. But let me give Stephen a chance here. He said, if there's no solace in the fruits of our research, there's at least some solace, some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants,

or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life. They also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours, working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. Isn't that beautiful?

I thought you'd like that. I love it. I love it. And yet, and yet, and yet the overarching question, the overarching, overarching question is, over-arching, overarching question is, it's so intricate and yet so simple. It does seem weird that the universe of some level. That's called reductionism, and I'm a particle physicist by training, we tend to say that as you look smaller and smaller scales, this universe which has so many different things,

all the different materials, all the strange way things behave. If we look at it at a fundamental scale, there's just a few fundamental laws that govern all of that, and a few elementary particles, just a few, and it is amazing. And we have discovered, yeah, there's only four fundamental forces, five, but four, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force in gravity.

And they govern everything that we've ever been able to measure. Fifth is a unifying one, right? Well, no, no, no. We think we're going to try and unify those four. We don't know of any other forces yet. So the problem is the strong weak in electromagnetic seem like they can be easily unified. Gravity is the outlier.

And no one yet knows, except some string theorists thought string theory might be a way to do it, how to unify gravity with the other forces. I would do this, but I just learned in your book, you can't do that. But gravity, so when we look for a unified theory

that unifies all the forces, it unifies a strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity, and we don't have such a theory. Right now, the only real theory we have that unifies forces is the weak and electromagnetic. The strong force looks very much like the weak in electromagnetic, and we know at some extremely small scale, 16 orders of magnitude in size smaller than the proton, the strength of the weak electromagnetic

and strong forces will all become the same. And therefore, it seems quite likely to us that they will unify together in some single force. But gravity is still out here. And we can't yet figure out how to unify gravity with these other forces because the difference is each of these other three forces can be described by quantum theory. Quantum mechanics works. With gravity, quantum mechanics doesn't work.

And in some sense, it's an open question still. Some people, some really good physicists still say, do we have to dispense with gravity and change the theory of gravity so it becomes a quantum theory? Or at some fundamental scale, do we dispense with quantum mechanics? And we don't know. String theory is a quantum theory that purports to be a theory of gravity. So it's great. That's what got people excited.

The problem is it requires there to be a whole bunch of extra dimensions. And whenever you've gone on stage and walked off, you've never gone into an extra dimension. Well, but then everything is, things have evolved from that original explosion. Such weirdness to such strange things that, you know, that brains would not have thought of because it just... It got complicated. The world got complicated. You and I were born. And then that which didn't work died away, and that which worked stayed in extent.

And then that multiplied. And over the billions and billions of years, all this matriculation became something. In fact, yeah, I wrote, I'm going to send you another one of my books. It's called Adam, which is a biography of an atom from the beginning of the universe to the end. ATOM or ADA. Yeah, in the beginning I said there were no atoms or Eves, but ATOM. A.O.M. But it's A.TOM. It's a story of an oxygen atom. But it is really amazing that evolution from the earliest moments of universe. That's why, by the way, I got into cosmology and astrophysics. My training is in particle physics. But I realized that if I really want to understand the universe, that the universe was a great experiment. It was a great particle physics experiment. It was only done once, as far as we can tell, our universe, the big bang. But if we look out and are careful enough, we might see things in the universe that allow us to work back. to the very beginning of time. And that's and and we have help me with this one.

Help me with this. So a hundred years ago, along comes Einstein, 150 years. And you know, one of the great minds and we begin to understand more. Why did it take up until now, the hundred years of tectonic plates? Why did it take up until now to somebody suggest, well, there was a big bang and that's how it all started. What do you mean? Somebody thought there's a big bang. We see in science things change all the time. The speed of light may not be the final defining measurement.

Well, come on. Everything changes. And 90% and 95% of what we're looking at, we don't know. That's true. But there's some things we do know. What you shouldn't confuse about, and this is really important, there's a tremendous amount we don't know about the universe. But that's not the same as saying we know nothing.

So you're right, at the forefronts of science, where I wrote my book about, anything goes. But where things have survived the test of experiment, those things aren't going to change. If I take a ball, a billion years from now, when I know about quantum gravity, if I take a ball here and let it go, it's going to fall. And Newton's laws will describe how it fell. Now, Newton's laws have been subsumed in a more elegant theory called general relativity. And so are the boundaries of knowledge pushed forward? but it's not as if the things that have survived the test of experiment are ever going to change. Electromagnetism is always going to be electromagnetism.

Even if we discover it's part of a unified theory, the force between an electron and a proton will be described a billion years from now. And if you ask me why Einstein was Einstein when he was? Because, as Newton would have said, he stood on the shoulders of joints. Einstein wouldn't have developed what he did if Michael Faraday, the British experimentalist, had discovered the laws of electromagnetism and James Clerk Maxwell 40 years earlier. If Einstein had been born, Einstein had been born 50 years earlier, who never would have been Einstein. So does that not tell you about coincidence?

