Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Brian Keating,

00:00:02.520 | experimental physicist at USSD

00:00:05.160 | and author of "Losing the Nobel Prize"

00:00:07.760 | and "Into the Impossible."

00:00:10.280 | Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast

00:00:12.680 | of the same name called "Into the Impossible."

00:00:16.880 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:18.880 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:21.020 | in the description.

00:00:22.160 | And now, here's my conversation with Brian Keating.

00:00:25.980 | As an experimental physicist,

00:00:29.560 | what do you think is the most amazing

00:00:31.360 | or maybe the coolest measurement device

00:00:34.680 | you've ever worked with or humans have ever built?

00:00:37.880 | Maybe for now, let's exclude the background imaging

00:00:41.560 | of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.

00:00:45.240 | - Yeah, I'm slightly biased

00:00:46.320 | towards that particular instrument.

00:00:47.800 | - We'll talk about that in a little bit.

00:00:49.080 | - Yeah, but certainly the telescope to me

00:00:51.600 | is a lever that has literally moved the earth

00:00:55.800 | throughout history.

00:00:56.640 | - So the OG telescope?

00:00:58.000 | - The OG telescope, yeah.

00:00:59.040 | The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think,

00:01:02.040 | but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.

00:01:05.880 | And it was kind of interesting

00:01:07.680 | because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s,

00:01:12.400 | it was the beginning of movable type.

00:01:14.380 | And so people for the first time in history

00:01:17.400 | had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.

00:01:21.020 | So looking at a printed word now,

00:01:22.480 | we just take it for granted, 12-point font, whatever,

00:01:24.920 | and that's what the eye charts are based on.

00:01:26.400 | They're just fixed height.

00:01:27.240 | But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight

00:01:30.240 | if you didn't have perfect vision.

00:01:33.300 | And there was no way to even tell

00:01:34.320 | if you had perfect vision or not

00:01:35.400 | until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type.

00:01:39.000 | And at that time, people realized,

00:01:40.240 | "Hey, wait, I can't read this.

00:01:41.600 | "My priest or my friend over here,

00:01:43.220 | "he can read it, she can read it.

00:01:44.600 | "I can't read it.

00:01:45.440 | "What's going on?"

00:01:46.440 | And that's when these people in Venice

00:01:49.240 | and in the Netherlands saw that they could take

00:01:51.500 | this kind of glass material and hold it up

00:01:54.080 | and maybe put another piece of glass material

00:01:55.880 | and it would make it clearer.

00:01:57.520 | And what was so interesting is that nobody thought

00:01:59.520 | to take that exact same device, two lenses,

00:02:02.600 | and go like, "Hmm, let me go like this

00:02:04.560 | "and look at that bright thing in the sky over there,"

00:02:07.160 | until Galileo.

00:02:08.400 | So Galileo didn't invent it,

00:02:10.160 | but he did something kind of amazing.

00:02:12.440 | He improved on it by a factor of 10.

00:02:14.760 | So he 10X'd it, which is almost as good

00:02:17.000 | as going from zero to one as going from one to 10.

00:02:20.280 | And when he did that, he really transformed

00:02:24.860 | both how we look at the universe and think about it,

00:02:28.480 | but also who we are as a species,

00:02:30.600 | because we're using tools not to get food faster

00:02:34.240 | or to preserve our legacy for future generations,

00:02:39.240 | but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.

00:02:43.720 | - Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able

00:02:47.000 | to see the star, maybe there was some kind of makeup

00:02:51.240 | of the atmosphere which, for the early humans,

00:02:53.880 | made it impossible to see the stars,

00:02:55.740 | that we would never develop human civilization,

00:02:57.820 | or at least raising the question of how important is it

00:03:00.400 | to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there,

00:03:03.820 | as opposed to, maybe this is an over-romanticized notion,

00:03:07.980 | but looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit

00:03:10.680 | too much focused on survival,

00:03:12.760 | not being eaten by a bear/lion.

00:03:15.380 | If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder,

00:03:17.300 | "What is my place in the universe?"

00:03:18.660 | You think that's modern humans romanticizing?

00:03:21.500 | - I think it's a little romantic,

00:03:22.840 | because they also took the same--

00:03:24.080 | - That's right.

00:03:24.920 | (laughing)

00:03:25.760 | - They took the same two lenses and they looked inward.

00:03:28.040 | They looked at bacteria, they looked at mares,

00:03:30.280 | and in other words, they made the microscope,

00:03:32.280 | and we're still doing that.

00:03:33.680 | And so, to have a telescope serves a dual purpose.

00:03:37.480 | It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in,

00:03:41.840 | but it's also looking back in time.

00:03:43.440 | In other words, if you can see a microscope,

00:03:44.660 | you don't think, "Oh, I'm seeing this thing

00:03:45.960 | "as it was one nanosecond ago."

00:03:47.760 | Light travels one foot per nanosecond.

00:03:49.900 | "I'm seeing it in a--"

00:03:50.840 | No, you don't think about it like that,

00:03:51.840 | but when you see something that's happening

00:03:53.680 | on Jupiter, the moon, Andromeda galaxy,

00:03:55.960 | you're seeing things back when Lucy

00:03:57.640 | was walking around the Serengeti Plains.

00:04:00.040 | And for that, I think that took then

00:04:02.760 | the knowledge of relativity and time travel and so forth,

00:04:06.840 | it took that before we could really say,

00:04:08.740 | "Oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes

00:04:11.320 | "in the human brain."

00:04:12.200 | So I think that might be a little too much,

00:04:14.100 | but nevertheless, I mean,

00:04:15.800 | what's better than having a time machine?

00:04:18.160 | We can look back in time, we see things as they were,

00:04:20.360 | not as they are, and that allows us to do many things,

00:04:23.160 | including speculate about that.

00:04:24.640 | But one of the coolest things,

00:04:25.720 | I don't know if you're familiar with,

00:04:26.560 | so I'm a radio astronomer.

00:04:27.920 | I don't actually look through telescopes very often,

00:04:30.280 | except on rare occasions when I take one out

00:04:33.940 | to show the kids.

00:04:35.040 | But a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral.

00:04:39.760 | I mean, it's much less cool 'cause you look at it,

00:04:41.200 | you're like, "All right, it looks cool.

00:04:42.120 | "It's got a weird-shaped thing.

00:04:43.640 | "It looks like it belongs in sci-fi.

00:04:44.920 | "It's gonna blast the Death Star," or whatever.

00:04:48.080 | But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope

00:04:52.040 | at a distant object,

00:04:53.540 | if that object fills up what's called the beam,

00:04:55.920 | which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope,

00:04:59.380 | it's called its beam.

00:05:00.520 | If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor,

00:05:03.560 | just a simple absorbing piece of material,

00:05:05.760 | at the focus of the radio telescope,

00:05:07.720 | that resistor will come to the exact same temperature

00:05:11.160 | as the object it's looking at, which is pretty amazing.

00:05:13.920 | It means you're actually remotely measuring,

00:05:16.120 | you're taking the temperature of Jupiter

00:05:17.920 | or whatever in effect.

00:05:20.120 | And so it's allowing you to basically teleport.

00:05:23.600 | And there's no other science

00:05:24.840 | that you can really do that, right?

00:05:26.000 | If you're an archeologist, you can't.

00:05:27.320 | Let me get into my time machine and go back and see,

00:05:30.600 | what was Lucy really like?

00:05:32.240 | It's not possible.

00:05:33.080 | - So the same thing happens,

00:05:34.820 | this is where I learned about this,

00:05:36.220 | from March of the Penguins,

00:05:37.320 | when the penguins huddle together,

00:05:38.980 | the body temperature arrives at the same place.

00:05:43.240 | So you're doing this remotely.

00:05:44.840 | This is the March of the Penguins, but remote.

00:05:46.880 | - We do it from Antarctica too,

00:05:48.160 | so there are some penguins around when we do it.

00:05:50.480 | - Okay, excellent.

00:05:51.480 | You mentioned time machine.

00:05:53.520 | I think in your book, "Losing the Nobel Prize,"

00:05:57.080 | you talk about time machines.

00:05:59.700 | So let me ask you the question of,

00:06:01.400 | take us back in time.

00:06:04.520 | What happened at the beginning of our universe?

00:06:07.520 | - Ah, okay.

00:06:08.660 | Usually people preface this by saying,

00:06:10.160 | I have a simple question.

00:06:11.360 | What happened before the universe began?

00:06:15.200 | - Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.

00:06:17.520 | I have a simple question for you, let's take two.

00:06:21.000 | I have a simple question.

00:06:22.080 | What happened at the beginning of our universe?

00:06:23.840 | There you go.

00:06:24.680 | - All right, good.

00:06:25.500 | So when we think about what happened,

00:06:28.160 | it's more correct, it's more logical,

00:06:30.540 | it's more practical to go back in time,

00:06:33.480 | starting from today.

00:06:34.640 | So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today,

00:06:39.640 | that's some day, right?

00:06:41.640 | I mean, you could translate it into some day, right?

00:06:43.360 | So on that day, something happened earlier

00:06:46.080 | than the moment exactly now,

00:06:49.120 | let's say we're talking around one o'clock.

00:06:52.160 | So at some point during that day,

00:06:54.480 | the universe started to become a fusion reactor.

00:06:57.200 | It started to fuse light elements and isotopes

00:07:00.120 | into heavier elements and isotopes

00:07:01.680 | of those heavier elements.

00:07:03.520 | After that period of time,

00:07:05.080 | going forward back closer to today,

00:07:06.600 | less 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier,

00:07:09.640 | or later rather, coming towards us today,

00:07:11.940 | we know more and more about what the universe was like.

00:07:14.400 | And in fact, all the hydrogen,

00:07:16.520 | to very good approximation,

00:07:17.920 | in the water molecules in this bottle,

00:07:20.160 | almost all of them were produced

00:07:21.400 | during that first 20 minute period.

00:07:23.660 | So I would say, the actual fusion and production

00:07:27.800 | of the lightest elements on the periodic table

00:07:30.560 | occurred in a time period shorter

00:07:32.360 | than the TV show, "The Big Bang Theory."

00:07:34.360 | - Well done, sir.

00:07:35.200 | (laughing)

00:07:36.920 | - Most of those light elements, besides hydrogen,

00:07:39.160 | aren't really used in your encounter, right?

00:07:41.640 | We don't encounter helium that often,

00:07:43.700 | unless you go to a lot of birthday parties,

00:07:45.340 | or pilot a blimp.

00:07:47.160 | You don't need lithium, hopefully.

00:07:49.400 | But other than that, those are the kind of things

00:07:51.080 | that were produced during that moment.

00:07:52.320 | The question became, how did the heavier things,

00:07:54.300 | like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.

00:07:56.800 | And I brought some samples for us to discuss,

00:07:59.760 | and how those came from a very different type of process,

00:08:02.260 | called a different type of fusion reactor,

00:08:04.640 | and a different type of process explosion as well,

00:08:07.160 | called a supernova.

00:08:08.560 | However, if you go back to the,

00:08:10.060 | beyond those first three minutes,

00:08:11.540 | we really have to say almost nothing,

00:08:13.920 | because we are not capable, in other words,

00:08:16.280 | going backwards from the first three minutes,

00:08:18.860 | as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book,

00:08:21.880 | we actually, marks a point where ignorance takes over.

00:08:25.200 | In other words, we can't speculate on what happened

00:08:28.320 | three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen

00:08:30.960 | was formed in our universe.

00:08:32.400 | We just don't know enough about that epoch.

00:08:34.760 | There are many people, most people,

00:08:36.320 | most practicing card-carrying cosmologists,

00:08:38.840 | believe the universe began in what's called a singularity.

00:08:41.520 | And we can certainly talk about that.

00:08:44.400 | However, singularity is so far removed

00:08:46.440 | from anything we can ever hope to prove,

00:08:49.120 | hope to confront, or hope to observe as evidence,

00:08:51.920 | and really only occurs in two instantiations,

00:08:54.900 | the Big Bang and the core of a black hole,

00:08:56.960 | neither of which is observable.

00:08:58.600 | And so for that reason,

00:09:00.120 | there are now flourishing alternatives that say,

00:09:02.860 | you can actually, for the first time, ask the question,

00:09:05.240 | that day, Tuesday, in the first moments of our universe,

00:09:10.840 | there was a Tuesday a week before that,

00:09:13.320 | 24 hours times seven days before that.

00:09:15.520 | That has a perfectly well-understood meaning

00:09:19.880 | in models of cosmology,

00:09:22.120 | promoted by some of the more eminent

00:09:24.120 | of cosmologists working today.

00:09:25.960 | When I was in grad school over 25 years ago,

00:09:28.600 | no one really considered anything besides that Big Bang,

00:09:31.120 | that there was a singularity,

00:09:32.960 | and people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know.

00:09:36.840 | But they would say, some future incarnation

00:09:39.260 | of some experiment will tell us the answer.

00:09:41.280 | But now there are people that are saying,

00:09:43.360 | there is an alternative to the Big Bang.

00:09:45.820 | And it's not really fringe science as it once was,

00:09:48.920 | 50, 80 years ago, when these models,

00:09:51.360 | by the way, the first cosmology in history

00:09:54.200 | was not a singular universe.

00:09:56.200 | The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra

00:09:59.760 | and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.

00:10:04.200 | And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.

00:10:06.680 | So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten's court,

00:10:09.660 | he'd have a pretty high H index right about now,

00:10:12.060 | because people have been using that cyclical model

00:10:14.820 | from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis,

00:10:18.220 | and right up until this very moment.

00:10:21.340 | - Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives

00:10:25.580 | to the Big Bang theory?

00:10:27.860 | - So there are many alternatives, starting with,

00:10:30.340 | so the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding

00:10:34.100 | singular origin of the universe,

00:10:36.340 | that stands in contrast to these other models,

00:10:39.260 | in which time does not have a beginning.

00:10:41.260 | And many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle,

00:10:45.540 | possibly infinite number of cycles,

00:10:47.980 | called by Sir Roger Penrose.

00:10:49.260 | And they all have things in common, these alternatives,

00:10:52.280 | as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis,

00:10:55.440 | which is inflation.

00:10:56.580 | Inflation is sort of, can be thought of as this spark

00:11:00.500 | that ignites the hot Big Bang that I said we understood.

00:11:03.380 | So it's an earlier condition,

00:11:05.000 | but it's still not an initial condition.

00:11:06.940 | In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock

00:11:10.060 | or a pendulum swinging back and forth.

00:11:11.840 | You look away for a second, you come into the room,

00:11:14.780 | pendulum swinging back and forth.

00:11:15.820 | Alex, tell me, where did it start?

00:11:17.820 | How many cycles is it gonna make before the,

00:11:19.960 | you can't answer that question

00:11:21.180 | without knowing the initial conditions.

00:11:23.140 | In a very simple system, like a one dimensional

00:11:25.460 | simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum.

00:11:27.620 | Think about understanding the whole universe

00:11:29.580 | without understanding the initial conditions.

00:11:31.740 | It's a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists,

00:11:35.280 | that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology,

00:11:39.640 | determine the quantitative physical properties

00:11:42.400 | of the universe prior to what's called

00:11:44.120 | the inflationary epoch.

00:11:45.480 | - So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch, we can't.

00:11:48.600 | 'Cause you can infer things about the pendulum

00:11:51.320 | before you show up to the room in our current epoch, correct?

00:11:54.960 | - Right, yeah, so if you look at it right now,

00:11:57.040 | but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?

00:11:58.920 | So that depends on how much energy it got initially,

00:12:01.320 | and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance,

00:12:03.400 | you had infrared camera,

00:12:04.240 | you could see it's getting hotter maybe,

00:12:05.800 | and you could do some calculations.

00:12:07.480 | But to know the two things in physics

00:12:09.560 | to solve a partial differential equation

00:12:11.200 | are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.

00:12:13.300 | Boundary conditions, we're here on Earth,

00:12:14.400 | it has a gravitational field, it's not gonna excurs,

00:12:16.680 | or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.

00:12:19.680 | It's not, it has simple properties.

00:12:22.700 | But this is like, in other words, you can't tell me,

00:12:27.040 | when did the solar system start orbiting

00:12:29.080 | in the way that it does now?

00:12:30.360 | In other words, when did the moon acquire

00:12:31.800 | the exact angular momentum that it has now?

00:12:33.980 | Now, that's a pretty pedestrian example,

00:12:36.760 | but what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch

00:12:40.440 | purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations

00:12:45.120 | for how the universe evolved

00:12:46.620 | after inflation took place and ended,

00:12:48.960 | but it says nothing about how it itself took place.

00:12:52.480 | And that's really what you're asking me.

00:12:54.120 | I mean, you don't, look, you care about

00:12:56.600 | like big bang nucleosynthesis, and the elements got made,

00:12:59.240 | and these fusion reactors,

00:13:00.520 | and the whole universe was a fusion reactor,

00:13:02.440 | but like, don't you really care about what happened

00:13:05.120 | at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?

00:13:08.800 | And the problem is we can't really answer that

00:13:11.560 | in the context of the big bang.

00:13:13.360 | We can't answer that in the context of these alternatives.

00:13:16.120 | So you asked me about some of the alternatives.

00:13:17.360 | So one is Aeon theory,

00:13:18.480 | the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose.

00:13:21.440 | Another one that's, it was really popular

00:13:24.280 | in the '60s and '70s, until the discovery

00:13:26.740 | of the primary component of my research field,

00:13:29.360 | the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB,

00:13:31.680 | the three Kelvin all-pervasive signal

00:13:33.520 | that astronomers detected in 1965.

00:13:36.720 | That kind of spelled the death knell in some sense

00:13:39.580 | to what was called the quasi-steady state universe.

00:13:42.520 | And then there was another model

00:13:47.980 | that kind of came out of that.

00:13:49.580 | You hear the word quasi, so it's not steady state.

00:13:52.080 | Steady state means always existed.

00:13:53.560 | That was a cosmology Einstein believed

00:13:55.400 | until Hubble showed him evidence

00:13:57.280 | for the expansion of the universe.

00:13:59.320 | And most scientists believed in that for millennia,

00:14:02.320 | basically, the universe was eternal, static, unchanging.

00:14:05.920 | They couldn't believe that after Hubble,

00:14:07.380 | so they had to append onto it,

00:14:09.840 | concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady,

00:14:13.240 | it was quasi-steady.

00:14:14.720 | So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen

00:14:17.200 | every century in a given volume of space.

00:14:20.040 | And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant,

00:14:23.160 | but because it was producing more and more every century,

00:14:25.320 | as centuries pile up and the volume piles up,

00:14:27.320 | the universe could expand.

00:14:28.640 | And so that's how they developed it.

00:14:30.040 | - But slowly. - Very slowly.

00:14:31.440 | And it doesn't match observational evidence,

00:14:33.680 | but that is an alternative.

00:14:35.400 | - By the way, did Einstein think

00:14:36.480 | the steady state universe is infinite or finite?

00:14:39.640 | Do you know?

00:14:40.480 | - I would assume that he thought it was infinite

00:14:43.680 | because there was really,

00:14:45.560 | if something had a no beginning in time,

00:14:48.520 | then it would be very unlikely we're in the center of it

00:14:50.960 | or it's bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.

00:14:54.320 | - I wonder what he thought about infinity,

00:14:56.360 | 'cause that's such an uncomfortable--

00:14:57.600 | - I guess it's a silly joke.

00:14:58.840 | I'm sure you're familiar with that silly joke, right?

00:15:01.040 | The silly joke was that there are only two things

00:15:03.240 | that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,

00:15:06.940 | and I'm not sure about the universe.

00:15:08.880 | - Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke

00:15:11.240 | is a good example of the joke.

00:15:13.120 | It's very meta.

00:15:14.400 | Okay, so, all right, so sorry,

00:15:16.880 | you were saying about quasi--

00:15:18.160 | - All the alternatives.

00:15:19.000 | - All the alternatives in the quasi-steady state.

00:15:20.920 | - And the most kind of promising,

00:15:22.800 | although I hate to say that,

00:15:24.320 | people say, "What's your favorite alternative?"

00:15:27.080 | - This is not investment advice.

00:15:29.480 | - Inflation is not transitory, it is quasi-permanent.

00:15:33.480 | So a very prominent--

00:15:35.760 | - Sorry to interrupt, we're talking about cosmic inflation,

00:15:38.180 | so calm down cryptocurrency folks.

00:15:40.280 | - That's right, although the first Nobel Prize,

00:15:43.080 | and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics

00:15:45.160 | was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.

00:15:48.360 | So most people don't know that.

00:15:49.200 | Inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.

00:15:50.520 | - It's a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.

00:15:53.320 | Doesn't matter the field.

00:15:55.080 | - Exactly, it's time translation invariant.

00:15:57.320 | So when we look at the alternative

00:15:59.880 | that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,

00:16:03.080 | these have serious virtues according to some.

00:16:07.080 | One of the virtues to me, just as a human,

00:16:10.040 | I'm just speaking as a human,

00:16:11.960 | one of the founders of the new version

00:16:15.640 | of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology

00:16:20.640 | is Paul Steinhardt.

00:16:22.520 | He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences

00:16:24.720 | at Princeton University, you may have heard of it.

00:16:27.000 | And he was one of the originators

00:16:29.520 | of what was called new inflation.

00:16:32.240 | In other words, he was one of the founding fathers

00:16:34.360 | of inflation, who now not only has no belief

00:16:38.520 | or support for inflation, he actively claims

00:16:41.160 | that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous,

00:16:46.080 | malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology,

00:16:49.680 | but to society.

00:16:50.960 | So here's a man who created a theory

00:16:53.440 | that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists

00:16:56.320 | such as it is, it's not a huge universe,

00:16:58.040 | but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.

00:17:00.960 | Some do both, but this man created this theory

00:17:05.160 | with collaborators, and now he's, I joke,

00:17:08.200 | I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity.

00:17:10.640 | You're like a deadbeat dad.

00:17:12.080 | Now you're saying like inflation is bogus.

00:17:14.760 | But he doesn't just attack.

00:17:17.400 | See, this is what's very important

00:17:18.680 | about approaching things as an experimentalist.

00:17:21.560 | You've got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful,

00:17:23.560 | and I think that's a huge service.

00:17:25.200 | An experimentalist has to say no.

00:17:27.800 | He or she has to be confident to say like,

00:17:30.440 | I don't care if I prove you right

00:17:32.840 | or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.

00:17:35.320 | We have to be like exterminators,

00:17:37.120 | and nobody likes the exterminator until they need one,

00:17:39.320 | right, or the garbage collectors, right?

00:17:41.440 | But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded

00:17:45.840 | by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry

00:17:48.880 | and the simplicity of some idea.

00:17:50.160 | Like inflation is a beautiful idea,

00:17:52.520 | but it also has consequences, and what Paul claims,

00:17:55.040 | I don't agree with him fully on this point,

00:17:57.360 | is that those consequences are dangerous

00:17:59.240 | because they lead to things like the multiverse,

00:18:01.480 | which is outside the purview of science.

00:18:03.800 | And in that sense, I can see support for what he does,

00:18:07.280 | but none of that detracts from my respect

00:18:09.120 | for a man, you know, imagine like, you know,

00:18:12.280 | Elon comes up with this like really great idea,

00:18:14.960 | you know, space, and then he's like,

00:18:16.040 | oh, actually, it's not gonna work,

00:18:18.080 | and you know, but like, here's this better idea,

00:18:19.920 | and he's like, SpaceX is not gonna work,

00:18:21.600 | but he's now created an alternative to it.

00:18:23.840 | It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done.

00:18:26.480 | Doesn't mean he's right, doesn't mean I'm gonna like,

00:18:29.000 | have more and more attention paid to it

00:18:31.560 | because he's my friend or because I respect the idea

00:18:33.880 | or I respect the man and his colleague,

00:18:36.480 | and he just works really hard with him.

00:18:39.000 | But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.

00:18:42.040 | And what it does most foremost is that it removes

00:18:46.160 | the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.

00:18:49.760 | So it takes away 50% of the motivation

00:18:52.660 | for a theory of quantum gravity.

00:18:54.840 | You talked a lot about quantum gravity.

00:18:57.120 | You talked to people, eminent people on the show.

00:18:59.400 | Always latent in those conversations

00:19:01.440 | is sort of the teleological expectation

00:19:04.140 | that there is a theory of everything,

00:19:06.640 | there is a theory of quantum gravity,

00:19:08.760 | but there's no law that says we have to have

00:19:11.160 | a theory of quantum gravity.

00:19:12.800 | - So that kind of implicit expectation

00:19:16.280 | has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory,

00:19:19.480 | so in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?

00:19:23.360 | So okay, maybe you can speak to what is

00:19:26.840 | the negative impacts on society

00:19:29.600 | from believing in cosmic inflation?

00:19:33.440 | - So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,

00:19:37.720 | according to its other two patriarchs,

00:19:40.200 | considered to be its patriarchs,

00:19:41.200 | Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford,

00:19:44.560 | although he was in the USSR when he came up

00:19:46.480 | with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt,

00:19:49.680 | was that the universe has to eventually

00:19:52.880 | get into a quantum state.

00:19:55.640 | It has to exist in this Hilbert space,

00:19:57.480 | and the Hilbert space has certain features,

00:19:59.280 | and those features are quantum mechanical,

00:20:00.760 | endowed with quantum mechanical properties.

00:20:03.200 | And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.

00:20:07.340 | So inflation can get started,

00:20:09.080 | but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets.

00:20:11.920 | It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?

00:20:14.360 | It continues the thrusting, and you need another mechanism

00:20:17.740 | to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion,

00:20:21.200 | which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere,

00:20:24.160 | it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times,

00:20:27.600 | including now, spawning an ever-increasing

00:20:30.920 | set of universes.

00:20:32.400 | Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish,

00:20:35.840 | and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.

00:20:38.740 | It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence,

00:20:40.940 | not only of inflationary cosmology,

00:20:43.420 | but more and more we're seeing it in string theory as well.

00:20:45.460 | So sometimes two branches coming to the same conclusion

00:20:49.500 | is taken as evidence for its reality.

00:20:52.220 | - So one of the negative consequences

00:20:54.140 | is it creates phenomena that we can't,

00:20:57.500 | that are outside the reach of experimental science?

00:21:01.300 | - Yeah.

00:21:02.140 | - Or is it that the multiverse somehow

00:21:04.060 | has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?

00:21:07.460 | Like it makes us, maybe it makes life seem more meaningless?

00:21:12.460 | Is that where he's getting at a little bit,

00:21:15.900 | or is it not reaching that far?

00:21:18.020 | - Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive.

00:21:20.900 | The answer is a little of both,

00:21:22.940 | because in one sense it's meant kind of to explain

00:21:26.540 | this fine-tuning problem, that we find ourselves

00:21:29.200 | in a universe that's particularly façade,

00:21:31.260 | that has features consistent with our existence,

00:21:34.780 | and how could we be otherwise?

00:21:36.220 | You know, the sort of weak anthropic principle.

00:21:38.940 | On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,

00:21:42.460 | literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.

00:21:45.960 | Like if I say, "Lex, you know, you've been working out,

00:21:48.260 | you look like, you know, yeah, you're having,

00:21:50.300 | yeah, it's great.

00:21:51.140 | You look like you're about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms."

00:21:54.780 | Like, "All right, yeah, you're right,

00:21:56.460 | but that's horribly imprecise, so what good is that?

00:21:58.900 | That's meaningless.

00:21:59.740 | You don't contribute any, what's called, surprise,

00:22:01.660 | or reduction in entropy, or reduction of your ignorance

00:22:05.540 | about the system, or you know exactly how much you weigh.

00:22:08.360 | So me telling you that tells you nothing."

00:22:10.320 | In this case, it's basically saying

00:22:11.940 | that we're living in a universe

00:22:13.220 | because the overwhelming odds of our existence

00:22:16.220 | dictate that we would exist.

00:22:18.980 | There has to be at least one place that we exist.

00:22:20.700 | But the problem is, it's a manifestation of infinity.

00:22:24.140 | So humans, and I'm sure you know this

00:22:26.620 | from your work with AI and ML and everything else,

00:22:29.940 | that humans, as far as we know,

00:22:33.540 | really are the only entities capable

00:22:36.100 | of contemplating infinity,

00:22:38.320 | but we do so very imperfectly, right?

