Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Avi Loeb on Aliens, Bob Lazar, Wormholes, Consciousness, SpaceX, and Many Worlds

Starting point is 00:00:00 Alright, hello to all listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now. Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business.

Starting point is 00:00:20 Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over 170 countries, your business has global potential. And their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. This is a conversation with the inimitable Avi Loeb. We talk about, well, I was struggling. What can I talk to Avi about that he hasn't covered before? Because he's been on over 400 podcasts.

Starting point is 00:01:16 He tends to give the same answers and be asked the same questions. It took quite some time, but along with the community, we managed to conceive of questions that he hasn't been asked, at least not in the public forum, such as what are his opinions on Bob Lazar, morality, purpose, a finality to the universe, the beginning of the universe, some technical questions about manifolds and the lower bound on the mass of elementary particles and astrophysical data, God, quite a few topics if you'd like to see more conversations like this or hear more conversations like this then please consider supporting donating whatever you would like at patreon.com slash kurt jaimungo literally every single one of the patrons helps a tremendous tremendous tremendous amount thank you so much for all the people who have continued to donate and thank you for those of you who are going to just Just so you know, soon I'll be hosting a three-way conversation between myself, Donald Hoffman, and Bernardo Castrop. It may be a four-way

Starting point is 00:02:10 conversation if we can get Jonathan Verveke in as well, although I'm unsure if he's available. However, it's at least going to be Bernardo Castrop and Donald Hoffman. That's coming shortly. We're looking to hit 50 patrons and then I'll be able to conduct that. Thank you. Thank you so much I appreciate it and enjoy the interview I want to know how much did writing your book or writing books in general or articles. How much does that clarify your thinking? Oh the main purpose for writing the book as I told the publisher was to for writing the book, as I told the publisher, was to broadcast the excitement that we can have in science, discovering important things that do affect our daily lives. And I told the publisher

Starting point is 00:02:52 that if one person around the world will decide to become a scientist after reading my book, I will be satisfied. And as it turns out, a few weeks ago, I got an email from Malawi, turns out a few weeks ago I got an email from Malawi from a woman who wrote the book is great and I'm thinking of becoming an astronomer so I told her the story about the publisher and I asked her are you the one are you that person that will become a scientist thanks to reading my book and she said maybe so I invited her to apply to graduate school at Harvard in astronomy. And I very much hope that she will do so. And then I can work with her. There was another undergraduate student from Columbia that wrote to me and said,

Starting point is 00:03:36 reading about your work changed my life. And so I get about a dozen emails of this type every day now. And I am really satisfied about writing my book. It wasn't so much for me to clarify my thinking as to communicate my excitement about doing science. And, you know, the fact that we can maintain our childhood curiosity, we can be excited about doing it. maintain our childhood curiosity. We can be excited about doing it. It's not a job like being in the business world, the commercial world, where you get paid and then you use the money for what you really enjoy. In fact, you know, I would enjoy doing what I'm doing, irrespective of whether I get money for it. There were no problems that you had as ambiguous in your mind that when you

Starting point is 00:04:23 started writing, then it helped you elaborate it or cultivate it or disambiguate it? It was already somewhat formed in your mind. Now you just got to put it on paper? Yeah, I mean, it's all in my head to start with. And it's just a question of putting it in a way that is compelling. And, you know, it's very much the same when I do my science. Very often, someone comes to my office and says, this is what I'm working on. Sort of immediately I come up with suggestions for ideas and how to proceed. And very often that person says, oh, wow, how did you come up with that? I didn't really think about it. And it's not as if it takes me a great effort to do that. It's sort of in my head to start with, and I'm just explaining it. And there is not much distance between putting it on paper and having it in my head. The only difference is this way many other people know about it. Okay, talking about communicating ideas to other scientists,

Starting point is 00:05:23 I recall you saying that when you were in your younger years, you would speak about ideas, and then they would get rebuffed, but then someone who's on the periphery listening in would then advance those ideas, and maybe they would be advanced to the level of becoming new fields in physics or insights or inventions and so on. Can you give me some examples of that? Yeah, it happened several times. And, you know, early on in my career, I looked for affirmation for other people to accept an idea that I proposed before I would advocate for it. And very often I was disappointed because I'll give you an example.

Starting point is 00:06:04 21 years ago, I'll give you an example, 21 years ago I thought that it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the mass of black holes at the centers of galaxies and the depth of the gravitational potential well that they're embedded in. So in other words, if black holes grow, they behave like kids, you know, they eat as much food as they can from the table until they become too energetic and then they throw off the food from the table. And so if that's the case, then black holes would grow up to a certain mass, at which point they release so much energy they become so energetic that they clean off the food that allows them to continue to grow and so i suggested let's check if black hole masses are correlated with the depth of the gravitational potential well of the galaxy that hosts them and the way to measure that is by the speed by which stars are moving within that galaxy near the core of the galaxy and when i suggested that people said no that's not interesting it's

Starting point is 00:07:11 it's probably there is nothing interesting in that relation and i remember mentioning it at the conference and it was completely rebuffed and then we had a junior faculty search at the astronomy department and as it happens in the short list there were two people working exactly on on the central black holes in galaxies and i suggested to both of them independently to check that and uh since they were young people they decided to do that and they had all the data in principle i could have done it as well anyway they did it and each of them got so excited a few months later they said wow there is a very tight correlation between the black hole mass and the characteristic speed of stars in the galaxy that hosts it

Starting point is 00:07:55 and then they decided to publish and they published exactly the same time the two teams and then they started fighting with each other for the credit because it becomes the hot the hottest thing in the field and then for for a decade it became the thing that everyone talks about and that was the first indication and then a couple of years later i suggested that to call i had a sabbatical and at princ, and I suggested to a few people that were experts in black holes and the inflow of gas onto black holes, I suggested, perhaps we should calculate what happens when there is a hotspot, a region that is very bright, orbiting a black hole very closely, so that you can perhaps map the space and time around the black hole this way. perhaps map the space and time around the black hole this way. And they completely dismissed it and said,

Starting point is 00:08:48 well, there would never be a hotspot that maintains its integrity. This is not worth doing. And so I came back to Harvard after the sabbatical and I suggested it to a postdoc of mine. And we did the calculation. We wrote a few papers. And then just a year and a half ago, two years ago, a group in Germany discovered exactly that phenomena. They found a hotspot moving around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy just in the way that I envisioned.

Starting point is 00:09:16 And the hotspot was orbiting very close to the black hole. And so once again, and then uh i can give you many more examples you know i gave for example a lecture on gravitational wave astrophysics which is a new way of doing astrophysics astrophysics traditionally astronomy was based on light collecting light but then according to einstein's theory of gravity when you have massive objects like black holes that are very compact, they distort space and time around them. And when they move close to each other, they can send out waves. And these are called gravitational waves. And at the time, it was 2013, I thought it's an important subject for the coming years.

Starting point is 00:10:00 And I decided to give a lecture about it in a winter school for students. And I decided to give a lecture about it in a winter school for students. And then 10 minutes into my talk, one of the other lecturers, who was, by the way, still is 20 years younger than me. So it has nothing to do with age. But he's very conservative. He stood up. How long ago was this? This was 2013, January. And he stood up and said, why are you wasting the time of these graduate students on a subject that will clearly not be important during their lifetime for their careers? And just two years later... He said this aloud in front of everyone?

Starting point is 00:10:37 In front of everyone? Yeah, that's on video. We can find it. And, you you know he was much younger than i am working on uh star formation and so forth a conservative astronomer so to speak uh but young relatively young and so um two years later the ligo collaboration announced or discovered uh the announcement came uh six months later. But then, you know, in August 2015, it was discovered that there was an event, a gravitational wave event discovered by LIGO. And that ushered a new era in astrophysics where gravitational waves are being used to discover objects that otherwise do not emit any light, black holes that come together. And the Nobel Prize was awarded for that a few years ago. And clearly, you know, the same students that were in the audience were still doing their PhDs where this discovery was made. And so saying, why are you wasting the time of these students on a subject that will never be important was clearly invalid. why are you wasting the time of these students on a subject that would never be important was clearly invalid uh and you know it happened to me many times and at some point like five years ago

Starting point is 00:11:49 i said to myself the hell with it i i don't need confirmation from other people you know it's just well it makes you know it makes me depressed to to listen to the criticism and then realize that the this is the the you know the the hottest thing in the field later on, a few years later. So how is that possible? Well, it is possible because people do not have the vision about the future. And they prefer to dismiss new ideas, innovation, and so forth, just because it takes them out of their comfort zone.

Starting point is 00:12:25 They're used to doing business as usual. And so five years ago or so, I decided to basically not listen and just do what I think is right based on my inner compass. And you can see that nowadays, you know, as a young scientist, I would never be able to sustain the pressure, the social pressure that exists around me right now. But I'm sort of immune to it by now. What social pressure exists around you right now? What are you referring to? Also, why did it take you? I don't know how old you are, but why did it take you? I'm 59. Why did it take you until you're 54?

Starting point is 00:13:04 Yeah. But why did it take you? I'm 59. So, yeah, it took me more than 50 years. Why did it take you until you're 54? I imagine that if this occurred to you when you were in your late 20s, maybe three times, then by the time you're 33 or 35, you would say, okay, to heck with it. Forget what other people think. Well, maybe I'm a slow learner. Maybe I'm also, you know, I do care about what people, I did care about what people think early on. I did care about what people think early on.

Starting point is 00:13:27 And you have to understand the entire structure of academia relies on other people evaluating you throughout the various stages. In order to get tenure, you need a tenure committee to recommend, and that is based on letters that are obtained from the community at large. So you need to dance to the music of a lot of people in order to be sort of tenured.

Starting point is 00:13:48 And then the same is true about getting grants. Grant support is, you know, the selection committees are often populated by people that are mainstream and they have their own agenda and they don't welcome innovation as much. And to me, it's still a miracle that the LIGO experiment was funded in the first place. I was told by important people at the National Science Foundation that nowadays at present time the likelihood of it being funded would have been very small. It was the vision

Starting point is 00:14:22 of a few people a couple of decades ago that pushed it through. It's really hard to imagine that nowadays the National Science Foundation or other federal agencies would receive an advice from the scientific community to embark on a risky project of this type. It was not at all clear that it would reach the sensitivity necessary. project of this type, it was not at all clear that it will reach the sensitivity necessary. And so, you know, you're dependent throughout your career on many people that will approve your agenda. And as a result, you develop the mentality of listening and paying attention and not deviating too much from the beaten path. And that is quite common.

