The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Dialogues with Richard Dawkins

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Richard Dawkins and I have appeared together onstage many times, been the subject of the documentary The Unbelievers, and have collaborated on various writing projects as well. Thus it may come as a surprise to you to learn that each time we get together, we find new things to discuss and learn from each other. It surprises us as well. This fall we agreed to appear onstage together at two separate events co-sponsored by The Origins Project. The events, entitled Changing Minds in Changing Times were coordinated by Atheist UK and were in London and Birmingham. In both events I gave short presentations, and at the end of the event Richard and I appeared together onstage for a dialogue. At the first event I was able to discuss with Richard his latest book, Books do Furnish a Life, and at the second event, for the first time, Richard interviewed me, for his new podcast, The Poetry of Reality. We have combined these two dialogues here into a single podcast. Together they cover a broad collection of subjects, from science, to science communication, and finally to the threats to free inquiry now occurring in higher education. As always, I find it an absolute pleasure to spend time conversing with Richard. He is charming, eloquent, and insightful. I hope you enjoy these newest discussions 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

Hi, and welcome to the Orgence Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. Richard Dawkins and I go back a long way. We've had great times together. We've had many dialogues on stage. We've written things together. And we've even appeared in a movie together, the Unbelievers, that followed us as we lectured around the world. And you might think, based on that, there's nothing new for us to talk about. And we often worry about that, but in fact we found that each time we have a dialogue on stage or online, there are new and exciting things to talk about. We are surprised and perhaps he'll be surprised. This year, we did two events on stage in England for Changing Minds and Changing Times, which was produced in part by the

Origins Project, one in London, one in Birmingham. And we found them fascinating. They were surprising that in London, I got to interview Richard about his interests and his recent book and other things. And in Birmingham, for the very first time, Richard interviewed me for his podcast and this podcast. And we've recorded them and combined them together here for this Origins Project podcast. And I hope you find it as fascinating and entertaining as we found doing them more. So please enjoy these podcasts, these discussions, these two discussions with Richard Dawkins. You can watch them, as always, without any commercial interruption, if you could be a paid subscriber to our substack site, Critical Mass. And those subscription fees go to supporting the Origins Project

Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that produces the podcast and our other public events, and I hope you'll consider supporting it. Otherwise, eventually it'll be released on YouTube. They can watch it on our YouTube channel, as always, or you can listen to it on any podcast site. No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you enjoy these dialogues as much as I always enjoy my dialogues with Richard. Well, we've done a lot of double acts together, Lawrence,

but this is the first time I've had the pleasure of interviewing you. Yes, yes. And I'm going to treat it with everybody's permission as a kind of tutorial in physics. Okay. Because I hardly understood a word of what you said. Which is always my test case. For example, I mean, when you said this is ridiculous, this is absurd,

and therefore everything's absurd in modern physics, in the same sense. Yeah, you're right in the sense that you're absolutely right. modern physics has taught, almost everything is absurd when it comes to conventional wisdom and common sense. It's taught us that common sense is not to be trusted. You have to go to the actual data. You have to go to the data and ask if common sense is consistent with the data.

And you should be willing to accept. And I think as you probably said, it's not surprising that common sense doesn't work, because common sense is evolutionarily based. And it's based on the things that got us successfully reproducing for a million years and not, and not an understanding the universe. And the biggest surprise is that it somehow has led to a species that can. It's hugely surprising that it's led to a species that can. And sometimes I console myself with the thought you just said that, after all, we evolved to work out where the next meal is coming from and where the next member of the opposite sex and where the next waterhole and where the next... so on.

And so it's not surprising that we cannot grasp the idea that when a particle moves from one orbit to another, it doesn't pass through the intermediate stages when a particle goes through

two slits at once and so on. I love there's a cartoon in the New York. You've probably seen it. It's in a veterinary waiting room, a vets waiting room, and the nurse is there, and she's breaking some news to one of the people who's

sitting there with another person with a dog with one of those lampshade things on and she's saying to one man about your cat Mr. Schrodinger I have some good news and some bad news well

Schrodinger made up the cat fable as a demonstration of how ridiculous the interpretation of quantum theory is that it will in his terms, the cat is neither alive nor dead until you open the box.

And that's clearly absurd. And yet, it's one of the accepted, reputable interpretations of quantum theory. Another one is the many world's interpretation where there are numerous billions of universes where the cat is alive and billions of universes where the cat is dead, which is, to my mind, slightly less absurd, actually.

it's very uneconomical, but not totally absurd. Where do you stand on... Or I suppose there's a third school of thought, which is Feynman, who says, just shut up and calculate. Well, I side with Feynman to a great extent there. I don't come on the side of either. I think they're both misplaced.

I do think you're right. If you had to pick one, the many world's interpretation is more palatable, or closer, a little bit closer to what actually is the case. But neither are the case. And in fact, quantum theory does not predict that the cat is both alive and dead. It predicts that an electron can be spinning this way and that way. But properly interpreted, quantum theory says the world is quantum mechanical, yet the world around us is classical.

You're in that chair, you're not in that chair and in the audience at the same time. An electron could be, but you're not. So there's somehow, there's some, something happens when the world becomes classical. And if quantum mechanics is correct, then it should explain how the world becomes classical. And one of my colleagues and professors first, and then a colleague and then friend, who's now passed away Sidney Coleman at Harvard, who was, interestingly enough, the smartest person in the department. At the time, the department had five Nobel laureates in it, but he was smarter than any of them and also funnier.

he pointed out that we get it exactly wrong. There should be no such discussion as the interpretation of quantum mechanics because the world is quantum mechanical. So any time you describe the real world in terms of some cluge, which is the classical world we experience, you can prove something that sounds nonsensical like the many world's interpretation. And in fact, what we should try and understand is the interpretation of classical mechanics.

How is it that the world we see is the way it is when the real world is different? And he gave a great lecture, which I talk about in the new book, and I really recommend you looking at. You can see it online called Quantum Mechanics in Your Face. But one of the things I didn't mention the book, which I think is lovely, is the realization. So quantum mechanics says many weird things should happen, but when we measure them, we measure something different.

people often talk about it's the collapse of the wave function. There's no collapse of the wave function. It's just thinking about quantum mechanics correctly and measurement, you realize how a classical observer will always measure classical things. And the example he uses is from a Tom Stopper play where Ludwig Weinstein is sanding on a corner in Cambridge, and he's thinking, and someone stops this, what do you think about? He said, well, I'm thinking about the fact that people say,

you know, that the Earth orbit doesn't orbit the Sun. It just, I mean the Earth doesn't orbit the Earth, the Earth orbits the sun. It just looks like the... And so it says, yeah, and he says, well, I'm thinking about what would it look like if it was the other way around? And of course, it would look exactly the same. And when you think about it, and he carefully shows that this classical cluge can result from a careful understanding of quantum mechanics.