00:22:40.620 | So if I say to you, like, "What's bigger,

00:22:42.280 | the number of water molecules in this thing,

00:22:45.180 | or the number of real numbers?"

00:22:46.700 | Or if I say, "What's bigger, the number of real numbers

00:22:48.220 | or rational numbers?"

00:22:49.240 | There are all different classifications

00:22:50.740 | of the amount of infinities that there could be.

00:22:53.200 | Infinity to the infinity power.

00:22:54.580 | You know, when you have kids someday, they'll tell you,

00:22:55.780 | "I love you, infinity."

00:22:56.940 | You have to come back, "I love you, infinity, plus one."

00:22:59.140 | Right, so, but the human brain

00:23:01.220 | can't really contemplate infinity.

00:23:03.380 | Let me illustrate that.

00:23:05.160 | They say in the singularity,

00:23:06.820 | the universe had an infinite temperature, right?

00:23:10.720 | So let me ask you a question.

00:23:12.460 | Is there anything that you can contemplate in the,

00:23:15.740 | Einstein's little quip aside, that's infinite?

00:23:18.420 | Like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature,

00:23:22.420 | energy, that's infinite.

00:23:24.900 | And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it.

00:23:27.540 | But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?

00:23:30.580 | You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.

00:23:32.940 | How does it go from like to half of infinity?

00:23:34.580 | 'Cause that's still infinity.

00:23:35.700 | How did it cool down?

00:23:36.900 | How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?

00:23:39.460 | So now it's only infinity over two in terms of pascals.

00:23:42.380 | - Less infinite, more infinite.

00:23:44.600 | Yeah, I mean, it's, that's one of the biggest troubling

00:23:48.740 | things to me about infinity is,

00:23:51.660 | you can't truly hold it inside our minds.

00:23:53.780 | It's a mathematical construct that doesn't,

00:23:55.780 | it feels like intuition fails.

00:23:57.820 | But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly,

00:23:59.980 | and then use, like physicists,

00:24:02.740 | they're incredible intuition machines,

00:24:05.440 | and then they'll play with this infinity

00:24:06.980 | as if they can play with it on the level of intuition

00:24:10.340 | as opposed to on the level of math.

00:24:12.140 | You know, it may be something cyclical,

00:24:14.100 | you can imagine infinity just going around the same,

00:24:17.380 | kind of like a Mobius strip situation.

00:24:21.420 | But then the question then arises,

00:24:23.740 | how do you make it more or less infinite?

00:24:26.460 | Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.

00:24:28.900 | - And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?

00:24:31.260 | It's either some placeholder for infinity,

00:24:33.340 | or it's one divided by a very, the smallest possible,

00:24:36.420 | real number that you can represent in the memory.

00:24:39.660 | - Well, that's basically my undergraduate study

00:24:42.460 | in computer science is how to represent

00:24:44.220 | a floating point in a computer.

00:24:45.820 | I think I took 17 courses on this topic.

00:24:47.900 | It was very useful.

00:24:48.980 | - So I came to the right place.

00:24:49.940 | But in terms of what a physicist will mean,

00:24:53.540 | and you're right, I mean, physicists will blindly,

00:24:55.660 | nonchalantly subtract infinity,

00:24:57.780 | renormalization and do things to get finite answers.

00:25:01.180 | And it's miraculous.

00:25:02.980 | But at a certain point, you have to ask,

00:25:05.420 | well, what are the consequences for the real world?

00:25:07.380 | So one of them, you ask, what's the problem?

00:25:10.220 | Does it make us more meaningless?

00:25:11.740 | They purport, many of the people that support it,

00:25:14.020 | like Andre Linde.

00:25:15.220 | In fact, Andre Linde says, you have a bias,

00:25:18.060 | you, Lex, me, Brian, you have a bias

00:25:20.580 | that you believe in a universe,

00:25:22.980 | but shouldn't you believe in a multiverse?

00:25:25.940 | What evidence do you have that there's not a,

00:25:28.620 | so he turns it around.

00:25:30.060 | Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say,

00:25:31.700 | no, if anything can happen,

00:25:33.500 | then there's no predictive power within the theory.

00:25:35.920 | Because you can always say, well,

00:25:37.260 | this value of the inflationary field

00:25:39.180 | did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy

00:25:43.500 | for us to detect it with BICEP or Simon's Observatory,

00:25:45.980 | or whatever, but that doesn't mean

00:25:47.100 | that inflation didn't happen.

00:25:48.180 | And that's logically 100% correct,

00:25:50.740 | but it's like kinda chewing Wonder Bread.

00:25:54.060 | I apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but.

00:25:57.580 | (laughing)

00:25:59.140 | - Wonderbread/lex.com.

00:26:01.740 | - Type in code Kleb, right?

00:26:03.660 | Kleb, that's my favorite Russian word,

00:26:05.420 | is like, would you like a piece of Kleb?

00:26:07.540 | - By the way, even that word Kleb,

00:26:10.900 | which means bread in Russian,

00:26:12.700 | as you say it, and you're jokingly saying it now,

00:26:15.900 | it made me hungry because it made me remember

00:26:18.180 | how much I loved bread when I was in the Soviet Union.

00:26:20.700 | When you were hungry, that was the things

00:26:23.660 | you dreamed about, I don't know.

00:26:25.020 | - You know, what's amazing is how many

00:26:26.700 | of the Soviet scientists contributed

00:26:29.100 | to so much of what we understand today,

00:26:32.120 | and they were completely in hiding.

00:26:33.380 | Like, there was no Google,

00:26:34.260 | they couldn't look up on Scholar, they had nothing.

00:26:36.340 | They had to wait for journals to get approved

00:26:37.860 | by the Communist Party to get approved.

00:26:39.700 | And then, and only then, if they weren't a member

00:26:42.420 | of some, I'm sure you know, Jewish scientists,

00:26:44.980 | you had a passport that said Jew on your passport.

00:26:48.300 | And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich,

00:26:52.740 | he was the advisor, one of my advisors,

00:26:54.660 | Alexander Polnareff, and he had to,

00:26:58.180 | only because he was like at a Nobel level

00:27:00.500 | and was one of the fathers

00:27:01.740 | of the Soviet atomic bomb program,

00:27:03.700 | could he even get his Jewish student,

00:27:05.940 | he was Jewish too, but only by virtue

00:27:08.820 | of his standing of his intellectual accomplishments,

00:27:11.160 | would they give him the dispensation

00:27:12.820 | to let his student travel to Georgia or something.

00:27:15.980 | And it makes what we complain about,

00:27:17.940 | and I complain about academia,

00:27:19.500 | and it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about?

00:27:22.020 | We have no idea of how good it is,

00:27:24.160 | and that they were able to create things

00:27:25.900 | like inflation, completely isolated from the West.

00:27:28.160 | I mean, some of these people didn't meet

00:27:30.220 | people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead.

00:27:33.140 | And they just learned this thing through smuggled in,

00:27:35.860 | you know, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.

00:27:39.340 | There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard,

00:27:41.860 | probably because they were working,

00:27:43.380 | they could pass off as, well, we're doing stuff

00:27:45.500 | for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.

00:27:47.980 | - At the same time, there is interesting incentives

00:27:52.300 | in the Soviet system that maybe we can take this tangent

00:27:55.980 | for a brief moment, that because there's a dictatorship,

00:28:00.700 | authoritarian regime throughout the history

00:28:02.940 | of the 20th century for the Soviet Union,

00:28:05.660 | science was prioritized.

00:28:07.780 | And because the state prioritized it,

00:28:10.820 | through the propaganda machines, through the news,

00:28:12.500 | and so on, it actually was really cool to be a scientist.

00:28:16.140 | Like, you were highly valued in society,

00:28:17.980 | maybe that's a better way to say it.

00:28:19.820 | And I would say, you're saying, like, we have it easy now.

00:28:23.500 | In that sense, it was kind of beneficial

00:28:27.620 | to be a scientist in that society,

00:28:29.080 | because you were seen as a hero, as there's--

00:28:31.940 | - Yes, Lvovich was hero of the Soviet Republic.

00:28:34.100 | - And that, you know, there's positives to that.

00:28:37.060 | I mean, I'm not saying, I would take the negatives

00:28:40.300 | or the positives, but it is interesting to see a world

00:28:43.780 | in which science was highly prized.

00:28:46.140 | In the capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist,

00:28:49.540 | let's just say the American system,

00:28:51.580 | the celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses,

00:28:56.580 | maybe business leaders, musicians,

00:29:01.080 | and, you know, the people we elect

00:29:03.860 | are sort of lawyers and lawyers.

00:29:07.780 | (laughing)

00:29:09.340 | So it's interesting to think of a world

00:29:12.300 | where science was highly prized,

00:29:13.940 | but they had to do that science

00:29:16.820 | within the constraints of always having Big Brother watching.

00:29:21.020 | - Yeah, same in Germany.

00:29:22.260 | Germany had, you know, highly prized science.

00:29:24.020 | I mean, one of the most famous, tragic to me, cases

00:29:26.540 | is Fritz Haber, who invented the Haber-Bosch process

00:29:29.800 | that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet?

00:29:31.780 | You look, I mean, I know you fast,

00:29:33.740 | intermittent fast every day, and you do that.

00:29:36.020 | You know, I said chleb, and you got,

00:29:37.660 | it's a little drool, but--

00:29:38.820 | - He says I'm lifting and I look slim.

00:29:41.460 | This is amazing.

00:29:42.700 | I'm gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder.

00:29:44.540 | I think that's a website.

00:29:45.380 | - You gotta swipe left or right for that, I don't know.

00:29:48.420 | But when you think about, like, you know,

00:29:50.340 | what he did and created the fertilizer process

00:29:52.780 | that we all enjoy and we eat from every day,

00:29:55.460 | he was a German nationalist first and foremost,

00:29:58.820 | even though he was a Jew.

00:30:00.140 | And he personally went to witness the application

00:30:02.340 | of ammonia, chlorine gas, applied during trench warfare

00:30:05.340 | in 1916, in battles in Brussels and whatever.

00:30:08.580 | And he was, they had a whole cadre of Nobel laureates

00:30:10.900 | in chemistry and physics, you know,

00:30:12.780 | that would go and witness these atrocities.

00:30:14.460 | But that was also, they were almost putting science

00:30:17.620 | above, I don't wanna say human dignity,

00:30:19.780 | but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed.

00:30:23.620 | And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz

00:30:27.500 | because of the chemical that he invented also

00:30:30.020 | called Zyklon B.

00:30:31.540 | And so it's just unbelievable.

00:30:32.980 | So I feel like that does have resonance today

00:30:36.060 | in this worship of science, you know,

00:30:38.660 | and listen to science and follow the science,

00:30:41.300 | which is more like scientism.

00:30:42.860 | And there is still a danger.

00:30:45.140 | You know, I always say, just 'cause you're an atheist

00:30:47.940 | doesn't mean you don't have a religion.

00:30:49.660 | You know, just because you, you know,

00:30:51.340 | in my case, in my books, I talk a lot

00:30:53.740 | about the Nobel Prize.

00:30:54.700 | It's kind of like a kosher idol.

00:30:56.660 | It's something that you can worship, you know,

00:30:58.420 | it doesn't do any harm.

00:30:59.420 | And we want those people that are so significant

00:31:02.380 | in their intellectual accomplishments.

00:31:03.700 | 'Cause there is a core of America

00:31:06.060 | and the Western world in general that does worship

00:31:08.660 | and really look at science predominantly

00:31:10.540 | 'cause it gives us technology.

00:31:12.100 | But there's something really cool about that.

00:31:14.780 | And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point

00:31:17.340 | between looking to science for wisdom,

00:31:20.740 | which I don't think it has, they're two different words,

00:31:23.540 | but also recognizing how much good and transformative power,

00:31:27.020 | maybe our only hope comes from science.

00:31:28.980 | - You opened so many doors

00:31:32.660 | 'cause you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book.

00:31:37.660 | So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science

00:31:43.300 | and to the Nobel Prize that's fascinating to explore.

00:31:46.420 | And we will, and we still haven't finished the discussion

00:31:50.140 | of the beginning of the universe, which we'll return to.

00:31:54.100 | But now, since you opened the book,

00:31:56.580 | wow, pun unintended, of losing the Nobel Prize,

00:32:01.420 | can you tell me the story of BICEP,

00:32:04.420 | the Background Imaging of Cosmic

00:32:06.900 | Extragalactic Polarization Experiment,

00:32:09.180 | BICEP I and BICEP II,

00:32:11.460 | and then maybe you can talk about BICEP III.

00:32:13.180 | But the thing that you cover in your book,

00:32:16.340 | the human story of it, what happened?

00:32:18.740 | - Yeah, that book is, in contrast to the second book,

00:32:21.700 | that's like a memoir.

00:32:22.740 | It's really a description of what it's like to feel,

00:32:26.620 | what it feels like to be a scientist

00:32:28.880 | and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty,

00:32:32.220 | imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book

00:32:35.260 | in more detail, but to really feel like

00:32:38.300 | you're doing something and it's all you think about.

00:32:41.540 | It is all-consuming.

00:32:43.580 | And it's something I couldn't have done now

00:32:45.540 | 'cause I have too many other wonderful,

00:32:47.860 | delightful demands on my time.

00:32:50.100 | But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated

00:32:53.000 | by the night sky, who has a 12-year-old, 13-year-old,

00:32:56.140 | and really mixed together throughout my scientific story

00:32:59.800 | has always been wanting to approach

00:33:01.800 | the greatest mystery of all,

00:33:03.040 | which I think is the existence or non-existence of God.

00:33:06.000 | So I call myself a practicing agnostic.

00:33:08.960 | In other words, I do things that religious people do,

00:33:12.620 | and I don't do things that atheist people do.

00:33:16.120 | And I once had this conversation,

00:33:18.040 | with my first podcast guest, actually,

00:33:19.360 | I shouldn't say, oh, I was just having a conversation

00:33:21.520 | with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.

00:33:24.200 | And I miss him.

00:33:25.040 | - Name drop.

00:33:25.880 | - Name drop, yes.

00:33:27.320 | I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of comments

00:33:29.320 | about how many agnostics--

00:33:30.160 | - So in case people don't know,

00:33:31.560 | Brian Keating is the host of Into the Impossible podcast,

00:33:34.840 | where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists

00:33:38.720 | in the history of science,

00:33:40.280 | physicists especially in the history of science.

00:33:43.300 | - So when I talked to Freeman, I said,

00:33:45.160 | Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too.

00:33:47.680 | Can you tell me something?

00:33:48.520 | Like, what do you do on Sundays?

00:33:50.840 | Do you go to church?

00:33:51.680 | He's like, no, I don't go to church.

00:33:53.600 | And I'm like, well, imagine there was

00:33:55.560 | an intelligent alien, and he was looking down,

00:33:58.120 | or she, I don't know, thing was looking down,

00:34:01.600 | and it saw Freeman, and on Sundays,

00:34:03.680 | a group of people go to church,

00:34:05.280 | but Freeman doesn't go to church.

00:34:06.600 | And then there's another group of people

00:34:07.640 | that don't go to church, and those are called atheists,

00:34:10.200 | but Freeman calls himself an agnostic,

00:34:12.200 | but he does the things that Richard Dawkins,

00:34:14.120 | he doesn't go to the same church

00:34:15.960 | that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to.

00:34:18.240 | So I said, how would you distinguish yourself,

00:34:19.920 | if not practice?

00:34:20.840 | So I'm a behaviorist.

00:34:22.180 | I believe you can change your mentality,

00:34:23.800 | you can influence your mind,

00:34:26.080 | view your bodily, physical actions.

00:34:28.480 | So when I was a 12-year-old, I got my first telescope.

00:34:30.520 | I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church,

00:34:32.600 | which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid

00:34:34.440 | who grew up in New York.

00:34:35.280 | Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not.

00:34:36.880 | But I was just fascinated by these--

00:34:39.800 | - Can we get into it for a second?

00:34:42.920 | - Okay, yeah, all right, let's go.

00:34:45.160 | - All right, let's go there.

00:34:47.440 | Let's go to Baby Brian, or Young Brian.

00:34:51.120 | - The new sitcom on CBS.

00:34:53.120 | - Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents.

00:34:55.840 | My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook.

00:34:58.160 | He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.

00:35:00.520 | And my mother was an eminent mom

00:35:02.200 | and a brilliant English major, et cetera.

00:35:05.800 | And they raised, they were secular.

00:35:08.800 | We'd go to, I always joke,

00:35:09.640 | we'd go to synagogue two times a year,

00:35:12.520 | on Christmas and Easter.

00:35:14.160 | No, no, we would go, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, right?

00:35:16.940 | That's the typical two-day-a-year Jews.

00:35:19.520 | And then we'd have matzahs once a year on Passover.

00:35:23.320 | And that was about it.

00:35:24.400 | And for years I was like that,

00:35:26.400 | until my parents got divorced,

00:35:28.120 | my mother remarried, and she married an Irish Catholic man

00:35:31.080 | by the name of Ray Keating.

00:35:32.360 | My father's name's James X.

00:35:34.400 | So when she remarried Ray Keating,

00:35:37.760 | I was immediately adopted.

00:35:39.920 | I'm actually adopted into the Keating family.

00:35:42.360 | And he had nine brothers and sisters,

00:35:44.720 | and just warm and gregarious.

00:35:46.400 | They did Christmas and Easter.

00:35:49.480 | It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had.

00:35:51.440 | And I do things with great gusto.

00:35:53.960 | Whatever I do, I wanna take it all the way.

00:35:55.900 | So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity,

00:35:59.320 | in this case, Catholicism.

00:36:00.320 | So I was baptized, confirmed,

00:36:02.280 | and I said, "I wanna go all the way."

00:36:04.880 | I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.

00:36:07.440 | - And you're gonna be the best altar boy there ever was.

00:36:10.480 | - I had like serious skills.

00:36:11.920 | You pass that collection basket,

00:36:13.400 | I could push people and get 'em to two extra contributions.

00:36:17.720 | But in this case, I was 13.

00:36:20.440 | I don't know if you remember when you were 13,

00:36:23.400 | but if you extrapolate the next level up,

00:36:25.760 | it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.

00:36:28.240 | The next level up from confirmation, altar boy, is priest.

00:36:32.240 | And I don't know if you're aware of this,

00:36:33.440 | but priests are not entitled to have relations with women.

00:36:37.520 | And as a 13-year-old boy,

00:36:38.880 | kinda like future forecasting what life's gonna be like

00:36:41.960 | for myself if I continue on my path,

00:36:44.200 | I found it, maybe I--

00:36:46.560 | - The math is not up.

00:36:48.200 | - That's right.

00:36:49.080 | There was a serious gap in that future.

00:36:53.360 | And instead, when I should have been preparing

00:36:56.320 | for my bar mitzvah, as most Jewish boys would be,

00:36:58.600 | a 12, 13-year-old boy, I actually got a telescope

00:37:01.480 | and became infatuated with all the things

00:37:04.120 | you could see with it.

00:37:04.960 | It wasn't bigger than that one over there

00:37:06.280 | that your hedgehog's looking through.

00:37:08.280 | Is that a hedgehog?

00:37:10.000 | - It's a hedgehog in the fog.

00:37:13.080 | I should mention, and we'll go one by one, these things.

00:37:16.320 | You've given me some incredible gifts.

00:37:18.160 | Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope

00:37:21.600 | that I put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look.

00:37:24.320 | - Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist.

00:37:27.800 | - Why experimentalist versus an engineer?

00:37:30.040 | - 'Cause you assembled this telescope,

00:37:31.480 | you gave it a mount, and you connected it to a very powerful--

00:37:35.200 | - Yeah, but there's no experiment going on.

00:37:36.480 | It's just engineering for show.

00:37:38.280 | It's very shallow.

00:37:39.120 | Experiment is taking it to the next level

00:37:41.520 | and actually achieving something.

00:37:42.920 | Here, I just built a thing for show.

00:37:44.960 | - Well, that's always a joke.

00:37:45.800 | You're an experimental cosmologist.

00:37:47.560 | I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.

00:37:49.880 | Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things,

00:37:52.120 | soldering things.

00:37:53.080 | It's not actually doing the stroking

00:37:55.400 | of my non-existent beard, contemplating the cyclic

00:37:58.000 | versus the bouncing cosmological moment.

00:38:00.200 | - Just like most of robotics is just using Velcro

00:38:03.480 | for things.

00:38:04.320 | - Right, yeah.

00:38:05.140 | It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever.

00:38:07.560 | So telescope.

00:38:08.440 | - Yes, this telescope.

00:38:09.320 | What's the story of this little telescope?

00:38:11.360 | - This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways.

00:38:14.580 | It's a symbol of what got me into,

00:38:18.520 | what brought me all the blessings I have in my life.

00:38:21.160 | Came from a telescope.

00:38:22.360 | And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.

00:38:26.480 | You right here, wherever we are,

00:38:28.760 | a biggest city on earth, Manhattan,

00:38:30.200 | where I was growing up as a 12-year-old

00:38:31.680 | outside of Manhattan.

00:38:33.360 | You can see the exact same craters on the moon,

00:38:35.600 | the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter,

00:38:38.760 | the same phases of Venus.

00:38:40.280 | You can see the Andromeda galaxy,

00:38:42.480 | that's two and a half million light years away from earth.

00:38:45.680 | You can do that with that little thing over there.

00:38:47.480 | Or one that's a little more expensive.

00:38:48.720 | Get one that has a mount

00:38:49.640 | and you can attach now your smartphone.

00:38:52.240 | What the hell is that?

00:38:53.080 | I wouldn't have known what that was in 1984.

00:38:55.520 | And with that, you can do something

00:38:57.000 | that no other science to my knowledge

00:38:59.560 | can really replicate.

00:39:00.840 | Maybe biology in some sense.

00:39:02.360 | But you can experience the physical sensation

00:39:06.680 | that Galileo experienced

00:39:08.340 | when he turned a telescope like that to Jupiter

00:39:11.200 | and saw these four dots around it.

00:39:12.960 | Or that Saturn had ears as he called it.

00:39:15.540 | Or that the moon was not crystalline, polished, smooth,

00:39:18.120 | and made of this heavenly substance,

00:39:20.520 | the quintessence substance, right?

00:39:22.680 | So where else can you be viscerally connected

00:39:26.040 | with the first person to ever make that discovery?

00:39:27.680 | Try doing that with the Higgs boson.

00:39:29.520 | Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity,

00:39:33.600 | call up Harry Cliff and say,

00:39:35.560 | "I wanna replicate."

00:39:36.400 | How did you feel?

00:39:37.220 | He didn't feel anything.

00:39:38.200 | None of them felt anything.

00:39:39.240 | It took years to come out of it.

00:39:40.680 | You can't do it.

00:39:42.080 | But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.

00:39:44.440 | - That's fascinating.

00:39:45.420 | It's almost like maybe there's another one like that

00:39:49.160 | is fire.

00:39:50.000 | - Yes. - Like when you build

00:39:51.180 | a bonfire, can you actually get it?

00:39:53.640 | See, if you use a lighter,

00:39:55.000 | I think if you actually, by rubbing sticks together

00:39:58.080 | or however you do it without any of the modern tools,

00:40:00.880 | that's probably what that's like.

00:40:02.280 | And then you get to experience the magic of it,

00:40:04.860 | of what early humans, homo sapiens did.

00:40:07.680 | - You feel what Og felt when he did it that first time.

00:40:10.480 | By the way, is this a gift?

00:40:11.920 | - This is a gift, of course.

00:40:12.760 | - Okay, I'm, is this--

00:40:13.600 | - You need a little bit of a swag upgrade,

00:40:15.100 | so I got you some gifts.

00:40:15.940 | - I will, yeah, this is, I'm pulling a Putin.

00:40:18.880 | Like, ask if this is a gift.

00:40:21.200 | I'm making it very uncomfortable for you to say.

00:40:24.280 | Not really, this piece of black paper.

00:40:25.120 | - This is actually my childhood telescope here.

00:40:28.000 | - But now I'm keeping it.

00:40:29.400 | - That's right. - All right.

00:40:30.400 | - So looking through this telescope.

00:40:32.080 | - Was when your love for science was first born.

00:40:34.680 | - Changed my life.

00:40:35.500 | Because not only was I doing that,

00:40:37.320 | I was replicating what Galileo did,

00:40:39.360 | but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself

00:40:42.520 | to Galileo Galilei, okay,

00:40:43.640 | if there's any confusion out there.

00:40:45.120 | But I did replicate exactly what he did,

00:40:47.240 | and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.

00:40:48.760 | Let me write it down.

00:40:50.180 | So it had another effect,

00:40:51.320 | which all good scientists, budding scientists should do,

00:40:53.520 | and all parents should do.

00:40:55.080 | Get your kid a book, a little notebook,

00:40:57.040 | tape a pencil to it, write down what you see,

00:40:59.760 | what you hypothesize, what you think it's gonna be.

00:41:01.960 | Not like in the high school, you know,

00:41:03.760 | like hypothesis, thesis, but just like,

00:41:06.720 | wow, how did I feel?

00:41:07.920 | Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.

00:41:10.180 | Sketch what you see, the Lagoon Nebula,

00:41:13.140 | the Pleiades Seven Sisters,

00:41:14.800 | you can see them anywhere on Earth.

00:41:16.880 | And when you do that, again,

00:41:18.360 | you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain,

00:41:20.960 | as I understand it,

00:41:22.120 | and you're connecting them through your fingertips.

00:41:24.660 | You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips,

00:41:27.020 | in your connection between what you see,

00:41:30.160 | what you observe, and what you write down.

00:41:31.880 | Then you do research, right?

00:41:34.680 | The goal of science is not to just replicate

00:41:36.360 | what other people did, is do something new.

00:41:38.640 | And that's why we call it research,

00:41:40.400 | and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.

00:41:43.000 | And in so doing, you start to train a kid

00:41:46.000 | at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.

00:41:48.800 | It's unbelievable.

00:41:49.640 | And now we can do even better,

00:41:50.720 | 'cause you got to share it on Instagram or whatever.

00:41:53.040 | And you can, by doing so, have an entree

00:41:56.060 | into the world of what does it really mean

00:41:57.700 | to be a scientist, and do so viscerally.

00:42:00.000 | You know, I often say, I was taught this

00:42:02.600 | by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade,

00:42:05.840 | that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into.

00:42:09.600 | Let me pour in some facts, intellects,

00:42:11.280 | and you know, it's not like machine learning,

00:42:12.800 | you're just showing like billions of cats,

00:42:14.640 | or you know, you're not like forcing it in,

00:42:16.560 | you're bringing it out.

00:42:17.560 | It means to pour out of, in Latin, educare.

00:42:20.200 | And what more could a teacher want

00:42:22.840 | than to have something, the kid is just like gushing.

00:42:25.080 | No, you're not gonna see like--

00:42:25.920 | - To inspire the kid.

00:42:26.960 | - Yes. - Inspire.

00:42:28.120 | - Yes. - Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.

00:42:29.680 | - Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins, she's watching, yeah.

00:42:31.360 | She's a big fan. (laughing)

00:42:33.880 | Me, she doesn't care for, but you.

00:42:35.120 | - Yeah, excellent.

00:42:35.960 | We take those we love for granted.

00:42:38.720 | This is in Manhattan.

00:42:40.920 | - This is in Westchester County, New York.

00:42:42.720 | - Got it.

00:42:43.560 | So, okay, but then that's where the dream is born.

00:42:46.280 | - Yeah.

00:42:47.160 | - But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.

00:42:51.640 | So going to university, graduate school, postdoc,

00:42:56.640 | all the way to where you are today.

00:42:58.400 | What's that, what are some notable moments in that journey?

00:43:03.200 | - So I call that the academic hunger games,

00:43:05.760 | 'cause it's like you're competing against these people

00:43:09.480 | who are just getting smarter all the time

00:43:11.480 | as you're getting smarter all the time.

00:43:13.360 | They wanna get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.

00:43:16.600 | There's fewer slots to get into college

00:43:18.320 | than not in high school.

00:43:19.400 | There's fewer slots in graduate school.

00:43:20.880 | There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.

00:43:23.360 | And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.

00:43:26.560 | We just did a faculty search at UC San Diego,

00:43:29.200 | 400 applicants for one position.

00:43:31.280 | It's almost getting impossible.

00:43:32.920 | I almost can't conceive of doing what these new,

00:43:35.840 | brilliant young people applying to become

00:43:37.440 | an assistant professor at a state university

00:43:39.680 | that they're doing.