Starting point is 00:15:05 What is not common is someone like me that reaches leadership positions. You know, I've been chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years, and I've chaired many important committees. Someone at that level often, you know, behaves even more as a conformist because of political considerations. You have to understand, it's just like looking at seashells on the beach.

Starting point is 00:15:34 You know, when a seashell first arrives at the beach, it looks special and unique. It has special color, special shape. But as time goes on, you know, the waves rub seashells against each other. And then they start to lose their identity and they start to look like each other. And eventually you end up with sea sand, basically pieces of seashells that are indistinguishable from each other. And that's what happens in academia. You know, each individual researcher starts different. indistinguishable from each other and that's what happens in academia uh you know each in the each individual researcher starts different but then you rub against many others and you end up being

Starting point is 00:16:12 indistinguishable from them okay when i hear that here's what i'm thinking there's this it's not a quote but it's a story from steve jobs and he said almost the opposite so there it's obviously a happy middle he said what you want to do is take people who are like rocks that are unpolished and then put them into a rock tumbler because afterward they come out like diamonds. So you want to take intelligent, smart people and have them argue. I can see this. Well, as long as the argument is accepted to be different, then that is, I completely agree that that experience of argument and exchanges is helpful. hand you create an environment where you know the dominant view where there is a group thing where the uh the folklore of of a field that dominates and anyone that suggests something different is pushed aside that is bad and that's what i was referring to uh-huh uh-huh so if it's geared toward constructing and also if it's geared toward some goal. Yeah, if you look, for example, if you look, for example, I mean, the ideal example is the corridor of Bell Labs.

Starting point is 00:17:31 You know, Bell Labs was established by a corporation that has a profit in mind. But in that corridor, they put very creative people and, you know, some of them ended up winning the Nobel Prize. There were lots of inventions that came out of the corridor of Bell Labs. And so putting a lot of creative people in the same environment and allowing them to innovate and giving them an incentive to innovate, that is the best. And so in that sense, I would agree with Jobs that, you know, putting them next to each other is beneficial. But if, on the other hand, you put people together and exert pressure so that, you know, they do not deviate from what everyone else is thinking, that's bad.

Starting point is 00:18:17 So right now, the incentives are geared towards self-preservation or idea preservation. Yeah. And what can be done to fix this? One of the questions that I had from the audience was, let's imagine there are some wacky ideas. Obviously, you don't want to let in just any idea. There is something to be said about being too fringe, but then there is something to be said about having permeable walls. Right.

Starting point is 00:18:36 How do you fix this system, quote unquote? Well, very easily. You basically evaluate each idea on its merit. So the point is you are not evaluating the person that mentioned that you're not using, you know, the personal traits as a way of dismissing an idea, which is very often done. Very often the attacks are personal. If you see in idea, which is very often done. Very often, the attacks are personal. If you see in politics, it's very common. In science, it should not be the case. In science, we should argue about the ideas,

Starting point is 00:19:12 about anything idea doesn't make sense, you can easily prove that. So let me give you an example that comes from the opposite side. So for example, with respect to Oumuamua, I suggested that it may be of artificial origin as a possibility, and that encountered a lot of opposition.

Starting point is 00:19:33 Now, the latest alternative to that was that maybe it is a nitrogen iceberg. That was a suggestion. And you can find nitrogen pure nitrogen as you need in this case uh in order to explain the fact we haven't seen a cometary tail around the mua mua and also that it's flat and that is it was pushed from the away from the sun all of these facts will come into uh we could be explained if it was made of pure nitrogen and pure nitrogen for example exists on the surface

Starting point is 00:20:05 of pluto so the suggestion was let's imagine a lot of plutos around other stars and you chip off their surface with a high efficiency more than 10 percent uh of all the plutos are being chipped off the and then you send out these rocks and one of them is aumuamua. And okay, I said fine and then I wrote a paper just a week and a half ago saying well if you imagine that to be the case and if you end up needing more mass than you have in stars in the Milky Way galaxy by a factor of a hundred actually it turns out. And so it's just a bet. Sorry, what do you mean by that? Are you referring to the work by Desk and Jackson, I believe?

Starting point is 00:20:51 Desk and Jackson, yes, exactly. And the reason for that is, you know, the layer of pure nitrogen on the surface of Pluto is relatively thin. So it just makes a few percent of the mass of Pluto. Most of the mass is, you know, in rock and water, ice and so forth. So you lose by that. And then so for every bit of nitrogen that you produce, you need much more rock and water, ice to exist and then on top of that you need hydrogen and helium that are much more abundant than rock so if you do that just the

Starting point is 00:21:31 mass budget how much mass do you need to process in order to make enough objects so that you would see one of them as a mua mua and we know that you need to produce a certain you know uh number of such objects per unit volume so that we would see one of them coming within a few years of the time that we were observing the sky you know with pan stars so basically if you just go through the math which is really simple straightforward and also they require that it would then you know this object would be just half a billion years old because otherwise it would get completely evaporated. So if you put all of these considerations together, you find that you need 100 times more mass

Starting point is 00:22:13 than you have available in stars. So even if you take all the mass in stars, multiply by 100, only then you will have enough surface layers of exo-Plutos or Pluto-like planets around other stars to make enough objects like Oumuamua so that you would see one of them during that mode of observations. So to me it makes this scenario very unlikely. So I just mentioned that as an example of how a scientific debate should go. Someone proposes an idea,

Starting point is 00:22:47 and then you discuss the idea on its merit. And, you know, if you do a calculation that shows that something is problematic with that, you know, that that is a reason for concern and for working on something else. So that is a scientific debate. On the other hand, if someone goes to Twitter and says something negative about a paper and just doesn't even read it, or says something negative about a person without referring to the details of the idea, or says something negative about the reference list of a paper rather than the content of the paper, you know, that is not a viable scientific discussion. So my point is, we can maintain a high level of integrity in the scientific process if we just refer to the ideas rather than attack people personally. And that's the way we should proceed. And, you know, most of the time in science, you have to understand, most of the time, things are uncertain. We just don't have enough evidence. You have to understand most of the time things are uncertain. We just don't have enough evidence.

Starting point is 00:23:47 And therefore, we should contemplate possibilities. And that's legitimate. That's part of the scientific process. You can't skip that step. You can't say, I know the answer and I don't want to dismiss other possibilities, even though there is not enough evidence for your answer to be right. So I think it's good to have ideas on the table that are viable scientifically, because then we are exploring all possibilities. And by the way, imagination is extremely important because we can't just always restrict our attention to things that we know from the past. We will never discover new things that way. What's Jackson's and Desch's

Starting point is 00:24:26 response to this? I don't know. All I've seen are personal attacks, not necessarily from them, but from other people. And is that the social pressure that you were referring to before, that previously, let's say five years younger, you wouldn't have been able to withstand? That's a low level, you know, what you find on social media, which I don't have been able to withstand that's a low level you know that what you find on on on social media which i you know i don't have any account on social media so i'm less exposed to that but and i'm very grateful for that um you know i i decided not to have any account when i married my wife she asked me not to do that and so i uh agreed not to do that and i'm and that was more than 20 years ago and i'm very glad that I don't have an account on social media because then I can think creatively and not be affected. I mean of course I'm losing on

Starting point is 00:25:12 some bits of information that are floating around on social media but I benefit much more by not listening to you know low-level discussions. I'm keeping my eyes on the ball, so to speak, not on the audience. And so that's one kind of pressure that you find on social media, but I'm sort of resilient to that because I don't monitor it. But then there are, of course, there are other ways that people exert pressure through students and postdocs.

Starting point is 00:25:47 You know, they are much more vulnerable. They don't have secure positions. So if you create an atmosphere where some ideas are ridiculed, then postdocs and students are simply afraid of pursuing them because of their future careers. simply afraid of pursuing them because of their future careers. You know, and I got a lot of emails from people saying, you know, I completely agree with you, but I cannot express myself because I worry about my job prospects. And that comes from people that are not necessarily at the lowest level of academia. Even people that are, you know, have secure positions are worried about that. have secure positions are worried about that. And this is unhealthy because we want an open discussion

Starting point is 00:26:30 and scientific discussions, a discussion based on content, not on the way things look like or on personal attacks. Why is it you think aliens are considered to be unconventional or so unconventional that they don't merit an academic response or an academic investigation? Well, there are several aspects.

Starting point is 00:26:52 First of all, as we discussed before, many ideas are ridiculed for no good reason, even in the context of black holes or gravitational waves, as I mentioned to you. I remember when i started as a postdoc the idea of inflation cosmic inflation was ridiculed in some circles of astronomy so that happens all the time except in the and of course the the search for extraterrestrial intelligence you know started 70 years ago so it has a long history. In the early days, it wasn't ridiculed as much,

Starting point is 00:27:27 but every now and then, there was a very negative response of the community. Since 1993, there is no significant federal funding for this subject, and as a result, it was pushed aside. Now, the strange thing is that um for example in in particle physics uh there was the superconducting super collider a very big experimental project that at some point you know the funding for it stopped and and then what happened in theoretical physics is that there was a whole culture that developed after that, that is divorced from feedback from experiments. And this culture of theoretical physics became string theory and the discussions of the multiverse and the extra dimensions and so forth, ideas that have no evidence to support them. So on the one hand, you have a situation where the mainstream in theoretical physics discusses concepts that have

Starting point is 00:28:34 no foundation in experimental data, and that is accepted. And there are big communities of people working on these ideas. And they are not even interested in testing the idea. So most of the papers are about mathematical details, not about how to test one idea versus another. And if you suggest a test, they shy away from it and try to raise enough dust so that you won't be able to rule out the theory. And so that you wouldn't be able to to rule out the theory um and so um that's one culture and at the same time you have in astronomy a culture that also as a result of not funding a research area is completely negative about something that is

Starting point is 00:29:18 down to earth so to speak we have it on earth it's's intelligent life, technological life. So and we now the one thing that we know now that wasn't true 20 years ago is we now know that half of a big fraction of all the sun like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly the same separation. And so the Earth sun system is not unusual. And as a result, if you arrange for similar circumstances you might as well get similar outcomes and rather than argue about whether it's likely or not likely whether we are unique special or whether we are very common as common as ants are on a sidewalk rather than argue about that and by the way i believe in the latter option as you know we should just search and of course we will never find the truth if we don't search. And the strange thing is the current situation is there is very little funding,

Starting point is 00:30:11 a thousand times less funding for the search for technological signatures than there is for the search for dark matter. And frankly, the nature of dark matter will have zero impact on our daily lives. If Oumuamua was a technological relic, or if we find other technological relics in space, that would have a huge impact on society. And society, the public, is very interested in this subject and it funds science. So I find the current situation unacceptable.