It was, well, I like, and as long as we call it coincidence, it's an accident. There's no, there was, it wasn't preordained that Einstein would be born there. He was lucky. He was lucky. And we're lucky to be born now because of all the things we're learning. But as you say, your grandchildren will be lucky. to have been born when they are because when they're your age and my age, there presumably be a lot more they know about the universe than we're now. If the world still exists, if it still exists, we hope, but we, but, but one of the ways that'll be happening,

if the world will only continue to exist if we continue to ask questions and are willing to say we don't know. One of the things I just wrote a piece for a newspaper, they'll come out in a few weeks, I think part of this culture war nonsense that I know you and I have a little patience for is that people aren't willing to say, I don't know. They all know this is the way, this is the way it is and you're wrong and this is the way it is, you're wrong and you're evil because, and if we just said, you know, maybe I don't know, let me listen to you and see if maybe you're right, then all that would go away, I think. Well, that's a neat political idea, but humanity is very perverse. It is. But you know what? I think, but that's why science is so

useful. That's one of the reasons I, it's not just the results of science, it's the methodology. It's the process of constantly questioning and testing and re-questioning. How many billions of dollars did the web telescope cost us? Ten billion dollars. Used to be a lot of money. Not anymore, right? I mean, you know, $10 billion over 20 years. I was going to say, in 20 years' time, it was a lot of money, 10 billion is a lot of money, even now. I mean, you'd get an argument. If you'd You were to say today in Congress, you know, let's spend $10 billion on a telescope. We got the border.

I've been through this many times. We had the superconductor super glider that was killed because it cost $10 billion. But $10 billion over 20 years is half a billion dollars a year. And if you look at what we spend, half a billion dollars on it, and it's one aircraft carrier is a billion dollars. And so you've got to ask the question. But it's also the leaders. Mm-hmm. of our country, of the world need to be invested with the holy light of the quest for knowledge.

Of curiosity, the question of knowledge, exactly. There's nothing else exists other than being fed and have a roof over your head. nothing else exists after the amenities of living are met. Nothing else exists but why and where and how. Otherwise, what's the point of being human? I mean, you said it in the very beginning of your book. You said, knowledge feeds me. It's as necessary to my existence as oxygen.

And ultimately, you know, and in fact, I've said this before, but I'll say it again. People, science in some sense, suffers by the fact that it produces technology that makes the world go around. Because when I ask questions about the beginning of the universe and I propose the dark energy and all those things, people say, okay, big deal. Why? Is it going to make a better toaster? Is it going to make a car, better car? And the answer is, well, maybe, but it doesn't matter. It's the ideas. People don't ask, what's the use of a Mozart symphony or a Picasso painting. It's what makes being human worth being human because it gives you a different perspective of your place in the universe. I know you love music. Music transports you and gives you a different perspective of what it means to be human. So to science. And for me, the greatest gift of science is not the technology that made this conversation between you and I possible across a country with computers. It's the ideas.

It's the ideas. It's a notion that, you know, the understanding that we share atoms, that all of those ideas are what makes science so wonderful. And that makes it like art, music, and literature, a central part of our culture. And that's really the purpose of my podcast and also the books. Science and culture are connected. And having this disconnect where somehow people say, ah, science, you know, it's like saying you don't like music or you don't like art or movies or any of the things that we all love. It's what makes it would, it's what raises humanity from the level of farce to tragedy. It's what

makes humanity worth being human. So I would argue technology is wonderful. And science has made the world a better place. No doubt about it. And it's produced technology that every day astounds both you and I. But it's the ideas to me that are the most important thing. Because they're the knowledge. You're like yourself who not only know, but promulgate. And that's incredibly, well, as you state, it's not the word important doesn't even apply. It's as necessary as food. Yeah. And you know, and I think and one of the things that I, I admire about you, besides just liking you, is that curiosity, is that child's curiosity and the fact that you've been able to use your, just like I use my, to some extent, my profile as a scientist to have a platform to try and get people interested in science. You use your platform of celebrity to get people excited about the world, part in part. You do many other things. But I think that's the greatest thing you can do is to try and encourage people to, um,

And especially encourage people who may not view themselves as being scientists. When there was a movie that was made about me and a biologist called Richard Dawkins, who you may have heard of. And it was called the unbelievers, because both of us are sort of atheists. But in that movie, we asked people about science, and we got a bunch of celebrities. And we should have gotten you, but probably couldn't get through your agent at the time. But anyway, we got, I remember convincing Cameron Diaz to be on it. And I said to her, look, I knew she was interested in science

because she'd once attended a lecture of mine. And I said, look at all the young girls who admire you because for all the reasons that they admire you. If they see you talking about science as something fascinating, then that's something, that's a gift you're giving them. And that's what we use to convince her to be on it. But I think it's really important that people see that science is, anyone, you don't have to be an expert to be, to be enjoy science.