00:43:40.760 | It takes so much courage to do that.

00:43:42.960 | So I went from this kid in New York

00:43:45.720 | thinking I would never be a professional astronomer,

00:43:48.600 | A, because I didn't know any, I'd never seen any,

00:43:50.960 | I didn't even know that they existed,

00:43:52.640 | and I thought, who the hell's gonna pay me

00:43:54.040 | to look at the stars?

00:43:55.000 | Like, won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?

00:43:57.320 | Like, it's just not something I could conceive

00:43:59.320 | of getting paid to do, even if I had the brilliance

00:44:01.280 | to do it, which I didn't feel I did.

00:44:03.840 | And then I went to graduate school.

00:44:05.640 | And during graduate school, I had this kind of

00:44:10.360 | on-again, off-again relationship with my father.

00:44:12.800 | And I knew that he was a mathematician.

00:44:14.480 | He had left and gotten remarried himself

00:44:16.440 | and moved across the country.

00:44:17.320 | I didn't see him for 15 years.

00:44:19.560 | And in that time, I learned a lot about him,

00:44:22.080 | and I learned that he had gotten very interested

00:44:23.960 | not in pure mathematics, which he had been

00:44:25.840 | a number theorist and contributed seminal work

00:44:28.360 | on the Fantine equations, which play a role

00:44:31.360 | in Turing's work, you may have seen.

00:44:33.080 | But anyway, he had become interested,

00:44:35.560 | turned completely away from that into the foundations

00:44:37.880 | of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.

00:44:40.080 | And by that time, I was at Brown University,

00:44:42.200 | and I was thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter

00:44:44.880 | physicist or experimentalist.

00:44:46.600 | I never thought I'd be a theorist, and I'm not a theorist,

00:44:48.760 | so it was pretty prescient.

00:44:50.600 | But it always appealed to me, like, why not do

00:44:53.760 | what made me happy as a 12-year-old?

00:44:56.160 | We often forget about those primitive things about us

00:45:00.080 | are probably the most sustainable, durable,

00:45:01.920 | and resilient attributes of our character.

00:45:04.200 | So with my own kids, I'm like, what are they interested in

00:45:06.200 | now when they're young?

00:45:07.280 | And it doesn't mean that's what they're gonna do.

00:45:08.840 | I mean, some of them wanna play Fortnite,

00:45:10.600 | like professional Fortnite, which there are,

00:45:13.040 | but the odds of that is less than the odds

00:45:15.320 | of being a professor.

00:45:16.160 | - Can I ask you, is your father still with us?

00:45:19.320 | - No.

00:45:20.160 | - Just in a small tangent.

00:45:23.600 | - Yeah.

00:45:24.520 | - Do you miss him, do you think about him?

00:45:27.240 | Does his mathematical journey reverberate

00:45:30.920 | through who you are?

00:45:32.080 | - Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:45:33.200 | I mean, it did in very many ways,

00:45:35.840 | and he's been gone for a long time now.

00:45:37.880 | Thinking back to that time with him,

00:45:40.640 | he must have instilled some capacity for me

00:45:43.840 | to only wanna spend my time, which is a limited quantity.

00:45:46.960 | I don't think it's the most limited quantity.

00:45:48.400 | Maybe we'll talk about that later.

00:45:49.600 | But to go into only the most challenging,

00:45:53.600 | interesting things with the limited time

00:45:55.880 | that we have while we're alive.

00:45:57.120 | And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.

00:45:59.720 | For me, it was the foundations of the universe,

00:46:02.600 | and how did it come to be?

00:46:03.760 | And I felt like, well, people have been trying

00:46:05.520 | since Einstein to outdo Einstein,

00:46:07.240 | really have made great progress

00:46:09.000 | in the foundations of quantum mechanics,

00:46:10.880 | but this is an exciting time.

00:46:12.640 | The COBE satellite had just released its data

00:46:15.080 | that the universe had this anisotropy pattern.

00:46:17.520 | Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God

00:46:20.080 | and so forth.

00:46:21.640 | And so it seemed like this is a good golden age

00:46:23.700 | for what I'm gonna do and what I'm most interested in.

00:46:26.400 | But always throughout that, I wanted to understand,

00:46:29.200 | I didn't wanna be a wrench monkey.

00:46:30.480 | No offense to people that just do experiment.

00:46:33.080 | - And no offense to monkeys.

00:46:34.280 | - No offense to monkeys, that's right.

00:46:35.720 | This little guy, sorry, man.

00:46:37.760 | But thinking back to what animates me,

00:46:40.600 | it's not doing the engineering

00:46:42.000 | as much as it is getting the data,

00:46:44.360 | but there's a lot of steps.

00:46:45.360 | I wanna be the guy understanding

00:46:48.440 | what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.

00:46:52.000 | So I always joke with my theorist friends,

00:46:54.280 | call me a closeted theorist.

00:46:55.800 | I wanna be what they call a guy

00:46:58.680 | who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.

00:47:01.440 | So I wanna be like that for physics,

00:47:04.120 | for theoretical physics.

00:47:04.960 | I wanna be like the guy who doesn't do new theory

00:47:07.080 | but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.

00:47:09.280 | - I love that formulation of a theorist

00:47:12.560 | is understanding the source of the signal you're getting.

00:47:17.560 | Signal is primary.

00:47:20.000 | The thing you measure is primary,

00:47:22.480 | and theory is just the search of explaining

00:47:26.680 | how that signal originated, but it's all about the signal.

00:47:31.840 | I mean, I see the same search for the human mind

00:47:34.240 | and neuroscience in that same kind of way.

00:47:37.680 | It's ultimately about the signal,

00:47:39.920 | but you kind of hope to understand

00:47:42.520 | how that signal originated.

00:47:43.880 | That's fascinating.

00:47:45.160 | That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics

00:47:50.160 | 'cause it ultimately, at the end of the day,

00:47:54.840 | is all about the signal.

00:47:57.480 | - Yeah, yeah, and maybe those two things,

00:48:00.200 | the neuroscience and the cosmos,

00:48:02.560 | not getting too romantic, but yeah,

00:48:04.680 | maybe they're linked in some fundamental way.

00:48:07.280 | Some fundamental cosmic consciousness,

00:48:09.760 | but-- - We're gonna get to that.

00:48:11.560 | - Yeah, yeah, no, we definitely have to get to that.

00:48:13.400 | (laughs)

00:48:14.520 | But getting back to, yeah, so my origins,

00:48:16.720 | so I always say, and I wanna try this on you.

00:48:18.640 | You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions,

00:48:20.200 | but I'm gonna ask you some questions.

00:48:21.280 | What's the most important day on the calendar?

00:48:23.000 | Don't tell me the date, but to you,

00:48:24.560 | what's the most important day to you every year?

00:48:27.960 | - Do I have to answer or do I have to think about this?

00:48:29.600 | - No, no, answer.

00:48:30.760 | You don't have to tell me the exact date on the calendar.

00:48:32.360 | It could be your mistress's birthday or whatever, but--

00:48:35.360 | - I have so many I lose track.

00:48:36.840 | (laughs)

00:48:38.160 | Even though I'm single, how does that even make sense?

00:48:40.400 | - I know. - Okay, I'm sorry.

00:48:42.160 | So a day, like a month and a day, yeah.

00:48:46.240 | I mean, for me, it would be December 31st.

00:48:49.560 | - Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.

00:48:52.500 | Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth.

00:48:54.920 | They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?

00:48:58.200 | January means the portal between,

00:49:00.440 | the god was the portal between the beginning and the end.

00:49:02.680 | So you're looking back, maybe 'cause you're Russian,

00:49:05.080 | like the death side, the light side,

00:49:06.880 | looking forward into January, the beginning, right?

00:49:09.240 | (laughs)

00:49:10.200 | So everybody's most important day

00:49:14.040 | is usually some beginning or something significant.

00:49:17.280 | For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all.

00:49:19.240 | It was like, why did the universe get born,

00:49:20.640 | as I said before?

00:49:21.940 | And I didn't think there, again, I didn't, I just,

00:49:25.560 | there was some mental obstruction that I didn't realize

00:49:28.720 | that I could get past,

00:49:30.560 | because I didn't think anybody does it.

00:49:32.680 | Like I knew astronomers knew these answers,

00:49:34.840 | like the universe at that time,

00:49:36.160 | between 10 and 20 billion years old.

00:49:38.160 | Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old.

00:49:41.720 | It's incredible, the five digit, you know,

00:49:43.520 | for significant, five--

00:49:44.360 | - What is it again, 13 point--

00:49:45.800 | - 13.872 billion years.

00:49:48.920 | 872 million.

00:49:50.880 | - So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?

00:49:52.920 | Is it, what are the error bars on that?

00:49:53.760 | - So for me, I'm 50.

00:49:55.280 | So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me

00:49:57.320 | and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.

00:49:59.520 | - Yeah.

00:50:00.360 | - Half a percent, percent level accuracy.

00:50:02.440 | - There's a confidence behind that?

00:50:04.040 | - Oh yeah, I mean, there's a significance, yeah.

00:50:05.600 | No, it's extremely well measured.

00:50:07.080 | I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have.

00:50:09.120 | In contrast to, again, 25 years ago,

00:50:12.280 | we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion

00:50:14.560 | or 20 billion years old,

00:50:16.020 | but there were stars in our galaxy

00:50:18.040 | that were believed to be as they are,

00:50:19.520 | it's about 12 billion years old,

00:50:21.100 | or in the universe that were 12 billion.

00:50:22.680 | So that would be like you being older than your father.

00:50:26.680 | It was embarrassing.

00:50:27.640 | - Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent

00:50:30.360 | on a tangent on a tangent?

00:50:31.800 | How old is the universe?

00:50:33.400 | Can you dig in onto this number?

00:50:35.960 | How do we know currently with those,

00:50:38.560 | I guess you said four or five--

00:50:40.600 | - Significant figures, yeah.

00:50:41.440 | - Significant digits.

00:50:42.760 | - So we can come about it from two different ways.

00:50:44.920 | One, basically they rely on the most important number

00:50:47.920 | in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant.

00:50:50.280 | The Hubble constant is this weird number

00:50:52.680 | that has the following units.

00:50:54.160 | It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.

00:50:58.320 | So it's a speed per distance,

00:51:00.360 | which means you multiply it by distance

00:51:01.760 | and you get a speed.

00:51:02.880 | And what is the speed you're measuring?

00:51:04.240 | Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy

00:51:06.120 | at many megaparsecs away.

00:51:07.840 | So a galaxy at one megaparsec away.

00:51:09.560 | This isn't actually strictly true

00:51:10.800 | because of local gravitational effects.

00:51:12.920 | But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away,

00:51:15.440 | I would say that that galaxy's moving

00:51:16.680 | 72 kilometers per second away from you.

00:51:19.120 | And every galaxy, except for the local,

00:51:21.600 | very most local group surrounding us,

00:51:23.440 | maybe a half a dozen galaxies,

00:51:25.160 | out of 50 to, sorry, out of 500 billion galaxies

00:51:30.160 | to perhaps a trillion galaxies.

00:51:32.660 | So 12 out of that number are moving towards us.

00:51:35.840 | The rest are moving away from us.

00:51:37.520 | So that number, if you invert it,

00:51:40.560 | if you say, well, when did those things last

00:51:42.640 | touch each other, all those galaxies?

00:51:44.240 | Now they're really far apart.

00:51:45.740 | We know how fast they're moving away.

00:51:47.080 | It's a very simple algebra problem

00:51:48.600 | to solve when were they touching.

00:51:50.200 | That's where you get that number from.

00:51:51.960 | - So there's the local 12 and then the rest.

00:51:54.320 | - Ignore the 12, yep.

00:51:55.240 | - And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others

00:51:57.200 | and yeah, then solve the algebra problem.

00:52:00.960 | How does the stuff in the beginning,

00:52:03.980 | the mystery of that beginning epoch

00:52:05.620 | change this calculation of--

00:52:07.420 | - Very little because actually we understand

00:52:10.820 | how there's some other ingredients that go into it,

00:52:12.820 | namely how much dark energy there is in the universe,

00:52:14.860 | how much dark matter there is in the universe,

00:52:16.400 | how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera,

00:52:19.940 | and how much ordinary matter, like we're made up of,

00:52:22.100 | neutrons, protons, croutons.

00:52:24.660 | - Okay, so the--

00:52:25.500 | (laughing)

00:52:28.260 | - Morons.

00:52:29.320 | (laughing)

00:52:31.320 | - It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.

00:52:36.320 | How does that make sense?

00:52:38.680 | - Oh, oh, yeah, so you're talking about the fact

00:52:40.440 | that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe

00:52:43.920 | that's located at a distance that is farther

00:52:46.800 | than the speed of light times the age of the universe.

00:52:49.760 | Naively you would say that, yeah.

00:52:51.600 | So you're right, if the universe were static,

00:52:54.640 | if the universe came into existence,

00:52:56.200 | and you can conceive of this,

00:52:57.520 | universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe,

00:53:00.480 | so the universe just started off,

00:53:02.720 | those galaxies were, you know,

00:53:04.520 | they could be moving towards us, away from us, who knows,

00:53:07.760 | that you could say, I can see a galaxy

00:53:10.000 | that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years

00:53:13.800 | times the speed of light.

00:53:14.760 | That would be true.

00:53:15.960 | But the fact that the light is expanding

00:53:18.360 | along with the expansion of the universe,

00:53:20.480 | so imagine there was some very distant past,

00:53:23.160 | we were near a galaxy, it's gonna produce some light,

00:53:26.000 | and that galaxy's going to be moving away from us,

00:53:28.320 | the light's gonna be getting more and more red shifted,

00:53:30.380 | as it's called, and it's gonna be moving

00:53:31.920 | farther and farther away from us as time goes on,

00:53:34.800 | there'll be some acceleration

00:53:35.880 | as we get into the era of dark energy.

00:53:37.780 | The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance,

00:53:41.640 | if you will, from which, which represents all the events

00:53:45.160 | that we could have received information from.

00:53:47.720 | We can't currently communicate with that galaxy.

00:53:50.920 | It sent us some light, and now it's moving away,

00:53:53.520 | and it sent us some light, and because the space

00:53:55.480 | is also dragging the photons with it, if you like,

00:53:57.880 | the photons are participating

00:53:59.840 | in the expansion of the universe,

00:54:01.080 | that's why they're red shifting,

00:54:02.520 | that we can see things out to where the universe

00:54:05.240 | first began expanding, not just when it began existing.

00:54:09.240 | And because the universe has been expanding

00:54:10.680 | for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing down yet,

00:54:14.080 | which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise,

00:54:18.060 | that we can see things approximately three times

00:54:20.280 | the age of the universe away from us.

00:54:22.100 | So we can see, let's call the age of the universe

00:54:24.080 | 15 billion years, just to make the math simple.

00:54:26.200 | We see things at 45 billion light years distance

00:54:29.600 | in that direction, and we see things

00:54:31.600 | at 45 billion light years in that direction,

00:54:34.240 | just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.

00:54:36.840 | So that means we see things that themselves

00:54:39.320 | are 90 billion light years away from each other.

00:54:42.520 | That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe.

00:54:45.320 | Is there another universe beyond that?

00:54:47.040 | We don't know.

00:54:47.880 | So I'm conjecture, there's not only one,

00:54:49.600 | there's an infinite number of them.

00:54:51.240 | - How are you emotionally okay with the fact

00:54:54.320 | that our universe is expanding?

00:54:55.960 | So like--

00:54:56.800 | - It's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvy Singer.

00:54:59.720 | - I grew up in the Soviet Union.

00:55:02.560 | We watched propaganda films.

00:55:03.600 | - I realize that you did, yes.

00:55:05.440 | So there's a famous--

00:55:06.280 | - Annie Hall, is that some kind of--

00:55:07.800 | - It's a communist party, a propagandist movie

00:55:11.680 | with Woody Allen, certainly canceled,

00:55:13.800 | but nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet.

00:55:17.640 | He made a movie called Annie Hall,

00:55:19.080 | in which, it's a self-depiction.

00:55:20.800 | He's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David.

00:55:23.680 | Neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew.

00:55:26.120 | He's in Brooklyn, and he all of a sudden tells his mother

00:55:28.800 | he's not doing his homework anymore.

00:55:29.960 | He refuses to do his homework.

00:55:31.360 | His mother says, "Why?"

00:55:32.400 | Goes, "'Cause the universe is expanding,

00:55:34.200 | "and it keeps on expanding.

00:55:36.120 | "Everything will rip apart,

00:55:37.040 | "and we'll never have anything in contact,

00:55:38.940 | "and everything is meaningless."

00:55:40.240 | I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to.

00:55:43.160 | And she goes, "What are you talking about?

00:55:45.580 | "We're in Brooklyn.

00:55:46.720 | "Brooklyn is not expanding."

00:55:49.120 | And that's true, Brooklyn is not expanding.

00:55:50.800 | The solar system is not expanding.

00:55:52.640 | Oftentimes, I get asked,

00:55:53.480 | "What is the universe expanding into?"

00:55:55.480 | That's one of my favorite questions.

00:55:57.200 | "What is it expanding into?"

00:55:59.020 | And I say, it's actually an easy question,

00:56:00.920 | if you think about it.

00:56:02.320 | You've seen your friend Elon.

00:56:04.040 | He goes out into space.

00:56:04.880 | He's got a rocket, right?

00:56:05.880 | What's outside of the rocket?

00:56:07.840 | If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle,

00:56:10.120 | take the cap off it, go outside the rocket,

00:56:12.440 | you know, sip in some Tang,

00:56:14.960 | screw on the cover of it, what's in there?

00:56:18.260 | Is it empty?

00:56:19.100 | - That's just semantics, I guess.

00:56:22.420 | Yeah.

00:56:25.000 | - No, it's definitely not empty.

00:56:26.040 | - So you step outside the rocket?

00:56:27.800 | - Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space,

00:56:29.480 | the quote-unquote vacuum of space.

00:56:30.320 | - And there's no more liquid in it.

00:56:31.800 | - There's no more liquid in it, no.

00:56:32.720 | It's just a container, one cubic centimeter.

00:56:34.680 | Let's make it simple.

00:56:35.840 | One cubic centimeter of a box,

00:56:38.200 | and you take it out into space,

00:56:39.400 | outside the Falcon, whatever, right?

00:56:41.640 | What's inside that box?

00:56:44.040 | It's not empty.

00:56:45.100 | There's actually, I'm gonna say,

00:56:47.320 | this is gonna set your friends,

00:56:48.460 | there's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements

00:56:53.140 | that we call the cosmic microwave background

00:56:54.900 | inside that box at any second.

00:56:56.580 | - Okay, all right, hold on a second.

00:56:58.480 | What?

00:56:59.320 | 420, that's, I've heard of that number before.

00:57:03.340 | All right, let's--

00:57:04.180 | - It used to be 69, but then they changed it.

00:57:06.780 | - Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.

00:57:09.300 | - In a millimeter box, it's 69.

00:57:10.940 | - What are we talking about here?

00:57:12.860 | What's in the box?

00:57:16.460 | I'm gonna get, that's right.

00:57:18.020 | Let's think outside the box.

00:57:19.060 | No, we're thinking inside the box.

00:57:20.220 | So if you have, every cubic centimeter

00:57:22.380 | of our observable universe is suffused with heat

00:57:25.340 | left over from the Big Bang, dark matter particles,

00:57:28.520 | there's a little ordinary matter in the universe,

00:57:30.920 | and every cubic centimeter,

00:57:33.020 | there's some probability to find a proton,

00:57:34.700 | a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.

00:57:37.580 | There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos

00:57:39.660 | inside of that cubic centimeter.

00:57:41.320 | Now, just imagine how many cubic centimeters

00:57:43.020 | there are in the universe.

00:57:44.040 | It's enormous.

00:57:44.880 | There's enormous numbers of particles in our universe.

00:57:47.200 | It's a very rich universe.

00:57:48.920 | But now let's zoom in on that box.

00:57:51.120 | So now inside that box, there might be one,

00:57:54.000 | let's say there might be one ordinary matter,

00:57:56.240 | like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.

00:58:00.000 | There might be a couple hundred neutrinos,

00:58:03.160 | and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420.

00:58:07.000 | What's between those guys?

00:58:08.500 | What's between the protons and the neutrinos

00:58:13.120 | and the photons?

00:58:14.280 | Just zoom in to a cubic micron now.

00:58:17.080 | Imagine 420 things inside a box this big.

00:58:19.400 | It's actually pretty empty.

00:58:20.960 | They're just zipping around in there.

00:58:22.400 | So between them, there's a lot of empty space.

00:58:24.480 | - And this is outside the physics-based models of fields

00:58:28.560 | and all those kinds of things.

00:58:29.400 | - Yeah, and dark fields. - Just asking the question,

00:58:32.720 | what is this emptiness?

00:58:33.560 | - What is the particle content in the universe

00:58:35.880 | in every cubic centimeter of the universe?

00:58:38.440 | - Outside of the 420.

00:58:39.720 | So you have the 420.

00:58:41.000 | - 420.

00:58:41.840 | - They have some mass.

00:58:44.480 | - Well, they have energy.

00:58:45.320 | They're not mass.

00:58:46.160 | Photons are not mass.

00:58:46.980 | - Energy or mass. - That's why they don't

00:58:47.820 | bring suitcases.

00:58:48.660 | You know that's true, right?

00:58:50.080 | Photons never bring suitcases with them

00:58:53.040 | 'cause they're traveling light.

00:58:55.200 | See, I don't even get to laugh at you.

00:58:57.520 | Corny dad jokes.

00:58:58.360 | Okay, you'll appreciate something.

00:58:59.560 | - No, this is pretty good.

00:59:01.520 | I'm laughing on the insides.

00:59:02.880 | What's in the box?

00:59:03.920 | What's the 420?

00:59:04.800 | What's between the photons?

00:59:07.440 | - That's what space is.

00:59:08.440 | That's what the universe is expanding into.

00:59:10.360 | - Okay.

00:59:11.200 | - Yeah, so that's the notebook

00:59:13.680 | on which the photons are written.

00:59:16.280 | - That's beautiful work.

00:59:17.120 | - But still, thank you.

00:59:19.440 | Still, I understand this,

00:59:22.880 | but it's still uncomfortable that

00:59:24.800 | if the universe is expanding,

00:59:27.680 | that this thing is expanding.

00:59:29.600 | The canvas is expanding.

00:59:31.480 | It's very strange.

00:59:33.240 | 'Cause if we were just sitting there still,

00:59:35.240 | I guess if we're in Brooklyn, nothing's expanding.

00:59:37.720 | So our cognition, our intuition about the world

00:59:41.880 | is based on this local fact that

00:59:44.720 | we don't get to experience this kind of expansion.

00:59:49.520 | - Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray.

00:59:52.400 | But you know that gravity is the weakest

00:59:54.400 | of the so-called four fundamental forces,

00:59:56.400 | and yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.

01:00:00.000 | Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled

01:00:01.800 | towards the Andromeda Galaxy

01:00:03.320 | at some enormous rate of speed

01:00:05.320 | because of its massive counter-gravitational force

01:00:07.800 | to the force we exert on it.

01:00:09.640 | So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.

01:00:13.680 | And because of that,

01:00:15.960 | we can think about these effects of expansion

01:00:18.920 | as the relationship between the, as you said,

01:00:22.520 | the grid lines on the notebook, right?

01:00:25.520 | Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship

01:00:29.680 | between those points, how far they are from each other,

01:00:33.120 | and those can change, those point distances can change

01:00:36.360 | over time because of the force of gravity.

01:00:39.120 | So it's weak, and what we experience as gravity

01:00:43.000 | is the changing of those trajectories

01:00:46.560 | from being rectilinear to curvilinear.

01:00:48.860 | That's what we experience as gravity.

01:00:51.160 | You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish

01:00:53.400 | about a bowling ball and a trampoline.

01:00:55.720 | That's almost right, because it's actually,

01:00:57.840 | you have to visualize that now in four dimensions,

01:01:00.120 | like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object,

01:01:03.280 | including on the sides,

01:01:04.400 | and it becomes very hard to visualize.

01:01:06.240 | So a lot of people use that.

01:01:08.080 | It's also a fraught analogy because you're using gravity,

01:01:11.100 | like the notion of gravity pulling something down

01:01:13.420 | to explain the notion of gravity.

01:01:15.160 | So it's a little overburdening, the analogy.

01:01:18.320 | - But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish

01:01:20.040 | wrote the foreword to your book.

01:01:21.320 | - Yeah.

01:01:22.400 | - How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?

01:01:24.800 | How do they, on the emotional level,

01:01:26.760 | how do they make you feel

01:01:27.640 | that they're just moving space-time?

01:01:30.960 | - Yeah, so gravitational waves were,

01:01:33.160 | the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves

01:01:35.040 | discovery the first time, it was discovered twice,

01:01:39.160 | indirectly by two men named Halston Taylor,

01:01:43.920 | and that was given my first year of graduate school.

01:01:45.920 | The day I entered graduate school, almost,

01:01:47.840 | they announced these two guys won it,

01:01:49.720 | and the guy who won it did the work

01:01:51.160 | that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age.

01:01:53.560 | - Is this in the '40s?

01:01:55.080 | - This was, no, this is--

01:01:56.760 | - That was a joke.

01:01:57.600 | - No, yeah, that was good, that was good.

01:01:58.440 | - All right, thank you.

01:01:59.260 | - I got it, I got it.

01:02:00.100 | You know, to a cosmologist, age means nothing.

01:02:02.800 | And to a tennis player.

01:02:03.880 | - Not on Tinder.

01:02:04.720 | (laughing)

01:02:05.760 | - That's right.

01:02:06.600 | - All right, sorry.

01:02:07.600 | - Gravitational waves do fit in

01:02:09.440 | because what we're trying to do now

01:02:12.040 | is use the properties of gravitational waves,

01:02:15.060 | the analogous properties that they have to photons,

01:02:18.200 | that they travel at the speed of light,

01:02:20.040 | that they go through everything,

01:02:21.120 | they can go through everything,

01:02:22.640 | and that they're directly detectable.

01:02:24.600 | We're using them to try to confirm

01:02:28.520 | if or if not inflation occurred.

01:02:31.920 | So did inflation, the spark that ignited

01:02:34.720 | the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe

01:02:37.120 | and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe,

01:02:39.440 | did that take place?

01:02:40.560 | There's only one way that cosmologists believe

01:02:43.160 | we could ever see that,

01:02:44.480 | through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves,

01:02:48.320 | not these old newcomers like Barry's studies,

01:02:51.380 | the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us,

01:02:55.040 | a billion years ago,

01:02:56.680 | but we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years

01:02:59.280 | ago during the inflationary epoch.

01:03:01.960 | However, those we cannot build a LIGO

01:03:05.480 | and put it at the Big Bang.

01:03:07.880 | So if you wanna measure,

01:03:09.280 | let's say you have the old time firecracker,

01:03:12.440 | let's say there's a firecracker,

01:03:13.640 | and you wanna see if it went off

01:03:15.180 | in the building next door to you.

01:03:16.760 | You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it,

01:03:19.560 | but you can hear it.

01:03:21.040 | And what we're trying to do is hear the effect

01:03:23.400 | of gravitational waves from the Big Bang,

01:03:25.720 | not by using a camera or even an interferometer

01:03:29.320 | like Barry used and his colleagues,

01:03:31.760 | but instead using the CMB, the light,

01:03:35.280 | the primordial ancient fossils of the universe,

01:03:37.840 | the oldest light in the universe,

01:03:39.600 | we're gonna use that as a film, quote unquote,

01:03:43.040 | onto which gravitational waves get exposed.

01:03:46.080 | - And hope you can,

01:03:47.240 | so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy

01:03:49.720 | for the exposure?

01:03:51.840 | - So the signal, as I said,

01:03:53.960 | so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter,

01:03:56.840 | and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.

01:03:59.280 | However, what we're looking for

01:04:00.800 | is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.

01:04:04.840 | We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.

01:04:07.480 | We're looking for what its polarization is.

01:04:10.240 | - And we'll go, let me just ask,

01:04:11.800 | are you serious about the per cubic millimeter,

01:04:13.960 | 420 is the number?

01:04:15.040 | - Centimeter.

01:04:17.520 | - Per cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.