Starting point is 00:30:40 It would have an impact on society in the sense of how we view ourselves? Yeah, many different aspects. How we view our place in the universe, you know, and our aspirations for space. If there are others out there, if there is a smarter kid on the block. And by the way, most stars form billions of years before the sun. And therefore, they may have had civilizations like us billions of years before us so we are arriving relatively late to the game you know the way i see it is you know we

Starting point is 00:31:11 are born into this world uh just like actors that are put on a stage without a script we don't know what the play is about so the first thing to check is whether there are other actors out there perhaps they know what's going on because they have been around for a while so that's what like searching for another kid on the block finding whether there are smarter kids on you know most likely there were civilizations that died by now but we can find relics technological relics they sent out to space just like we send voyager one voyager two new horizons and so forth so it's a very natural to me again it's a common sense to invest in the search for such things i call it

Starting point is 00:31:54 space archaeology you know monitoring for example with a camera every object that comes into the solar system from outside that gets close to Earth and checking it, you know, checking whether it's artificial or natural by a close-up photograph, because a picture is worth a thousand words. And in my case, a picture is worth 66,000 words, the number of words in my book. So I think it's very natural to do this search and invest at least the same amount of money we invest in the search for dark matter, which is also a search in the dark. You know, we don't know what the dark matter is. Why not invest hundreds of millions of dollars or even a billion dollars? That's what we invested in in LIGO. To me it sounds like a straightforward thing to do, a very commonsensical thing to do,

Starting point is 00:32:41 but somehow my view is not dominant. Not only that, but the discussion is being ridiculed. And moreover, the community doesn't like me saying that, even though that's the reality of the situation. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair.

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Starting point is 00:34:15 slash everything and use the code everything when i hear that what i'm wondering is is there a way to monetize the search for aliens because then you can get the private industry. Well, the private sector, definitely, definitely. And then number two, what do you think about Elon Musk's mission to Mars? Okay, so those are two questions, privatizing the search for aliens and then Elon Musk. Definitely. I think if there are individuals interested in the search, I have some good ideas about how to do space archaeology, how to examine interstellar objects that enter the solar system and come close to Earth and take a photograph of them.

Starting point is 00:34:51 And, you know, that could be a new frontier in astronomy that was never pursued. And it's simply because just a few years ago, we discovered the first interstellar object, Oumuamua. So right now, we have our eyes open. It's a wake-up call for us. And I would be glad to discuss with wealthy individuals what can be done to advance this frontier. I think it would be a very exciting frontier, even more exciting than gravitational wave astrophysics or the search for dark matter.

Starting point is 00:35:28 And it could be, you know, it could be the most important discovery that humanity ever made if we find conclusive evidence for alien technology floating in space. floating in space. So given that, I think we should definitely pursue it with the private sector because that is completely independent and is known for its innovation, you know, because there are very wealthy individuals that became wealthy as a result of taking risks and innovating in the technological sector. So I think it would be fantastic

Starting point is 00:36:06 to open up new scientific frontiers that they can pursue with their wealth. The second question about going to Mars, I think one aspect of that that was not explored enough and should be explored before we go on that ship that brings us to Mars is um the health concern you know they if um down here on earth we are protected by the earth's magnetic field from very energetic particles cosmic rays and by the atmosphere of the earth uh and and the environment

Starting point is 00:36:42 of the space station floating, just hovering above earth is also relatively protected. But if you go to Mars and you spend a year, actually a significant fraction of your brain cells can be damaged as a result of energetic particles going through the helmet. I mean, you have to be in a cave underground or to have some special shielding around you to be protected and there was not enough attention given to that and i think

Starting point is 00:37:15 that should be addressed because we don't want it to be a one-way trip where after a year everyone that goes there dies so there's too much of a focus on building the atmosphere not much of the lack of a magnetic well yeah so i mean one thing is of course to create a habitat that allows people to breathe and you don't need to build a whole atmosphere to terraform mars you can just do it inside a closed vessel you know and but at the same time worrying about how to protect humans so that they can live there for more than a year is I think a major challenge that was not addressed enough and of course you can do it in steps you can go first to the moon and then because the moon is closer to us and we can ship people back and forth more easily. And that could be a stepping stone to Mars. What do you think of Sean Carroll's many worlds, well it's not his many worlds interpretation, but he seems to think it's the only game in town with

Starting point is 00:38:17 regard to quantum mechanical interpretations, and he seems to think it's not as arbitrary as people say and that maybe there's some evidence for it. At least if you quote-unquote follow the math. So what do you make of that? Well, so quantum mechanics was discovered the experimentally and that's an important Lesson for us to maintain our humility as scientists you know, sometimes we need the experiments to give us an insight about nature that we haven't expected. And it takes us out of our comfort zone. And it took Albert Einstein out of his comfort zone because he thought that you can't have quantum mechanics with spooky action at a distance. It makes no sense to him. And so he wrote a paper about it, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, trying to propose an experiment that will demonstrate that spooky action at a distance does not exist.

Starting point is 00:39:14 And versions of that experiment were done and he was proven wrong. And indeed, we are a century later after quantum mechanics was discovered still feeling uneasy about how to interpret it and this is an excellent example for why we need experiments because very often experiments open us our eyes to facts that we you know we haven't anticipated that our imagination is limited the more limited than nature's imagination in a way and we we should science is basically um just being a student for life uh as a scientist you are you have to be humble and modest enough to admit that you know that perhaps nature is different than than your preconceptions and if you were to say i don't need verification i know the truth in advance i know that there are extra dimensions or i know that umuamua was a rock or i know that this and that without even checking, then you are just like the philosophers during the days of Galileo

Starting point is 00:40:26 that didn't want to look through his telescope because they knew that the sun moves around the earth. So I just wanted to make that point that quantum mechanics is really an excellent example of why as scientists, we should always regard ourselves as students of nature. But coming back to so to the question of what's the meaning of quantum mechanics that as you mentioned that there was the many world interpretation and uh sean carroll puts it in a modern context um um and uh obviously

Starting point is 00:41:02 does sean carroll add anything that hasn't been said before on the many worlds interpretation from Everett? Yeah, I mean, there are some new nuances now that relate to how to define the wave function and the possible existence of the multiverse that some people contemplate as, you know, possible existence of the multiverse that some people contemplate as you know that the actual reality is much bigger than what we can experiment with within the observable universe that we see but then i would say that the verdict is still out i mean every year or two, I read an interesting essay that offers new insights to

Starting point is 00:41:48 quantum mechanics, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but we are not there yet. We haven't converged on something that everyone agrees on. And again, I think the way to converge would be to be guided by experiments. And it's quite possible, you know, that the one thing we're missing is the connection with gravity, that we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that was tested experimentally. And perhaps in the context of such a theory, the concerns we have will go away. Because one thing that you recognize in quantum mechanics, at least the traditional way it was formulated in, is that time plays a special role relative to space and um whereas in in in the general theory of relativity time and space are just dimensions of space time and they can be curved by objects and so forth and so perhaps once we identify a winning theory that

Starting point is 00:42:43 unifies quantum mechanics and gravity many of them uh ambiguities that we have right now in physics and by the way there are many not just not just the interpretation of quantum mechanics that there is the information paradox in the context of black holes and we don't know what happens to information that falls into a black hole, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes evaporate eventually into thermal radiation that doesn't carry that information. So the question is, if the black hole goes away, where is all the information that we threw into it when we made it? And that's a fundamental question because quantum mechanics argues that information cannot be destroyed. And so this is one puzzle that is also unsolved in modern physics.

Starting point is 00:43:31 Then there is a question of what happens in the singularities of either the singularity of a black hole where the curvature of space and time diverges or the singularity of the Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang? Do you believe that there are singularities within oh it's clear that singularities are just appearing in einstein's theory of gravity because it doesn't it's not unified with quantum mechanics because once you get to very large curvatures of space and time you have to correct the equations that einstein wrote because quantum mechanics comes into play. So again, the singularities are just symptoms of us having an incomplete theory. And what we need is to

Starting point is 00:44:13 unify quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity of Einstein. And of course, string theory is a very popular contender. But you ask string theories can you tell me what what happens to the singularity of a black hole they say oh that's a too difficult question we can't really address it at this point when you ask them what happens at the big bang just before the big bang they say oh that's too difficult we can't really and then there are people that try to formulate some guesses as to how string theory would behave. But so first of all, there is not a unique answer from string theory right now. And the theory is not unique in its predictions. And second, on the issues that matter, it doesn't put any skin in the game. It doesn't say here is

Starting point is 00:45:01 a prediction that you can test experimentally. if you find one answer then string theory is right, if you find another answer then it's wrong. No, they prefer not to put skin in the game so that it will still be right forever. And there is even the claim that if by some philosophers that if physicists agree on something for a decade, it must be right. And I find that really embarrassing that people argue that. Which philosophers? Oh, there is a philosopher that wrote a book about string theory and suggesting that, you know, we should adjust our conception of what physics is supposed to mean, that experiments may not be needed,

Starting point is 00:45:48 and that in fact, physics is what physicists do. And once again, from my perspective, I hold exactly the opposite view. I think that nature educates us. We are just students of nature. So we should be modest and learn from experiments. We can't imagine that we will know the truth in advance. You know, to me, it sounds like hallucinations, like you are high on drugs if you believe that you can, that reality always

Starting point is 00:46:16 reflects what you think it is. That's what people that are, you know, that hallucinate think. But you can think that you are the wealthiest person in the world. And when you go to the bank and check how much money you have in your checking account, you realize that, you know, that's an experiment and you realize that you cannot cash it. So, I mean, of course, people can feel happy. I have nothing against that. They can do mathematical gymnastics and feel happy. I just have the objection I have is about that applying to reality. A reality check needs to happen at some point. Right, exactly. Otherwise, I mean, you can just celebrate something that is not real. Okay, let's talk about Bob Lazar. I sent you an email and I asked you if you had the time to

Starting point is 00:47:02 please watch this video. It was a technical explanation of Bob Lazar in his younger years. Did you have a chance to even skim it? Yeah, I skimmed it. And what I found on the web is that he made a lot of statements without showing any evidence. And, you know, here I give usually the example of Napoleon. You know, there were many people over the years that claimed that they are Napoleon. And how do you check that? Once again, experimentally, you ask them, show me your ID. And if they can't show you the ID that says that they are Napoleon, and if they keep insisting that they are Napoleon without showing you evidence for that, you know, there are places where you can put them. And my point is, evidence is the key. That's the way that science gets credibility, that that's the way for us to make progress, as I discussed before, for us to learn new things

Starting point is 00:48:00 through experiments, through evidence. And it's not just a nuance. Looking for evidence is not just something that you can give up on. It's a necessity. That's the only thing that will keep you sane and making relevant statements. And you can make a lot of statements that look bizarre, You can make a lot of statements that look bizarre, interesting, intriguing, emotionally appealing. You know, you can make a lot of statements like that. And in fact, our culture is full of that. You have all kinds of myths in our culture. You know, if you can think about lots of them,

Starting point is 00:48:40 I mean, Santa Claus. I mean, there are lots of myths that are accepted uh and they're part of our culture but they're not regarded as part you're crushing me right now i thought santa claus is real oh man summarize my point is uh when i checked a lot of the things he said he didn't bring um credible evidence to support them and that's what makes me worry that, you know, that he's not real. Ah, I see. I see. Did you take a look at any of his explanations as to how the spacecraft would work? And is it feasible in your mind?