But people will get hung up of the many ones. or interpretations of quantum mechanics and write books about it to make themselves seem profound. It's totally misplaced in my view. It's like saying the interpretation of general relativity in terms of Newton. Well, the results of general relativity in terms of Newton are absurd. Light doesn't go in bend in Newtonian mechanics, but if you try to interpret general relativity in terms of Newton, you'd have to come up with these weird cluges, but no one does it. I don't know, well, I know why they do it with quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics is so strange that people, even at their heart,

because in principle we all have seen curved pieces of paper and curved things, so even if curved three-dimensional spaces are beyond our kin, we're used to the ideas, but quantum mechanics is completely beyond our perception, our experience, and therefore is innately not understandable. As Feynman said, if you think you understand it, you don't understand it. So it's not the case that you're perfectly safe playing Russian roulette because even if you shoot yourself in another world, you go on. I would say it's not, and I would say that since life is finite, then, you know, it doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, because even in the many, the important thing about the many worlds interpretation is some people think that somehow those other worlds,

if they are the same as our world. You're not, you can't go between them. So you're dead if you shoot yourself in the head. It really doesn't matter what's happening. Yes, I don't really mean that seriously. But it's, it's, and it's precisely that reason that quantum mechanics with many complex electrons and photons do strange things that we can measure in the laboratory,

but only if we very carefully prepare them. We see quantum teleportation and entanglement and all these exotic stuff. But the reason people win Nobel Prize is, for that is it's really hard to do the experiments. Because the minute you stop shielding these very carefully prepared states and allow them to interact with the world around them, all those weird quantum mechanical correlations disappear.

And so the weirdness of quantum mechanics is invisible to us. And objects like you and Schrodinger's cat, the challenge is to explain why Schrodinger's cat isn't. both alive and dead, and a proper understanding of measurement theory in quantum mechanics will tell you that it's a nice... So you... Do you wish you were experimental physicist? Now that I'm older, yes. When I was younger, well, see, theoretical physics seems sexier. The people you heard of, Einstein, Feynman,

you know, almost all of the great theorists, great physicists, you heard of, about in the in most of the 20th century that I sort of idolized or at least made me want to be a scientist. We're all theorists, you know, sitting alone in a room discovering the universe, which is not how it happens at all. But in fact, it was only, and I, when I was a undergraduate, I actually did experimental physics, which is what convinced me I didn't want to be in experimental physics. Not only that it was easy for me to destroy things, I nearly blinded myself with the laser once, but, but what, I was What really convinced me, and this is one of the reasons I hold them in such admiration,

is that I worked for six months on a little thing to try and get one little part of an experiment to work, six months on that one little thing. And yeah, I finally got that one little thing to work, but I'm a very impatient person. And the idea of spending 10 or 20 years on an experiment which might reveal absolutely nothing was something that didn't appeal to me. But now, I certainly, as I became a physicist, my appreciation of experiment dramatically increased, actually, when I was a graduate student.

I used to do mathematical physics when I started, very mathematical physics. And it was now a friend of mine, named Sheldon Glashow, who was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, who one day looked at me and said, there's formalism and there's physics. And you have to know how to tell

the difference. And what he convinced me is you always should ground yourself in observation. You should never be far away from what we can measure. Or you're at risk of sort of intellectual masturbation, of sort of wandering off into a domain that has nothing to do

with the real world. And that caused me to almost all of my work, therefore has in some ways been related to things we can measure. Not all of it, but much of it. And the other thing about experiment that I envy now is that that when you build something, it's real.

You have something there. You have something to show for your work afterwards. Whereas ideas are so much more ephemeral. And you can never really, I mean, ideas are often in the background anyway. You know, Einstein developed general relativity. It was a triumph, but David Hilbert, the mathematician, was that close to developing it.

You know, I profiled what we wrote in 1995. There were other people thinking similar things. So you never kind of feel like with an experiment you've done something, you've demonstrated something, you've really tapped into nature. It's terrifying if you're an experimental, if you're a theorist. It really is terrifying to think that some weird idea that you're writing down might actually describe the universe. Let me raise another of the things that came up in your pre-stall. When you said even when the prediction is fulfilled to the umpteenth decimal place, it's still not actually. actually true and I get that. But on the other hand, when you say in all science, I mean, well, my Darwin's theory of natural selection is true. Well, that's not just provisional. Well, that's an interesting question. Well, okay, maybe not quite that, but the fact that we are cousins to chimpanzees is simply true. Yeah, okay, there are scientific facts

that what we've measured, what we've measured is true. Okay? What we measured, you can't, you know, I mean, unless the measurement is wrong, and you can always test it and retest it. But when you measure something, you're dropping a ball, it's going to fall down, not up. No matter what we learn about quantum gravity, you let the ball go. A million years or now, it's not going to go up. It's always going to be described. It was lost because our measurements have shown that in general. But it's not, but the question is, is it true over all times and spaces?

And you could say with evolution that evolution is true, but it's true. It's manifested in the long term over long times. It's not, it doesn't necessarily describe accurately what's happening at every instant when a biological system is working. No, that's true. So that's what I mean by universally true. And it's the challenge of evolution.

The reason people don't buy it is that you need to understand long times and it's something hard for people to accept that something as complex as the eye or DNA or RNA could actually develop. Well, let me persist in my role as the unintelligent layman trying to have. When you, excuse me, we hear about Hubble showing that the universe expanding and then the metrics extrapolating backwards. I get that extrapolating backwards makes sense, but why to a point? Why not to a sphere, you know, the size of the Earth or the size of the solar system or something? Why a single point?

Well, because if you take the theory seriously, then that theory and many theories of physics are time reversal invariant. So if you can extrapolate forward, then you can always run the movie backwards. And if you take the theory to its logical conclusion with gravity being attractive, if the universe is always expanding, then at some point, if you work backwards, it's always contracting. And the extrapolation of that is to a single point, but you're absolutely right that we have no right to extrapolate the theory back to a single point because of what I said earlier. We know general relativity breaks down as a theory.

We know it describes the universe beautifully and galaxies beautifully, but we know, and this is a great gift, we know explicitly the scale at which general relativity stops making sense. It's called the Planck scale. We know if quantum mechanics is true, that general relativity stops making sense at a very small scale. So you can't extrapolate back and do it with any confidence. It doesn't stop physicists from doing it. And many physicists do it.

And we generally, when you should take all of those things with a grain of salt, whether it's Roger Penrose or anyone else. If I sound naive, it's because I reckon I'm probably not alone. Yeah, no, it's great, and I know we've had these discussions, but I also know that, anyway. I don't understand what's the difference between inflation and expansion? Oh, that's a great question, and again, you're probably right that, you know, I threw out the term. So what Le Mette showed, really, Lemaître and since then, is that general relativity doesn't allow for a static configuration of matter, and the answer is the answer is the same as Newton. Newton doesn't allow a static configuration of matter because gravity is universally attractive.