01:04:20.240 | I wonder if Elon knows this,

01:04:21.560 | and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.

01:04:23.760 | - Yeah, it's true.

01:04:26.640 | - Funding secured, excellent.

01:04:29.360 | So I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak,

01:04:34.080 | of triumph, that you described in losing the Nobel Prize.

01:04:38.360 | So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.

01:04:42.360 | Can you describe what bicep one and bicep two are?

01:04:46.080 | Bicep three, perhaps, the instruments

01:04:48.760 | that can detect this kind of polarization?

01:04:51.400 | What are the challenges, the origin story, the whole thing?

01:04:54.920 | - Yeah, so, well, the origin story goes back again

01:04:57.600 | to like a father-son rivalry, it really does.

01:05:00.160 | My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera,

01:05:02.440 | but he never won a Nobel Prize.

01:05:04.160 | And some parents in America, they compete with their kids.

01:05:08.000 | Oh, I was a football player in high school,

01:05:09.440 | I'll show you, and whatever, wrestling, whatever.

01:05:11.480 | And some of us could be healthy too.

01:05:13.840 | But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy.

01:05:17.280 | Like we would compete and he was much more

01:05:20.520 | of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist

01:05:23.080 | so we had both different ideas

01:05:25.080 | in what was worth prioritizing our time.

01:05:27.880 | But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize.

01:05:30.040 | And I knew I could kind of outdo him.

01:05:32.240 | So I feel pretty venal and kind of minuscule

01:05:35.800 | kind of character-wise saying that.

01:05:37.240 | - The only reason you could outdo him

01:05:38.800 | is because the Fields Medal is given every four years.

01:05:41.680 | - And only if you're under 40,

01:05:42.920 | which he was no longer under 40.

01:05:44.000 | - So he's working under much more limited conditions.

01:05:47.640 | - That's right.

01:05:48.480 | So even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert,

01:05:50.760 | the book's called "Losing the Nobel Prize,"

01:05:52.120 | so I didn't do it.

01:05:53.520 | But I wanted to do something big

01:05:54.920 | and I wanted to do something

01:05:56.440 | that would really just unequivocally be realized

01:06:00.080 | as a discovery for the ages, as in fact it was

01:06:02.800 | when we made the premature announcement

01:06:04.340 | that we had been successful.

01:06:05.760 | - So you were, from the beginning,

01:06:07.800 | reaching for the big questions.

01:06:10.480 | - That's all I cared about.

01:06:11.400 | - As an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences.

01:06:14.400 | - That's all I wanted to do.

01:06:15.640 | I felt like if it's not, you know,

01:06:18.680 | if it's worth spending perhaps the rest of my life on

01:06:22.560 | as a scientist, it better be damn well

01:06:25.320 | better be interesting to me, to carry me through,

01:06:27.540 | to give me the, you know, I always say,

01:06:29.960 | passion is great when people say,

01:06:31.360 | "Oh, follow your passion," but it's not enough.

01:06:33.680 | Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket,

01:06:35.840 | but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.

01:06:38.480 | - So then you swung for the fences with BICEP1.

01:06:41.800 | What is this?

01:06:42.720 | - So BICEP1 was born out of

01:06:45.200 | kind of interesting circumstances.

01:06:46.480 | So I had gone to a Stanford University for a postdoc,

01:06:49.840 | so an academic Hunger Games--

01:06:51.640 | - Stanford?

01:06:52.640 | - Stanford University, yeah, it's this small little school.

01:06:56.200 | It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts

01:06:59.160 | that you're affiliated with.

01:07:00.640 | But as I went there, I was working

01:07:04.120 | for a new assistant professor.

01:07:05.720 | She had gotten there only a year before I got there,

01:07:08.920 | and she had her own priorities,

01:07:10.360 | the things that she wanted to do.

01:07:11.960 | But I kept thinking in my spare time

01:07:14.440 | that I wanted to do something completely different.

01:07:16.040 | She was studying galaxies at high redshift,

01:07:17.640 | and I wanted to study the origin of the universe

01:07:19.720 | using this type of technology.

01:07:22.120 | And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine

01:07:25.360 | who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Heminkowski,

01:07:28.260 | that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope,

01:07:30.520 | we didn't need a 30-meter diameter telescope,

01:07:32.920 | we needed a tiny refracting telescope,

01:07:35.200 | no bigger than my head, less than a foot across.

01:07:38.080 | And that telescope would have the same power

01:07:40.000 | as a Hubble telescope, sized telescope could have,

01:07:43.040 | because the signals that we're looking for

01:07:44.440 | are enormous in wavelength on the sky.

01:07:46.720 | They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky.

01:07:50.260 | And if we could measure that,

01:07:52.160 | it would be proof, effectively,

01:07:53.440 | as close as you get to proof,

01:07:54.880 | there could be things that mimic it,

01:07:55.880 | but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.

01:07:58.840 | Inflation being the signal

01:08:00.400 | originally conceived of by Alan Guth

01:08:02.680 | to explain why the universe

01:08:04.200 | had the large-scale features that it does,

01:08:06.400 | namely that it has so-called flat geometry.

01:08:09.000 | So there's no way to make a triangle in space,

01:08:12.080 | in our universe, that has three interior angles

01:08:15.320 | that do not sum to 180 degrees.

01:08:18.220 | You can do that with spacecraft,

01:08:19.560 | you can do that with stars,

01:08:20.560 | you can do that with laser beams,

01:08:21.560 | you can do that with three different galaxies.

01:08:23.560 | All those galaxies, no matter how far you go,

01:08:25.720 | have this geometry, it's remarkable.

01:08:27.800 | But it's also unstable, it's very unlikely,

01:08:30.840 | it's very seemingly finely tuned,

01:08:32.920 | and that was one of the motivations that Guth had

01:08:34.680 | to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation,

01:08:38.240 | 1979, when he was a postdoc, also at Stanford, at Slack.

01:08:42.340 | And he was trying to get a permanent job,

01:08:44.360 | I was trying to make my name for myself,

01:08:46.520 | and so I realized I could do this,

01:08:48.560 | but I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford

01:08:51.800 | to do a job for her.

01:08:53.160 | And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.

01:08:56.780 | And then one day she couldn't take it anymore

01:08:58.460 | 'cause I was sketching notebooks

01:08:59.960 | and planning his experiments,

01:09:01.280 | and I just, I wasn't, no, I actually--

01:09:03.160 | - You had big ideas in your mind,

01:09:04.080 | you were planning big experiments,

01:09:06.080 | and that was difficult to work with on a small scale

01:09:10.000 | for like a postdoc type of situation,

01:09:12.280 | where you have to publish basic papers,

01:09:15.320 | deliver on some basic deadlines for a project,

01:09:17.800 | all those kinds of things.

01:09:18.640 | - Yeah, and support your advisors, paying,

01:09:19.720 | and she was paying me.

01:09:21.120 | And so one day I came in,

01:09:22.520 | and it actually involved another friend of mine,

01:09:26.960 | an astronomer named Jill Tartar,

01:09:28.800 | one of the pioneers in the SETI science business

01:09:31.760 | of detecting extraterrestrials,

01:09:33.480 | which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens,

01:09:35.900 | so I'm sure we won't get into aliens.

01:09:37.920 | But Jill was visiting Stanford,

01:09:39.720 | and I was like, "I really wanna meet her,

01:09:40.760 | "can you introduce me?"

01:09:41.600 | And she said, "No, in fact, you're fired."

01:09:43.560 | My boss.

01:09:45.240 | So I was like, "This is possibly the best thing

01:09:48.840 | "that could ever happen to me."

01:09:50.080 | I didn't know where it would lead or what happened to it,

01:09:52.640 | but getting fired from this ultra-prestigious university

01:09:56.280 | turned out to be the path, I mean, literally,

01:09:58.440 | that brings me here today,

01:10:00.200 | in that, because of that,

01:10:02.580 | I ended up working for another person in Caltech,

01:10:05.840 | which is in Pasadena,

01:10:07.920 | and she, my original boss, Sarah Church,

01:10:10.600 | she got me the job with her former advisor,

01:10:12.920 | a man by the name of Andrew Lang.

01:10:15.000 | And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know,

01:10:17.760 | like, he's like a Steve Jobs or an Elon,

01:10:22.680 | charismatic, handsome, persuasive, idea man,

01:10:27.140 | not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything,

01:10:29.280 | but understood where things are going decades from now.

01:10:33.960 | And he had been involved in an experiment

01:10:35.200 | that actually measured the universe was flat,

01:10:37.860 | very close to flat,

01:10:39.300 | along with a preceding experiment done at Princeton

01:10:41.740 | by Lyman Page and other collaborators.

01:10:43.480 | - So the shape of the universe is flat.

01:10:45.240 | - The geometry of the universe is flat.

01:10:47.720 | - How did he do that experiment?

01:10:49.400 | - So he used the cosmic microwave background.

01:10:51.900 | And so what I said is,

01:10:53.360 | you have to look for triangles in the universe,

01:10:55.440 | so you can measure triangles on Earth,

01:10:56.920 | you can actually, it's hard to show

01:10:59.120 | that the Earth is curved,

01:10:59.960 | but you can show the Earth is curved

01:11:01.200 | using triangles, mountaintops, et cetera,

01:11:03.000 | if you have an accurate enough protractor.

01:11:04.880 | - Allegedly, yeah. - Yeah.

01:11:06.320 | (laughs)

01:11:07.560 | God, you're like auto-canceling, this is great.

01:11:11.120 | My ratings are gonna go up, man, this is gonna be great.

01:11:13.640 | Take out the-- - If you want actual science,

01:11:15.560 | go listen to Brian.

01:11:17.240 | If you want all of these conspiracy theories,

01:11:19.720 | or AKA the truth about flat Earth, listen to him.

01:11:23.720 | And so what he used was the following triangle.

01:11:27.360 | There are proto-galaxy-sized objects in the CMB.

01:11:32.280 | The cosmic microwave background has these patches,

01:11:34.600 | and so you can make a triangle out of the diameter

01:11:37.840 | of one of these blobs of primordial plasma,

01:11:41.760 | the soup that constitutes the early universe,

01:11:43.920 | which is hydrogen, it's very simple material.

01:11:46.080 | Understand hydrogen, electrons, and radiation,

01:11:48.280 | very simple, plasma physicist's son, understand it.

01:11:51.720 | The diameter is one base of the triangle,

01:11:54.680 | and then the distance to the Earth is the other two legs.

01:11:57.340 | So he measured, along with his colleagues at Caltech

01:12:00.000 | and University of Rome and that other group at Princeton,

01:12:03.160 | measured the angle, interior angle, effectively,

01:12:07.200 | very, very accurately, and showed that it added up

01:12:09.880 | to 180 degrees.

01:12:11.280 | - Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?

01:12:15.080 | Can you know where they,

01:12:16.800 | could trace them back location-wise?

01:12:19.080 | - You can know where they are, but more than that,

01:12:21.040 | there's so many of these patches.

01:12:22.520 | There are about one square degree on the sky.

01:12:25.680 | The sky, you may know, a sphere has about

01:12:27.840 | 44,000 square degrees in a sphere.

01:12:30.520 | So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches

01:12:33.960 | over which he could do these kind of measurements

01:12:36.080 | to build up very good statistics.

01:12:37.680 | That's not exactly how they do it,

01:12:39.280 | or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang,

01:12:41.560 | but they did measure very accurately

01:12:43.840 | the, what was called the first Doppler peak,

01:12:46.520 | or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.

01:12:49.240 | - That's, so the sphere has 44, approximately,

01:12:53.320 | 44,000 square degrees.

01:12:56.200 | So to cover a sphere, that's a very kind of

01:12:59.280 | important data collection thing

01:13:00.800 | when you're sitting on a sphere

01:13:01.920 | and you're looking out into the observable universe.

01:13:04.840 | So there's a lot of patches to work with.

01:13:07.920 | - Yeah, and in fact, a lot of the fast

01:13:10.080 | kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres

01:13:12.560 | and machine learning in the early 2000s, still used today,

01:13:16.040 | was created out of this field by data analysts

01:13:18.400 | using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles

01:13:21.720 | called heel picks, is what it's called.

01:13:24.640 | - And so it's just stitch all this stuff together,

01:13:26.400 | and that's, and stitch it together very accurately.

01:13:29.680 | - Yeah, get high statistical significance

01:13:32.200 | in order to reduce the statistical errors,

01:13:35.000 | very clean signal and measurement device

01:13:37.680 | to reduce the systematic errors,

01:13:39.320 | those are the two predominant sources of error

01:13:41.520 | in any measurement, those that can be improved

01:13:43.720 | by more and more measurement, you know,

01:13:44.920 | you take more and more measurements of this table,

01:13:46.520 | you'll get slightly better each time,

01:13:48.280 | but you only win as the number of,

01:13:50.880 | one over the square root of the number of measurements,

01:13:53.280 | but the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.

01:13:55.600 | So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.

01:13:57.640 | Again, it's not exactly how they did it,

01:13:59.000 | they also have to do a Fourier analysis,

01:14:00.960 | decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration, windows,

01:14:04.020 | there's a lot of work that goes into it,

01:14:05.720 | image analysis, and then comparing that

01:14:08.320 | with cosmological parameters, very simple model,

01:14:10.960 | just six different numbers that go into a model

01:14:12.960 | that made a prediction, and one of those

01:14:14.840 | is the geometry of the universe pops out,

01:14:16.800 | and that is the universe has zero spatial curvature,

01:14:19.520 | and that was called Boomerang.

01:14:20.960 | So he had just come off of this.

01:14:22.560 | Now, let me remind you, who was the first person

01:14:25.200 | to measure the curvature of the Earth?

01:14:27.280 | It's a guy named Aristophanes in the, you know, whatever,

01:14:29.920 | lived around Aristotle's time.

01:14:31.960 | His name is in the history books.

01:14:33.080 | So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like,

01:14:35.160 | he's like the next Aristotle, Aristophanes,

01:14:37.760 | like, I just wanted to work for this guy.

01:14:39.760 | You know, he clearly had this brand,

01:14:41.560 | he was about 40 at the time,

01:14:43.280 | California Scientist of the Year,

01:14:45.320 | I was sure he was gonna win a Nobel Prize for that,

01:14:48.000 | and I knew that he, you know,

01:14:50.320 | so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk,

01:14:53.060 | and he said, you know, I love it, you got a job,

01:14:55.980 | and before I could even, you know,

01:14:57.360 | before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take it,

01:14:59.240 | you know, like, it was too good to be true,

01:15:01.720 | and I started working there at Caltech,

01:15:03.640 | and slowly but surely, 'cause Caltech's

01:15:05.880 | a rich, private university, at that time,

01:15:08.240 | run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore,

01:15:11.420 | he just wrote us a check, Baltimore wrote us a check,

01:15:13.400 | and said, get started on this idea,

01:15:15.440 | and so we started coming up with the idea

01:15:17.040 | for what I later named BICEP,

01:15:19.240 | Background Imaging Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization,

01:15:22.840 | which is kind of ironic,

01:15:23.800 | because we ended up measuring galactic polarization,

01:15:26.160 | we'll get to that in a minute,

01:15:27.840 | but along the way, the idea was very simple,

01:15:30.240 | we're gonna make the simplest telescope

01:15:31.800 | you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope.

01:15:35.000 | Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head.

01:15:38.440 | Only way, you know, forward is making things more complex,

01:15:41.560 | right, and when you make things complex in science,

01:15:43.200 | you introduce the possibility for systematic errors,

01:15:46.160 | and so we wanted to build the cleanest instrument,

01:15:48.280 | turns out the cleanest instrument you can build

01:15:49.780 | in astronomy is a refracting telescope.

01:15:52.000 | We also had to, unlike that telescope, or Galileo's,

01:15:55.160 | we had to use very sensitive detectors

01:15:58.220 | that were cooled less than 1/20th of the temperature

01:16:02.160 | of the cosmic background itself,

01:16:04.320 | which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe,

01:16:07.020 | so we had to cool these down to about .1

01:16:09.040 | or .2 degrees Kelvin, above absolute zero.

01:16:12.260 | To do that, we needed to put it inside

01:16:13.680 | of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules

01:16:16.560 | and water molecules and take it to a very, very special

01:16:19.880 | place called the South Pole, Antarctica,

01:16:22.400 | from which I retrieved for you a patch,

01:16:24.740 | there it is over there.

01:16:25.880 | So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.

01:16:30.280 | - Bright, oh yeah.

01:16:31.640 | - You fly down. - As somebody

01:16:32.680 | who was born in the Soviet Union,

01:16:34.080 | we obviously like to call it red,

01:16:35.520 | United States Antarctic Program,

01:16:38.760 | the National Science Foundation.

01:16:41.520 | And the base is called

01:16:42.400 | the Amundsen-Scott South Polar Station.

01:16:45.360 | So it's a little-known fact of geopolitics

01:16:47.520 | that whatever country occupies a region

01:16:50.280 | has ownership over it.

01:16:51.920 | Now there is a treaty in Antarctica,

01:16:53.320 | you can't use it for military purposes,

01:16:55.480 | for mining, et cetera, et cetera.

01:16:57.280 | But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago,

01:16:59.280 | Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole.

01:17:01.640 | Now there's no land at the North Pole, right?

01:17:04.240 | So what did he do?

01:17:05.080 | He stuck it on the ocean underneath.

01:17:06.720 | But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica,

01:17:10.760 | which was first reached about 110 years ago,

01:17:13.200 | first time in human history.

01:17:15.400 | Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.

01:17:18.160 | It means like no bears there,

01:17:19.960 | basically opposite of where polar bears are.

01:17:21.640 | Arctic means polar bear, that's where, in Creek.

01:17:24.520 | - Oh, did not know that, fascinating.

01:17:25.880 | - So Antarctica means the opposite place of that.

01:17:27.760 | So humans never even saw it,

01:17:29.480 | let alone went to the South Pole,

01:17:30.680 | which is kind of in the middle of that continent.

01:17:33.560 | We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.

01:17:37.280 | It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego,

01:17:40.280 | Texas, and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile.

01:17:43.760 | Those are the two premier places on earth.

01:17:46.600 | Of course, you'd like to go into space,

01:17:47.680 | there's no water in space.

01:17:48.520 | - So it's not about cold, it's about dry.

01:17:51.960 | - Exactly.

01:17:52.900 | So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka

01:17:57.720 | and you can put it in this cup, right?

01:17:59.320 | And we can take it over to a microwave somewhere

01:18:01.400 | and heat it up.

01:18:02.240 | After two minutes, the water's,

01:18:04.560 | three minutes, the water's boiling.

01:18:05.920 | You can't touch it.

01:18:06.760 | Take it from me, don't touch it.

01:18:08.020 | But you can touch the mug and take it out

01:18:09.360 | if you want to, right?

01:18:10.360 | Why?

01:18:11.200 | Because the mug is totally bone dry.

01:18:13.000 | But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules,

01:18:15.480 | 'cause water molecules resonate exactly

01:18:17.440 | at these microwave frequencies.

01:18:19.000 | So we don't want these precious photons,

01:18:21.680 | 420 of them traveling per cubic centimeter,

01:18:24.620 | from the Big Bang itself to get absorbed

01:18:26.560 | in some water molecule in the earth's atmosphere.

01:18:29.000 | So you take it to a place with the fewest number

01:18:30.640 | of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area,

01:18:34.440 | and that happens to be either Chile,

01:18:35.920 | or my other project, the Simons Observatory is located,

01:18:38.480 | or you take it to the South Pole.

01:18:40.640 | We took it to the South Pole,

01:18:42.200 | and spent a couple of months of my life down there.

01:18:46.000 | And it's like being on Hoth.

01:18:49.200 | You know, it's like,

01:18:50.040 | it's a completely otherworldly environment.

01:18:52.640 | Ice, planar, flat as a pancake.

01:18:55.920 | You, like, and the buildings are built up on stilts.

01:18:59.880 | They're built up, 'cause the snow

01:19:01.120 | will otherwise cover them over.

01:19:03.360 | The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.

01:19:06.760 | If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth,

01:19:08.920 | they yank 'em before you go down there.

01:19:11.320 | If you have any issues with your appendix,

01:19:12.920 | they'll cut it out of you before you go down there.

01:19:14.840 | The Russians at Vostok Base, not too far away,

01:19:17.040 | about 600 miles away.

01:19:18.880 | The doctors there, there's a famous picture

01:19:20.680 | of one of 'em operating on himself,

01:19:22.940 | taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter

01:19:25.720 | by himself.

01:19:26.560 | - It's a harsh condition.

01:19:27.640 | Science in the harshest of conditions.

01:19:29.760 | - On earth, at least.

01:19:31.080 | And we go to those great lengths,

01:19:32.560 | because it's a pristine environment

01:19:34.240 | to observe these precious photons.

01:19:36.440 | And we built this telescope,

01:19:38.120 | and it weighs tens of thousands of pounds.

01:19:40.640 | And it had to scan the sky, almost like, it's a robot.

01:19:44.600 | I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended.

01:19:47.120 | It needed, we have a guy who spends a year

01:19:50.080 | of his life down there, a girl who spends a year

01:19:51.760 | of their life down there.

01:19:52.960 | They're called winter-overs.

01:19:54.280 | They arrive in, sometimes as early as November,

01:19:56.840 | and they don't leave until the following December.

01:19:59.200 | And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000.

01:20:02.680 | You just have to work for one night of your life.

01:20:04.400 | That's all.

01:20:05.240 | (laughing)

01:20:06.360 | It's a long night.

01:20:07.760 | And what Bicep is, and I couldn't bring

01:20:10.840 | my polarized sunglasses here,

01:20:12.600 | so I brought these actual polarizers here.

01:20:14.480 | So if you take this and put it in front

01:20:16.400 | of your telescope there, you have now made a polarimeter.

01:20:21.200 | You have made a polarization-sensitive telescope.

01:20:24.120 | Now you may not be able to immediately know

01:20:26.320 | how you would use such a thing,

01:20:27.800 | but one way to think about it, now take this guy

01:20:30.380 | and look at a light, look at a light source,

01:20:33.720 | put one up to your eye, and now put the other one

01:20:35.600 | in front of it, anywhere, and now rotate them.

01:20:39.040 | What happens to the light source?

01:20:41.560 | - Becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.

01:20:45.440 | - Yeah, so that's called a quadrupolar pattern, right?

01:20:48.120 | So it's repeating, it goes bright, dim, bright, dim.

01:20:50.760 | It rotates twice in intensity

01:20:54.240 | for every single physical rotation.

01:20:56.680 | - Wow.

01:20:57.520 | - And that's because of the property of the photon.

01:20:58.680 | The photon is a spin-one field, but the polarization

01:21:02.520 | of light is the axis at which its electric field

01:21:06.040 | is oscillating.

01:21:07.280 | Its electric field is marching straight up

01:21:09.280 | and straight down, and so therefore,

01:21:11.120 | vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical

01:21:14.120 | polarization, and so you get the same pattern

01:21:16.320 | as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation.

01:21:19.200 | It's just like a spin-two object.

01:21:22.760 | So now if you put that in front of the telescope,

01:21:25.200 | you can do one of two things.

01:21:27.520 | Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in

01:21:29.880 | because you have one of the polarizers,

01:21:31.640 | and then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.

01:21:34.080 | You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.

01:21:37.080 | Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.

01:21:40.000 | There's a crystal, it's called calcite.

01:21:42.200 | This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.

01:21:44.800 | This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there,

01:21:48.380 | and tell me, what does it look like?

01:21:50.800 | - There's a...

01:21:51.640 | Like I could see everything twice.

01:21:56.440 | - It's a double image.

01:21:57.520 | - It's a double image.

01:21:58.400 | - That is a special crystal that has two different indices

01:22:01.040 | of refraction.

01:22:02.640 | So light emerging, which is unpolarized

01:22:04.980 | from the black ink, comes out,

01:22:07.240 | and it splits into two different directions.

01:22:09.800 | And it could split even more if I made the crystal,

01:22:12.240 | give you my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have.

01:22:14.360 | - What is the crystal with this kind of property called?

01:22:16.200 | - It's called calcite.

01:22:17.320 | This is crystal, it's called birefringent crystal.

01:22:20.040 | Bi means two, refringent means refracting.

01:22:23.420 | So this is a special type of material

01:22:25.460 | that separates light based on its polarization.

01:22:28.400 | - Pretty clean bi-signal.

01:22:31.440 | - Yeah.

01:22:32.280 | - It's cleanly two.

01:22:34.560 | - Yeah.

01:22:35.400 | - I'm seeing two very cleanly.

01:22:36.760 | - It's very crisp, right.

01:22:37.640 | So that's yours to keep with every time you host me.

01:22:39.980 | Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand.

01:22:43.400 | - Yep.

01:22:44.240 | - Put it on top of the crystal,

01:22:46.560 | and kind of move it back and forth.

01:22:47.880 | - Wow.

01:22:49.360 | This is incredible.

01:22:50.680 | You can switch, as you rotate,

01:22:52.240 | you switch from one signal to the other.

01:22:55.740 | So one of the refractions to the other.

01:22:58.660 | Whoa.

01:22:59.500 | - So that is, now, you are analyzing the polarization,

01:23:02.880 | you are confirming the light comes out of the crystal,

01:23:05.200 | two different types of polarization.

01:23:07.160 | And effectively, what we do,

01:23:09.260 | is we have those two things, if you like,

01:23:12.000 | but working in the microwave,

01:23:13.700 | so our detector, that's where the cosmic photons

01:23:16.100 | are brightest in the microwave regime

01:23:17.680 | of the electromagnetic spectrum,

01:23:19.880 | and we're coupling that to a refracting telescope.

01:23:21.980 | But your eyes are refracting telescopes,

01:23:23.400 | so you are a polarimeter right now.

01:23:25.480 | The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization,

01:23:29.160 | but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light

01:23:31.840 | and the color, that's what we call color,

01:23:33.360 | and intensity of brightness.

01:23:34.920 | - So you're devising an instrument

01:23:37.000 | that's very precisely measuring that polarization.

01:23:38.840 | - Exactly.

01:23:39.900 | And doing so in the microwave region,

01:23:41.880 | with detectors not made of biological human retina cells,

01:23:46.080 | but of superconductors, and things called bolometers,

01:23:49.800 | and this has to be done at temperatures

01:23:52.320 | close to absolute zero, under vacuum conditions,

01:23:55.080 | one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.

01:23:58.600 | - So why is it that this kind of device

01:24:01.280 | could win a Nobel Prize?

01:24:03.080 | - So when the CMB was discovered,

01:24:05.760 | it was discovered serendipitously.

01:24:07.300 | There were two radio astronomers

01:24:09.960 | working at the time at Bell Laboratories.

01:24:12.960 | Now why would Bell Laboratories

01:24:14.420 | be employing radio astronomers?

01:24:16.080 | Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple,

01:24:19.520 | or it was like a think tank, or it was Google.

01:24:22.280 | Let's say it was like Google.

01:24:23.120 | Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing.

01:24:26.720 | So they were working there,

01:24:28.660 | but imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers.

01:24:31.280 | Like they were actively recruiting,

01:24:32.880 | why would they do that?

01:24:33.880 | Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s,

01:24:36.440 | was the first commercial satellite launch for communication.

01:24:40.960 | And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone,

01:24:44.380 | part of AT&T and the early telephone company,

01:24:47.240 | later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.

01:24:50.480 | And they would take that 1946,

01:24:52.720 | and they would take that telescope technology

01:24:55.960 | that radio astronomers had developed,

01:24:58.460 | and they would use that to see if they could improve

01:25:01.340 | the signal-to-noise of the satellites that they were seeing.

01:25:03.280 | And they found they couldn't.

01:25:05.020 | They found that they could not improve

01:25:06.720 | the signal-to-noise ratio

01:25:08.220 | of the first telecommunication satellite.

01:25:10.120 | It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem.

01:25:13.080 | And they were bouncing signals from the West Coast

01:25:16.400 | up to the satellite, bouncing it down,

01:25:18.320 | landing it in New Jersey of all places,

01:25:21.360 | in northern New Jersey, Holmdel, New Jersey.

01:25:25.600 | And these radio astronomers couldn't get rid of the signal.

01:25:27.320 | So they said, "Well, New Jersey's not far from New York.

01:25:30.080 | "Let's see if the signal's coming from New York."

01:25:31.560 | Nope, not coming from New York.