Starting point is 00:49:17 Is it untenable? Is it ridiculous? No, I mean, once again, suppose he had a good idea for making a spacecraft that we currently do not have, okay, that NASA is not developing. He could have made a fortune out of it. How? Very simply, instead of talking about it, he could have built it. And then it would fly. What's the problem?

Starting point is 00:49:42 I mean, that's a straightforward. I don't understand why we need to talk about it even. I mean, any reasonable person that has an idea that is not being used and that could make millions or even billions of dollars, you know, first of all, establishes a patent on that. And secondly, you know, tries to build this thing. And if it's real, he will make that profit. You know, it would be bigger than Tesla. It would be bigger than SpaceX because you would find a technology that NASA can use

Starting point is 00:50:12 that nobody thought about. So, you know, it makes zero sense to say, I know how to do something and not reveal the details and not build it. If you know how to do it, just build it. That's what I tell kids when they come to me with ideas. Okay, I believe what he was saying is that he doesn't know how it works. What happened was he was told to work on some craft

Starting point is 00:50:37 and he believes they're of alien or extraterrestrial origin and that the US government knows how to pilot them to some degree in the same way that you can learn how to use a phone or a tablet, like they've dropped phones and tribes and they know how to turn it on. But they don't know how it works. And he said, possibly the way that it works is with this element called element 115. And there's a strong nuclear force, which turns into a gravitational force. And that I find interesting. I don't know how it works. But to me, if that's true, that's, that's one way of unifying quantum field theory with gravity either way.

Starting point is 00:51:10 What do you think about that? From the point of view of a physicist, this is just nonsense. I mean, it makes no sense. I have never heard about how you turn the nuclear force into a gravitational force in any piece of equipment. Of course, if you reach the Planck scale, you might be able to do something, but no accelerator gets even close. The only time when we reached that scale, perhaps, was at the Big Bang or near a singularity of a black hole. So I would say this is just not, I mean, it makes no scientific sense to me and uh moreover let's imagine that he

Starting point is 00:51:48 did not know the details but someone else has that equipment why do you think that someone else will keep it secret why won't they just use it or develop it and and you know get a great advantage relative to others by using it. I was listening to one of your, actually, I believe you said this plenty of times that someone said to you, deflation is not disprovable. I'm sorry. Inflation is not disprovable. Yeah. Okay. Do you mind explaining why? Okay. So here is the thing that cosmic inflation is a theory that was proposed um about um 40 years ago uh and it

Starting point is 00:52:30 was meant to explain some very peculiar facts about the universe uh one of which let me just mention because it's really simple to to follow uh when we look in one direction uh in the on the sky we find the cosmic microwave background relic from the Big Bang with some temperature. Okay, then we look at the opposite direction on the sky, and we find the cosmic microwave background having exactly the same temperature. Now how is that possible it took the age of the universe for this light to arrive to us from these two points on the sky. And these two points on the sky did not have time

Starting point is 00:53:11 to communicate with each other because it would take twice as long at least, or more than that for the light to arrive from one point to the other. So how come the universe was arranged in a way such that conditions are the same throughout the entire sky in terms of the cosmic microwave background temperature, for example? So we know the universe had similar initial conditions to one part in 100,000 throughout the region that we can see. Meaning that in one part in 100,000, it's the same temperature or what?

Starting point is 00:53:47 Yes, yes. And how come it was prepared in such a state, which is very special? You know, if you would imagine just a random state, you would have very different temperatures in different places. So inflation attempts to explain that. The idea is that everything that we see came from a very small patch that was stretched exponentially in time very quickly. So points that were in contact with each other were separated very fast,

Starting point is 00:54:24 faster than light from each other and that is possible based on Einstein's theory of gravity you can separate points exponentially away from each other if the vacuum itself dominates gravity which by the way is what is happening right now in the universe the expansion of the universe is accelerating as of recently over the past half of the history of the universe the the expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down and the idea is that the same thing happened at a very early time and then that took a small region of space that where points were connected to each other, had the same conditions, and spread them apart. Sorry, I want to make sure I'm understanding. Is this just a change of the metric with the

Starting point is 00:55:10 cosmological constant? So inflation is just saying the cosmological constant was large in the early universe and then somehow it became smaller? Or positive? Yeah, exactly. The cosmological constant is equivalent to the vacuum having some mass density, some energy density, which by the way, today is called dark energy. I mean, it's basically the energy of the vacuum. So by the vacuum, I mean, if you clean up all the matter, whatever you have left is the vacuum and the vacuum could have a uniform energy density, the same energy density everywhere, because it's the vacuum,

Starting point is 00:55:47 it's the ground state. So if you just imagine early cosmic time, the vacuum had a large energy density, and that went away. It was sort of a false vacuum, the vacuum was excited to some higher state. And then it decayed into the vacuum we have today then that will create an exponential expansion that is called a cosmic inflation early on and would explain some facts about the universe it could also generate it will make the universe have the same conditions everywhere but it also through quantum mechanics generates small ripples in the the density of matter one percent ripples in the density of matter. 1% ripples? Yeah, small fluctuations because of quantum mechanics

Starting point is 00:56:32 that later grow and become the galaxies that we see today or the objects that we see today. So that's the beauty of the concept of cosmic inflation, that it explains a lot of things and that's why it was widely accepted after after a while in the scientific community uh sorry i just want to make sure i'm understanding this correctly so is the way that they put a bound on the time that the cosmological constant was extremely high is it with by observing the cosmic background radiation and saying okay there's a one percent difference about one in a hundred, you said,

Starting point is 00:57:07 right? No, one in a hundred thousand. Yes. Okay. One in a hundred thousand. So then that means that there's a, a bound it's to how long that could go on for because otherwise the fluctuations would be so large that we would see larger gaps. I mean, larger variations. So that there is, there is a lower limit on how long it persisted, which is you need to inflate enough so that the small patch would become as big as the universe today. Okay.

Starting point is 00:57:34 That's the minimum you need to expand by. But it could have expanded much more than that. We just don't know. So inflation could have lasted much more. You know, we have no upper limit on how long it lasted. But we have a lower limit. And we know that it should have ended so that we will end up with universe full of matter that made all the objects we see now. So the vacuum could not have continued to dominate the expansion forever because then we wouldn't exist so the vacuum

Starting point is 00:58:05 dominated for a while and that while lasted at least 60 periods of exponential expansion at least 60 and then after that it you know we don't know how much more but eventually it decayed and became the matter that we have today and and the universe entered into its expansion the way we see it. So anyway, Unfalsifiable because. Okay. No. So that idea is, as it was formulated initially was a very interesting idea because you can test it. There are various predictions.

Starting point is 00:58:40 One of them is that the geometry of the universe would be flat and and so forth and and by the way it was confirmed the the universe is flat you know if you draw a triangle the sum of the angles is 180 degrees and so forth but then at some point it became clear that to account for inflation, you actually come up with the multiverse. There are lots of other regions inside of which conditions could be very different. So anything that is possible happens an infinite number of times in such a theory of cosmic inflation.

Starting point is 00:59:23 So once you allow for not just our reality to exist, but you have all kinds of regions where things, everything that can happen happens an infinite number of times, then it starts losing its predictability because anything that you find about our universe could, you could, it's a very flexible theory now that can explain anything. And so I had a panel discussion with alan guth that is one of the pioneers of inflation and in which i asked him a simple question i said and that was about five years ago i asked him is inflation falsifiable is there an experiment by

Starting point is 01:00:00 which you will detect something about the cosmic micro background or about the universe that will demonstrate that inflation is wrong. Can you envision something? I'm not saying necessarily that it's wrong. I'm just saying, is there a way to test it? Skin in the game, as you would call it. Yeah. And he said, that's a silly question. He said, any observational fact in the universe universe can be a if inflation right now as a

Starting point is 01:00:27 theory is sufficiently flexible that it can explain can accommodate any fact that you detect and to me a theory of everything is not very far from being a theory of nothing because if you can explain anything that you find, then what's the value of the theory? It doesn't give you any added value because first you find it and then the theory says, yes, yes, of course, a version of the theory would make it. So what did I learn?

Starting point is 01:00:55 I didn't learn that the theory is right. I didn't learn the theory. I cannot learn that theory is wrong. And therefore it loses its scientific value, in my view, not in the view of Alan Good. He thinks that it makes the theory very robust because it can agree with anything that is being found. And, you know, that is the shift in the culture that I'm worried about. You see this with string theory as well. Yes. I'm not sure if Alan is a string theorist.

Starting point is 01:01:26 this with string theory as well yes i'm not sure if alan is a string theorist well no he's not but then the two cultures uh you know celebrate to get the same the same view about how physics can be done nowadays they both i mean also in the context of string theory you know for example there was a suggestion that then uh you know some it has a landscape and its landscape, the landscape of string theory, accounts for some versions of inflation. And so I asked the person that worked on that, I said, OK, so this connection that you make between the natural incarnation of string theory and inflation, suppose we measure something in the cosmic microwave background about inflation, and we show that the kind of inflation that you are advocating is wrong. Would that prove string theory wrong? And that person said, no, string theory will always be right.