It's like it's again, I can't play. I'm not Eric Clapton. I can't play the guitar, but I can enjoy him. But for some reason, people think you have to be an expert in science to enjoy it, even though you can enjoy art and music and literature and new movies without being, you know, an expert. It's a very valid, uh, thought, thesis, uh, argument. Um, you just, said something that tantalized me because I don't understand atheism is not believing at all but

your scientist believes in the mystery solution to the mystery so I think people well you're right I don't like to use the word belief as a science I'm fascinated by it I'm awed by it I amazed by it and maybe I maybe the word believe what we atheism, I don't think, I don't even think atheism. I'm not, I don't want it to be a, you know, a salesman for atheism. But I think people also mislabel atheism. They think it's like religion. All atheism is saying the arguments to believe in a God aren't convincing to me. That's all. Well, except the most basic one. Which is what? How did it start? And that's, I wrote a book called the universe from nothing. It showed you don't need any supernatural shenanigans. The whole universe with 100 billion galaxies. each containing 100 billion stars can all come from nothing without violating the laws of physics and without supernatural quantum mechanics and universes are popping into existence all the time around us. And if you asked yourself the following question,

what would a universe that popped into existence from nothing by just the laws of physics that survived for 13.8 billion years look like? And you asked what the properties that universe would be. it would turn out to be exactly the properties of the universe we find ourselves living in. Does that prove that our universe came from nothing? No, but it certainly makes it possible and makes it possible. But the great thing about science is not that it says, we're back to the brain that can't encompass something coming from nothing.

You're right. It seems crazy. It seems crazy. Well, the word nothing is nothing. Well, what do you mean? Actually, this is an important question because people ask me, what do you mean by nothing? So let me ask you what do you mean by nothing? everything ceases to exist. Okay, so there's no space, no time, no particles, no matter, nothing.

Okay, and what I tell you is that out of that, where there's no space, no time, no radiation, no particles, suddenly the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity allow suddenly, boom, a space to pop into existence. But that very fact, the laws of quantum mechanics. Okay, so you might say the laws are, the laws are pre-existing, okay? But even that may not be necessary. Where did that law come from? Who knows? Exactly.

Why do you need a God? Why do you need a God to put? I'm not saying God. I'm saying, who knows? Exactly. That's atheism. That's agnosticism. But no, but agnosticism is just a form of atheism.

That's the, what people, I actually wrote the preface of a book written a long time ago, and I didn't realize it was called the case for atheism. And the guy was very clear. Agnosticism is just a form of atheism. There are different kinds of atheism. There are people who say, God can't exist. It's impossible. But there are just people who say,

I'm not convinced by any of the arguments that have been given to me that a personal God exists. And that's atheism too. That's atheism too. It's just saying it's not a belief system. It's just saying. But it's bad. I think scientists like yourself,

who speak that way, get a bad rap. Of course. Because you're not saying it's a mystery. Well, in fact, you are saying it's not a mystery that it can exist from nothing. It could. It's a mystery, but we still say, all we're saying is we don't know the details. But the argument that it has to be God is like it's just giving up and stop thinking. It's like Ricky Jervais, who I had talked to.

It's like going, no, no, no, no, no. Why mention God is just a way, a term is saying, I don't understand it. We're going to go to heaven, God. That's not the God we're talking about. You're more like the Einstein's God, the God of Spinoza. The awe and wonder of the universe is what is your God, right? That's exactly it. And you call yourself, I've heard you say spirituality.

I hate when people use that term because I don't know what it is. I think it's somewhere you wrote. It's like sitting at home watching movies while smoking God. The awe and wonder is the spirituality. Yeah, that's fine. Great. That's great. That's wonderful.

And I buy that, and I think the universe, and Einstein said that, you know, he talked about the goddess but he didn't really mean God. He talked about the fact that the universe is comprehensible was for him the greatest wonder and mystery of nature at all, the fact that we can even comprehend it in any, at even any level, maybe not completely. Maybe we'll never understand it completely. The fact that we can even comprehend it a little bit is just remarkable. And the universe is awe-inspiring. In fact, that's my point. You don't need the nonsense. You don't need the fairy tales.

The universe itself is so amazing that you don't need to add on, you know, someone parting the waters and all the rest of this. The universe is pretty darn amazing. The fact that the moon causes the tides on Earth is pretty dense. Remember it. I am not a religious person. any way, any shape of the word.