01:25:32.920 | "Let's see if it changes with the year.

01:25:34.180 | "Maybe it's coming from the galaxy,"

01:25:35.380 | which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930-something.

01:25:38.680 | - So not being able to reduce the signal

01:25:41.440 | or increase the signal-to-noise ratio,

01:25:43.400 | the noise was-- - It was noise.

01:25:45.120 | They knew the signal was right.

01:25:46.680 | They couldn't get rid of the noise.

01:25:48.080 | And there was excess noise over the model

01:25:49.800 | that had not only been predicted by them,

01:25:52.080 | but had been measured by a previous guy,

01:25:53.800 | a guy by the name of Edward Ohm.

01:25:55.520 | He measured the same signal,

01:25:57.360 | found that there was this hiss of static,

01:25:59.320 | of radio static that he could not get rid of,

01:26:01.660 | that had a value of about three Kelvin.

01:26:03.960 | So you can translate.

01:26:04.800 | Remember I said, if you take a radio telescope

01:26:07.480 | and you have pointed at an object that's hot,

01:26:10.520 | the radio telescope's detector

01:26:11.920 | will get to the same temperature as the object.

01:26:14.080 | It's a principle of radiothermodynamics.

01:26:16.440 | So it's a really interesting thing.

01:26:17.640 | So a thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter

01:26:19.360 | from here on Earth.

01:26:20.200 | It's amazing.

01:26:21.520 | And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal

01:26:24.520 | not by its intensity, but by its temperature.

01:26:27.600 | So he found, this guy Edward Ohm,

01:26:29.600 | oh, there's this three Kelvin signal, I can't get rid of it.

01:26:32.240 | It must be I did my error analysis wrong

01:26:34.960 | and I would give him an F

01:26:36.320 | if he was one of my first year students.

01:26:38.840 | But he's just attributed to lack of understanding.

01:26:41.520 | These other guys, Penzias and Wilson,

01:26:43.760 | who are also radio astronomers, they said,

01:26:45.840 | no, let's build another experiment,

01:26:48.360 | put that inside of our telescope

01:26:50.600 | and do what's called calibration.

01:26:53.000 | Inject a known source of signal every second

01:26:56.600 | that has a temperature of about four Kelvin

01:26:58.720 | because the signal that they were trying to get rid of

01:27:00.280 | is about three Kelvin.

01:27:01.440 | And you wanna have it as close as possible

01:27:02.920 | to the pernicious signal as possible.

01:27:04.840 | They did that once a second.

01:27:06.320 | So they got billions of measurements,

01:27:07.560 | millions of measurements over the course

01:27:08.840 | of several months, years, and even by the end,

01:27:12.200 | millions of measurements for sure.

01:27:14.520 | And they found they couldn't get rid of it either,

01:27:16.320 | but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.

01:27:20.400 | - So how does having a four Kelvin source,

01:27:24.480 | how does the calibration work?

01:27:25.600 | Just out of curiosity.

01:27:26.560 | - It could be larger.

01:27:27.400 | Imagine you're trying to calibrate the microphone.

01:27:29.280 | You could do it with a really loud sound,

01:27:31.260 | but the gain would start to compress.

01:27:33.520 | So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector

01:27:35.960 | in every experiment that I've ever worked on.

01:27:38.400 | And they only have a linear region over a very small region.

01:27:41.240 | And you wanna keep it as linear as possible.

01:27:43.340 | That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of,

01:27:45.120 | you're trying to compare like a voice

01:27:47.040 | and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine,

01:27:49.080 | it's not gonna be as easy on the amplifiers

01:27:52.480 | as getting a slightly, a gong or something, a violin.

01:27:55.960 | - So the idea of the noise is present in both?

01:27:59.140 | - There's noise present in both.

01:28:00.360 | And you measure, what they did is they made

01:28:02.640 | a separate measurement just of the calibration system,

01:28:05.520 | which they measured exactly very well.

01:28:07.160 | Four Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.

01:28:09.280 | That's a temperature that's not gonna change.

01:28:11.440 | And it's certainly not gonna change

01:28:12.360 | over a time scale of one second.

01:28:14.120 | And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal,

01:28:16.720 | unknown signal, known signal, like a scale, like a balance.

01:28:18.840 | So another way to think about it is like this.

01:28:20.320 | You've seen these Libra kind of balances

01:28:22.480 | where you put two weights in a pan, right?

01:28:24.360 | What happens if you put like a one ounce weight

01:28:26.520 | on one side and a 20 kilogram weight?

01:28:28.360 | You don't get any measurement, right?

01:28:30.040 | You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight.

01:28:32.320 | That's why they use four Kelvin.

01:28:33.780 | - Got it.

01:28:34.620 | But just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic

01:28:37.400 | element to the fact that you're arriving

01:28:40.240 | at the same temperature.

01:28:41.200 | That's kind of fascinating.

01:28:42.040 | And you're measuring stuff in terms of,

01:28:43.660 | you're measuring signal in terms of temperature

01:28:45.640 | at the source.

01:28:46.840 | - Yeah.

01:28:47.680 | - So you get to, I mean, there's something

01:28:49.440 | about temperature that's intimate.

01:28:51.200 | - Yeah.

01:28:52.040 | - It's cool.

01:28:52.880 | - Yeah, especially since all life is basically

01:28:56.340 | conversion of energy and trying to control entropy,

01:28:58.920 | which is then related to thermodynamics exactly in that way.

01:29:02.600 | And this is a very crucial kind of thing to do in science

01:29:06.680 | because they weren't looking for the signal.

01:29:08.640 | They found it accidentally, these two scientists,

01:29:11.200 | Penzias and Wilson.

01:29:12.720 | And I like to think that those kinds of discoveries

01:29:15.140 | are the purest in science.

01:29:16.500 | Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said,

01:29:19.040 | like the most important reaction as a scientist

01:29:21.540 | is not Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know,

01:29:25.280 | I have found it.

01:29:26.400 | No, he said, no.

01:29:27.560 | He said like, that's weird.

01:29:29.020 | Like that's a much better reaction or that's freaking cool.

01:29:31.860 | Like that's a scientist, not like, oh, I found one.

01:29:34.720 | Because-

01:29:35.560 | - Surprise.

01:29:36.380 | - Yeah.

01:29:37.220 | - Yeah.

01:29:38.060 | - 'Cause if you find what you're gonna find,

01:29:38.880 | that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias,

01:29:43.000 | which is deadly.

01:29:43.960 | And so, you know, as close to deadly as possible.

01:29:46.240 | - So how does that take us to something

01:29:47.960 | that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?

01:29:50.640 | - Ah, so Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal.

01:29:54.240 | They ended up discovering the heat left over

01:29:56.480 | from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera.

01:30:01.480 | And that was a serendipitous discovery.

01:30:03.040 | They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

01:30:04.800 | It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.

01:30:07.640 | My reasoning is, what if you could explain

01:30:09.840 | not only how the elements got formed,

01:30:11.720 | but how the whole universe got formed

01:30:13.820 | and kill off every other model of science?

01:30:16.680 | So if that weren't enough, every scientist,

01:30:19.540 | you know, worth his or her salt,

01:30:21.200 | had told me and Andrew Lang and our colleagues,

01:30:24.760 | this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize, if you could do it.

01:30:27.780 | Because it was really explaining, again,

01:30:29.780 | the stakes of this science is different

01:30:31.580 | than like super fluidity, plasma physics.

01:30:33.880 | When you talk about the origin of the universe,

01:30:36.400 | it ties into everything.

01:30:37.840 | It ties into philosophy, theology.

01:30:41.840 | You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct,

01:30:45.440 | that the Bible can't be correct.

01:30:47.240 | In other words, what the Bible is correct now

01:30:49.320 | isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it.

01:30:52.080 | I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.

01:30:54.820 | But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.

01:30:57.800 | What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular?

01:31:00.560 | It would be more like the cosmology

01:31:02.520 | of Akhenaten and Egyptians,

01:31:04.820 | than the biblical Torah, Old Testament,

01:31:07.100 | if you will, narrative.

01:31:08.580 | So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.

01:31:11.360 | And again, it's not an offense,

01:31:12.640 | 'cause we need plasma physics.

01:31:14.120 | We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics.

01:31:17.360 | Like we literally use every branch of physics,

01:31:19.600 | and thermodynamics, superconductivity, quantum mechanics,

01:31:22.160 | all that goes into our understanding of the instrument.

01:31:24.840 | And even further, if you wanna understand the theory

01:31:27.680 | that predicts the signal that we purport to measure.

01:31:29.720 | So I rationalized that if Penzias and Wilson

01:31:33.640 | won the Nobel Prize for this,

01:31:35.320 | if Hulson Taylor won the Nobel Prize

01:31:37.600 | for indirectly detecting gravitational waves,

01:31:39.760 | this is decades before LIGO,

01:31:41.320 | by me detecting gravitational waves indirectly,

01:31:45.360 | detecting how the universe began,

01:31:47.800 | detecting the origin of the initial conditions

01:31:50.800 | for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis,

01:31:52.560 | which won the Nobel Prize in 1983,

01:31:55.040 | these are like five Nobel Prizes, potentially.

01:31:57.880 | For that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly

01:32:00.800 | get to being a slam dunk, to outdo what my father did,

01:32:04.240 | to do really this impossible.

01:32:06.160 | And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird,

01:32:10.720 | because people are like, "Oh, you don't really,

01:32:14.480 | "you still want the Nobel Prize, you're still greedy.

01:32:16.780 | "And look, you wrote another book about it."

01:32:19.120 | And I always joke, I'm like,

01:32:19.960 | "Well, if you wanna see if I'm a hypocrite,

01:32:21.280 | "just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.

01:32:23.780 | "And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite."

01:32:26.560 | - Wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings

01:32:29.200 | on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on.

01:32:31.540 | But, so there's this ambition, let's say,

01:32:36.280 | this device, this kind of signal could unlock

01:32:39.520 | many of the mysteries about the early universe.

01:32:42.240 | And so there's excitement there.

01:32:44.200 | So let's take it then further.

01:32:47.020 | I mean, there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak.

01:32:50.200 | Not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize,

01:32:54.520 | if the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded

01:32:58.400 | from the list of three that would get the Nobel Prize.

01:33:01.480 | So why were you excluded?

01:33:04.480 | Maybe that's a place to tell the story of BICEP2.

01:33:07.560 | - Yeah, so BICEP2, like iPhones,

01:33:10.160 | or I know you're an Android fanboy,

01:33:12.000 | but every year, they get a little bit better.

01:33:14.440 | They get more megapixels, they get more optics,

01:33:17.000 | triple X zoom, whatever, okay, right?

01:33:19.600 | We upgraded our detectors as well.

01:33:21.480 | The initial detectors were based

01:33:23.200 | on what are called semiconductors.

01:33:24.840 | They have certain properties that make them

01:33:27.020 | very difficult to replicate at scale.

01:33:29.240 | And we wanted to make them into superconductors,

01:33:31.880 | which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them.

01:33:35.320 | Why superconductors?

01:33:36.640 | Well, again, we're measuring heat.

01:33:38.160 | So one thing about a superconductor

01:33:40.160 | is that it transitions from some finite resistance

01:33:43.320 | to zero resistance over a very short span

01:33:47.000 | of temperature range.

01:33:48.340 | That means you can use that very short span dependency

01:33:51.280 | as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer.

01:33:54.840 | And so my brilliant colleagues around the world

01:33:56.960 | in this case, Jamie Bach,

01:33:58.020 | and nowadays Suzanne Staggs at Princeton,

01:34:00.600 | they are just exquisitely making these sensors,

01:34:03.920 | tens of thousands of them.

01:34:05.800 | The initial BICEP1 instrument,

01:34:07.680 | of course, we just call it the BICEP,

01:34:09.440 | that only had 98 detectors.

01:34:12.200 | Simon's Observatory is gonna have 100 times more

01:34:15.540 | just in one of our four telescopes.

01:34:17.740 | We're gonna have 60,000 detectors operating full-time

01:34:21.680 | at 0.1 degree above absolute zero

01:34:24.460 | in the Atacama Desert, we'll get there.

01:34:26.440 | But in the case of getting back to what BICEP did,

01:34:30.160 | we upgraded, made BICEP2.

01:34:32.560 | In January 2010, we had just installed

01:34:37.560 | in the exact same location at the South Pole

01:34:42.240 | in the same building,

01:34:43.240 | which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory, DSL,

01:34:47.280 | still operating to this very day.

01:34:48.940 | We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before.

01:34:54.280 | Had very similar, identical optics, cryogenics,

01:34:56.960 | vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors

01:35:00.120 | to 512 detectors, so almost an order of magnitude.

01:35:03.440 | Very substantial upgrade.

01:35:05.480 | And it had certain other features

01:35:06.780 | that made it even more powerful,

01:35:08.520 | but then just a naive factor of five.

01:35:10.940 | And then we started observing with that,

01:35:12.640 | and we knew we'd have years to go,

01:35:14.080 | and maybe we'd never see anything.

01:35:15.280 | Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations

01:35:17.520 | in the fabric of space-time produced close to the origin

01:35:20.200 | of the universes we could ever get to.

01:35:23.000 | So I was playing a role in that.

01:35:24.320 | Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea

01:35:28.160 | that I had had for BICEP along with Andrew Lang.

01:35:31.580 | And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley,

01:35:37.120 | and I got a call from Andrew Lang's,

01:35:38.960 | or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor,

01:35:41.720 | Paul Richards, at UC Berkeley.

01:35:44.040 | And he said that Andrew was dead.

01:35:45.880 | He had taken his life by suicide.

01:35:49.000 | And this is a man,

01:35:50.280 | and I had already lost my father at this point,

01:35:52.480 | in 2010, but he was like a father figure to me, Andrew.

01:35:55.720 | He would give me advice on marriage,

01:35:58.600 | on how I should be with my kids,

01:36:00.480 | and what was the most important way

01:36:03.280 | to move through the academic ladder.

01:36:04.640 | Again, he was preternaturally suited

01:36:07.160 | to win the Nobel Prize.

01:36:08.520 | Everyone always thought he would win it.

01:36:10.760 | If he were alive, he still could win it.

01:36:12.560 | In fact, his wife, or his ex-wife, won it,

01:36:15.040 | Frances Arnold, in 2018.

01:36:17.720 | And it was this power couple,

01:36:20.480 | and it destroyed me for a long time,

01:36:23.720 | because he was just this magical person.

01:36:27.400 | I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life,

01:36:30.400 | even like these aspects of raising kids

01:36:34.440 | and being married without him.

01:36:37.000 | And to do it in that way, it felt like,

01:36:40.000 | again, he's got kids,

01:36:41.560 | and I feel terrible for them, obviously,

01:36:44.240 | but it did feel like a betrayal.

01:36:45.440 | I mean, I'm just being honest with you.

01:36:46.640 | It felt like, why the F did you not reach out?

01:36:50.200 | I thought we were close, and I couldn't.

01:36:52.680 | I told him everything,

01:36:53.800 | and I felt like he had told me everything.

01:36:56.400 | And now he was gone,

01:36:57.440 | and then inevitably, we had to keep running the instrument.

01:36:59.960 | I mean, there's millions of dollars invested,

01:37:01.800 | careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard,

01:37:05.720 | and then here we were,

01:37:06.680 | and who's gonna take over the lead?

01:37:08.360 | He was the lead of the project at Caltech.

01:37:10.920 | And then it turned out that the other collaborators

01:37:14.160 | with whom I had been working for years

01:37:15.680 | and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well,

01:37:18.200 | they had decided to form a collaboration

01:37:21.080 | in which I was no longer the principal investigator.

01:37:23.480 | I was no longer one of the co-principal investigators

01:37:25.560 | as I was on BICEP1.

01:37:26.920 | So I continued on BICEP1 as the co-leader of it,

01:37:29.580 | but not on BICEP2.

01:37:31.040 | And obviously, that was pretty painful.

01:37:34.640 | - This is all happening at the same time

01:37:36.280 | as you lose this father figure.

01:37:40.360 | Now there's this kind of,

01:37:42.360 | this one betrayal in a way,

01:37:45.200 | and then there's another,

01:37:46.920 | or something that feels like a betrayal.

01:37:48.800 | - Yeah, and he had kind of been the only one

01:37:51.840 | looking out for my interest in the new experiment.

01:37:54.800 | I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego,

01:37:57.440 | and there were other postdocs in the mix,

01:37:59.200 | all of whom would come there to work with him

01:38:01.240 | to get the approbation that would then lead

01:38:03.720 | to their careers taking off as it did for mine.

01:38:06.780 | And so there was a competition.

01:38:09.000 | I mean, science is not free from egos and competition

01:38:13.320 | and desires, rightfully or wrongfully,

01:38:15.880 | for credit and attribution.

01:38:17.440 | - Was he the source of strength and confidence

01:38:20.000 | for you as a scientist, as a man?

01:38:22.040 | I mean, we're kind of alone in this world.

01:38:26.280 | When you take on difficult things,

01:38:28.480 | we often kind of grasp at a few folks

01:38:31.760 | that give us strength.

01:38:33.300 | - Yeah.

01:38:34.140 | - Was he basically your only source of strength

01:38:37.320 | in this whole journey?

01:38:38.260 | Like primarily in terms of like this close knit?

01:38:41.840 | - As a scientist, there were really two.

01:38:43.600 | There was one, this Russian cosmologist,

01:38:46.080 | Alexander Polnareff, who thankfully is very much alive.

01:38:48.520 | He was at Queen Mary University.

01:38:51.040 | Now he's retired.

01:38:52.520 | He was kind of a theoretical, cosmological father to me.

01:38:56.000 | And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me,

01:39:00.320 | you need to have a brand as a scientist.

01:39:02.560 | Every scientist has a brand,

01:39:04.000 | and some of them don't protect it.

01:39:05.620 | Some of them don't burnish it.

01:39:07.840 | But some of the skills about being a scientist,

01:39:09.980 | we don't teach our students,

01:39:11.520 | involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona?

01:39:16.520 | And he was the exemplar for that.

01:39:18.760 | In addition to being the avuncular,

01:39:21.560 | father figure type character,

01:39:23.580 | that really was the person I would talk to.

01:39:26.480 | I had issues with, when I had issues with my own students,

01:39:29.360 | and he would tell me how those were,

01:39:30.680 | and he would tell me his misgivings

01:39:32.960 | about people that he worked with,

01:39:35.320 | or things in his personal life.

01:39:36.520 | And it was devastating.

01:39:39.160 | But again, like who the hell am I?

01:39:40.680 | I'm not his kid.

01:39:42.240 | His kids lost father.

01:39:44.400 | So I feel guilty talking about it in that sense,

01:39:46.720 | but it's just a reality.

01:39:48.440 | - Well, there is something that's not often talked about

01:39:50.600 | is people who collaborate on scientific efforts.

01:39:55.000 | I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't wanna compare,

01:39:58.680 | but sometimes when the collaborations are truly great,

01:40:03.480 | it sounds similar as when veterans talk about

01:40:09.160 | their time serving together.

01:40:11.360 | There's a bond that's formed.

01:40:12.920 | So like comparing family and this kind of thing is,

01:40:15.960 | you know, it's not productive,

01:40:19.920 | but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real,

01:40:24.120 | because you're taking on something,

01:40:28.160 | you're taking on the impossible.

01:40:29.760 | You're trying to achieve something,

01:40:32.520 | sort of like there's this darkness,

01:40:33.960 | this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by,

01:40:37.640 | which is what the human condition is.

01:40:40.480 | And you are like grasping at hope

01:40:42.840 | through the tools of science.

01:40:44.720 | And you're doing that together with like a confidence

01:40:47.960 | you probably should not have,

01:40:50.040 | but you're boldly pushing through.

01:40:51.480 | And then for him to take his own life,

01:40:56.480 | it can ask you about this kind of moment that combined,

01:41:02.160 | I don't wanna say betrayal,

01:41:03.860 | but perhaps the feeling of betrayal

01:41:05.880 | that BICEP2 kind of goes on without you,

01:41:09.320 | even though you're part of it,

01:41:11.480 | you're not part of the leadership group.

01:41:13.480 | Can you describe those low points?

01:41:17.300 | Was there a depression?

01:41:19.840 | Or was there a crumbling of confidence?

01:41:23.000 | - Yeah, I mean, it was so wrapped up

01:41:26.280 | with my identity as a person, you know,

01:41:29.240 | like there's only a few different ways to have identity,

01:41:32.040 | and you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically.

01:41:34.800 | One of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist

01:41:37.120 | and that sometimes is their primary identity.

01:41:39.160 | Now I've got other, you know, I'm a husband and father,

01:41:41.920 | but you know, at that time that was my identity.

01:41:44.840 | So to have that kind of taken away,

01:41:48.100 | it, you know what, it reminded me of being, you know,

01:41:51.000 | kind of adopted in a sense, like the one who created me

01:41:55.840 | or that I had played a role in my life,

01:41:58.360 | that he abandoned me in the sense,

01:42:00.800 | it felt like these people are abandoning me.

01:42:02.640 | And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy

01:42:04.320 | that you use is like in the war,

01:42:07.080 | they're all working, you know, for common good.

01:42:08.680 | It's not like, I wanna be, get the most kills.

01:42:11.600 | I compare it more to like a band,

01:42:13.360 | like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did.

01:42:16.400 | And then they like, you know, they ripped apart

01:42:18.780 | because of egos, credit, they had solo careers,

01:42:21.220 | they had, you know, relations of their intimates

01:42:24.120 | and so forth.

01:42:25.340 | And there it's not only for the common good.

01:42:27.800 | There is more of a zero sum aspect.

01:42:30.160 | Like I would say, science is not,

01:42:32.340 | science is an infinite game.

01:42:33.920 | You can't win science.

01:42:35.800 | You never get to the, oh, we won science.

01:42:37.400 | And even the Nobel Prize, they don't feel like,

01:42:38.880 | oh, we're done.

01:42:39.720 | They feel like a lot of times they're imposters,

01:42:41.320 | even to that day.

01:42:42.960 | However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of,

01:42:46.240 | lot of finite games where there is only one winner

01:42:49.060 | for tenure.

01:42:49.960 | There is only three winner,

01:42:51.240 | are only three winners for the Nobel Prize.

01:42:53.840 | And because of that, I think it's heterodox

01:42:56.000 | and it's very confusing, especially there's no guide.

01:42:59.160 | I never got a guide how to be a professor,

01:43:00.760 | how to teach, how to lead a research group,

01:43:02.520 | how to deal with the death of an advisor,

01:43:05.000 | how to deal with an unruly graduate student or two.

01:43:07.560 | So we're all like reinventing it,

01:43:09.920 | which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it.

01:43:12.400 | 'Cause the academic system that I am a part of

01:43:14.320 | and you are a part of is a thousand years old.

01:43:16.860 | Dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy,

01:43:20.120 | 1088 or so, first universities were established.

01:43:24.200 | And very little has changed.

01:43:26.560 | There's some guy or gal scratching a rock

01:43:28.880 | on another piece of rock and lecturing in front.

01:43:31.920 | There's only one better aspect nowadays

01:43:33.800 | is that back then, the students could go on strike

01:43:36.880 | if they didn't like the professor

01:43:38.240 | and then he or she wouldn't get paid.

01:43:39.920 | Probably mostly it was he's back then.

01:43:42.160 | Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced

01:43:44.400 | by tenure, so okay.

01:43:45.800 | But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug

01:43:50.080 | getting pulled out from underneath me

01:43:52.080 | because he was like my consigliere.

01:43:55.400 | He was a guy I sought counsel and counseled me

01:43:59.000 | and he's dead and I felt like there is no one

01:44:02.440 | who's gonna honor the agreements that we had.

01:44:05.520 | And he was a very soulful person.

01:44:07.080 | He was so much better at being a scientist

01:44:09.560 | than I could ever be.

01:44:11.400 | And just the loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.

01:44:14.920 | And I thought, oh, it's so sad

01:44:17.760 | 'cause he could have won the Nobel Prize.

01:44:19.920 | I don't think like that anymore.

01:44:21.400 | First I think about his kids.

01:44:23.160 | Felt at first, now there goes my chance

01:44:25.480 | at winning a Nobel Prize and hence the title of the book

01:44:28.440 | was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.

01:44:31.080 | It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize

01:44:32.960 | that have to be done away with.

01:44:34.120 | It's a double entendre.

01:44:35.400 | We need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize

01:44:37.440 | to help science out.

01:44:38.520 | We can talk about that a different time.

01:44:39.960 | But in the context of now thinking back on it,

01:44:44.240 | that was such a minuscule part of it

01:44:46.160 | because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize

01:44:49.200 | or I did win the, or any of us did.

01:44:51.960 | Would that have changed anything?

01:44:53.240 | Would that have brought anything back?

01:44:55.120 | It's so, we say it's like vanity, it's futility.

01:44:58.760 | And I just, for me, the Nobel Prize is like,

01:45:03.760 | I don't wanna say it's insignificant

01:45:06.080 | 'cause obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence.

01:45:08.640 | And I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show,

01:45:11.480 | I'm gonna name drop, okay?

01:45:13.000 | And he prepares, he prepares like a surgeon

01:45:17.440 | before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show.

01:45:20.400 | So you see him going on Colbert Report,

01:45:22.840 | you think, oh, they just have a banter,

01:45:24.320 | he's just naturally gifted.

01:45:25.400 | No, he said, no, no, no.

01:45:27.080 | You say that, you're undermining what he does.

01:45:29.760 | What he does is he goes back,

01:45:31.280 | he watches the last month of Colbert Reports

01:45:33.680 | or whatever it's called, late show.

01:45:35.720 | And he says, how long does Steven pause between questions?

01:45:38.520 | How long in the news cycle does he go back?

01:45:41.240 | What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?

01:45:44.200 | So I took Neil and I did that for you.

01:45:46.600 | And I look back, how many times has Lex mentioned

01:45:48.680 | the words Nobel and Prize?

01:45:50.200 | And I put it into Google Ngram

01:45:51.640 | and out came exactly the same number of times

01:45:55.040 | as show episodes as of this moment.

01:45:58.960 | So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.

01:46:01.680 | - Yeah, I mean, it is so strange as a symbol

01:46:05.560 | that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right?

01:46:09.000 | It's both sad and beautiful that a little prize,

01:46:17.000 | like a little award, a medal, a little plaque,

01:46:20.520 | they'll be most likely forgotten by history completely.

01:46:23.320 | Some silly list.

01:46:26.240 | It's somehow a catalyst for greatness.

01:46:32.120 | It resulted in you doing your life's work.

01:46:35.560 | The dream of it.

01:46:37.040 | - Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?

01:46:39.680 | I can't necessarily counterfactually state

01:46:42.080 | that that would have happened.

01:46:43.480 | So no, it definitely has a place.

01:46:46.000 | And for me, it is valuable to think about it.

01:46:50.280 | But the level of obsession that academics have about it

01:46:54.800 | is really, I think it is almost unbalanced

01:46:58.480 | becoming unhealthy.

01:47:00.080 | And again, I make no truck

01:47:03.240 | with the winners of the Nobel Prize.

01:47:04.760 | Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show.

01:47:08.120 | And to think about the one rule.

01:47:10.480 | So by the way, right after the denouement of the story,

01:47:13.680 | which I'll get to in a bit,

01:47:15.440 | how our dreams went down to dust and ashes,

01:47:19.160 | I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

01:47:21.440 | to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.

01:47:25.400 | So the one that I theoretically

01:47:27.360 | could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually,

01:47:31.440 | they asked me to nominate.

01:47:32.320 | Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say, "Brian,"

01:47:35.200 | instead of me inviting myself on the show,

01:47:37.080 | if you say, "Brian, would you like to come

01:47:38.520 | "on the Lex Friedman podcast?"

01:47:40.040 | I say, "You know what, Lex?

01:47:42.040 | "You know that guy, Rogan?

01:47:42.880 | "I think you might have heard him.

01:47:44.000 | "Can you introduce him to me?"

01:47:46.600 | You imagine how that would feel.

01:47:47.720 | Like you'd be like, "Ah, you know, I'm humiliated."

01:47:50.000 | So I was asked to nominate the winners.

01:47:51.280 | And the one rule that they say,

01:47:53.360 | of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated,

01:47:55.800 | there's only one rule that they maintained.

01:47:57.720 | In other words, he said one person can win it

01:47:59.960 | for something they discovered in the preceding year

01:48:02.920 | that had the greatest benefit to mankind.