So if you put a bunch of mass points down in Newtonian gravity, they're always going to collapse together because they're always going to be attracted by gravity. And more or less, what LeMet showed, is the same thing is true in general relativity. If you have normal matter and radiation, it's more or less universally attractive, and therefore the only way you could have a universe

that's as old as ours, if you started out with a static universe, it would have already collapsed by now. So the only possibility is to start it out expanding, and then it'll slow down and maybe return back. If you throw a rock, it'll go... I'm familiar with the idea that when the solar system condensed out of a ball, out of a lot of gas, gravity was attracted to little nuggets of matter that were forming, and they gradually grew and grew and grew gravity, and they became planets. and so that's gravity pulling things together

and making in this case planets or rocks or that's easy to understand but contraction to a single point of infinitesimal size is utterly different from that. It is except why don't we collapse right now? Why are we sitting in these chairs? Thankfully, that's a rhetorical question I'm not going to make you answer me.

But the answer is because of electricity magnetism. Happily, gravity is the weakest force in nature, which is why we can ignore it for every experiment we do on Earth. It's, you know, the electric and magnetic forces that are holding this cable up, are stopping it from going down. I get that. So that stops the Earth from collapsing to a point. But if they weren't there, if gravity is universally attractive,

there should be nothing that would stop it from keep on collapsing. And the great... But the sheer volume of... matter that's there couldn't collapse to a point. Well, in fact, well, that's not necessarily true because in fact as far as we know, electrons have no volume. No, but protons

and neutrons do. But they're made of elementary particles called quarks, which in the canonic picture have no volume and photons. So they would break up into their constituent particles if you crush them small enough. Okay, so you've answered my question in a way that I find very surprising, but I'm

rather glad of it. Because what you're saying is that all the matter in the universe, all the protons and neutrons, electrons you can lead, could be collapsed into a point. And all you're doing is you're crushing them and removing the space between them. Yeah, and I'm saying, but even, but, you know, you don't have to go to that level of potential absurdity. We can go to a scale where we think we understand the laws of physics. And in fact, I wrote a book called Adam, where we can,

in our conventional picture, everything that is now in all 100 billion galaxies that are in our universe and all the matter and radiation, at some time that we can define where the laws of physics still work, was contained in a region smaller than the size of an atom. I mean, that's unfathomable, but nothing stops it from happening. And there's nothing, there's no force that can ultimately stop that. For certain objects, there are. Gravity is weak enough. And that was, if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, one of the things Oppenheimer was famous for,

among physicists, was the first realization that if you had a star that was big enough, that even the nuclear forces would not stop it collapsing into what later now we call a black hole. And that was, you know, and so, but there are only special circumstances. The sun, when it stops having fuel, won't be a black hole,

because the nuclear forces are strong enough to hold the star together and electromagnetism is hard. But if you have a big enough mass, nothing can be gravity, big enough mass. Yeah, so. Yeah, so just the sheer amount of matter

crushing it into into a and here, if that didn't make you upset or confused, let me try this. It's even worse. Because as the matter gets crushed, it gets hotter and hotter.

And actually, in that primordial atom of the metric or the one I talked about that book, the actual total amount of stuff is far more than the sum of everything we now see by a factors of a million, million, million, million. Namely, almost all of the energy and stuff in that primordial atom has been later dissipated by the expansion because the universe has done work as it's expanding and it's lost energy. And so the universe now, with its mere hundred billion galaxies, if you want to add up the total energy of the observed universe in matter, it's a small fraction of the total energy that was contained in that primordial atom.

It was so much bigger than you could get rid of all the matter we now see in the universe and the amount of energy in that region would be almost the same. It's really the fact that we can even think of those things with a straight face. is remarkable to me and until the 1980s no one did. I mean the great change and I got involved

in that was to think that with some seriousness we could apply the physics we understand on fundamental scales to explain the universe and largest scales. It's the ultimate chutzpah and arrogance but physicists are very arrogant so it's okay. Okay well I had thought

and I think I'm now wrong I had thought that there was something changed in the laws of physics itself that made it possible, but you're now telling me you literally can't crush all the matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you get to a single point, we know the laws of physics must change, and we know, and people like me, I think most scientists would say it doesn't collapse to a single point, that some new law of understanding gravity will intervene.

It collapsed to the size of a soccer ball. Or even a soccer ball is amazing, or a baseball, or even a solar system. The densities are unimaginably great, unimaginable. Yes. But let me point out that even that if that may seem so ridiculous that we wouldn't talk about it or it's not worth thinking about, even the time when the universe was one second old and the universe was somewhat bigger than our solar system, we can actually predict what that weird, incredibly hot, dense system that was 10 billion degrees would be doing with physics we can measure in the laboratory. And we predict the abundance of light elements precisely. One of the things that Jim Peoples won the Nobel Prize for is that we can extrapolate, we can measure in the laboratory and extrapolate back to the universe of one second old and make predictions that over 10 orders of magnitude agree with observations.

So we know that even that incredibly hot, dense state, which is almost unimaginable, we can test that our ideas are correct and they're correct. It is remarkable. It is. You ought to change the subject now. You've written in your podcast and things about the politicization of science and the subversion of journals like nature

and Scientific American. Well, talk a bit about that. Well, look, part of what's driven you and I for much of our careers is the is the need to have people understand the process of science. It involves two important things. Nothing is sacred. There's nothing that can't be questioned.

There's no such idea that's... And heresy is not heresy. Those are the two characteristics that both you and I find so reprehensible about organized religion that has led us to try and help people open their minds beyond that. And so it's tragic to me that those two characteristics are infiltrating too much the academia and the scientific community.

The idea that there's some things you cannot say, that Richard Dawkins cannot say that there are two sexes, that that's heresy and he should be banned or he should lose awards for saying something, when in fact the whole point, the whole point of science and the whole point of education is to make you uncomfortable first, and science only proceeds, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine who's here who drove me up here, only proceeds by a dialectic.

Whenever I get a letter from people, from not scientists, I get letters every day, it used to be letters, now it's emails, telling me that they've been working for 20 years and they have a theory of everything, okay? You know right away it's suspect. Because it, I mean, unfortunately, people have this picture of Einstein working alone, and he wasn't really working alone,

in a room developing general relativity, is not the norm. Science proceeds by dialectic. I say something, you challenge it. You criticize me and try and cut to the quick what I'm saying, because that's the way the scientific community works. Because only if I can convince you, only if I can survive the test of experiment and rational debate, will my ideas survive and be worth talking about. So it's essential that there be debate, discussion, and that no idea should be above attack or accepted without evidence. And what we see happening in academia and in the scientific journals is certain things that are not allowed to be said because they may offend some people.

and we've always I know from our discussions you and I strongly believe that you know and our good friends Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens said it more beautifully than I can certainly said that you know being offended is who cares

okay that you that science and education should make you uncomfortable and the idea that people need safe safety that scientific environment should be safe that is the most contemptible word It's utterly contemptible.