But if waters parted to people who had no idea of the explanation of the winds and the tide, there's a possibility, as you know, the water separated because of the waters and because of the winds and the tide. And the people ran across and then the winds and the tide changed. And here comes the pursuers and they get inundated. That's possible. That doesn't have been possible. And you're right. And people ascribe it to God.

And all you can say is, well, you know, but you know, there's another explanation. It's a lot simpler. And not only that, we can test it. And we can make a prediction. And we can actually test. And that's the difference. But you know, it's. And then you get into the mystery of the brain.

Oh, yeah. And the very mystery of us. The crazy. The most. Thinking. What, some of the ideas that you and I have talked about are, how did we arrive at that. In consciousness.

I'm not our dogs. I think that's the biggest mystery. I mean, literally, last chapter of that book is on consciousness because it's far, I tell people, I'm a physicist because it's easy. It's easier than trying to understand consciousness. Because we don't even,

the weird thing is we can't even define consciousness very well. And there's a great experiment I talk about in there that shows you can't even trust people when they tell you why they're doing what they're doing. They think they know why they're doing what they're doing. But they're not really doing it for that reason. It's a rationalization they've invented to create this sense of self. But what creates a sense of self? And we don't know.

And I think ultimately, as I described there, I again use another line from the physicist Richard Feynman, who said, if you can't build it, you don't understand it. So maybe the only way we'll finally understand consciousness is if we create a machine that's conscious. Now, before we part company. Yeah, because I know what's getting on, but I appreciate you. Talk to me about. that okay I'm I'm doing a lot of work with AI and and I even interviewed a guy

it's strangest thing I interviewed a guy I think or else it was a dream it was so unreal that it may not have been real that's how I feel about it wow on the other hand it may be on on tape so it exists I believe I talked to the curator who must have been a scientist of renown whose job it was was to to

whose job it was to manage the most sophisticated computer that we have that was fed everything written in English that exists okay one of these your knowledge so maybe it wasn't a dream

so I talked to the guy and the guy there's a cavernous opening in back of him and I said do you think that that could ever come alive and he says no I don't think it could but I got to tell you every so often I sit here at night and the hair of my arms goes up because I think there may be an intelligence behind me I think it's I think we're a far far far away from that I mean what what these things that appear intelligent are they They data mine. They get all this data, and they're good at selecting and parsing it.

But that's not the same thing as necessarily intelligence. But aren't we computers? Aren't we? Your scientist? I think we're computers, but we're sufficient, but we're not the same as the computers we build. Hold on a second. So your science teachers said, oh, all right, this and science.

that and they fed you that information and now you're spouting back that information no no but i'm but but i also am doing other things i think i'm creating new information hopefully over my life you're combining the thoughts that you no maybe when i'm proposing something new that hasn't been done before i like to think in once or twice in my life i've done that and when you've done that when you when you create a character that's new sure it's been influenced it's been influenced but here but but But the question is, do they, computer, does chat GPT4, or whatever you want to call it, does it understand what it's doing? And I think almost everyone who's thought about it would say no, but that doesn't mean it's not a, it's not a, it might not happen eventually. What's love and what's justice and, you know, you ask it moral questions.

It spouts back Plato. It spouts back Spinoza. So can a, so can a student that memorizes a dictionary, but that doesn't make them intelligent. Right? That doesn't make them a good picture. You know, in fact, and people will jump on me here because it's changed. But when I was chair of a physics department, we used to, you know, get graduate students. And the students from China would always come in with the best test scores. And one of the reasons was they'd been educated to be able to do well on the tests. And they also had a tendency to always sort of revere their instructors and not question their instructors. So what happens when they came to graduate school, they would, they would have, they would be great at tests, but when it came to doing research and questioning sometimes what their instructors are saying, they weren't always so good. Now, that's changed a lot, China's changed a lot. So just doing well on tests and knowing the answers, it's the important thing. It's knowing what good questions to ask, and that's intelligence. It's knowing what good questions

to ask, and that's the hard thing. That's what's driven people. And the people who've moved us forward are the ones who learned to ask the new question. I had the best time with you, Richard. This has been like a bath. Look, you know what? I have been with you once a decade for two decades now, and for me it's far too little. And I want you to move here.

And by the way, you know, you've, you know, the Confederation Center for the Performing. You got the phone number. I want you to suggest a real estate agent. I will. And Confederation Center for the Arts, which is beautiful, wants me and you, to do a dialogue there. So we should do it on stage.

They'll do it. Okay. That'll be, I'll come there. And then you'll look at real estate and we'll do the and that, and it'll pay for your trip. Best of all, you and I. You and I. It's what a lovely, lovely time. My goodness. It's great. It's been great. Thank you. And you

take care of your. Larry, I'm going to tell you something. This is my definition of love. I love you. Me too. Me too. My definition too. Absolutely. Take care, Moody. I'll see you soon. See you soon. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. 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 Originsproject Foundation.org