01:48:06.080 | Made the world better, right?

01:48:07.880 | None of that was mentioned in the letter.

01:48:09.480 | It said many people can win it for work done long ago.

01:48:12.320 | They didn't mention anything in the letter to me

01:48:14.000 | signed by the Secretary General.

01:48:15.680 | Nothing about benefiting mankind.

01:48:16.920 | They said, "Just one thing, can't nominate yourself."

01:48:20.200 | So none of these guys nominated themselves.

01:48:22.160 | - Actually, little known fact,

01:48:23.800 | they sent that exact letter just to you.

01:48:26.400 | That rule was created just for you.

01:48:29.920 | - That's called the Keating Correlate, yes, exactly.

01:48:32.800 | - Just to like-- - Good for them.

01:48:34.800 | - Rub it in.

01:48:37.600 | I mean, in this particular case,

01:48:39.600 | of course, there's some weird technicality or whatever,

01:48:42.360 | but in this particular case,

01:48:43.680 | it's kind of a powerful reminder.

01:48:47.160 | - Yeah, no way.

01:48:48.000 | - That the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind.

01:48:51.360 | And there's stories behind all of that.

01:48:54.360 | - Yeah, I mean, here's a good example.

01:48:55.560 | Again, this is my friend, Barry Barish.

01:48:57.080 | He's become like a mentor and a friend.

01:48:59.240 | He wrote the foreword to my book, "Into the Impossible."

01:49:03.040 | He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died,

01:49:07.080 | and he admits it, and he said it.

01:49:09.080 | And actually, it's funny with him,

01:49:10.280 | because I've heard you talk very rhapsodically

01:49:13.480 | and lovingly and romantically with Harry Cliff,

01:49:16.080 | and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way,

01:49:18.320 | about the LHC and how wonderful it is,

01:49:21.200 | and how in that, we were about to build

01:49:23.520 | the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas,

01:49:27.000 | and it didn't get built,

01:49:28.400 | and it got canceled by Congress, and blah, blah, blah.

01:49:30.280 | And I say to Barry,

01:49:31.200 | that was the best thing that ever happened to you.

01:49:32.960 | And he's like, "What the hell are you talking about?"

01:49:34.240 | I'm like, if that didn't get canceled,

01:49:35.800 | first of all, even though it did get canceled,

01:49:39.400 | the Europeans went on to build it themselves,

01:49:41.840 | saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars,

01:49:44.240 | and we wouldn't have learned anything

01:49:46.040 | really substantially new,

01:49:47.440 | as proven by the fact that, as you and Harry talked about,

01:49:50.160 | nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note

01:49:52.720 | has come out.

01:49:53.560 | And actually, he's had a recent paper,

01:49:55.200 | but it's been an upper limit,

01:49:56.520 | along with his collaborators, an LHCb experiment

01:49:58.800 | that I'm gonna be talking with him about.

01:50:00.680 | But the bottom line is,

01:50:01.840 | it was really built to detect the Higgs.

01:50:03.080 | So the SSC, for twice as much money,

01:50:06.200 | would have sucked up Barry's career,

01:50:07.640 | and he would have been working on that.

01:50:08.760 | Maybe not.

01:50:09.720 | And then he would never have worked on LIGO,

01:50:11.920 | and then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, right?

01:50:13.960 | So you look at counterfactual history.

01:50:15.440 | That's not actually a big stretch, right?

01:50:16.960 | If the SSC had still gone on, he would have worked on it,

01:50:19.080 | 'cause he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment.

01:50:21.840 | Second thing, if,

01:50:23.400 | imagine the following thing had happened.

01:50:26.280 | They won the Nobel Prize, because in September 2015,

01:50:30.440 | they detected unequivocal evidence

01:50:32.320 | for the in-spiral collision of two massive black holes,

01:50:35.880 | each about 30 times the mass of the sun,

01:50:38.180 | leaving behind an object

01:50:39.880 | that had just less than 60 solar masses behind.

01:50:43.160 | So one solar mass worth of matter,

01:50:45.760 | got mass, got converted to pure gravitational energy.

01:50:49.000 | No light was seen by them.

01:50:51.220 | This particular date, September 14th, 2015, okay?

01:50:56.120 | That explosion, because of the miracle of time travel

01:50:59.920 | that telescopes afford us,

01:51:01.160 | that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago

01:51:05.840 | in a galaxy far, far away.

01:51:07.240 | They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in,

01:51:08.880 | still, and they never will, okay?

01:51:10.840 | If that collision between these two things,

01:51:13.640 | which have probably been orbiting each other

01:51:15.220 | for maybe a million years or more,

01:51:17.540 | if that had occurred 15 days earlier,

01:51:20.180 | Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, because--

01:51:23.240 | - It's hilarious to think that there's one human

01:51:26.040 | that won the Nobel Prize,

01:51:27.000 | because two giant things collided.

01:51:31.200 | - A billion, 200 million years ago,

01:51:34.120 | and if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30,

01:51:37.320 | because that was the deadline

01:51:39.260 | for the Nobel Prize to be announced,

01:51:40.720 | they announced the findings in February,

01:51:43.220 | but you have to nominate the winners in January.

01:51:45.320 | So I could have nominated them up until January 30th,

01:51:48.060 | but they didn't announce anything,

01:51:49.800 | and there were just rumors,

01:51:51.000 | and so he didn't,

01:51:53.000 | but the reason that he wouldn't have won it,

01:51:54.640 | 'cause there was another guy who was still alive,

01:51:56.560 | considered to be the founder and father

01:51:58.560 | of three of the three fathers,

01:52:00.080 | Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne, who did win it,

01:52:02.760 | and the third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Drever,

01:52:05.160 | who passed away, again, he was alive in 2016,

01:52:08.760 | he died in the middle of 2017,

01:52:10.120 | and then he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

01:52:12.600 | - And here we are, several billion of hairless apes

01:52:16.560 | that strangely wear clothing,

01:52:19.780 | celebrated three other clothed hairless apes

01:52:24.780 | with a medal, with one particular element,

01:52:30.560 | and then they made speeches in a particular language

01:52:34.000 | that evolved-- - They bent down

01:52:36.180 | to get those medals in front of another guy

01:52:38.800 | who wears even fancier clothes,

01:52:40.800 | who is the king of Sweden.

01:52:42.680 | - And then they got some free food afterwards.

01:52:44.920 | - They get some reindeer meat, that's right.

01:52:47.020 | - Okay, excellent.

01:52:48.540 | Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example,

01:52:53.040 | what happened to you in terms of Bicep 2?

01:52:57.160 | - I wanna kinda speak at a high level

01:53:00.960 | about a particular thing I observed.

01:53:02.520 | So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast,

01:53:05.880 | I was just listening to the podcast,

01:53:07.040 | I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.

01:53:09.520 | And it also coincided with my entry into grad school

01:53:14.520 | and this whole journey of academia.

01:53:17.600 | So grad school, getting my PhD,

01:53:19.680 | then going to MIT and then Google,

01:53:21.560 | and then just looking at this whole world of research.

01:53:26.540 | What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world

01:53:31.540 | is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them.

01:53:37.360 | He gets genuinely, and I now know this

01:53:39.880 | from just being a friend privately,

01:53:42.600 | he genuinely gets excited by the success of others.

01:53:47.600 | And the contrast of that to how folks in academia

01:53:53.160 | often behave was always really disappointing to me.

01:53:56.680 | Because the natural, just on a basic human level,

01:54:00.700 | there is an excitement, but the nature of that excitement

01:54:04.940 | is more like, I'm happy for my friend,

01:54:08.620 | but I'm really jealous and I want to even outdo them.

01:54:11.380 | I wanna celebrate them, but I wanna do even better.

01:54:13.940 | So that's even for friends.

01:54:16.000 | So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others.

01:54:21.100 | And then couple that with just the,

01:54:24.340 | you now as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling,

01:54:28.220 | which is like, there's not even a willingness

01:54:31.180 | to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.

01:54:35.260 | People in academia are often best equipped,

01:54:40.020 | technically in terms of language, to celebrate others.

01:54:43.360 | They understand the beauty, the full richness

01:54:48.040 | of why the cool idea is as cool as it is.

01:54:50.980 | And they're in the best position to celebrate it.

01:54:53.180 | And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others,

01:54:57.020 | they might end up on the cover of Nature or whatever,

01:54:59.880 | and not me. - It's a zero-sum game.

01:55:01.740 | - They turn it into a zero-sum game.

01:55:03.880 | The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me

01:55:08.500 | and many others is that it doesn't have to be that way.

01:55:12.060 | And forget money and all those kinds of things.

01:55:15.300 | I think there's a narrative told that academics are this way

01:55:20.740 | because there's a limited amount of money,

01:55:23.220 | and so they're fighting for this.

01:55:24.540 | I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way.

01:55:28.500 | I think you can have a limited amount of money.

01:55:32.900 | The battle for money happens in the space of proposal.

01:55:36.860 | There's networking, there's private stuff.

01:55:39.360 | Public celebration of others, and just actually,

01:55:42.820 | just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart

01:55:46.180 | is not have to do anything with money.

01:55:48.540 | It has to do with you having a big ego

01:55:51.980 | and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey

01:55:55.020 | that we're all on.

01:55:56.500 | And there's folks like Joe Rogan,

01:55:58.500 | who in the comedian circles is also rare,

01:56:01.780 | but he inspired all these other comedians to realize,

01:56:05.020 | you know what, it's great to celebrate each other.

01:56:07.100 | We're promoting each other, and therefore the pie grows

01:56:10.340 | 'cause everybody else gets excited about this whole thing,

01:56:12.860 | and the pie grows.

01:56:14.100 | Right now, the scientists, by fighting,

01:56:16.940 | by not celebrating each other, are not growing the pie,

01:56:20.020 | and now because of that,

01:56:22.180 | sort of science becomes less and less popular.

01:56:24.180 | - It's a flywheel, exactly.

01:56:25.660 | No, and I wanna point out two things.

01:56:26.740 | One is that I remember you went on Joe's show

01:56:29.900 | maybe a couple of years ago,

01:56:31.400 | and then he gave you a watch.

01:56:34.480 | He gave you like a Rolex, right?

01:56:36.260 | And I tweeted to you, and I think it's--

01:56:37.540 | - Omega. - Omega, sorry.

01:56:38.900 | Okay, fine.

01:56:40.340 | The watch that went to the moon,

01:56:42.440 | which we will get to in a bit.

01:56:44.640 | I don't think he could give you what I gave you,

01:56:46.220 | though, by the way.

01:56:47.060 | (laughing)

01:56:47.880 | And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.

01:56:50.540 | - And by the way, I also wanted to mention,

01:56:52.340 | because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset,

01:56:55.220 | and you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.

01:56:57.100 | And we had this conversation with him,

01:56:59.660 | 'cause I was like, when I was,

01:57:01.160 | so moving to Austin, and had a conversation,

01:57:06.140 | like, don't you think it's weird

01:57:07.580 | if we have the same guests at the same time or whatever?

01:57:10.140 | He's like, fuck that.

01:57:12.620 | I want you to be more successful than me.

01:57:14.620 | I want, he truly wants everybody,

01:57:18.060 | like, especially people close to him,

01:57:19.900 | to be more successful.

01:57:21.060 | Like, there's not even a thought, like--

01:57:23.180 | - But you know why he does,

01:57:24.260 | and this is what I tweeted to you,

01:57:25.100 | and one of the few things I think you have retweeted

01:57:27.380 | that I sent you.

01:57:28.220 | I said, someday you're gonna give that to somebody.

01:57:31.060 | And today I wanted that to be me.

01:57:32.580 | No, no. (laughing)

01:57:35.620 | Joe's Omega.

01:57:36.460 | No, but the point is, he sees in you that same grandiosity,

01:57:40.960 | that same genuine spirit graciousness.

01:57:43.020 | And I think that's true.

01:57:43.860 | And you do do something very rare.

01:57:45.460 | I don't wanna turn this into too much of a love fest,

01:57:47.260 | but I do wanna say, even back to Andrew,

01:57:49.980 | who I've almost been hagiographic about,

01:57:52.780 | just treating him like a saint.

01:57:54.220 | He said to me the same thing,

01:57:55.220 | and in a moment of peak, said like,

01:57:57.980 | goddammit, I have to train these guys

01:58:00.560 | and women that work for me

01:58:02.460 | so that they can be better than me,

01:58:04.220 | so that they can go out and compete with me

01:58:06.320 | for the same limited amount of funding from the effing NSL.

01:58:09.820 | That wasn't who he was.

01:58:12.900 | That was just an expression.

01:58:14.060 | Like, I am doing something which is fundamentally,

01:58:16.460 | but you know what?

01:58:17.360 | When you have kids, hopefully,

01:58:19.620 | please God, you will someday.

01:58:20.900 | 'Cause I think, and I hope we can get

01:58:22.380 | to talk about that later, but part of investment

01:58:26.060 | and part of doing something when you have a kid,

01:58:28.580 | like you can get married.

01:58:30.460 | You can marry someone 'cause she's rich or he's rich.

01:58:33.460 | You can marry someone 'cause they're good looking

01:58:35.100 | or he's good looking.

01:58:36.300 | You can marry for all these different reasons

01:58:37.940 | that are ultimately selfish.

01:58:39.980 | There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish.

01:58:41.860 | Nobody says, "Oh, you know what?

01:58:43.060 | "I really want this thing that's three feet tall,

01:58:44.900 | "that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor,

01:58:47.000 | "that wakes me up all hours of the night,

01:58:48.440 | "that interferes with my love life."

01:58:50.060 | Nobody says that 'cause it doesn't benefit you

01:58:52.120 | for months and months.

01:58:53.060 | A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me,

01:58:55.380 | does a lot of my solo videos, he's having his first kid.

01:58:58.100 | He's like, "What do I do?"

01:58:59.300 | 'Cause it always gets stupid if I,

01:59:00.400 | "Oh, catch up on sleep now."

01:59:01.660 | Like, yeah, I'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bank.

01:59:04.500 | I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right?

01:59:06.700 | You can't do that, that's stupid.

01:59:08.100 | What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby,

01:59:10.840 | let the mother relax.

01:59:11.820 | Like, in other words, do the things,

01:59:14.060 | and this really relates back to what Aristotle once said.

01:59:16.380 | Aristotle once said, "Why do parents love kids

01:59:18.900 | "more than kids love parents?"

01:59:20.780 | As much as you love your dad and your mom,

01:59:22.740 | they still love you more.

01:59:24.580 | And because you love that which you sacrifice for.

01:59:27.140 | Here's a proof.

01:59:28.780 | I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.

01:59:31.020 | Some with severe, one of my uncles,

01:59:34.180 | my uncle on the Keating side had severe,

01:59:35.820 | what they called mental retardation,

01:59:37.300 | now it's probably has a different name.

01:59:40.180 | That, out of the nine other brothers and sisters,

01:59:42.800 | he was their favorite.

01:59:44.400 | 'Cause they had to sacrifice so much for him.

01:59:46.920 | And I think of that, in the small case,

01:59:49.080 | like Joe's kind of mentoring you or whatever,

01:59:51.160 | and you're gonna mentor someone else.

01:59:52.120 | You love that which you sacrifice for.

01:59:54.380 | Sacrifice is reduction of entropy,

01:59:56.480 | it's storing and investing, and you wanna protect that.

01:59:59.520 | And that to me really speaks to this.

02:00:02.240 | So, yeah, I don't hold it against.

02:00:03.680 | But it is true, like scientists are,

02:00:06.300 | when they're described, again,

02:00:07.720 | they're often said to be like children, right?

02:00:09.240 | You've heard this description.

02:00:10.120 | They're inquisitive, they're curious, they're passionate.

02:00:12.360 | They love, and I'm like, yeah,

02:00:13.340 | and they don't play well with others.

02:00:14.360 | They're jealous, they're petty, they're selfish,

02:00:15.640 | they won't share their ball and they'll go home.

02:00:18.120 | There's no such thing as a single-edged sword.

02:00:19.820 | I wish there were, you know,

02:00:21.520 | because we need some more of that,

02:00:23.140 | 'cause you gotta dull it up.

02:00:24.640 | But in this case, he, you know,

02:00:27.320 | I think when you have this kind of investment in science,

02:00:32.080 | it's gonna be natural.

02:00:33.640 | But that doesn't mean we have to like,

02:00:35.080 | you know, feed the flames of competition.

02:00:37.680 | You know, I'm like really,

02:00:38.880 | if you go to the homepage of the NSF,

02:00:40.880 | or the Department of Energy,

02:00:42.260 | or the recently released National Academy of Sciences

02:00:45.160 | Future of Science for the Astronomical Sciences,

02:00:48.480 | for the next 25 years or more,

02:00:50.920 | they talk about how many Nobel Prizes

02:00:52.360 | these different science things could win.

02:00:54.080 | Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB,

02:00:57.000 | B-mode polarization, the nice, you know,

02:00:59.480 | that's figure two in this thing.

02:01:01.800 | And I'm like, what message does that send to kids?

02:01:03.640 | Like, to young people?

02:01:05.360 | Like, that's what you should be doing

02:01:06.640 | so that you win this small, as you said,

02:01:07.840 | this prize given out by one hairless ape to another

02:01:10.040 | wearing a fancier costume eating reindeer?

02:01:11.880 | - Especially in the case of the Nobel Prize,

02:01:12.960 | it's only currently given to three people.

02:01:15.280 | - At most, which was never one of his stipulate.

02:01:17.440 | He actually said one, you can only give it to one person.

02:01:19.800 | So they change it, why did they change it?

02:01:21.320 | I talk about, I speculate in the book.

02:01:22.720 | By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11

02:01:24.680 | about the Nobel Prize and its effect.

02:01:27.400 | But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting,

02:01:29.440 | like I'm speaking, actually this coming up in December,

02:01:32.880 | is that the Nobel Prize is given out

02:01:35.000 | on the day of Alfred Nobel's death.

02:01:37.560 | There's a lot of, and they bring in flowers,

02:01:39.960 | not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,

02:01:42.520 | which is in San Romino in Italy.

02:01:47.200 | It's a lot of like death fascination.

02:01:48.960 | You know, denial of death features heavily

02:01:50.840 | in the Nobel Prize, because it's like,

02:01:52.640 | what outlives a person?

02:01:54.120 | Well, science can outlive a person.

02:01:55.640 | My father has a theorem named after him.

02:01:57.320 | It's still engraved in many places around the world.

02:02:01.120 | You or I, we can go to different places around the world,

02:02:03.040 | people know who we are based on our publications.

02:02:05.440 | We engrave things, we wanna store things,

02:02:07.080 | we wanna compress things.

02:02:08.360 | And I think there's something beautiful about that,

02:02:10.800 | but there is a notion of denial of death.

02:02:12.520 | Like there is a notion of what will outlast me,

02:02:15.180 | especially if you're among the many,

02:02:17.120 | 90 something percent of members of National Academy

02:02:19.560 | don't believe in an active faith,

02:02:21.760 | you know, in a creator, in a God.

02:02:24.920 | And science can substitute for that,

02:02:28.020 | but it's not ultimately as fulfilling.

02:02:31.080 | I just, I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way,

02:02:34.320 | even practicing but not believing in a religion

02:02:37.400 | can fulfill a person.

02:02:39.280 | - So, which is interesting,

02:02:40.880 | 'cause you do bring up Ernest Becker

02:02:42.520 | and the denial of death in losing the Nobel Prize book.

02:02:46.660 | And there is a sense in which

02:02:48.320 | that's probably in part at the core of this,

02:02:53.200 | especially later dream of the Nobel Prize

02:02:55.200 | or a prize or recognition.

02:02:57.120 | I've interacted with a few, you know,

02:03:00.840 | or a large number of scientists that are getting up in age.

02:03:04.500 | And there is the feeling of real pride of happiness

02:03:09.200 | in them from winning awards and getting certain recognitions.

02:03:14.200 | And I probably at the core of that is a kind of a mortality

02:03:18.520 | or a kind of desire for mortality.

02:03:23.520 | And that was always off-putting to me as opposed to,

02:03:28.720 | I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it's off-putting,

02:03:32.320 | but it just, rather than celebrating the pure joy

02:03:37.320 | of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us,

02:03:43.440 | just the actual exploration of the mysterious.

02:03:50.600 | - For its own sake. - For its own sake, yeah.

02:03:55.880 | - Well, that's why I said, you know,

02:03:56.880 | it's like a scientist should, okay,

02:03:58.920 | you have to be careful and not have any, you know,

02:04:00.880 | physical, it has to be platonic,

02:04:02.400 | but you can think of scientists and mentor.

02:04:05.880 | I have a chart in the book and a plaque made

02:04:08.200 | by one of my graduate students, former graduate students,

02:04:10.120 | she's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron.

02:04:13.400 | And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations.

02:04:16.520 | So here I am, 17 levels down.

02:04:19.160 | There's a guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz,

02:04:21.240 | different Leibniz, 1596 he was born,

02:04:24.080 | and I'm in this chain.

02:04:25.700 | And I don't know if you know this,

02:04:27.360 | but in the Russian language,

02:04:28.600 | the word scientist means someone who was taught.

02:04:31.520 | I'll say it very simply, one who was taught, right?

02:04:33.880 | - Uchani. - Uchani.

02:04:35.280 | So it probably means a guy who was taught, right?

02:04:38.080 | - No. - Okay, it'd just be a person.

02:04:39.760 | - No, no, no, it's literally someone who was taught.

02:04:42.680 | - Someone who was taught, right.

02:04:43.880 | So what does that mean?

02:04:44.720 | To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning.

02:04:47.520 | One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist,

02:04:50.720 | 'cause you have to learn from somebody else.

02:04:52.600 | Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward.

02:04:55.160 | If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist

02:04:58.560 | in the truest sense.

02:05:00.160 | And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach

02:05:02.180 | and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale,

02:05:04.280 | I'm influencing more than the 24 kids I might have

02:05:07.100 | in my graduate class or undergraduate class,

02:05:09.320 | and potentially could reach thousands of people

02:05:11.600 | around the world, and make them into scientists themselves,

02:05:15.920 | because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial.

02:05:18.980 | There is no competition, there is no zero-sum,

02:05:21.440 | fixed mindset versus growth mindset,

02:05:24.880 | because it is an infinite game.

02:05:26.400 | Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings

02:05:29.200 | of the negativity of the Soviet Union,

02:05:30.920 | or pre-World War I Germany, or Imperial Japan,

02:05:35.560 | science celebrated, and we're just making

02:05:38.880 | a nation of scientists.

02:05:40.320 | And we're not doing it to become multi-billionaires,

02:05:42.840 | or necessarily for any military purpose whatsoever.

02:05:47.000 | But if we had that, sometimes I'm flying home at night,

02:05:50.440 | when you fly into LA, you literally, it's very rare,

02:05:53.040 | you can see the number 10 million.

02:05:55.080 | It's very hard to visualize things.

02:05:57.160 | You see a brick wall, you ask how many bricks are there,

02:05:58.800 | it might be a thousand, two thousand.

02:06:00.560 | 10 million lights, there's 10 million souls.

02:06:03.280 | And you can see, and they're discreet,

02:06:04.880 | they're not like the Milky Way all blending together.

02:06:06.960 | - Each lost in their own busy lives,

02:06:10.240 | excited, fall in love, afraid of losing their job,

02:06:13.120 | all that, by the way, people should know

02:06:14.760 | that you're a pilot, so you literally mean fly.

02:06:17.640 | - Yeah, sometimes I get to do it.

02:06:19.120 | - You get to look at the eye of God perspective

02:06:22.880 | on these 10 million, on these millions of helpless apes.

02:06:26.240 | - And I don't think they're like constellations,

02:06:28.160 | but upside down, like the city.

02:06:29.840 | This is like a, hopefully I'll stay,

02:06:31.440 | keep the plane the right way up.

02:06:32.520 | But when you think about that,

02:06:34.040 | imagine they're all working together.

02:06:36.200 | And imagine, you always talk about love,

02:06:38.300 | but you don't know that they're not worthy of love,

02:06:42.240 | so you're looking down on them.

02:06:43.440 | And it's just amazing, 'cause you think,

02:06:45.240 | what an amazing creation is man and humans,

02:06:48.360 | and what can we do?

02:06:49.520 | It's phenomenal, it's so exciting.

02:06:52.080 | And then I get to do it, it's a job I say,

02:06:54.280 | don't tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free.

02:06:56.760 | I love what I do.

02:06:57.840 | But to think about, oh, if my student succeeds,

02:07:01.160 | and I'm not, no.

02:07:02.160 | It is unfortunate that you have experienced it.

02:07:05.560 | I've certainly experienced it.

02:07:06.800 | And I think there are ways around it.

02:07:08.960 | I think it is a vexing problem,

02:07:11.160 | because people want to, it's very tempting

02:07:14.380 | to keep your own garden fertilized.

02:07:17.960 | You know, one thing that's interesting is,

02:07:20.000 | people are like, why are you doing this thing?

02:07:21.480 | And a podcast, and you're supposed to be

02:07:23.520 | serious scientists leading this huge project,

02:07:25.380 | and collaborators, and I'm like, well,

02:07:28.880 | most of what I do, as I said before,

02:07:30.880 | for you it's Velcro, for me it's like,

02:07:33.200 | what is the deal with the safety standards

02:07:36.220 | on the truck that we're driving up

02:07:37.480 | to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator

02:07:39.640 | that will allow the concrete truck to,

02:07:40.960 | it has nothing to do with the Big Bang,

02:07:42.800 | inflation, the multiverse, God's existence,

02:07:45.160 | it has nothing to do with that, right?

02:07:46.000 | So those are people I say I have to talk to.

02:07:48.560 | The people that come on the show,

02:07:49.800 | those are people I want to talk to.

02:07:51.440 | And that's super fun, I mean,

02:07:52.560 | it's a real honor that I get to do it.

02:07:55.360 | I'm using, I have some unfair advantages, right?

02:07:57.560 | I'm at a top university, we have people

02:07:59.280 | that's affiliated with the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation,

02:08:01.800 | you know, brilliant scientists coming through,

02:08:04.480 | but I felt like it would be kind of a shame

02:08:06.880 | if I didn't allow them to teach at scale,

02:08:09.840 | 'cause they're better teachers than I am.

02:08:11.840 | - Let me ask you a interesting, maybe difficult question.

02:08:16.600 | Have you ever considered talking on your podcast

02:08:21.320 | with the people who would get the Nobel Prize for Bicep 2

02:08:24.440 | if it turned out to be detecting what it is?

02:08:28.200 | - Yeah, I mean, I'm still friends with them,

02:08:30.280 | and they have still gone on to,

02:08:32.040 | so we should say like why we didn't win the Nobel Prize,

02:08:34.600 | and then what happened with the group

02:08:37.800 | that is now leading it, that I'm completely divorced from,

02:08:41.360 | in a secular sense.

02:08:43.560 | We're friends, you know, we see each other,

02:08:45.720 | you know, we send each other emails and stuff like that.

02:08:48.240 | - I would love to get their sense of like

02:08:49.880 | what the natural heartbreak built into the whole process

02:08:54.280 | of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is.

02:08:56.120 | I would love to hear an honest, real conversation.

02:08:58.840 | I understand you're friends, but there's some hard truth

02:09:01.800 | that even friends will talk about it till you put a mic.

02:09:02.640 | - No, they weren't happy I wrote the book.

02:09:04.160 | I mean, I remember one of them, you know, was like,

02:09:06.240 | well, what's this I hear about a book?

02:09:07.840 | And I mean, a lot of people told me not to write the book.

02:09:10.160 | They said it's gonna give, you know,

02:09:11.840 | too much attention to the Nobel Prize,

02:09:13.360 | gonna look like sour grapes.

02:09:15.120 | Again, I say, you can prove I have sour grapes or not,

02:09:17.720 | just give me the next prize.

02:09:18.920 | No, if I--

02:09:19.760 | - So you would, if you get a Nobel Prize for literature,

02:09:21.840 | you would turn it down?

02:09:23.000 | - I don't know.

02:09:24.160 | It's funny, 'cause Sabina Hasenfelder,

02:09:26.320 | who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and--

02:09:30.960 | - And a shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize.

02:09:33.280 | - You're right, she's so gracious and so good.

02:09:35.320 | She has that German, you know, just gentleness.