Starting point is 01:02:22 What it will prove is the connection that I made between string theory and inflation. That connection is right. So you see, the psychology is always to retreat to a place that cannot be shown wrong. And although it sounds very appealing and comfortable because you can maintain your image as, you know, being always right and you don't put any skin in the game. It's not really what physics is about. This flatness that you mentioned of space time.

Starting point is 01:02:57 Is this why we can say that a galaxy is moving away from us at a certain speed. And the reason why I say that is in a manifold, you can't technically, to get a bit technical, can't technically compare two different velocities unless they're brought at the same point, unless you have a horizontal or vertical subspace given by a connection and so on. So how can you compare different velocities when you're at different points in a manifold

Starting point is 01:03:19 is what I'm wondering. No, so first of all, I should say that in Einstein's theory of gravity, you can get a very distant galaxy to move away from us faster than light. And that is because it's far away. So space and time can expand faster than light when you're dealing with points that are separated by a large distance. That's allowed by Einstein's theory. And that's why we lose contact with galaxies once they start moving faster than light relative to us. And so in an accelerating universe,

Starting point is 01:03:53 two points that were in contact are separated eventually so that they are not in contact anymore after a while. And of course that time that it takes is the time that it takes them to reach the speed of light. Basically, that's the time that they're still in contact. And after that, they're not in contact, that they cannot communicate. But to your second question, that has to do with how can we measure that the universe is flat? And that is simply just like you check if a piece of paper is flat.

Starting point is 01:04:24 You draw a triangle and you check if a piece of paper is flat. You draw a triangle and you check the sum of the angles. If the sum of the angles is 180 degrees, you know that this piece of paper is flat. But if it sits on top of a ball, for example, then the sum of the angle can be bigger than 180 degrees. You can take a line from the pole to the equator, go along the equator and go back to the pole. And each of these angles would be 90 degrees. So 90 plus 90 plus 90, if you're doing it, that would be 270. It's more than 180 degrees, then you know that the surface is not flat.

Starting point is 01:05:06 It's actually curved like a ball, positive. So how do we check the sums of the angles of a triangle in the universe? Well, we just need a standard ruler, and we have that in the early universe, a sound wave would propagate a certain distance that we can calculate. So at a given time after the Big Bang, we know how far a sound wave can propagate. And it turns out that

Starting point is 01:05:31 this is the distance where you can have correlations between the temperature of the microwave background, because sound waves correlate different points in the sky where the temperature of the microwave background knows about another point. Sorry, why are you using sound waves? Because sound waves require medium. Yes, there is a medium. The matter in the universe is the medium. I mean, there is ordinary matter and there is light and there is dark matter. So there is matter. And the sound waves, we can calculate the speed by which they move. And so if we look at a certain time after the Big Bang, we can tell how far sound waves could propagate. And that defines the standard ruler. That's the distance over which different points in the sky would be correlated with each other because they could speak via sound waves with each other.

Starting point is 01:06:19 And so when we look at the microwave background, we can measure the angle that that yardstick occupies. And we can figure out whether the sums of the angles in that triangle, the base of the triangle is the yardstick, the distance that sound traveled at that time. And then the other sides of the triangle go to the observer. So the observer looks at this yardstick and we can look at how what is the angle that this yardstick occupies and from that we can figure out that whether the universe is flat or not and this experiment was done in in the year 2000 we already knew that the universe is flat that it's the simplest geometry you can think of. That's absolutely interesting. Of a flat space. A priori, is there a reason why it should be flat?

Starting point is 01:07:08 I see it's as simple, but also is there a margin of error with this? Well, there should be a margin of error. Yeah, there is a margin of error right now. The precision right now is a few percent, but cosmic inflation naturally, in the old incarnation of it where not everything was possible. But if you were to take the models from 1980, they would expect the universe to be flat because you take a small patch of space.

Starting point is 01:07:37 You might have some curvature of space and time in that patch, but then you inflate it. And when you inflate it, you stretch it to huge dimensions so all the curvature that you had on small scales is now being ironed out and you can think of it as a cosmic iron you basically iron out by expansion you you make the universe flat the geometry flat and it happens to be the case that the universe is flat indeed. That seems to me to be evidence for the inflation. Yes, it is. But in the original incarnation of the 1980s, what happened afterwards is that the theory was appended, supplemented by ingredients that make it much less predictive, that it can accommodate anything.

Starting point is 01:08:24 That's the part that they resist. I see. I see. Let's imagine, I think Wolfram predicts that there's a lower bound to the elementary particle masses, or at least he says he can get to that. I think you mentioned that astrophysical data can validate this. How? Well, Wolfram has a different way of looking at physics, Wolfram has a different way of looking at physics, which is related to something he worked on for a while. It's diagrams of... Hypergraphs and so on. Yeah, hypergraphs.

Starting point is 01:08:56 And he has a group of people working with him, and it's a very ambitious project. He's very bright. vicious project. He's very bright. I haven't seen yet that the effort yield predictions that we can test experimentally. So far, he's trying to reproduce things we know about. And then he's actually not far from where I live and he's relatively local. How many minutes away driving? Yeah at some point I hope to have a conversation with him walking together in the woods and trying to get the latest on his work. But then as far as I know it's not yet at the point where the theory predicts new things that we can test beyond what we already know.

Starting point is 01:09:48 I see. I see. So what do you think of his model? I think it's too preliminary. It's nice to have people thinking independently, you know, and I very much, I salute his effort intellectually because it's very ambitious, you know, to come up with a completely new way of looking at physics. And his courage for taking on this task and his intellect. I mean, he's brilliant when you listen to him. Have you heard of Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity? Have you researched into it? And what do you think about it? I did not look into it in detail.

Starting point is 01:10:23 No, so I cannot comment. But I know that he's very bright. Do you think that innovation in physics is going to necessarily come from the outside because of these selective pressures that you mentioned in academia? Yeah, well, I think what happens is that this pressure

Starting point is 01:10:41 is reducing the efficiency of science, that fewer people are attempting to deviate from the beaten path, and especially the young people. If you think about Albert Einstein, he was not deterred by oppression. He, in one year, had five seminal papers, and I very much hope that this tradition will come back, where young people will not be afraid to innovate. And I think even with social pressure, as long as we continue to do experiments, you know, that's the key. Because experiments and collecting evidence will eventually tell us that we are wrong. It takes more time if we are not open minded. And if you look, for example, the perfect example

Starting point is 01:11:26 is the Mayan culture. When I visited Mexico, I went to Chichen Itza, and the tour guide was bragging about the Mayan culture and saying that astronomers in that culture were held at a very high regard. They were considered astronomer priests the highest level in society and i was wondering why and turns out that uh politicians uh the rulers of the mayans they thought that by knowing the positions of planets and stars on the sky you can forecast the future so you can tell the outcome of a. You can decide when to go out to a war so that it will be successful, so that you would win based on the locations of planets. So they put astronomers that monitor the sky, the planets.

Starting point is 01:12:14 Where did they get that idea from? Just from the predictive powers of the weather and then extrapolating that? No, it's sort of like horoscopes nowadays, you know, astrology. It's a natural tendency of people to believe that there are powers that extend way beyond what reality is, you know, and alchemy was one example where people thought that their beliefs or emotions affect, you know, materials, the nature of materials. So anyway, they thought that the motion of stars and planets affect human history

Starting point is 01:12:52 and that's astrology fundamentally. So, but that was their belief system. And then the astronomers collected huge amounts of data over thousands of years and amazing data. But it was not used for the purpose of finding Newton's law of gravity. It was for the political purpose of winning a war. And if you think about it from a modern perspective, we now know that the motion of mars or venus have nothing to do with whether the gulf war was successful or a disaster and so we nowadays have a different view about planets and stars

Starting point is 01:13:34 and collecting all this exquisite data was not enough if you have the wrong conception good data is not enough so you need to be open-minded for other interpretations and to think about the data that you get in ways that are not traditional. And I bring this up because if you always think that you know the answer in advance, you might not even collect the data. That's even more dangerous. The Mayans were, in a way, more advanced than those people that say, we don't need data, we know the answer without it. You know, those philosophers that say, if physicists agree on something, that's enough. That's much more primitive than the Mayans' belief system, because the Mayans were collecting data about the sky. sky at least and and you know the i think that's the most important thing that we can maintain in terms of the integrity of science is its reliance on evidence rather than on what people say um and i hope if that stays even if some ideas are ridiculed now eventually there

Starting point is 01:14:41 would be data and evidence that would demonstrate that they're right. And that's what happened to me, you know, in the examples that we discussed at the beginning of our conversation, you know, that eventually data came along and demonstrated that what I'm saying is correct. And so that is, you know, great. I mean, and by the way, it's not about me being right. It's not about us. It's about the dialogue we have with nature. I recall reading in one of your Scientific American articles about the limitations of knowing a theory of everything. And you cited Gödel. I'm not sure if you were citing Gödel to say that what Gödel's incompleteness theorem has to say is something about whether or not we can ultimately

Starting point is 01:15:18 find the laws that govern us. Or you're using that to say, well, look, there are limitations, so let's be a bit more humble. Which one was it? Does Gödel's theorem have anything to do? It was the second one. I think we should be humble because we will never have a complete theory of everything. Logically, that was demonstrated by Gödel. But also, you know, the scientific process is a work in progress. You know, it turns out that when we discover new things, we can ask more questions.

Starting point is 01:15:48 It's not that we ask less questions. So the illusion that physics would get to an end and that would be it, that was advocated a hundred years ago, before Einstein came, more than a 100 years, 120 years ago, before Einstein came with special relativity and quantum mechanics was discovered, and clearly physics was revolutionized. And it was said in recent decades by some people, and again, I think they are completely misguided because, you know, knowledge is just an island in an ocean of ignorance. We know so little. And the way for us to maintain the integrity of science is to stay modest and say, look, we don't know so much. And it's work in progress. And sometimes we may be wrong. So let's be open minded and let's continue to collect evidence and make progress through that. Why does Gödel's incompleteness theorem have anything to do with whether or not we can learn fundamental laws? Because what Gödel demonstrated

Starting point is 01:16:50 is that you cannot build a self-consistent logical system that can be proven and be self-contained, so to speak. I see, I see. You're talking about whether or not we can prove that our theory of everything can be proven and be self-contained, so to speak. I see, I see. You're talking about whether or not we can prove that our theory of everything is the theory of everything. So there will always be some loopholes,

Starting point is 01:17:12 even at the logical level. But what I'm referring to in addition to that is the fact that reality, it will take us a long while before we figure out all the details of reality through experiments, in addition to the logical issues. I recall you mentioned that science, sorry, that religion can learn from science, obviously, in the sense that we investigate nature, it tells us more about God, as well as it allows us a deeper appreciation of that nature. And this is an old view, actually, which says that if you have

Starting point is 01:17:45 an interpretation of the Bible, the Christian Bible, and you find that nature contradicts that, then it's not that nature is wrong, it's that your interpretation of the Bible is wrong. Nature is always right, because nature is what God made. Nature is God in some way, actually. So then I'm wondering, that means that religion can learn from science okay can science learn from religion and if so how well yeah so um you know being a physicist is just like trying to figure out what the building is is made of you know you're trying to figure out the bricks and mortar that make the building that's the fundamental laws of physics. And when we look at the universe, we're trying to figure out what it's made of,

Starting point is 01:18:27 what the composition of the universe, what are the laws that are governing it. And then lo and behold, we find that most of the matter in the universe is in some form that we don't know what it is. And we are not made of it. It's called dark matter. So we still have to figure it out.