Exactly. Yeah, what does safe mean? Not just science, but universities generally. Yeah, you should never feel comfortable. In university, if you are, you're not working and you're not learning. Yeah. And so, to me, I've been attacking, I've been attacking that idea, but what scares me, and it's more in the United States, but not completely, it's in England, too,

because I know I was in an Oxford debate on, is everyone religious? Is everyone religious? I took the side of yes, by the way. some of my atheist colleagues took the other side. And my example was what you might call wokeism, what I call fundamentalist wokeism, that you get rid of religion, and people still believe in certain ideas

in the absence of evidence and in spite of evidence, and also defend them almost to the death, that you cannot question them. And this notion of safety, in fact, this young woman was on my side at Oxford, and she talked about safetyism, and what you're seeing everywhere, is the idea that people should have safe spaces in university

is where they won't have to hear ideas that offend them or upset them. And yet, and I don't know if you have colleagues, but I have many colleagues in the United States who change their curriculum for fear that something they're going to say is going to offend or upset a student, because they know their job is on the line. And that's what's scary, that people can lose their jobs

for saying something. In a high school in Canada, I now live in Canada, A woman got fired for talking about using the word Indian for indigenous people. She was a history teacher referring to the Indian Act of 1918. But referring to the act by its name got her fired because using that word is so harmful that people will be traumatized by hearing it. I mean, I know it upsets you as much as it does me. And so, and it scares me when, when,

journals claim it as a fact that science is systemically racist or sexist. I say, show me the evidence. Let me question whether that's the case. And if you question it, that's where you're attacked by these journals.

You can't discuss. If you try to discuss something like that, the mere act of discussing it is taken as that you're partisan in one side or the other? It's just like Miriam was talking about. It's being a non-believer in Islam. The very fact of asking a question,

if you ask a question about the Muhammad, you could be killed, right? And we're not at that stage, but you can be killed academically or scholastically or shamed. And so it scares me when we have the institutions of science defending that non-scientific notion and also claiming to have an end, without asking the question,

it is true that in the physical sciences, at least, there are more men than women. That's just true. It's also true, by the way, in the biological sciences, there are more women than men. But that isn't discussed, okay? And the presumption that in the physical sciences, it doesn't represent the demographics of the society.

The presumption is that that's due to sexism, or if they're not an equal number of minorities, the presumption is that's due to racism. And you've got to be able to say, hold on, how do you know that? And demonstrate that. And of course, in all my experience, and I would argue that of all the places in society, academia is probably the place with the least sexism and least racism. And so I'm offended.

When I hear the head of the National Institutes of the Health, who's a, you may know, I'm Francis Collins, who is a nice guy. Yeah, and I know him, and he's a nice guy. friend, I think some of the stuff he says is nonsense, especially with regards to religion. But when he got up and said the NIH is systemically racist, what he should do if he believe that is resign. If you're saying you're headed an institution for 20 years that's systemically racist, how can you really believe that and still be the head of that institution?

But they say it because it plays to the crowd. I don't understand. It seems to me to be cowardice on the part of the... heads of institutions to Coutao to I don't see what they have to lose and they're not going to lose that job. Well, I think, now that's an interesting question.

Why are they coward? And I absolutely agree with you. The real offenders here are the heads of institutions, university presidents, heads of scientific societies. But you do see what they have to lose, right? Because universities now require... University presidents used to be intellectual leaders. Now they're fundraisers, okay?

And what they're trying to do, and the way you fundraise is like anything. You advertise, you present yourself as everything people want you to be. And so if you stand, it's just the same as the communist scare in the 1950s, if you virtue signal, if you say not only we're at the vanguard of anti-racism and anti-sexism, you gain a lot. You gain in the it sounds good and if you violate people's rights in the process What happens? Oh, a professor gets fired. Okay, but so if you're if your interest is trying to present a face because you know you're going to be attacked if you're the university president and you say and you say

say that, you know, not only is your institution not racist, but you think that people should, it's okay to be offended. You're going to be viscerally attacked by the media and by huge numbers of people online, and what you'll find is there boycotts, there'll be efforts to get people to stop donating to your university, for students to stop going to your university.

But the people you want to get donations from, billionaires, I just thought rather unlikely to go along with that. Why would you say that? Well, maybe I'm wrong. I will say, I don't know if I should say this in public, no, I've been in communication in an effort to try and think, what can we do to change the situation, one of the possibilities would be to communicate with groups of billionaires

who are donating money at universities and say we won't donate to university unless there's free speech, free speech and open inquiry. And I've actually been in communication with a philanthropic group that represents a lot of these people, and that may be one way to... I would have thought so, and that's certainly my intuition. I don't have evidence

for it, but... Well, you know, I think what happens is, and I had this discussion with my friend who's a hero, is a very intelligent person, but watches this from afar, and the language sounds good, so people say, oh, of course it's good to, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, or good things. Why are you... Well, of course that's good,

but firing people for... But they're not aware of that. What they're aware of is the verbiage that makes it sound like they're defending. That's why I changed, you know, I realized it was a friend, I forget who it was, who convinced me when I was using the word woke as a pejorative, they convinced me I was really not being fair,

because being woke is good intention. Social justice is well-intentioned. Of course we want society to be just. So the motivation behind social justice is a good one. And so I call it fundamentalist wokeism in the same way that, I guess I say fundamentalist Islam. I mean, I assume there are Islamic people who are just like they're Christians who are kind

and gentle and don't believe in stoning and don't believe in this and that. And they're like any religious people. They pick and choose what they like and they don't consider the stuff they don't like. And so you might say that version, those Islams are not, there's nothing inherently evil in that picture, just like there may not be anything inherently evil in many people who call the Muslims Christian. But fundamentalism is always evil. And fundamentalist wokeism, which is this notion.

that people need to be removed for heresy is just as bad whether it's Islam or or academia except in Islam it's people's lives at stake physical lives it's fake in academia it's people's careers are at a stake but it's also science and if you love science like you and I do science can only proceed if there are unfettered inquiry and if we fetter people then you know science is going to stop it happened in the Soviet Union with with genetics You saw it with Lysenko. There's a terrible book, which is called, a Russian book,

which is called The Situation in Biological Science Today, a nice catchy title. And it's a testimony of one geneticist after another confessing to their sins. To their heresies. They stand up one after another and they say, I have offended against the Lysenko. against Comrade Stalin, and I denounce Mendel and I denounce Morgan, and then they're led off to jail.