02:09:40.320 | - She's a little too nice for my taste, I would say.

02:09:43.200 | - I wish she could really say what she thinks.

02:09:44.600 | And be snarky on occasion.

02:09:46.440 | So she wrote a review of my book when it came out,

02:09:48.680 | three or four years ago.

02:09:49.920 | And she said, well, you know, Brian Keating,

02:09:53.040 | like she said, well, it's good, it's interesting.

02:09:55.640 | He talks a lot about cosmology.

02:09:57.040 | But, you know, they can do whatever the hell they want.

02:10:00.040 | And he, you know, presumably has problems with it,

02:10:02.800 | but it's none of his business, basically.

02:10:04.240 | It's a private, and at the end she said,

02:10:06.640 | but, you know, if you want one good thing,

02:10:08.440 | he's a really good writer, and who knows,

02:10:10.520 | he could win the Nobel Prize in literature someday.

02:10:13.000 | And then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog,

02:10:15.160 | which was kind of funny.

02:10:16.000 | But anyway, no, so getting back to the guys

02:10:18.640 | that we were, you know, kind of collaboratemies,

02:10:21.320 | or frenemies, and we're still, look, you know,

02:10:24.480 | we don't wish each other active, ill, I've visited them,

02:10:27.380 | they're welcome to visit me, they have visited me.

02:10:29.960 | The thing I have to say is that I just wonder

02:10:32.080 | about introspection.

02:10:33.560 | Like, for me, literally, I don't care about the Nobel Prize,

02:10:38.480 | other than what it can do to, you know, benefit science.

02:10:42.040 | But I no longer, I did, but by the way,

02:10:43.760 | I did seriously care about how it would benefit

02:10:45.480 | Brian Keating early on in my career.

02:10:47.440 | I'm just totally honest.

02:10:48.480 | I'm not proud of it, it's kind of embarrassing.

02:10:51.440 | But now I would hope that people would say,

02:10:53.400 | like, okay, the guy is like, you know,

02:10:55.480 | it's not, he's obsessed with it,

02:10:56.840 | my next book is not about this.

02:10:58.440 | You know, it's about something completely different.

02:11:00.160 | And, you know, I do feel like people lack introspection,

02:11:05.160 | a lot of times, in science.

02:11:06.320 | Like, we don't think about why we're doing what we're doing.

02:11:08.760 | And I think it comes down to curiosity.

02:11:11.720 | One thing about Joe, and again,

02:11:13.640 | I've only listened to like, I have to confess,

02:11:16.280 | you know, you're like my father,

02:11:17.440 | now I'm confessing my sins to you, father Lex,

02:11:19.480 | father Friedman. - Go on.

02:11:21.640 | - I haven't listened to like that many of your episodes,

02:11:24.360 | start to finish, okay?

02:11:25.560 | With our friend, mutual friend, Eric,

02:11:27.080 | I've listened to a bunch of recent ones,

02:11:28.800 | a bunch of, Einstein, Weinstein,

02:11:33.000 | oh, Weinstein, Weinstein, that's what it is.

02:11:35.440 | - I get them confused with the brother.

02:11:38.160 | - The brothers, the brothers,

02:11:40.200 | and a few others.

02:11:41.040 | I haven't ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode,

02:11:43.960 | but from what I've seen with him,

02:11:45.800 | he has a preternatural curiosity.

02:11:48.360 | He doesn't have passion.

02:11:49.320 | There are a lot of podcasts that have passion,

02:11:50.720 | like I've been on there, show you.

02:11:52.200 | He has curiosity, like,

02:11:53.440 | he's not gonna stop talking about something

02:11:55.280 | until he hops it, until he understands it,

02:11:57.280 | until he gets it viscerally.

02:11:59.240 | And I respect that,

02:12:00.320 | because as I say in this more recent book,

02:12:02.880 | passion's like, kind of like the dopamine hit

02:12:05.400 | that gets you started, like, oh, I'm gonna be great,

02:12:07.640 | maybe I can win a Nobel Prize.

02:12:08.600 | Like, that's not gonna sustain you.

02:12:10.720 | The sustenance comes from the passion

02:12:13.200 | converting to curiosity.

02:12:15.160 | And what I wanna do is convert as many things as possible

02:12:18.200 | to things that I can then,

02:12:20.080 | because actually I've had on people that discuss addiction.

02:12:23.960 | And there is an addictive quality to doing podcasts

02:12:27.920 | or whatever, but there's an addictive quality

02:12:29.120 | being a scientist.

02:12:30.320 | And you get to do things that are very specialized

02:12:33.320 | in specialized locations with special people,

02:12:36.120 | paid for by other people who have no fricking idea

02:12:38.560 | what you do.

02:12:39.400 | So imagine you worked in some job,

02:12:41.760 | and Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things.

02:12:44.760 | Like, when he was, he was once said,

02:12:47.200 | he said, "If you can't explain it to your grandmother,

02:12:49.360 | "you don't understand it yourself."

02:12:51.000 | Then the day he won the Nobel Prize,

02:12:52.200 | a reporter asked him, "What'd you win it for?"

02:12:53.480 | He said, "If I could explain it to you, bud,

02:12:55.220 | "it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize."

02:12:56.520 | So let's leave aside his inherent contradictions.

02:12:58.960 | But in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush

02:13:02.640 | that you get from it.

02:13:03.680 | But what is ultimately gonna be the sustenance of it?

02:13:07.640 | So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way

02:13:11.280 | to nucleate that.

02:13:12.480 | I don't know, actually, I don't know if it's like,

02:13:14.840 | can you turn someone into a,

02:13:16.800 | I used to ask this question all the time.

02:13:18.240 | Like, can you make someone creative?

02:13:21.360 | Like, can you teach someone to be creative?

02:13:23.000 | I don't know.

02:13:23.880 | Can you teach someone to be curious?

02:13:26.400 | I don't know.

02:13:27.220 | I do know that kids are naturally curious.

02:13:29.360 | As they get older, they get less curious.

02:13:31.440 | Just like I heard from the other forward authors,

02:13:34.340 | James Altucher, he said, once he did,

02:13:37.080 | they did a study, kids smile 300 times a day,

02:13:39.480 | or smile or laugh, adults five or six.

02:13:42.600 | Five or six.

02:13:43.440 | No, I'm just trying to get you to laugh,

02:13:44.520 | but you're not gonna laugh.

02:13:45.600 | But anyway, no, it's true.

02:13:46.440 | So somewhere you lose 30 to 50%.

02:13:48.960 | - I'm not entertained.

02:13:50.800 | But that's 'cause I'm an adult.

02:13:52.120 | No, and then I do remember there's some distribution

02:13:54.960 | in those studies with the happier adults

02:13:56.960 | smile a little more, but still the kids

02:13:58.720 | blow 'em out of the water.

02:13:59.560 | - Just crush it.

02:14:00.380 | So can you, is it, or should, in other words,

02:14:02.480 | should we invest our energy in getting

02:14:05.280 | the half-life decay constant stretched out more

02:14:08.160 | for curiosity for kids?

02:14:09.600 | Or should we try to reset the dopamine hit,

02:14:12.280 | and then, I don't know.

02:14:13.440 | It's an open question.

02:14:14.280 | - Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace,

02:14:17.320 | the key to life is to be unboreable.

02:14:19.240 | I think you could train this kind of thing,

02:14:22.640 | which is in every single situation,

02:14:25.320 | so like, which I think is at the core,

02:14:28.760 | at least this correlated with curiosity,

02:14:30.800 | is in every situation, try to find

02:14:35.800 | the exciting, the fascinating.

02:14:37.680 | Like in every situation, you sitting at the,

02:14:40.040 | I don't know, waiting for something at a DMV

02:14:42.800 | or something like that.

02:14:43.920 | Find something that excites you,

02:14:45.840 | like a thought, like watch people

02:14:48.400 | or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people

02:14:53.400 | have to go to the DMV every day.

02:14:55.680 | And then try to go into the pothead mode

02:14:58.320 | of thinking like, wow, isn't this weird

02:15:00.880 | that there's a bunch of people that are having

02:15:03.160 | to get a stamp of approval from the government

02:15:06.440 | to drive their cars, and then there's millions

02:15:08.520 | of cars driving every day.

02:15:09.360 | - Or like, how can I do this better?

02:15:10.480 | Maybe there's some blockchain,

02:15:11.760 | and they could like, VIN transfer.

02:15:13.200 | Yeah, exactly, yeah.

02:15:14.200 | No, that is a good, that is a good move.

02:15:15.680 | - And then, every situation, I think if you rigorously

02:15:19.120 | like just practice that at a young age,

02:15:21.480 | I think you can learn to do that,

02:15:23.000 | because like, sometimes people like ask me for advice,

02:15:26.240 | and like, to do this thing or that thing is,

02:15:29.760 | I think you at the core really have to have this muscle

02:15:33.840 | of finding the awesomeness in everything,

02:15:36.720 | because if you're able to find the awesomeness

02:15:38.600 | in everything, like whatever journey you take,

02:15:40.960 | whatever weird--

02:15:42.800 | - Meant for Japan, I think that's what you meant.

02:15:45.760 | - That you take through life is going to be productive,

02:15:48.240 | is gonna end up in a great place.

02:15:50.680 | So like, that muscle is at the core of it.

02:15:52.400 | I guess curiosity is central to that.

02:15:57.040 | But you didn't win the Nobel Prize,

02:16:02.200 | the team of Bicep that led the Bicep 2

02:16:05.640 | didn't win the Nobel Prize, because of some space dust.

02:16:10.280 | - That's right, it's mixed schmutz.

02:16:12.520 | - Which one is the moon, which one is--

02:16:16.040 | - That one's the dust, the space dust, yeah.

02:16:18.880 | - What are we looking at?

02:16:21.640 | So why is space dust the villain of this whole story?

02:16:25.880 | - Well, it's funny, I wrote these books,

02:16:27.840 | and I don't know about you, but when you get all these books,

02:16:29.680 | I'm sure you get books, people send you books,

02:16:31.520 | they always come in these dust jackets, right?

02:16:33.400 | I was always like, what the hell is a dust jacket?

02:16:35.400 | How much dust is raining down at any moment?

02:16:38.160 | I mean, this is immaculate, this room is Russian tidiness,

02:16:41.480 | but in a normal household, how much dust is raining down?

02:16:44.160 | It's not really pretty, until I wrote a book,

02:16:47.280 | and I realized, I'm writing a story

02:16:49.520 | about the origin of the universe,

02:16:51.480 | and the prologue to the cosmos,

02:16:54.240 | and dust is going to cover this story.

02:16:57.440 | It's actually more a story about

02:17:00.400 | astrophysics and cosmology than dust,

02:17:02.280 | and this is the link between the cosmological

02:17:05.400 | and the astrophysical, so what does that mean?

02:17:07.120 | So astrophysics is, broadly speaking,

02:17:09.040 | the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens,

02:17:13.040 | astronomical phenomena.

02:17:14.800 | Cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution,

02:17:17.160 | composition of the universe as a whole,

02:17:18.760 | but it's not really concerned with stars,

02:17:20.360 | galaxies, and planets, per se,

02:17:22.400 | other than how they might help us measure

02:17:24.520 | the Hubble constant, the density of the universe,

02:17:26.760 | the neutrino content, et cetera, et cetera.

02:17:29.280 | So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit,

02:17:31.920 | they're like, not all astronomers

02:17:34.160 | and astrophysicists are equal.

02:17:35.400 | They're all equal, but some are more equal than others.

02:17:37.360 | So we have kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right?

02:17:40.000 | And cosmologists are studying, we're using Einstein,

02:17:42.360 | we're not using Boltzmann,

02:17:44.400 | we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures.

02:17:46.840 | In so doing, you can actually become blinded

02:17:49.880 | to otherwise obvious effects

02:17:52.840 | that people would have not overlooked.

02:17:55.920 | In our case, when we sought out the signal,

02:17:58.600 | we were using the photons that make up

02:18:01.120 | this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe,

02:18:03.680 | luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately.

02:18:06.320 | We're using those as a type of film

02:18:08.200 | onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it,

02:18:11.160 | make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way,

02:18:14.040 | and then we can use our polarized sunglasses,

02:18:16.120 | but in a microwave format,

02:18:18.120 | to detect the characteristic twofold symmetry pattern

02:18:20.920 | of under rotation.

02:18:22.440 | That's the technical way that we undergo it.

02:18:24.200 | I mean, there's a lot more to it.

02:18:26.160 | But there are more than one thing

02:18:27.880 | that can mimic exactly that signal.

02:18:29.560 | First of all, when you look at the signal,

02:18:31.760 | the signal, if inflation took place, big if,

02:18:34.240 | but if it took place,

02:18:35.880 | the signal would be about one or two parts per billion

02:18:39.880 | of the CMB temperature itself.

02:18:43.000 | So a few nano Kelvin, the CMB is a few Kelvin,

02:18:46.960 | the signal from these B-modes would be a few nano Kelvin.

02:18:50.480 | It's astonishing to think,

02:18:52.200 | Penzias and Wilson, 1965,

02:18:54.360 | measured something that's a billion times brighter,

02:18:57.960 | and that was what, 60 years ago,

02:18:59.880 | let's call it 60 years ago since they discovered it.

02:19:02.480 | Moore's law, you're more expert,

02:19:04.400 | let's call it every two years.

02:19:05.920 | So you're talking about like two to the 30th power

02:19:08.480 | doubling or something like that, at that.

02:19:10.640 | So let's call it two to the 20th, something like that.

02:19:12.600 | So that's like only two to the 10th is a thousand,

02:19:17.120 | correct my math, I'm wrong.

02:19:18.320 | Two to the 20th is a million,

02:19:20.400 | two to the 30th is a billion.

02:19:22.000 | So we're outpacing Moore's law

02:19:25.440 | in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments

02:19:27.520 | to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos.

02:19:30.360 | And they don't have to deal with,

02:19:31.920 | in the semiconductor factory in Santa Clara, California,

02:19:35.240 | they don't have to deal with meteorites and astronauts

02:19:37.920 | and things like coming into the laboratory.

02:19:39.760 | It's a clean room, it's pristine,

02:19:41.160 | they can control everything about it, right?

02:19:42.760 | We can't control the cosmos.

02:19:44.680 | And the cosmos is literally littered

02:19:46.440 | with particles of schmutz, of failed planets,

02:19:48.920 | asteroids, meteoroids, things that didn't coalesce

02:19:52.480 | to make either the earth, the moon,

02:19:55.640 | the planet Jupiter or its moons,

02:19:57.480 | or get sucked into them and make craters on them,

02:19:59.800 | et cetera, et cetera.

02:20:00.940 | The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum.

02:20:04.240 | There's very few, thank God,

02:20:05.560 | Chicxulub sized impact or progenitors

02:20:09.320 | that will take out all life on earth.

02:20:11.840 | But there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles

02:20:15.000 | and microscopic grains.

02:20:16.400 | And then there's a fair number

02:20:17.540 | of intermediate sized particles.

02:20:19.680 | It turns out this little guy here

02:20:21.640 | is the end product of a collapsing star

02:20:26.720 | that explodes in what's called a supernova,

02:20:28.480 | type two supernova.

02:20:30.080 | So stars spend most of their life

02:20:31.800 | fusing helium nuclei protons and neutrons

02:20:36.800 | into helium nuclei.

02:20:38.880 | And then from there it can make other things

02:20:40.720 | like beryllium and briefly make beryllium

02:20:43.280 | and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen,

02:20:45.160 | all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel.

02:20:48.680 | And iron and nickel are endothermic.

02:20:50.640 | It takes more energy than gets liberated

02:20:52.760 | to make an atom of iron.

02:20:55.880 | When that happens, there's no longer enough heat

02:20:58.080 | supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse

02:21:01.400 | of the material that was produced earlier.

02:21:02.920 | So the star forms, you know, goes inside out.

02:21:04.920 | That's how scientists discovered helium

02:21:07.440 | was discovered on the sun.

02:21:08.560 | I don't know, did you know?

02:21:09.400 | That's why it's called helium.

02:21:10.560 | Yeah, they went there at night.

02:21:11.960 | And-- - Oh, well done.

02:21:14.000 | - They went there at night.

02:21:14.840 | Now, helium means Helios is the god of the sun.

02:21:16.720 | It was discovered in its spectrum

02:21:18.400 | from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago.

02:21:20.920 | It wasn't discovered like when oxygen

02:21:23.080 | and you know, iron was discovered.

02:21:25.520 | So it's only a relatively recent comer to the periodic table.

02:21:28.400 | - So helium came after oxygen.

02:21:31.160 | - Oh no, first hydrogen forms into helium.

02:21:33.720 | So that's the first thing that formed.

02:21:34.880 | - No, in terms of discoveries.

02:21:36.280 | - Oh yeah, after oxygen.

02:21:37.360 | Yeah, I think Priestley and yeah, and others,

02:21:40.280 | the Dalton discovered it in the 1700s.

02:21:42.840 | No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum

02:21:45.040 | of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption

02:21:47.560 | and called Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum.

02:21:51.360 | So, but when it tries to make iron,

02:21:53.860 | there's no longer any leftover heat.

02:21:55.600 | In other words, there's heat left over from fusing,

02:21:57.800 | as you know, the sun of a plasma physicist,

02:21:59.680 | he fused to a hydrogen nuclei,

02:22:02.300 | you get excess energy plus you get helium.

02:22:04.400 | So that's why fusion energy could be

02:22:05.880 | the energy source of the future and always will be.

02:22:08.440 | No, no, hopefully it'll come much sooner than that.

02:22:11.360 | And so doing, trying to make iron, it takes more energy,

02:22:13.920 | doesn't give off enough energy, star collapses, explodes.

02:22:16.600 | And what does it spray out into the, you know,

02:22:18.680 | cosmic interstellar medium?

02:22:20.280 | It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff.

02:22:22.760 | Luckily for us, because some of that coalesced

02:22:25.160 | and made the core of the earth,

02:22:26.800 | onto which the lighter like silica and carbon

02:22:29.400 | and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed.

02:22:31.520 | And some of that made its way to the crust.

02:22:33.640 | The iron made its way to the crust.

02:22:35.400 | Some of that your mother ate

02:22:36.960 | and synthesized hemoglobin molecules.

02:22:39.480 | And hemoglobin has iron particles in it.

02:22:41.400 | It's a quite amazing substance.

02:22:43.120 | Without it, you know, we wouldn't have our red blood,

02:22:44.800 | we wouldn't exist as we are.

02:22:47.360 | - Is this a very long, complicated mom joke?

02:22:49.840 | (laughing)

02:22:51.160 | - I've done enough dad jokes, my quote is up.

02:22:53.760 | So I'm taking this object, you know, seriously.

02:22:57.100 | There's not, all of it gets bound up in a planet.

02:22:59.240 | In fact, forming planets is very inefficient.

02:23:01.600 | And so there's a lot of schmutz left over,

02:23:03.640 | some of which gets in the way of our telescopes,

02:23:06.580 | looking back to the beginning of time.

02:23:08.600 | And some of those molecules, like iron,

02:23:10.400 | is used in compass needles, right?

02:23:12.100 | They're magnetized.

02:23:13.320 | And magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them

02:23:16.320 | and make the exact polarization pattern

02:23:18.140 | that we're looking for.

02:23:19.580 | As if the compass needles get all aligned,

02:23:21.760 | that's like the polarization of the dust grain.

02:23:24.160 | It's like that polarizing filter.

02:23:26.240 | That means light polarized like this will get absorbed,

02:23:29.040 | and light polarized like this will go through.

02:23:30.860 | So it's absorbing, it's making 100% polarized light

02:23:33.360 | out of an initially unpolarized light source.

02:23:35.800 | And that's what happened.

02:23:36.840 | And what we ended up claiming on March 17th,

02:23:41.840 | and I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this,

02:23:45.360 | at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics,

02:23:47.440 | there was an announcement.

02:23:48.280 | There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners

02:23:49.920 | in the audience.

02:23:50.960 | And the BICEP2 team, which I was no longer leading,

02:23:53.640 | I was still a member of it.

02:23:55.360 | In fact, in the announcement,

02:23:56.240 | the first person they mentioned besides, you know,

02:23:58.960 | thank you all for being here is me

02:24:00.920 | and my team at UC San Diego.

02:24:02.440 | Although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference

02:24:05.240 | because that-- - Harvard.

02:24:06.960 | - Complicated, yes, exactly.

02:24:09.360 | It's a little school up there in the Cambridge area.

02:24:11.960 | And so they ended up making this announcement

02:24:15.560 | that we had discovered the aftershocks of inflation.

02:24:18.180 | We detected the gravitational waves shaking up the CMB.

02:24:21.880 | And on that day, past Lex Friedman podcast,

02:24:24.600 | back when it was called Artificial Intelligence,

02:24:26.600 | Max Tegmark said, "Goodbye universe, hello multiverse,

02:24:30.200 | "and hello Nobel Prize."

02:24:32.160 | See, he saw that as confirmatory evidence,

02:24:35.200 | not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves,

02:24:37.680 | but of the multiverse.

02:24:39.160 | Goodbye universe, hello multiverse.

02:24:41.800 | - Multiverse is a natural consequence.

02:24:44.480 | - Consequence of inflation, yes.

02:24:46.200 | According to its prominent supporters, yeah.

02:24:49.600 | - Yeah, and of course, leave the poetry to Max,

02:24:51.880 | which he does masterfully.

02:24:54.120 | Okay, so that, the excitement was there.

02:24:58.280 | I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you

02:25:01.760 | is there too.

02:25:02.600 | That's some of the darker moments you're going through.

02:25:04.920 | But broadly for the space of science,

02:25:07.800 | there's excitement there.

02:25:09.040 | - Huge excitement.

02:25:09.880 | And I often note that this is a problem

02:25:12.680 | in what I call the science media complex.

02:25:15.060 | Because oftentimes you'll see things

02:25:17.000 | like past guest Sarah Seger, Venus Life exists.

02:25:21.400 | And that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right?

02:25:23.760 | And with the work that she's doing

02:25:24.800 | or her colleagues are doing.

02:25:26.560 | Clara, who's on your show as well.

02:25:28.200 | And that will be on front page, New York Times,

02:25:31.320 | Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune.

02:25:34.200 | It'll be above the fold, make headlines around the world.

02:25:37.080 | And then six months, 12 months later,

02:25:39.160 | as is the case for us, Retraction.

02:25:41.200 | Page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads,

02:25:44.960 | you know, and underneath the personal.

02:25:47.240 | So we have a problem in science.

02:25:48.800 | That the, you know, if it explodes, it leads, you know,

02:25:52.720 | and we get this huge fanfare.

02:25:54.600 | And this is not unique to my experiment.

02:25:56.900 | This happened with the earlier discovery

02:25:58.600 | of so-called Martian life discovered in Antarctica,

02:26:03.080 | which was announced after peer review.

02:26:06.200 | We weren't peer reviewed at the point

02:26:07.620 | when we made the announcement.

02:26:08.460 | We had a press conference and there are other reasons

02:26:10.740 | that the team leaders felt it was important to do that

02:26:13.000 | so that we don't get scooped by a referee who's unethical.

02:26:15.840 | We thought we had done everything right,

02:26:17.160 | but that's confirmation bias.

02:26:18.280 | - There's like levels to this.

02:26:19.960 | - Yeah, there were many levels.

02:26:21.800 | And there were people, you know, me warning

02:26:23.800 | about how it would be interpreted

02:26:25.200 | and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out,

02:26:28.260 | including the maps, which we still haven't released.

02:26:30.360 | And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical,

02:26:33.080 | but the public never knows this.

02:26:36.840 | I think it's, so I've made a rule

02:26:38.440 | that if I am ever in charge of, you know,

02:26:40.480 | doling out large amounts of science funding,

02:26:42.980 | that when you, you should keep kind of an option.

02:26:45.520 | In other words, you should have money for publicity.

02:26:47.880 | It's fine.

02:26:48.720 | Have money for your press conference.

02:26:50.220 | But hold in reserve in a bond to be used, hopefully never,

02:26:54.180 | but if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction,

02:26:58.360 | if it should occur.

02:26:59.860 | - So you would like to see,

02:27:01.720 | 'cause that's a big part of transparency is the,

02:27:04.680 | to me in the space of science, at least,

02:27:08.600 | that's as beautiful because it reveals the,

02:27:13.080 | it's like, it tells a great story.

02:27:15.200 | There's an excitement, there's a--

02:27:18.320 | - Humanity.

02:27:19.160 | - So there's a climax to the triumph,

02:27:21.640 | but there's also a climax to the disappointment at the end.

02:27:25.400 | Because that also eventually leads to triumph again.

02:27:29.560 | That sets up, that's the drama that sets up the triumph.

02:27:32.520 | Like with Andrew Wiles, Fermat's theorem,

02:27:36.920 | I guess it's not the last thing, whatever,

02:27:39.020 | is like the ups and downs of that, the rollercoaster,

02:27:43.600 | the whole thing should be documented.

02:27:44.440 | - That is science, that is science.

02:27:46.200 | And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura

02:27:49.040 | that excludes other scientists.

02:27:51.080 | Often from minorities or women,

02:27:53.120 | that you have to be, like Einstein came out of the womb

02:27:55.840 | and he was just like this guy with curly, no, he wasn't.

02:27:58.560 | He wasn't bad at math, that's all nonsense.

02:28:01.720 | But he said that he, you know what he said

02:28:03.600 | he attributed his success to, Lex?

02:28:05.200 | He said, "I never asked my dad what happened

02:28:08.560 | "when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid.

02:28:11.360 | "And thank God I didn't, because had I,

02:28:13.280 | "he would have told me the best answer of the day."

02:28:15.640 | Which, by the way, he would create 20 years later

02:28:18.920 | as a 26 year old in the patent office,

02:28:21.560 | obviously in Switzerland.

02:28:22.800 | And in so doing, by delaying when he asked these questions,

02:28:26.180 | he said, "I approached it with the intellect

02:28:28.680 | "of a mature scientist, not a little kid.

02:28:31.600 | "And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation."

02:28:34.160 | So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible,

02:28:37.400 | ineffable, omniscient, you know, being,

02:28:40.280 | I think that really does a disservice.

02:28:41.720 | And Jim Gates said, you know, he's like,

02:28:42.860 | "Einstein wasn't always Einstein."

02:28:45.120 | And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril,

02:28:48.040 | because we're humans, until we have artificial Einstein,

02:28:51.760 | which I don't think will ever exist.

02:28:54.160 | - You've launched the Assayer Project,

02:28:58.000 | where you hope to assess theories

02:28:59.620 | of everything with experiments.

02:29:01.840 | You have a YouTube video where you're announcing that.

02:29:03.860 | That looks super cool.

02:29:05.480 | Can you describe this project?

02:29:07.840 | And you also mentioned, kind of,

02:29:09.040 | you give a shout out to a little known fellow

02:29:11.920 | by the name of Galileo Galilei,

02:29:14.280 | as an inspiration to this project.

02:29:17.200 | - Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero,

02:29:21.040 | the kind of all-around scientist that I would love

02:29:23.560 | to approach the logarithm of Galileo.

02:29:27.640 | He was not only a phenomenal scientist,

02:29:31.020 | he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher.

02:29:36.020 | And back then, they didn't have distinctions

02:29:38.280 | between, you know, scientist and, you know,

02:29:39.840 | it was like a physician was like a physicist.

02:29:42.080 | And he would indulge, you know,

02:29:44.920 | kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy,

02:29:48.200 | thinking about phenomena such as the Earth's tides

02:29:52.520 | or the, you know, the composition of the Milky Way.

02:29:55.360 | And what's interesting about Galileo

02:29:57.120 | is that he was almost as wrong often as he was right.

02:30:00.880 | And Galileo was not alone like this.

02:30:03.520 | I always say, like, Einstein had at least seven

02:30:06.740 | Nobel Prizes that he could have won

02:30:08.440 | for discoveries that later became true.

02:30:10.640 | But he also had seven, you know, huge, you know,

02:30:13.840 | impossible to believe blunders in some sense.

02:30:16.960 | That's too bad 'cause he could have had a good career,

02:30:18.560 | as I would say.

02:30:19.480 | And Galileo was like that too.