Starting point is 01:18:44 And it's a puzzle and we're trying to figure out also the laws that govern the behavior of the universe. But if you look at the building, there is more to it than the bricks and mortar that make the building. There is the design and there is the purpose of the building and there is the meaning of the building you know and that goes beyond physics that's the metaphysics now a physicist can take a practical approach and say i don't really care about that i want to figure out how reality operates because that's the only tangible thing that i can later use in developing technology. You know, I don't want to think about things that I cannot test empirically, like, you know, that involve beauty.

Starting point is 01:19:33 Is the building beautiful? Is the building serving a bigger purpose? That's, that's not of my interest, but if you are an architect, you care mostly about that. You don't care about the bricks and mortar. As an architect, you, care mostly about that. You don't care about the bricks and mortar. As an architect, you draw a blueprint of a building. And in principle, the construction workers could use different materials to make that. Of course, the materials affect the durability of the building and so forth, but not so much the way it appears and functions. And so from the point of view of an architect, it's a completely different question, you know, than from the point of view of a construction worker,

Starting point is 01:20:16 what the building represents. And so the way I see that is that reality, you know, has many facets to it. And one of the facets is indeed what the physics is dealing with. But another facet is what the humanities are dealing with. And that includes philosophy and theology and religion. And, you know, as a human, you are incomplete if you were not to consider all the facets. I mean, you can, of course, narrow yourself to one of them

Starting point is 01:20:46 and just say, I don't care about anything else. That's fine, but that's, in a way, narrow-minded. It's just like looking at the small piece of the big picture, and I think you're not fully satisfied living like that. I mean, I don't think that ignoring the humanities is a good practice. I'm reminded by Aristotle, who had a concept of causation, which unified what you're referring to. So material cause, efficient cause, formal and final. So material is what you break some order, and then the efficient is essentially causation as we understand it as physicists.

Starting point is 01:21:22 And the formal is, okay is okay the architecture and then the final is the purpose of it so you're saying we've forgotten about formal and final as physicists or as materialists in some way but then aristotle's causation was secular and what i was wondering is how can science learn from religion and that to me doesn't unless you want to call what aristotle was doing as religious where's traditional religion in your answer? happen to good people and vice versa and uh and you know you can operate if you are using the scientific method uh you can test those predictions you know if if there is a way by which you can forecast what will happen and you see that that's not happening that or you know if the biblical story of abraham in the bible if abraham heard the voice of god and

Starting point is 01:22:27 he had a cell phone where he had a voice memo app and he would have pressed the button he could have recorded the voice of god so you know it's in principle it's possible to test some of these direct interactions uh between a divine entity and and a human but if you believe more in the concept the philosophical concept like spinoza did where he identified god with nature and you know there is something to it because nature itself is not completely random you know it's organized and that's quite striking that the laws of physics create some order in the universe that otherwise would not exist. And the fact that the same laws of physics that we find here on earth apply everywhere is remarkable in my view. And, you know, discovering the laws of physics gives you a sense of awe

Starting point is 01:23:18 of the type that a religious person may feel, you know, because you are feeling something about nature that you uncovered that is remarkable, that applies everywhere. And it's much greater than we are because it applies everywhere. So you can call it a religious sense, a sense of, oh, but you're doing it through a scientific lens. And frankly, it's not obvious to me that there is a bigger meaning to life. Because if you think about the meanings that we assign to life, they're usually confined to Earth. All of our ambitions are confined to Earth.

Starting point is 01:24:00 And within a billion years, the sun will boil off all the oceans on earth so nothing that we care about that that is dear to our heart will stay around for more than a billion years so then you ask yourself is that really a valuable meaning something that will go away okay it will go away in a billion years not in a in a hundred years but qualitatively speaking it will go away okay it will go away in a billion years not in a in a hundred years but qualitatively speaking it will go away it's just like something that goes away in a week i mean it may be meaningful for a while but then it's not anymore so there is no absolute meaning to our existence if you think about the big picture and you know one thing that people ask me what is the one thing you would like to ask an alien if you were to be in contact that is the question i would like to ask is there a meaning to this

Starting point is 01:24:52 or what is the what is the meaning of this play and as i said at the beginning we are put on the stage like actors without a script what is the play about i would like to know that do you think that because we can zoom out and say that over across a billion years let's say that we'll no longer be here therefore it's meaningless do you think that that means it's meaningless or do you think that means that that view that we zoom out and look at our lives across a billion years that that is not a way that we should view ourselves the reason i'm saying that is if we say that it's meaningless because there's an end to it,

Starting point is 01:25:28 then why can't we just go to a Holocaust museum and say, well, their suffering didn't matter because there was an end to it anyway. Like, why can't we just apply that even more locally? There is a meaning, but it's temporary, of course.

Starting point is 01:25:41 And of course, it means the world to us because we are also short-lived. We live just for decades, a hundred years or so. And so during that time, that's what matters to us, what happens during that time.

Starting point is 01:26:00 But when I was referring to meaning, I was referring to something bigger that is not going to go away you know something that stays forever and that's the thing that we need to give up on i think and and again staying modest you know i think allows you not to want too much you know not to think that oh there you know, not to think that, oh, you know, I really want something that will stay forever. Perhaps we should, as you said, perhaps we should admit that everything is temporary. Everything changes all the time. We should just adapt to changing circumstances. And the meaning that we have is always short lived. And we should be happy about that. You

Starting point is 01:26:42 know, we can enjoy good food when we eat it. We can enjoy the company of friends when we have them around. And after a while, it goes away. That's okay. That's the way life is. And if we don't aspire for a meaning that is beyond that, that's okay. Something I was toying with was, I wonder if there's a way that the world of experience

Starting point is 01:27:06 can last forever. And the reason is, let's say in general relativity, right beside a black hole, you can watch your person, your friend enter the black hole infinitely for the rest of time. Obviously, they'd have to send photons back to you, but you can watch them. It's almost as if they're frozen right at the event horizon. But then for them, it's as if they passed into the black hole. Now, let's imagine in reverse, right before you're about to die, your experience of life gets stretched infinitely. To everyone else, it's as if it ended. But then in just like in general relativity, you can't say that your frame of reference is the correct one, that your friends is just as valid. So I'm wondering, does your experience, it's not something we can test,

Starting point is 01:27:45 but I'm wondering if right before you die, does it get stretched infinitely? And that's one of the reasons why they say heaven and hell exist. And also heaven and hell is dependent on how you live your life right now. Because if you live as if you're in heaven, or you live properly, or you live as if you're in hell and you hate everyone, if you were to die, you're going to feel that stretched out for the rest of your life. Now, you won't be able to see other people, but somehow phenomenologically or experientially, it will get stretched.

Starting point is 01:28:11 And that's a huge speculative jump. Well, that's an interesting thought. But if you ask me for my opinion, I think that we are just, our body is just like a computer. And when you unplug it from the wall, it shuts off, all the systems shut off. And that's the experience of death.

Starting point is 01:28:28 Basically, your cord is taken out of the outlet. Do you have any ideas as to consciousness or its origins? Is it emergent? Is consciousness emergent? Yeah, that's what I think. I think that we are very complex systems and we are subject to a lot of inputs you know from our environment and that's what makes us unpredictable so when

Starting point is 01:28:57 people talk about free will it's sort of the confluence of a lot of ingredients, each of which, you know, can change the outcome. And as a result, we are not that predictable. And of course, according to quantum mechanics, things are not predictable. There is a probabilistic outcome. But in general, you know, I think both free will and consciousness are incarnations of very complex systems. So it's the way that a complex system, the human, appears. But it doesn't mean that the building blocks of making a human are anything different than the physical elements that we know about. You just put them together in some way and you get phenomena like consciousness,

Starting point is 01:29:44 You just put them together in some way and you get phenomena like consciousness, by which we mean that the system itself recognizes that it exists and acts based on the feedback that it gets from reality. But in principle, I can imagine us constructing entities that will behave the same way in the future. You know, robots that are sufficiently advanced with AI and so forth. I don't see a qualitative difference between the human body and the materials that it's made of. It's just that the materials are organized in a way that gives the human body special qualities and abilities. But when we die, it's just like taking the computer cord out of the outlet. I'm sure you've heard of the hard problem of consciousness.

Starting point is 01:30:36 That is, how can we get experience from what's fundamentally not experiencing? Do you have any ideas as to that? You mentioned, well, when you have a feedback, when you have a system looking at itself, but then that's self-consciousness. I'm just referring to experience in and of itself. Yeah, because the experience is being sensed by our body. And our body can play tricks on us

Starting point is 01:30:59 and can give us senses that do not really exist outside of the body. And they are just self-created. So you can imagine phenomena like that. But it's all related to physical processes that are happening. Do you believe that there are wormholes, or stable wormholes? Possibly aliens are using them? No, at the moment, there are people suggesting how to construct wormholes, how to

Starting point is 01:31:29 perhaps build time machines. But all of these suggestions, again, are highly speculative because we don't have a quantum mechanical theory of gravity. And without it, you know, these ideas may not hold water, you know. So let's put it this way. We have no way of designing an engineering project to build either a time machine or a wormhole. The current knowledge is very sketchy and the proposals that we have in various papers are all very speculative. As for the fine-tuning of the universe, do you have any inklings as to why it is the way that it is? Do you take Lee Smolin's evolutionary black hole model? No. I think that the conditions we have in the universe were dictated by how it started around the Big Bang. And so, you know, just like cosmic inflation tries to explain various

Starting point is 01:32:25 facts. And once we have a quantum theory of gravity, we'll be figuring out where the universe came from, you know, what is the womb that the umbilical cord of the universe was connected to. And that would explain to us why it has the properties that it has. So rather than guess it, I would rather go to that womb that created the universe and ask what are the reasons that we have the conditions we have. So you believe that we can derive the fundamental constants in some way? Potentially, yeah. If we figure out what happened before the Big Bang using a quantum theory of gravity, perhaps, once again, what we find in the universe will be emerging out of those conditions, early conditions and the theory and the unifying theory, which we don't have at the moment. Before I get to audience questions, the last question I have, well, two, I want to know what you think is the difference between wisdom and intelligence. And then I wanted to know what you thought of Wigner's friends, Wigner's friends thought experiment or the thought experiment of Wigner's friend.