Yeah, and you've seen that there, and in fact, I just in my subsection site published a letter, you often see the scientists, and a number of them are my colleagues, Anna Kralov, is a chemist at Southern California, this fellow who just wrote this letter, you see the scientists that are objecting most are often scientists from the former Soviet Union because they've seen it exactly.

When they were young, they had to adhere to the party line in order to be part of the university. Right now, and you're aware of this, in university, maybe some of you aren't. In universities in the United States and in Canada, you have to write a statement about diversity, equity, and inclusion in order to get a job,

in order to be considered for a faculty position in most universities, or even a post-doc position. And the statement can't just be, I'm colorblind, I believe in supporting all people. That's not good enough. You have to show how you are specifically and have been your entire life anti-racist. And if you don't, you won't get a job. In Berkeley, where you spent time, the biology department at Berkeley, 2020, the 76% of the applicants were rejected.

By the ways, their applications for faculty decisions are, not read first by faculty. They're read first by the diversity and equity and inclusion bureaucrats. And those people removed 76% of the applicants from the application pool that was being considered by the department on the basis of the diversity and equity statements. So you never even got to see whether they were good biologists. Is that scary? Certainly is. I'm very shocked. I didn't know as bad as that. It's important. And the people who are, who are, Speaking out about that are former Soviet sciences,

because these statements are basically loyalty oaths. The same as in the 1950s. Faculty used to have to do an loyalty oath saying they weren't communists. And if they refused to, they were removed from their positions. And they would even be better if they could say, I'm not a communist, but he's a communist. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes. And you see that, you see that here as well, and it's unfortunate.

I find myself being blamed for this, because many, many times I'm told, well, you got rid of Christianity and this is what we get in exchange. Well, you know, there's some, you shouldn't be blamed, but that's why I meant all people are religious. And we both realize it. We all want to believe. I mean, we know that there's an evolutionary basis for religion.

If there wasn't, it wouldn't be so ubiquitous. You know, whatever it is that holds, whether it's power or societal conformance, there's all sorts of reasons you can see, and Anthony talked about some, why religion has become ubiquitous. So people can naturally want to believe certain things, and this secular religion of fundamentalist wokeism has for part of the community replace it. On the right, there's equally, equal nonsense. It's not just the left. And so I think that we're not to blame for it in any way. It's just we need to recognize that people are, and people need to realize that the easiest person to fool is yourself, as Richard Feynman said.

And that's the hardest thing for any scientist. You and your career and me and my career, I'm sure we've experienced that, where we really want to believe something to be right and probably well beyond the stage at which we should have given up our idea. We kept it because we're human. And being a scientist trains you.

By being wrong enough times, it trains you to be suspicious of yourself. And that's really an important part. That's what we should be teaching about science is to question yourself as much as, anyone else. One of the great virtues of science, methods of science, especially in medical science, is the double-blind trial, which is specifically aimed at avoiding your self-delusion by this desire

to approve your own hypothesis. And that's why you have to be so much more, that's why I'm so happy I do physics and not biology, right? So I don't have to do bubble-blind experiments. Well, you do. In CERN now, when looking for the, because we realize you can put in inherent biases, I was going to say you don't have to probe electrons and ask if they're, you don't have to worry, all electrons are the same. But the way it's done now, and the Higgs was discovered is a kind

of double-blind experiment. You, the experiment, you put in false signals and real signals to see if the experiment can detect between them, because it's so complicated, you don't know. And the people who are doing it don't even know which are the ones. As they shouldn't. As they shouldn't, exactly. And so that's become the norm in experimental particle. physics. But in general, we don't have to worry about the biases of electrons as much as we do, but the biases of people. How long are we supposed to go on for? I haven't been told. I don't know. When are we supposed to stop? What was that? Is that my cue? Ladies and gentlemen, what about that? Hey? I guess that's our cue. Thank you, Richard.

Can I just say, this was a, I've been waiting for this moment for many years with you, and it was a pleasure. And I thank you for taking the time. ask the questions and be willing to present them. It's always an honor to be on stage with you, but it was a particular pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you. It has been one of the great honors of my life

as a scientist, a writer, and a human being to have been able to share the stage with you so many times. And it's always... I haven't counted them. Have you counted them at my time? No, I haven't. and it's always enjoyable and also a little terrifying because I wonder what we're going to do next. But I want to say at the beginning and before we talk that, you know, I talked about Jacob Bernalski as having the best, most important, I thought TV series I've seen.

The, without a doubt, the best popular science book that was ever written. believe the most important and impactful science book that was ever written was a selfish gene. And it is a triumph of writing and of the human intellect, and it's changed more minds and more thinking than anyone.

And I want to thank you for that. Thank you. I'm interested you mentioned Bronowski. I hugely admired his television series. And when the book of that series, The Ascent of Man was reissued at the instigation of his daughter. She asked me to write a new forward to that book, which I was delighted to do, and I reread it, and was inspired by it all over again.

And Yana and I actually watched it as well. Watch the TV program. You can get it, I think. It's well worth watching. It's black and white. And this wonderful intellect, this man reflecting. on things. He doesn't use much in the way of his

cryonic visual. It's amazing. It's amazing. There's not all this animation. It's just this compelling man looking at the TV and talking. It's flashing glasses. Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing. And so, yeah, so I was really appropriate that you wrote the foreword for that.

And of course, you know, while the selfless gene was vitally important, as a demonstration of many people how scientists could could properly discuss science in a way that would change people's minds about the world, the God delusion has had a shockingly significant impact. I remember when it first came out. I did not expect it to literally change so many people's

minds. And I've been with you, but also around the world. that book has changed everything. And so another triumph. And I thought I'd start by talking about what triumph are you working on now? Oh, well, I'm working on a book called The Genetic Book of the Dead. Having written a couple of books

aimed mainly at young people, this one is aimed at grown-ups. It's aimed at the same audience as the selfish gene. And it's sort of, I suppose I could briefly say what the thesis is. If you look at the external appearance of animals, especially those insects that mimic leaves and sticks

and things like that, the perfection of mimicry that natural selection has managed to achieve is astonishing. And what I'm trying to say in the book is that that perfection is not skin deep. It must pervade the entire body of the animal

down to every single detail in every single cell, every biochemical reaction that's going on in there must be honed to the same degree of detailed, intricate, meticulous perfection as the stick insect or the butterfly that mimics another species of butterfly. It's just not obvious to us.

We can use our eyes. The naked eye is good enough to see the perfection of the external appearance. And it will take a biology of the future to discern the same degree of perfection as you look inside. Speaking of the biology of the future, we were talking backstage a second ago

about the bet, which you forgot we had. And I thought it would, we might be worth talking a little bit about this, my clearly incorrect claim, according to you, that life will always be identical to the life we see. So why don't you tell me, why don't you explain why that's ridiculous? Well, because the details of the genetic code are so arbitrary, the genetic code

I think cannot really have been put together by the same sort of process of natural selection as the rest of... Well, I think I'm right in saying that. It's not a very elegant code really. And Francis Crick actually devised a much better code. I think he's probably rather annoyed when it turned out not to be the one

that nature actually... adopted. It's what they call a degenerate code, and it's, that means that anyone amino acid is coded for by more than one colon in no

particular systematic way. I think it would be quite astounding. If, say, I think we had a different bit, which is that you thought that it was highly likely you predict that there will be life found elsewhere in the

solar system. I'm happy to bet there'll be life elsewhere in the universe, but the solar system is just too much. And so I would bet against that. And the only criterion that most exobiologists would accept

for life being not just a cross-infection, because that's another possibility. We know that there are some meteorites that have landed on Earth that have come from Mars. There's no doubt about that. and the only

completely watertight demonstration that it is not cross-contamination would be if it has a different genetic code. It has the same genetic code then all exobiologists would accept that this is due to cross-contamination, but you wouldn't. Well, you know, it's interesting, yeah,

I'll give you my arguments now. It's absolutely important to realize that there's contamination, so finding extant or extinct life on Mars if it were identical would just indicate that there was a common origin. Maybe the origin was Mars.

No, no, because according to you, they could have independently developed the same. It could have, but it's more like, we know, but I'm a physicist, so the physical, so we know there's a physical mechanism for contamination in Mars. So I'd say that's the most, if we saw identical

life, I'd say it's most likely contamination, and it would be fascinating to see whether it originated in Mars or Earth first. Yes. If when looked in the ocean under the oceans of Encelotis or any of the other icy moons, it's hard to imagine a physical mechanism for contamination because there are kilometers of layer of ice and there always have been.

And it's hard to imagine how anything would penetrate that or contaminated. So if we saw, so it would be a fascinating question. And if we, and it's going to be, right, there was just a big water plume scene on, and, and if we were able to penetrate that plume and find evidence of microbial life of some sort. And it had identical DNA, et cetera. We'd have to, it'd be an interesting question. You, you say all exobiologists would assume it was contamination. And I would say, let's ask as a physicist, which is more likely? and you'd have to come up with a mechanism of contamination

and unless you could come up with a mechanism of contamination that was more likely than the likelihood that it was an independent thing. So I think it would be a matter of debate. Yes, I agree. And as far as why, I mean, I mostly do it to be heretical why I think it'll be the same mechanism. But somehow chemistry and physics, a combination of enthalpy and entropy

produce the first forms of life, and I talked about it in the new book. Somehow, what is amazing is under certain conditions, systems are driven energetically and anthropically to create large, you know, maybe RNA molecules. And the question is, is there, so it's something about energy and entropy. There are degrees of similarity,

which we could talk about. I would agree with you that extraterrestrial life is going to be carbon-based. I go that far. And it will be protein-based. And what do you think, energy ATP? Do you think there will be any other? I'm not sure about that.

Only protein molecules, I think, have the necessary versatility to serve as enzymes that life needs. And protein molecules are marvelous at that. I mean, they have this extraordinary capacity to coil themselves into three-dimensional forms. And the three-dimensional shape of a protein is what gives it its enzymatic properties. And the three-dimensional shape comes from,

it's two-dimensional, sorry, it's one-dimensional sequence of amino acids, and that in turn comes from the DNA. Well, my bet would be that extraterrestrial life is carbon-based, it's organic, in other words, and protein-based. There must be some kind of genetics. It's going to be Darwinian. It must be some kind of genetics. The genetics itself will not be protein.

The genetics will be something else. but beyond that, I wouldn't bet on it being nucleic acid necessarily, let alone DNA. Even it was DNA, I certainly wouldn't bet on it being the same genetic code. Yeah, no, I know people have tried to make it codes with different nucleic acids. Certainly the thing about RNA is that makes it so special

is that it contains genetic information, but it's also an enzyme. It does both jobs. And so you'd have to find some precursor because, you know, it's chicken and egg. Yes. You know, what was the first, you know, protein that was created? Well, you can't, the proteins are enzymes,

but you have to have an enzyme to make the proteins. So RNA would be a very good bridge. So the question is, is there another kind of chemistry that would fulfill both things? And I don't know, but I'm willing to say... Every time I meet a biochemist, I try to get them to devise an alternative biochemistry. They don't really see the interest of that.

They don't want to do it for some reason. Yeah, well, I've... I've been, we ran an origins meeting once where people were trying to do that. And that's where I became convinced since they weren't doing a very good job, that maybe nature did do a good job and it did it once and it worked. And so, anyway, I figured it's a bet I'd love to lose. So, because finding another kind of life would be remarkable. But speaking of other kinds of life and losing, we were talking about the black cloud.

and you... Oh, yes. As you said, I think Fred Holland's The Black Cloud is one of the greatest science fiction books ever written, despite the fact that its hero is utterly obnoxious. Yeah. Maybe realistic in that.

Well, I'm almost certainly based on Fred Holland himself. Yeah, yeah. Because all his other science fiction books have the same obnoxious hero, although they have a different name in each case. But apart from that, it is brilliant. It does, as you said, have lessons about the way scientists work. I mean, there's a lovely beginning bit

where the black cloud is discovered in two completely different ways, partly astronomically, just seeing it appear. And partly mathematically, the same method as the planet Neptune was discovered by noticing that other planets were in a different place from where they should be, and therefore there must be gravitational influence

from some strange foreign body. and there's a lovely passage where simultaneously in America the astronomical observations are made and at the same moment in Cambridge the mathematician hero deduces that there must

be an object and he sends a telegram to America saying kindly advise if unidentified object is in so and so as he moves this left ascension so and so and it says the words of the telegram seem to swell to a gigantic height isn't that a wonderful

of drama. So that's one point. Another point is the way in which they work out that the black cloud must be a living thing. And two characters, the obnoxious hero and the Russian comic relief character

independently think that it must be living. And everybody else poo-poo's the idea and they do it by predicting and predicting and predicting. It's done by, done by, predicting if we are right then we must make such and such an observation prediction is everything in science that's another point and then I learned a lot of information theory the idea that you can that information is just information and it doesn't matter what medium it goes in that there's a

pianist this is the there's a rather male chauvinist thing the only woman in the in the in the story is is there because she's a good pianist and she plays a Beethoven sonata to the black cloud and the black cloud loves it and people are puzzled how on earth

it hasn't got ears how can it like this Beethoven sonata it doesn't matter the information is still there even though it's

transmitted in the form of mathematical symbols and the black cloud says it's too slow can you play that ten times faster and it really does enjoy it

and then finally there's the deep problems which really leads on your book, Lawrence, the things we don't know, things that perhaps we cannot know, are there problems, scientific problems, which the human brain is simply incapable

of grasping, because the human brain was never built by natural selection to have the necessary profundity. And finally, the Black Cloud offers to teach some physics to the scientists, and one by one,

they volunteer. and one by one they die of an overheated brain because they can't cope. These are all things which to me show how science fiction can teach you real science. Although there's one bit of science that you think you got wrong because he was... Oh, that's right.