Starting point is 01:33:24 I'm sure you've heard of it, about the collapse of the wave function. Yeah, so first with respect to intelligence and wisdom, there is a very big difference between them. Wisdom is the ability to identify the essential elements necessary to answer questions and learn about the world. So it's a way of improving the efficiency of us figuring out the truth, you know, and someone that is wise gives you a shortcut. You can be very intelligent and just examine all the exits from the highway

Starting point is 01:34:06 many of them would lead you into bad neighborhoods but if you are wise you will try to figure out which exit is the right one and So intelligence may be an essential skill in pursuing science. And you can become a world expert in a particular niche, just like taking an exit from the highway. In that exit, you can become the world expert. But it's not necessarily the niche that matters the most. But it's not necessarily the niche that matters the most. And if you are wise, you can figure out which niche matters the most.

Starting point is 01:34:53 If you're wise, how do you determine which one matters? Which one is the right one? I imagine that depends on the goal, but then I'm wondering, well, how do you decide on the goal? Is it just what allows you to survive? You have to decide about the guiding principles first. So, for example, to some people, what matters the most are subjects of relevance to society, you know, if it has an impact on society. Because after all, we live in a society, you know,

Starting point is 01:35:23 and whether we address how many extra dimensions exist or whether we address how to find a vaccine to COVID-19 or you know these are two different questions with very different impacts on society so you might use that when you evaluate what you want to do if you want to help people then you work on some questions that matter to them now it doesn't mean that they all have to be medical they could be questions that people care about right right so in that way since the public is funding science you are paying respect to the public if on the other hand you yourself, how many angels can sit on the tip of a pin, and you get funded by the public, and then you say, I don't care what the

Starting point is 01:36:11 public says, and I don't care if I have experiments to test my ideas, then that's a betrayal of the trust that the society has in academia. And that is a good reason for the public to say that academia is part of the elite, because it's divorcing itself from the interests of the public. So being wise is attending to the interests of those who fund you. That's an example. Okay, what about if there's no capitalism there's no funding well sorry in socialism you're also funded there's no money we're hunt hunter gatherers can you be wise yeah if you're a hunter and you still have a purpose right you are trying to hunt so you're so for that purpose you develop tools that are relevant so instead of the relevance

Starting point is 01:37:02 being to society to the people that fund, here the relevance is to your objectives. Sorry, what I'm trying to get at is how do you know which goals? You're presuming a goal already. So what I'm wondering is how do you determine which goal you should follow? Oh, okay. Well well the way i determine is uh personally that doesn't mean that everyone should operate this way but i i pay attention to the goals that are most important you know that that are that will make the biggest difference you see uh you can always work on on something in the periphery that makes very little difference to anyone and nobody would bother you and you will be happy you'll earn your living you'll go to work you will smile and people will smile at you and that's it but the question is does it matter to anyone or to yourself do you feel will you feel

Starting point is 01:37:58 at the age of 90 that you actually fulfilled your life interests? And the answer may be no. You should have been more daring, more risk-taking, more willing to embark on things that are difficult, that will take a while to figure out, but matter more. So I look at myself at that stage, at a late age, and ask, what would I advise myself now to do that would matter, that will make a difference? And that's what I do. Okay, well, let's get to some audience questions.

Starting point is 01:38:33 Steve Scully here says, is it possible that the universe is infinite, that there is no end to how large or small objects in the universe can be relative to one another, and that if the overall system is to be comprehensible, it is only by us recognizing how all of these apparently separate and distinct different systems actually share the same underlying mechanics. Read the question. You understood the question? Yeah, I understood.

Starting point is 01:39:01 Well, the answer to most of the question is yes. It's quite possible that in each direction, it's an infinite series of sizes and scales. But to me, the most interesting part of the question is, will the laws of physics apply everywhere the same way? Or will you have the... And so far, the amazing thing is that in the region that we can see that we can observe uh it appears like the laws of physics apply everywhere the same way and that that's remarkable but uh it may it's not guaranteed by any means and of course

Starting point is 01:39:42 people are searching for deviations because if you find a deviation you get an overprice right right that brings me to a question that I have for you but it's more for an experimentalist do you always need a theory to interpret the data or can you just interpret the data without a theory so for example collecting astronomical data we're assuming that we're at no special place in the universe and that the laws are pretty much the same throughout time. So can you interpret the data without a theory? Can you even make sense of the data without a theory? I don't think so.

Starting point is 01:40:15 I think you always have to have something in the back of your mind because otherwise the data is not telling you anything. You have to put it in a context. So just to give you an example, when I was a postdoc, you know, astrophysical journals used to come in print. It was not on the internet. And to come in print, it was not on the internet. So I went to the library at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and I saw that before the 1980s, there were photographs published in print where you can see giant arcs of light

Starting point is 01:41:01 surrounding clusters of galaxies and people just ignore them. The data was there. It was printed in images that were put in papers and nobody asked anything about those arcs. Why are there arcs? You know, it was in the data. Like lightning strikes between galaxies? Like sparks almost? Well, they look like arcs. then then in the 1980s the subject of gravitational lensing became popular and then people explain those arcs as focusing of light by the force of gravity you know so you have a cluster of galaxies that acts on light from a background source behind it let's say a galaxy sits far away behind the cluster and then the light that comes from that galaxy is being gravitationally bent and focused at the observer.

Starting point is 01:41:52 And you end up with what is called an Einstein ring. Einstein already thought that this could happen in 1940. So you can get the giant arc of a background source that is part of sort of a ring of light that comes from gravitational lensing. And once they realized that they said, Oh, that's a good explanation for those arcs. But the arcs existed in the literature before and people just didn't think about it in that context. So you can have data, it's just without a sense of what the data may mean,

Starting point is 01:42:27 you might actually not pay attention to it. Barfi Man 362 asks, do you still learn math and physics in the same way you did as you were when you were younger? And if not, how has aging and experience changed your learning process right so um i was always i'm not a good example because from a young age i was always most interested in ideas and uh then in the the mathematical techniques that are used to to

Starting point is 01:43:07 the mathematical techniques that are used to perfect them or demonstrate them. And so in that sense, I'm actually more efficient now than I was because, you know, I know the field much better. And so if I were to meet a younger version of myself I could teach myself quite a bit. So I feel that I'm much stronger now than I was at a younger age because I don't waste as much time in directions that would not prove useful, fruitful. But in terms of the techniques, it's true that after a certain age you stop learning new techniques, most people. And so you continue to use what you've learned during your studies, during your PhD, and you continue to use that. But you use it on subjects that are new um very few people do learn new techniques and and by that rejuvenate their skills people do that but since i was always about ideas uh about thinking

Starting point is 01:44:17 on things that other people do not think about then the techniques were not particularly important for me and I remember when I came as a postdoc I was asked what kind of computer skills you have and I said I very minimal during my PhD I just used whatever I needed in order to solve the differential equations that I had I didn't master anything beyond that and And the person who hired me was stunned. He said, how come you didn't learn? And I should say that I had a rather productive career, even though I didn't learn much more computer skills since then even. So it's possible.

Starting point is 01:45:02 Still? Yeah, because a lot of people have the technical skills but they lack the imagination or the the ideas so you play more in the realm of concepts and ideas and how they relate than you do with the mathematical pedantry yeah so it's sort of like you know sketching a blueprint of a building rather than building it. So then who does the mathematical work? You just give it to a graduate student? Yeah, students, postdocs,

Starting point is 01:45:31 a lot of people that I collaborate with. And with regard to learning new techniques and constantly staying updated, you said that some people do. But generally, let's say past the age of 30 or 40 i don't know which it's i'm asking you what time do you stop doing it and it's it's not this i know of people that are in their 50s that are learning machine learning now and you know ai and uh so i you know it really is a matter of people that enjoy the the you know the technical gymnastics and there are some people that enjoy the technical gymnastics.

Starting point is 01:46:05 And there are some people that enjoy that, and there are not many. But, I mean, there are a minority. Do you think that instead of focusing on artificial intelligence, like you mentioned, we should focus on wisdom, so artificial wisdom, so awe instead of AI. Do you think that that's something we should be focusing on? Or do you see, like, how the heck would we even start that project?

Starting point is 01:46:24 I do think that it's a very interesting idea. I haven't thought about it before. But yeah, you can think about designing a system that will be wise. More efficient, basically. Rather than go and explore all the possibilities. Brian Keating asks, our mutual friend Brian Keating. And by the way, for those listening, Brian Keating, a link to his YouTube channel will be below. He said, I'd love to know what his daily routine is. So that is you and whether you've expected and even regret the backlash to your new fame.

Starting point is 01:46:58 So daily routine and the backlash and how you feel about it. Well, since the pandemic started, it's more than a year now. Every morning at 5 a.m., I go out and jog in the company of birds, ducks, and rabbits and wild turkeys. They are very loud. I see the same wild turkeys for a year now along my path. What city are you in? I'm in a suburb near boston okay okay so it's cold oh yeah i go out in any weather whether it snows whether it rains uh whether it's freezing i you know i it's just an aspect of nature that i enjoy i enjoy going i enjoy very much being in the

Starting point is 01:47:42 company of nature rather than and i don't regard people or my colleagues in particular as part of nature because nature is always gracious. You know, you always learn something. I always enjoy nature. I grew up on a farm. So my day starts at 5 a.m. And I should say over the months of January, February, and half of March, I would have back-to-back interviews from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. There were about 450 of them all together. It was a huge, huge

Starting point is 01:48:16 exhausting marathon that I had to be engaged in just because of the interest in my book. But that's very untypical because by now it sort of is fading away. I mean, the book is already out for two months now. And by now I'm getting back to my regular routine, which is writing papers and commentaries. So I should say the past 12 months were the most productive in my scientific career because I didn't have to drive to work. I didn't have people getting into my office uninvited. I didn't have the administrative distractions that they usually have. And so I could focus on creative work.