At one point they asked the black cloud what was the first member of your kind? And the black cloud says I would not accept that ever was a first member. And the astronomers then exchanged knowing glances because this was an in-joke for astronomers because at that time Fred Hoyle was the leading proponent of the steady state theory as opposed to the Big Bang.

The very phrase Big Bang was his own satirical coining. Forgive me. It's being auctioned. Oh, okay. The painting? Oh, yes. Original, unique of Christopher Hitchens. Okay, while we're talking, you bid.

So we won't mind if you use your phones while we're talking. We'll go on for another few minutes. Is it bidding by phone or what? It's been bidding on eBay. And will the auction end when we end? Yep. Oh, okay. So the longer we talk, the higher the value will become.

There we go. And you can hold it. I like that if you want. Anyway. So, let's see. Okay, I was just saying about the steady state, it's one thing to believe, as Fred Hoyle did, that the universe had always existed, and galaxies, rather, are being spontaneously created.

And there's nothing wrong with that, except it's not factually correct, but there's nothing in principle wrong with that. What's in principle wrong is the idea that life could have been there all along, because life is too complicated. life has to have come about by an incremental process, such as Darwin suggested. And so that was, I think, the only scientific flaw in the book.

Yeah, no, the fact that it had to have come about, although I always like the fact that at the same time, and I agree with you with that, you've also said when we've been together, in fact, I think it's in the unbelievers, a very important point, that there never was a first fish, there never was a first... Oh, yes. And so why do you talk about that? Because I think it's a really important point. Well, it's a completely different point.

But yeah, it is, but it sounds the same. Yeah. Okay. It sounds vaguely paradoxical, although it isn't that we are all descended from a fish. But every one of the ancestors, that link us to that fish belong to the same species as its parents and his children. And so as you go back, you couldn't possibly, if you'd lined up all the intermediates between a human and a fish and had them all standing in a gigantic long parade,

and you walked along this huge long parade, you would not detect the change as you walked along because the change would be too slight in each generation. And yet, by the time you got back to the Devonian, you would find that it had become become a fish. So it's like a cinema film. Yeah, and that's, of course, a great challenge. That's why evolution appears so non-intuitive, because we just can't picture those, that kind of a line that long. Even if you wrote a tale and called it The Ancestor's Tale, it would be hard to.

Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you one question about Hoyle, and then I'm going to let you ask me a question, because given what I said about you and the importance of not just the significance of the selfish gene but the legitimizing science writing which has served for many people including myself to motivate people like myself to write

because of the example of how useful the selfish gene was, Hoyle was a science fiction writer and a popularized. and even though he didn't buy the Big Bang he actually did the work some of the key scientific work that helped demonstrate the Big Bang was true

and didn't share the Nobel Prize for that and do you think it was because he was a popularizer or maybe because he was just not likable or what which was I've always wondered that I mean he did this seminal work on the formation of the elements of the light elements yeah

And the colleagues that he worked with or associated with got the Nobel Prize and he didn't. He was an abrasive character, but that shouldn't have mattered. He ventured into other fields such as, well, evolution. He talked nonsense when he went into evolution. But I wouldn't like to speculate as to what went on in the prize givers mind. Yeah, it's hard to know. There's another one, George Gamma, was another one who also did seminal work, literally predicting many things, including the causal background, but again, was a popularizer and a joker. And it's hard to know.

It's really, it's nice, but that's one of the reasons why this selfish gene is so important, because you're a serious person. And the selfish gene is a book of scholarship as well as something for the public that has an impact. And I think that makes... We've talked in a last time we were there, that science writing is a form of literature that is too rarely appreciated as a form of literature, and it should be. Yes, I think it's kind of what I'm getting at.

I'm starting a new podcast, which is called the poetry of reality, meaning science is the poetry of reality. And it's kind of... I'm saying the same thing as you just said, that science ought to be a vehicle for great literature. Yes. It'll be great. We'll be competing podcasters, but I promise to come on.

Well, I want to ask your advice on how to... Oh, yeah, well, we'll talk about it. That would be an honor. You said backstage that when I was talking, there were one or two things that came to your mind. Oh, yes. Let me think, what was it? Oh, one of the things was the thing about time, being an illusion. Fred Hoyle wrote a book called Man in the Universe.

and one of the, it's a collection of essays and one of the essays is about time, the subjective present he calls it, as an illusion. And he said that to a physicist, there's no sense in which time moves from the past to the future, step by step by step by step,

is just all there. It's all just all laid out. The whole stretch is there at the time. And he actually puzzles himself about what it is that gives this strong illusion of time moving, time like an ever-rolling stream, as the hymn says. And I want to ask you about that. Well, you know, it's interesting.

He was prescient. When he thought that, I think he was ahead of his time, as he often was, in a variety of ways. Because there is this dichotomy. Physics generally is done by creating what's called a time slice, time A, and defining variables there and then using the laws of physics to propagate them forward. That's how quantum mechanics is done

and quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory, although most people don't realize the same. It's always some time slice. But the problem is that when you think about gravity, the variables of gravity are space and time. And therefore, if you wanted to define a quantum mechanical wave function whose variables are space and time,

it would have a value at every point in space, but also every point in time. And therefore, it would be defined from that wave function of the universe would have all of time from the beginning of the universe to the end embedded in it, in which case the past and future would not be any different than the present.

You just said that quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory. It is, yeah. So people who say something like Heisenberg's indeterminity principle cannot be used to sanctify free will. That follows from what you do. Absolutely. Yeah, the physics is determined.

Schroederge's equation is a second order differential equation. It defines exactly the wave function. Now, our measurements of the wave function are probabilistic, but the underlying physical quantity is determined with 100% accuracy by the, again, completely. But that's what makes the wave function, the universe so weird and people have thought about it. We don't have an end. I mean, it's an open question, but it's one of the reasons people, some people would say time is an illusion because

of this fact that if the world is quantum mechanical and if gravity is quantum mechanical and there's a wave function that describes the universe, in some sense, all of time would already be determined within the context of that wave function. How can you propagate it forward in time if time is already determined? All of these questions are problematic. and it's one of the many, many problems having you do with trying to understand a quantum theory of gravity that we don't have the answer to.