Starting point is 01:49:11 work. And I wrote of the order of 46 scientific papers and 52 commentaries, mostly in Scientific American, and then a couple of books. One of them is the one that was published two months ago, and there is another one, a textbook coming out at the end of June about life in the cosmos. So it has been a very productive time. And frankly, I can continue like that for the next few years without a problem. There is always something interesting to work on. And I enjoy the creative work. I used to do leadership positions just as a service to the community,

Starting point is 01:49:42 because at some point I realized that other people are not doing their job properly when they are leading a department or doing something else, chairing a committee. So I thought, you know, I should do it just to make sure that things are done according to the proper guiding principles. What were they doing? And what did you do that corrected it? Many times they would state the, you know, the right ideas, times they would state that you know the right ideas but they would not really accomplish them in practice and that was a puzzle to me because i could always see what needs to be done you know in order am i giving a specific example no because that that was of that will offend some people okay you can be vague sorry give an example you can just change it because i don't understand what you mean by what i mean is, you know, like, for example, when I became department chair in 2011, I continued three terms.

Starting point is 01:50:32 That was the longest service in the history of the department. I was the longest serving department chair. And then one thing from the beginning was that I was always straightforward with people. I would tell them the situation as is, right? I never manipulate people. I never hide things from them. And you might think that that's a negative politically, because very often in politics, you have to maneuver in a way that would,

Starting point is 01:50:57 people would not know exactly what is going on. But I found it to be, I didn't care so much because I said, you know, if I give up on my service, I would go back to research and I'll be happy at that. I'm doing the service, you know, just in order to serve the community. And so I was straightforward and it turned out to be a great asset because people never suspected me doing things behind their back and they always trusted my dealings with things and and then I I put an important item to promote the minorities and women in the department and you know I hired in that direction and there was not much resistance from my colleagues to that and so I you know I felt that I did accomplish something in nine years.

Starting point is 01:51:48 So, you know, transparency, allowing people from underprivileged circumstances to have the proper training so that they can become leaders. You know, these are the kinds of principles that I felt strongly about, and I tried to promote and that previously i didn't feel were promoted enough uh but now you know that i finished my third term and just um you know in july 2020 um then i can go back to doing creative work and that's what i enjoy the most. You wrote this book while you were the chair? The book was yes that's right. You were a productive man. Well I'm a no-nonsense kind of person in the sense that you know when I have a I work on it. And I work most of the day. How do you balance that with spending time with your wife?

Starting point is 01:52:50 And I'm not sure if you have kids, but whatever, your personal life. I have two daughters. Yeah, I mean, I do spend time with them, but one of them is 15. The other one is 19. And they are sort of independent by now, the two daughters. I'm surrounded by three wonderful women that were the muses for my book. And they support me in a lot of different ways, provide the right balance for my life. So I'm sort of at this point in my life, I'm self-sustained and can do creative work you know that's the the best you can

Starting point is 01:53:26 hope for that you don't depend on other people that have agendas that are not necessarily aligned with your principles so that that's a good place to be in and I'm very happy to be in that place when you were doing podcasts for 11 hours a day back a couple months ago including now even why do you say that you had to do it your publisher pushed you to do it or you want no no i felt that it's a platform that allows me to communicate what i believe in to the public uh had nothing to do some people argue that maybe i'm doing it to sell my book i told my my publicist that it's not for that purpose that i'm doing it to convey a book. I told my publicist that it's not for that purpose

Starting point is 01:54:05 that I'm doing it to convey a message. The publicist was saying, good job, Avi. And I said, I'm not trying to sell my book. So when the book became a bestseller, that was not my objective at all. I wouldn't care less if it sold just a few hundred copies and that's it. And what I would like to communicate

Starting point is 01:54:23 is a message to the public and i communicate through my book and through these appearances and and it got them huge attention from from the public i should say you know like there was a vice video that received the one and a half million views within a week and a half. And, you know, there was, of course, the interviews with Joe Rogan and some other people got a huge amount of attention. So in that sense, I did bring my message to the public. And that's what I wanted. And now I can move on and write additional books.

Starting point is 01:55:10 Do the views make you feel happy? Do you feel giddy? Do you share the news with your wife? Like, look, this got a million views. Or do you read the comments? How do you view your own appearances? I let the publicist look into that. And there were, of course, other opportunities that were opened up

Starting point is 01:55:27 that involve documentaries or films. There were, of order, 25 filmmakers and producers that approached us as a result of this. But we shall see if anything comes out. Congratulations. That's not easy. As a filmmaker, I know that that's not something to be sneezed at. So 20 years ago, 2001, you were married,

Starting point is 01:55:56 and your wife said, don't go on social media. How the heck does she know about social media in 2001? Yeah, because, well, back then um there were some versions of it and um uh my space i'm assuming yeah yeah my space i i forgot but you know i usually i do not deviate if i agree to something and i maintain the course and when facebook appeared and Twitter and so forth I kept my promise to her and in red was how attractive you were and how much girls will be messaging you wasn't about keeping you that that's an interesting insight I wouldn't yeah perhaps she was thinking about that yeah I don't know exactly why but then I'm

Starting point is 01:56:42 grateful worked out it worked it worked out in the sense that it kept me honest and independent of others. Okay, Barfiman again. His name is also Ryan Collins. He said, can you ask him about virtual black holes and spin network evolution? How might a superposition of spin network evolutions, brackets, spin foams fluctuate? network evolutions, brackets, spin foams, fluctuate? Well, so again, the structure of space and time is a matter of the unified theory of quantum gravity, which we don't have at the moment.

Starting point is 01:57:20 So John Wheeler was a physicist who thought about the space-time foam as the way that space and time appear on very tiny scales. That's not the way that string theory thinks of it right now. And there are all these extra dimensions. So I would say the verdict is still out as to what's going on with space and time. And let's just keep an open mind jeff b says number one have they confirmed yet if blc1 narrowband radio signal detected in

Starting point is 01:57:55 december 2020 by the parks radio telescope hopefully you know about this came from proxima centauri or was it just earth-based local interference? That's an excellent question. And most likely it's earth-based. The reason I say that is because the frequency was very steady, didn't really drift much. And it was a very narrow band of frequencies that was detected. And if it came, if it were to come from a habitable planet around Proxima Centauri, then you would see some drift in the frequency because of the motion of that planet well beyond the limits.

Starting point is 01:58:36 But of course, it could have come from a planet not in the habitable zone. Based on the fact that it was one telescope telescope in australia i think we should be very suspicious because the same telescope reported the fast radio burst repeating fast radio burst a few years ago that ended up being the uh they found that it comes only during lunchtime and uh then realized that it's's the door of a microwave oven that was opened prematurely by a person in the hotel. So I would say there is a high likelihood

Starting point is 01:59:14 that it's local. And the only way to find out is to have another observatory at a different location finding the same source. So we really need the confirmation before we assume that it is associated with Proxima Centauri Rabbit Skywalker says I really would like to hear his opinion about the claims from former Israeli director of the space program

Starting point is 01:59:37 Ham Asher brought forward you must have heard about it He must have heard about it referring to you And I wonder what Avi thinks about the story. Yeah, so my reply to that is he didn't really provide any evidence. And that goes back to what we discussed before, that if you don't have a document supporting your claim or some other type of evidence, then to me it sounds like no journalist should cover that story because otherwise you create a lot of noise in the system without much signal.

Starting point is 02:00:12 About there being evidence, there's someone named Kevin Knuth. I don't know if you've heard of him. He's a physicist from Albany. You've heard of him? Yes, definitely. Okay, well, I'm speaking to him in a few hours just for the people listening too. I'm speaking to him in a few hours. He says that he's analyzed some of the data of the UFOs, or UAPs, I believe they're called now, and he has showed that, through analysis, the amount of acceleration is incomparable to anything that we can produce, and it's, well, I guess you can take that as evidence. What do you think about that? Have you seen that paper of his so anything to do with

Starting point is 02:00:46 unidentified flying objects or aerial phenomena my take on those is simple that we should deploy state-of-the-art instruments cameras or audio sensors in the same locations and try to collect data just like a a scientific experiment, rather than rely on instruments that were not optimized for that purpose that pilots have access to or rely on reports that came from many years ago that we cannot really check. And so I think that all the UFO and UAP supporters

Starting point is 02:01:22 should fund a scientific mission experiment to monitor the earth yeah monitor those locations if you think that they are and basically if we see anything unusual it will be documented in a scientifically credible way rather than rely on those unoptimized reports that you know the, the images are always fuzzy. It could be something in the instrument. It could be something else in the sky that is an optical illusion. Could be many things. So I would highly recommend doing a scientific, credible scientific experiment. You know, it shouldn't be too expensive and it would save us a lot of time instead of discussing it. Let's just let, we should let the evidence dictate. Yes, of course.

Starting point is 02:02:09 Of course. I know you got to go. How do you, but how can we do that? Because I imagine that the UFOs are so small and they're so sporadic that to monitor the entire earth is not cheap. So how can conceivably that be done? You don't need the entire earth. You can just do it in the spots where detections were reported. Nowadays, we have technologies that didn't exist decades ago.

Starting point is 02:02:31 It should not be too expensive. I'm sure that at the level of tens of millions of dollars, one can do a state-of-the-art experiment to check if there is anything unusual. If we don't see anything unusual, experiment to check if there is anything unusual. If we don't see anything unusual, then it must mean that these were artifacts of the instruments or some illusions. Amjad Hussain had a couple questions that I wasn't able to get to during the interview, but I emailed Avi directly. And here's the exchange. Professor Avi, are there aliens on Earth living, sharing the planet with us in a non-electromagnetic

Starting point is 02:03:05 realm, dimension, consciousness like dark matter, energy, where we don't know their existence? And then he had another question, number two, do fundamental particles in nature have proto-consciousness, meaning that an electron feels its own intrinsic state of charge, spin, etc. Does consciousness equal existence? Avi replied saying the answers to both questions are no, as far as we know scientifically. Avi, you gotta go. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. It was a pleasure talking to you. It was a pleasure to answer all these questions. And they were

Starting point is 02:03:40 they were excellent, excellent questions, all of them them I enjoyed it very much

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Avi Loeb on Aliens, Bob Lazar, Wormholes, Consciousness, SpaceX, and Many Worlds

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