But what is clear, and I guess the point I tried to make, is that even if this abstract, deep question, it leads us to some new insights into a theory of gravity and a theory of space and time, what really matters is how the world we see arises, a world in which time really does appear,

to have meaning and the past is different from the future. You seem to be suggesting that time travel was not absolutely ruled out and it made immediately think of the famous

killing your grandmother paradox. You only just have to kill your grandmother. I mean anything you do in the past. I've illustrated by the hypothetical example of if a particular dinosaur had sneezed at a particular moment none of us would be here.

Yeah, absolutely. You know the butterfly effect, that kind of thing. There is a theory, there's one way around this in physics, and it involves what's called a closed time-like curve. In Star Trek, I think it's called a causality loop. But it would get around that, which is that basically, if you go back in time, you're doomed to do exactly the same thing you did before it, so that systems can travel in time and do a circle. But basically, somehow, so you want to shoot Hitler, but somehow the laws of physics. to ensure you trip, and you cannot change things.

And so it's a mathematical way around doing it. It's too contrived, it seems to me. It is very contrived, and that's one of the reasons why time travel appears so difficult to accept. And we even have, we even can come close to proving it's impossible. If you wanted to have time travel, you'd have to have a very, very special kind of energy. We actually, I can create, I have a time machine right here, okay. It's a wormhole. You can't see it, but it's a wormhole.

It's a shortcut through space, the kind that Jody Foster took in contact, and Carl Sagan's good in contact. If a stable wormhole existed, it's a time machine. And it's really simple to understand. So a wormhole is a shortcut through a curved space. So instead of going all the way around space,

it's like going through a mountain. Instead of going all the way up, you get a tunnel, and it's much shorter to go through. So that's what a wormhole is. But you see, if a wormhole is connecting two points in space and one of the ends of the wormhole is moving very fast, then clocks at that end of the wormhole are doing slowly. So in five years, as observed by an observer at this end of the wormhole,

if that end of the wormhole is moving very fast, it may just be a week for an observer moving at that end of the wormhole. But then you see if you went through the wormhole, you'd come out five years earlier except for a week, and then you'd take a spaceship back to where you began, and you come back before you left. So stable wormholes are, Our time machines, and interesting Kipthorne and others, showed that the problem is if normal matter and energy is all you have, we can show that the mouth of wormholes will collapse to form black holes before you could ever go through them.

There's no such thing as a traversal wormhole. So you might say time machines are impossible. But if you fill the wormhole up with negative energy, then the wormhole would be stable. So the question is, can you create negative energy? And that's the current unknown. We don't, there's no negative energy things we've ever been able to create in the laboratory. And people have even written papers showing up to a certain point you can't create negative energy in the laboratory. But there's always a loophole.

And so until we get those loopholes, until we have a theory of quantum gravity, you know, time travel will remain at least possible. But I'm more willing to bet that time travel is impossible than I am that life is always made of DNA. I think ultimately we'll find out the laws of physics preclude creating a configuration I could do that, but I don't know. You had a question backstage about particles and... Yes, I don't really understand the general theory of relativity, but I kind of partly do. What I don't understand is what on Earth gravity has to do with particles.

Why do you have to... Gravity, we're talking about something in which huge bodies are in... Particles are tiny things. What are they going to do with gravity? Gravitons. Well, what they have to do with gravity is the same thing that the tiny particles have to do with an electric field. I mean, you've always, you've probably rubbed a balloon on a wall

or felt your hair go up. That's because of static electric field produces a force. Yes. But we know that that force is produced by ultimately a coherent configuration of many particles. the electric field is a coherent configuration of many photons, and many individual quanta. And we can describe that. You need many, in order for it to be classical,

so you and I can see it, you have to have huge numbers of photons in the same state, and that creates this electric field. The photons are also responsible for... So when Jupiter exerts a gravitational influence on Earth... Yeah. Are there little particles, between Dufus or else?

If gravity is a quantum theory, then, in fact, you can show it's due to the exchange of particles, just like electromagnetism is due to the exchange of photons. Those particles are called gravitons. And it's really kind of interesting, because it's one of the... Richard Feynman was the first person, I think, to show this. I'm not sure.

But photons have a very particular characteristic. They happen to have spin one. It doesn't really matter what it is. But if you exchange a spin-1 particle, then like charges will repel. So we know that gravity can't be the same as electromagnetism because like charges attract matter attracts matter. There's only two possibilities,

exchange of a spin two particle or exchange of a spin zero particle. But you can show that if you exchange a spin two particle, then you can write down a theory that makes it look like that exchange is the curvature of space. And so we've never detected a graviton. but if gravity, if classical gravity, if Jupiter is interacting with us,

it's exchanging a huge number of gravitons with us. It's changing. I mean they're passing between? Yeah, and that's why gravity occurs at the speed of light. If the sun disappeared, literally disappeared. I mean, all the mass in the sun disappeared now. For eight minutes, we'd continue to go around the sun. I understand that.

And so it's because of, it's because it's because it's changed particle. But we have never detected a graviton. And some people would say gravity is ultimately not a quantum mechanical theory because we haven't been able to invent one. A colleague Gerhard de Tuf who won the Nobel Prize would might say that. And I'm very pleased to say that a colleague of mine who did win the Nobel Prize, Frank Wilczek, and I actually wrote down and showed that if we could detect gravitational waves, which are the classical version, just like radio waves, are the classical version of photons. You put enough of them and you can detect a radio signal.

If they're all in the same state, it's enough for you detect the radio signal. Gravitational waves are the classical version. Well, they have been detected. But they're the classical version. The question is, is there a quantum version? And what we showed is if you could detect them from the beginning of time, from inflation, we could prove that gravitons exist. So it's still an open question.

And so if you don't like it, you might be right. I wouldn't presume to like it or not like it. Well, that's good. That's the right answer, because whether you like it or not doesn't matter. How's the bidding going? Are we allowed to bid? Oh, yes. Okay. And yes, can Richard bid on this? Yeah, so why don't you write down a number and I'll give it to, I don't know where John is. But this is a secret auction. We don't know how to. Yeah, I mean, Richard would like to bid on it. And I'd like to bid on it too. I'd like we'd like to get $1 less than $1.00. Richard Bids.

Just to show support, at least. John, if I gave you, can Richard bid on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the painting? And I assume he wants to, do you want to do it privately? No, I don't. What's the bid at, do you know? We don't, we don't, we're not told, are we?

What was that? $410? Pounds. Pounds. Well, same thing. As for a cosmologist, it's really the same thing. So anyway, it's 410 pounds. Do you want to do a private bid or do you want to announce what you're willing to bid?

Richard, it's up to you. The auction's finished. Oh, the auction is finished? You didn't give Richard a chance to bid? Okay, well, it's 8 o'clock, which means I think that we are finished too. So thank you very much, Richard. And thank you all. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation.

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