02:30:21.280 | In other words, he would fall victim to, I think,

02:30:24.640 | this confirmation bias that all scientists

02:30:27.160 | have to guard their lives against, their careers,

02:30:29.760 | their brands, their reputations against,

02:30:32.040 | which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform

02:30:34.960 | to what you're trying to prove for one reason or another,

02:30:38.400 | or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it

02:30:42.080 | in order to bolster your confidence in it.

02:30:43.880 | And both are equally intoxicating.

02:30:45.680 | It's, you know, confirmation bias is a hell of a drug

02:30:49.360 | because it really, you know, reinforces this notion,

02:30:53.120 | which is partially sunk cost.

02:30:54.600 | You put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it.

02:30:57.540 | You don't wanna be wrong and go back on it.

02:30:59.640 | And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive

02:31:04.640 | about things such as, you know, the Earth being

02:31:08.640 | not located at the center of the solar system

02:31:11.140 | and the sun being the center,

02:31:12.240 | so-called Copernican hypothesis.

02:31:14.220 | And he would use as evidence very, very interesting ideas

02:31:19.200 | that all of which were wrong, basically.

02:31:20.980 | And in fact, we weren't able to prove

02:31:22.920 | that the Earth orbited around the sun.

02:31:25.120 | And I ask you, like, can you prove the Earth is not flat?

02:31:28.440 | No, well, you're a flat earther anyway.

02:31:30.080 | But I ask my graduates.

02:31:31.920 | - Proud Flat Earth Society member,

02:31:34.840 | t-shirts coming out soon.

02:31:36.840 | Let's Screamer.com/merch.

02:31:40.680 | - It's actually not trivial to do that,

02:31:42.140 | but most of my students, graduate students,

02:31:43.620 | can prove that the Earth is rounder,

02:31:45.220 | explain how the Earth--

02:31:46.100 | - It is actually not trivial to do, though.

02:31:48.020 | - It's not. - Yeah.

02:31:49.060 | - And much harder is to prove

02:31:50.180 | that the Earth goes around the sun.

02:31:51.660 | In fact, that's extremely hard to prove.

02:31:53.220 | And almost none of my students,

02:31:54.860 | even after they get their PhD and the final exam,

02:31:57.280 | I kinda like to just, you know,

02:31:58.500 | give them a little bit of humility.

02:31:59.700 | 'Cause I think to be a good scientist,

02:32:01.380 | you need to be humble, you need to have a little humility,

02:32:03.620 | and you need to have swagger.

02:32:05.120 | You need to feel like a little cocky, like, I can do this.

02:32:07.380 | I can do this thing that Einstein, by definition,

02:32:09.460 | couldn't do.

02:32:10.300 | I'm gonna attempt it.

02:32:11.340 | I'm gonna attempt to do what was impossible

02:32:13.620 | just a generation ago.

02:32:15.220 | - How do you prove that the Earth goes around the sun?

02:32:18.500 | Do you have to, is it by the motion of other planets?

02:32:22.180 | - So, there are many ways to do it.

02:32:23.380 | I mean, obviously, you could take a spaceship,

02:32:24.800 | park it at the north celestial pole of our solar system,

02:32:28.060 | and just watch what happens.

02:32:30.140 | But obviously, that wasn't how it was discovered

02:32:31.820 | in the late 1700s.

02:32:32.860 | So, it's called aberration.

02:32:34.460 | So, if you look at stars,

02:32:36.660 | as the Earth orbits around the sun,

02:32:39.620 | the position of the stars will shift slightly

02:32:42.020 | because of the tilt of the Earth,

02:32:43.300 | and because the Earth is in motion around the sun,

02:32:46.700 | and because the Earth has a non-trivial amount of velocity

02:32:50.500 | compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the sun,

02:32:53.720 | the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses,

02:32:55.900 | and those will correspond to the fact

02:32:57.520 | that we're moving around,

02:32:59.020 | if they're at infinite distance,

02:33:00.580 | which we assume that they are, they're not, really.

02:33:02.180 | But for all intents and purposes,

02:33:03.740 | in the scale of the solar system,

02:33:04.740 | they're infinitely far away.

02:33:06.100 | So, that's called stellar aberration.

02:33:08.140 | And that was the first way it was discovered.

02:33:10.580 | And actually, we still use that.

02:33:11.820 | We have to correct for that effect

02:33:13.260 | when we measure the cosmic microwave background.

02:33:16.060 | Because imagine you're inside of an oven,

02:33:18.340 | it has some temperature, three Kelvin,

02:33:19.820 | a thousand Kelvin, whatever.

02:33:21.100 | If I'm moving towards you,

02:33:22.720 | the photons that are coming to me in that direction

02:33:24.500 | will be blue-shifted, hotter,

02:33:26.180 | and the ones behind me will be red-shifted.

02:33:27.980 | I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount

02:33:30.860 | of matter or energy where you are,

02:33:32.620 | and it's an extension of the Doppler effect.

02:33:34.780 | So, we actually make use of that

02:33:36.460 | and construct what's called a local standard of rest.

02:33:39.540 | Anyway, so you can do it.

02:33:41.100 | But Galileo said, "No, no, no,

02:33:42.300 | "I'm not gonna wait for that.

02:33:43.820 | "I have other proofs for it."

02:33:45.780 | One of which is that the Earth has tides.

02:33:47.780 | And the tides come in and out twice a day,

02:33:50.100 | high tide and low tide.

02:33:51.420 | And he made the analogy,

02:33:53.420 | because the Earth is moving around the sun,

02:33:56.180 | say this is the sun here,

02:33:57.580 | and it's moving around the sun,

02:33:58.860 | but it's also rotating on its axis.

02:34:00.460 | See how the water's sloshing up and down

02:34:02.380 | inside the vodka bottle?

02:34:04.740 | As that happens, he said,

02:34:05.580 | "That's what the tides are caused by."

02:34:06.860 | Totally wrong.

02:34:07.700 | - Most people listen to this podcast.

02:34:09.260 | Just so you know, if you're listening to this,

02:34:12.300 | he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand.

02:34:14.780 | - Half drunk.

02:34:15.620 | - And we're both drunk and whatever else is possible.

02:34:20.620 | - So, as it sloshed around, he claimed that was what,

02:34:22.940 | no, it has nothing to do with that.

02:34:23.940 | The moon, over there, the moon pulls differentially

02:34:28.700 | on the Earth and the Earth's ocean.

02:34:30.660 | That causes the oceans to bulge slightly

02:34:33.060 | towards and away from where the moon is.

02:34:35.020 | And the moon is actually the source of the Earth's tides.

02:34:37.460 | It has nothing to do with Copernicus,

02:34:39.660 | the orbit of the sun.

02:34:40.700 | So he was totally wrong about that.

02:34:42.460 | He also thought that the Milky Way

02:34:44.580 | was comprised only of stars,

02:34:46.220 | when we know it's made of gas, dust,

02:34:47.940 | nebulae and things like that.

02:34:49.780 | So he had his fair share of blunders.

02:34:51.260 | Now, one thing I always kind of make note of,

02:34:53.660 | and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates,

02:34:57.460 | Fabiola Gianatti, Frank Wilczek,

02:35:00.500 | and Carlo Rovelli and my friend, Lucio Piccirillo,

02:35:03.980 | the first ever audio book of one of Galileo's dialogue,

02:35:07.220 | the one where he claimed to find evidence

02:35:08.980 | for the orbit of the Earth around the sun.

02:35:11.140 | But it was an error.

02:35:12.580 | - So you're reading parts of this text.

02:35:14.740 | - Yeah, it's a brilliant book.

02:35:16.500 | So this book was written in 1632.

02:35:19.260 | It was written and it was the one

02:35:20.700 | that caused him to go into house arrest

02:35:22.340 | and almost threatened to be tortured.

02:35:24.500 | And that book laid out his arguments

02:35:27.500 | for what was called the Copernican

02:35:29.460 | or the non-peripatetic Aristotelian, et cetera,

02:35:34.340 | notion of the planetary dynamic.

02:35:37.140 | And eventually he was forced to recant

02:35:39.780 | that he believed in it.

02:35:40.700 | And allegedly he said he still believes the Earth moves.

02:35:43.740 | Anyway, so we're making that,

02:35:44.940 | it's written in the form of a trilogue.

02:35:46.300 | It's actually called the dialogue with three people.

02:35:48.700 | There's one named Salviati,

02:35:50.380 | who is espousing Galileo's notions

02:35:53.140 | about how the heavens were orchestrated.

02:35:54.900 | And Salviati means like the salvation, the savior.

02:35:58.240 | Then there's a middleman, Segredo.

02:35:59.980 | So Carlo Rovelli is playing Salviati, brilliant one.

02:36:03.100 | I am playing Segredo,

02:36:05.500 | who's like an intelligent interlocutor.

02:36:07.700 | I'm a, you know, kind of just,

02:36:09.460 | I can appreciate Aristotle, I can appreciate Copernicus.

02:36:12.340 | Then there's this guy, Simplicio, the simpleton.

02:36:15.220 | And he espouses the words of the Pope.

02:36:18.220 | So you can imagine like, you know,

02:36:19.540 | you're working in Putin's government

02:36:21.660 | or you're working in whatever.

02:36:23.540 | And all of a sudden you're kind of putting the words

02:36:26.980 | of like the fool, literally calling the fool,

02:36:29.760 | but you're using the words of the all supreme powerful being

02:36:32.760 | on earth at that time, it was the Vatican church,

02:36:35.280 | especially for an Italian like Galileo.

02:36:37.260 | So he wasn't as brilliant, you know, politically

02:36:40.440 | as he was astrophysically and otherwise.

02:36:44.160 | - Who's doing Simplicio?

02:36:46.520 | - Simplicio is a friend of mine

02:36:48.200 | in University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarello.

02:36:51.520 | He's a Irish guy, but he has an Italian,

02:36:53.280 | no, no, he's a full-blooded Italian.

02:36:55.400 | They all speak English and Italian, I only speak.

02:36:58.560 | And that four words are written by,

02:37:00.400 | so one forward and this place has three forwards,

02:37:03.640 | which is like a 12 word.

02:37:04.940 | Okay, the four words are written by--

02:37:07.520 | - Can you explain that joke for me?

02:37:09.000 | - Yeah, that was a good one.

02:37:10.240 | The four word, three forwards,

02:37:12.540 | one of them is written by Albert Einstein,

02:37:14.520 | in which he says Galileo was not only

02:37:17.680 | one of the greatest scientists in history,

02:37:19.180 | this is Einstein telling Galileo,

02:37:21.680 | but he was one of the greatest writers

02:37:23.820 | and minds of all of human history.

02:37:26.380 | That forward is read by Frank Wilczek, who you've had.

02:37:29.500 | Jim Gates, who you've also had,

02:37:31.680 | he reads the translation, the translator,

02:37:35.080 | Stillman Drake is a renowned scientific translator.

02:37:38.840 | And then Fabiola Giannotti,

02:37:40.800 | she reads the introduction and dedication

02:37:43.880 | from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany

02:37:46.760 | and some of the different introductions

02:37:49.320 | that Galileo himself had.

02:37:50.600 | It's such a thrill to be able to do it.

02:37:53.020 | I only randomly found out,

02:37:54.360 | 'cause I wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long.

02:37:58.240 | And I was like, let me get the audio book

02:37:59.440 | 'cause I'm an audio medium kind of guy.

02:38:01.320 | Didn't exist, so I said, let's do it ourselves.

02:38:03.680 | And so we did it and hopefully it'll be out

02:38:05.440 | on Galileo's birthday, which is February 15th, 2022.

02:38:09.440 | It'll be a ripe 457,

02:38:11.560 | but that's not the only one of his books.

02:38:13.480 | Galileo wrote many books,

02:38:14.760 | one of which is called The Military Compass.

02:38:18.000 | And this is an interesting book

02:38:19.620 | for my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados.

02:38:22.600 | In this book, he talks about a compass,

02:38:24.960 | which is not a magnetic compass,

02:38:26.440 | but an actual slide rule.

02:38:27.880 | It's basically a slide rule.

02:38:29.440 | And it's a manual.

02:38:31.440 | It's like, imagine if your phone came with a manual.

02:38:34.000 | Nowadays they don't, right?

02:38:35.040 | But this was a manual for how to use this slide rule,

02:38:38.080 | which is enormously important.

02:38:39.760 | And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples.

02:38:41.840 | It's a brilliant book.

02:38:43.080 | One of the examples is how do you convert money?

02:38:45.400 | So he does a currency conversion

02:38:47.520 | between Ducati and Florentine Ducati

02:38:50.760 | and Scuti and whatever, you know, lira, whatever.

02:38:54.000 | He does all these currency conversions.

02:38:55.920 | One copy of this book, or maybe two exist,

02:38:58.920 | first printings from 1600 still exist.

02:39:02.200 | If Galileo had just kept those in his family,

02:39:06.080 | they're worth a hundred million dollars.

02:39:08.680 | Nowadays you can't get a Scuti.

02:39:10.120 | A Scuti is worth nothing.

02:39:11.420 | Like a Ducati is worth nothing.

02:39:13.040 | I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right?

02:39:15.320 | So it's a lesson.

02:39:16.160 | Like there are value in physical, you know,

02:39:18.760 | non-fungible tokens, this original non-fungible token.

02:39:21.560 | But then a third book is called the Assayer.

02:39:24.480 | So what is an Assayer?

02:39:26.400 | So Assayers were kind of like these alchemists,

02:39:28.800 | you know, physicists, chemists

02:39:29.880 | that would be around a court.

02:39:32.960 | And every so often for the treasurer,

02:39:35.280 | they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens

02:39:37.880 | and convert that to script or, you know, paper money.

02:39:40.760 | And to do that, they needed someone to verify

02:39:43.400 | with a standard of gold that they knew to be gold

02:39:46.080 | and do some kind of semi non-destructive evaluation

02:39:49.680 | of the purported object, the metal,

02:39:51.760 | that was supposed to be gold.

02:39:53.160 | So they would take these pieces of gold,

02:39:55.440 | theoretically gold,

02:39:56.360 | and they would rub it on something called a touchstone.

02:39:59.120 | Touchstone was a special piece of rock, granite, whatever.

02:40:01.720 | It has no intrinsic value.

02:40:03.840 | It's just a piece of rock.

02:40:05.080 | But with that rock, you could assay

02:40:07.640 | and determine the content of this thing

02:40:10.320 | that could be worth, you know,

02:40:11.360 | millions of lira or whatever, right?

02:40:13.240 | So it was an incredibly important job.

02:40:15.000 | And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock

02:40:18.680 | and use it to do something valuable.

02:40:20.640 | What I want to do in the Assayer Project

02:40:22.720 | is take this plethora of physical theories of everything.

02:40:26.840 | I said recently, you know,

02:40:28.520 | we should give a Nobel Prize to someone

02:40:29.920 | who doesn't come up with a theory of everything.

02:40:32.320 | Because there's just, that's a good,

02:40:34.800 | there's just like, it's just rotten with them.

02:40:37.280 | And I think it's great.

02:40:39.000 | You know, I often say that theory is kind of like software

02:40:42.920 | and I'm not denigrating software at all,

02:40:44.680 | but like, you can create a lot of software.

02:40:46.480 | You can make a quine and it'll make its own quine.

02:40:49.320 | And like, you can make infinite amounts of software.

02:40:51.240 | - Look it up, kids.

02:40:52.080 | - Yeah, and that's one of my favorite videos.

02:40:54.000 | And you can see, you can replicate, you can't replicate,

02:40:55.840 | you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope

02:40:57.640 | that makes a telescope.

02:40:58.480 | In other words, hardware's kind of like

02:40:59.840 | the non-fungible token that's the ultimate minted,

02:41:02.000 | you know, limited edition, the book,

02:41:03.400 | the compass book, like I talked.

02:41:05.320 | And so it's very expensive.

02:41:07.360 | That means you have to be very careful

02:41:09.080 | before you invest decades, billions, and humans

02:41:12.800 | into pursuing one of these theories of everything.

02:41:15.600 | You have to have good intuition for it.

02:41:17.840 | And lately what I've seen is not predictions,

02:41:21.160 | but retrodictions.

02:41:22.840 | So you see that the Large Hadron Collider

02:41:25.120 | will come out with a measurement.

02:41:26.680 | And then so-and-so will say,

02:41:28.160 | oh, this is, you know, this is compatible

02:41:30.920 | with string theory.

02:41:32.040 | Or G minus two of the muon, it has these bizarre properties,

02:41:35.400 | fifth force, string theory predicts this.

02:41:37.660 | String theory solves this.

02:41:40.840 | Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos,

02:41:43.560 | Large Hadron Collider bottom or B experiment.

02:41:47.280 | Blah, blah, blah.

02:41:48.120 | They'll say that it's compatible after the fact.

02:41:50.040 | And it's not so bad, right?

02:41:51.280 | 'Cause look, what did Einstein do with GR,

02:41:53.120 | general relativity?

02:41:54.920 | The first thing he did was not predict something new.

02:41:58.040 | He looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury.

02:42:01.320 | And he saw it was behaving strangely.

02:42:03.440 | And people had said, oh, that's because

02:42:05.080 | there's another planet hiding behind the sun

02:42:07.200 | that we can't see that perturbs the orbit

02:42:09.120 | of the planet Mercury.

02:42:09.960 | It's called Vulcan.

02:42:11.080 | That was one approach.

02:42:13.000 | That's kind of like the dark matter approach

02:42:14.760 | where it's like there's a clump of matter

02:42:16.520 | that we can't see that's influencing the planet

02:42:19.080 | that we can't see.

02:42:20.160 | And we use that to divine and intuit the existence

02:42:23.080 | of the other planet.

02:42:23.920 | That's actually how Neptune was discovered.

02:42:25.480 | Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior

02:42:27.560 | of the planet Uranus.

02:42:29.160 | So Neptune was dark, we couldn't see it.

02:42:30.880 | It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way.

02:42:33.040 | And that led to Le Verrier discovering the planet,

02:42:36.080 | predicting where this planet should be found.

02:42:38.240 | So it had a good heritage.

02:42:39.840 | And physics, right, to predict this planet

02:42:41.600 | that you couldn't see, that worked.

02:42:43.160 | But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping

02:42:46.200 | and bending of space time due to the presence of matter

02:42:49.680 | who would later become known as the Einstein equations.

02:42:51.600 | So he explained why Mercury did that.

02:42:53.880 | He didn't, and it was known since the time of Newton

02:42:55.920 | that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way.

02:42:58.640 | So he didn't predict it.

02:42:59.600 | He retrodicted it.

02:43:00.600 | That's fine.

02:43:01.480 | But at some point, you should come up with something new

02:43:04.000 | that's uniquely predictive of your theory, as I just said.

02:43:07.280 | The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune

02:43:09.920 | is actually a valid theory.

02:43:11.040 | It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan.

02:43:14.560 | And so if he had kept doing that,

02:43:16.920 | maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with

02:43:20.320 | these other predictions that he would later reject.

02:43:22.320 | Like he rejected the existence of gravitational waves.

02:43:24.920 | Ewan Barry talked about that.

02:43:26.600 | He didn't actually believe it.

02:43:27.440 | It was the one peer-reviewed paper that he had.

02:43:29.840 | He used to send back in those days,

02:43:31.320 | he'd send a letter to Nature, physical review,

02:43:33.560 | publish this, let them know how much it costs.

02:43:36.680 | And they got it rejected 'cause he said

02:43:38.280 | you can't detect gravitational waves.

02:43:40.200 | And actually, or they're not real.

02:43:41.840 | And the guy showed that they're real

02:43:42.960 | 'cause he corrected a math error

02:43:44.960 | in Einstein and Rosen's paper.

02:43:47.160 | So it's fascinating.

02:43:48.000 | What should the assayer do?

02:43:49.880 | He or she should look at these theories,

02:43:52.400 | look what things they explain that already exist,

02:43:54.600 | and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain

02:43:58.840 | if we can build experiments to test them.

02:44:01.880 | - So you have to kind of challenge yourself

02:44:03.120 | to think about what kind of predictions

02:44:06.080 | can they make such that we can construct experiments?

02:44:09.440 | So that's like ultimately back going to the signal,

02:44:14.360 | to the experimenter's theorist, essentially.

02:44:18.680 | - That's right.

02:44:19.520 | - So like very experiment-centric exploration

02:44:24.080 | of the fundamental theory of everything.

02:44:25.920 | - That's right.

02:44:26.760 | And the best scientists, the best physicists,

02:44:29.000 | were both experimentalists and theorists.

02:44:31.800 | Or at least that they, if they were experimentalists,

02:44:34.320 | they understood the theory well enough to make predictions

02:44:37.400 | or to explore the predictions

02:44:38.560 | and the consequences of those predictions.

02:44:40.880 | Or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo.

02:44:43.200 | Like Einstein has patents for things that he invented.

02:44:46.000 | And then some of his work led to the laser and the maser.

02:44:50.200 | So he had practically, it wasn't just pure airy-fairy,

02:44:52.880 | quantum reality and expanding universe.

02:44:55.240 | So in this case, what I wanna do is look at,

02:44:58.520 | there's 10 different theories of everything

02:45:00.040 | or cosmological models.

02:45:01.520 | They make predictions,

02:45:02.400 | they have advantages and disadvantages.

02:45:04.080 | And I'm just asking the question,

02:45:05.600 | why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning

02:45:07.880 | with confidence intervals?

02:45:09.040 | Why don't we have updates?

02:45:10.080 | Every time an experiment comes out,

02:45:12.000 | we can update our credulity in that experiment

02:45:14.240 | or that theory rather,

02:45:15.320 | based on the results of the experiment.

02:45:17.240 | And we shouldn't do it after the fact,

02:45:18.960 | or as Michio Kaku has said,

02:45:20.880 | "Well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are.

02:45:23.920 | "And that's not my job.

02:45:24.800 | "You're supposed to tell me if string theory is correct,

02:45:26.680 | "what should it predict if it's true?"

02:45:29.480 | There's one big problem, which I should say,

02:45:31.680 | that to be a good ass-heir,

02:45:34.360 | I think you have to be worldly in the sense of,

02:45:39.360 | worldly and curious,

02:45:41.320 | like we were talking about before with you and Joe.

02:45:44.160 | You can't only talk your own book.

02:45:47.480 | You can't only understand

02:45:49.680 | your own pet theory of everything.

02:45:52.280 | You can't only say,

02:45:53.440 | "Well, I only understand string theory,

02:45:55.760 | "and I don't have time for these other theories."

02:45:58.440 | Or as if it's beneath me to even go into,

02:46:01.860 | Garrett Lisey or Eric Weinstein or Stephen Wolfram,

02:46:05.260 | or aspects of M-theory, et cetera, et cetera.

02:46:08.060 | And there are some that say,

02:46:09.820 | why do we give string theory so much of an advanced pass

02:46:14.820 | when there are actually predictions it's made

02:46:18.340 | that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics?

02:46:21.620 | Like the dark energy should be negative,

02:46:23.740 | and we see it as positive.

02:46:25.460 | That's a huge strike.

02:46:26.500 | If you told somebody, "Here's my tenure application,"

02:46:28.900 | and one day it'll be, "Oh, I've made this prediction."

02:46:30.340 | If it wasn't done by Maldacena and Witten

02:46:33.620 | and folks like that,

02:46:34.780 | I don't know if it would have had the traction,

02:46:36.940 | the endurance, the resiliency that it's had.

02:46:38.940 | And that worries me,

02:46:40.060 | because all these men and some women

02:46:42.780 | are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas,

02:46:46.140 | and they're not even looking at what their neighbor's doing.

02:46:48.540 | - There's a thing that I really enjoyed seeing

02:46:51.980 | and that I don't see often enough with these theories,

02:46:54.600 | which is others who are also experts

02:46:58.220 | kind of studying them sufficiently well

02:47:01.740 | to steel man the theory,

02:47:04.060 | to show the beautiful aspects of the theory.

02:47:06.560 | You know, I see that with Stephen Wolfram.

02:47:09.860 | He has a very different sort of formulation of physics

02:47:14.860 | with his physics project.

02:47:17.140 | Now, physics is a foreign land to me,

02:47:21.380 | but his formulation,

02:47:23.560 | especially in the context of cellular automata or hypergraphs

02:47:27.040 | just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves

02:47:29.820 | are familiar.

02:47:30.780 | And so I'm able to see the real beauty there,

02:47:33.500 | and it saddens me that others in the physics community

02:47:38.500 | can't also see the beauty.

02:47:41.200 | Like, give it a chance.

02:47:42.820 | Give a chance to see the beauty.

02:47:44.340 | - Give it your respect.

02:47:45.780 | So there is one person who does take time

02:47:48.700 | and is what I consider to be a great scientist

02:47:51.780 | in terms of what he thinks.

02:47:53.220 | He obviously has invested interest in his own theory,

02:47:55.820 | and it's Eric.

02:47:57.080 | Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge

02:48:00.520 | of the history of physics,

02:48:02.240 | and he has a great warmth and graciousness

02:48:06.240 | when it comes to giving others.

02:48:08.160 | And I've witnessed this, and I've had,

02:48:09.900 | look, first of all, I think debate is pointless.

02:48:11.900 | Like, I don't know about you,

02:48:12.880 | but if you've ever voted like,

02:48:14.440 | oh, I saw this debate,

02:48:15.520 | and because Trump did so badly,

02:48:17.640 | now I'm gonna vote for Biden.

02:48:18.480 | No, never have.

02:48:19.320 | You almost never change anybody's mind

02:48:21.360 | unless you debate with love,

02:48:23.080 | unless you have almost like,

02:48:25.240 | we're gonna win together,

02:48:26.740 | like the red team approach in the military.

02:48:28.860 | They're trying to win a war.

02:48:30.340 | So they may disagree on the tactics day to day,

02:48:33.340 | but the strategy, we have to win this war.

02:48:35.140 | I love you, and I wanna protect you.

02:48:37.620 | I don't see that in very many of these physicists.

02:48:39.740 | From Kaku, I almost see it,

02:48:41.420 | it's embarrassing in some ways,

02:48:42.780 | 'cause they'll almost mock.

02:48:44.520 | With the exception of Eric,

02:48:45.860 | you know, Garrett's interesting.

02:48:47.140 | You know, his theory is, you know,

02:48:48.420 | people have a lot of issues, very technical.

02:48:51.620 | But Eric has taken the time to try to understand it.

02:48:54.660 | Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White's theory.

02:48:57.360 | And I don't see the same graciousness extended from them,

02:49:01.080 | I'm sorry to say.

02:49:01.920 | - Yeah, you're right, you're right.

02:49:03.220 | I mean, with Eric, he wants to,

02:49:05.940 | but he hasn't extended the same for Stephen Wolfram,

02:49:08.040 | because I think--

02:49:09.920 | - No, he didn't.

02:49:10.760 | No, actually, no, he did.

02:49:11.580 | I had a debate with them live on my show.

02:49:13.520 | - No, I did, I listened to it,

02:49:14.700 | but I just think it's outside of the toolkit

02:49:17.560 | that Eric is comfortable with.

02:49:19.180 | So it's not that he's not,

02:49:21.120 | but the main thing that's often absent

02:49:24.360 | and Eric does have is the willingness,

02:49:28.440 | and not just dismissing or mocking the other,

02:49:31.120 | he's reaching out.

02:49:32.320 | But, okay.

02:49:33.160 | - I mean, what if it's not,

02:49:34.840 | you know, I made a joke when they were on,

02:49:36.080 | I was like, how many theories of everything can there be?

02:49:38.320 | You know, Highlander, you know, there can be only one.

02:49:40.720 | You know, I don't know, maybe.

02:49:42.180 | - But he, of course, also, like the other folks

02:49:44.520 | who propose a theory, has an ego.

02:49:48.600 | He rides a dragon,

02:49:52.780 | with the dragon representing the ego.

02:49:55.460 | Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein.

02:49:59.140 | So he proposed initial sketches of geometric unity,

02:50:03.540 | which is his theory of everything.

02:50:05.180 | Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it

02:50:07.820 | that you find interesting,

02:50:08.980 | but what do you think about the response he got

02:50:13.980 | from the scientific community?

02:50:17.700 | - Well, you know, some of the response came from people,

02:50:20.940 | academicians, professors.

02:50:22.700 | Some came from a lay audience,

02:50:24.580 | and some came from trained scientists,

02:50:26.780 | who are no longer, you know,

02:50:27.700 | maybe practicing in the universities.

02:50:29.540 | I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol,

02:50:33.320 | which surprised me,

02:50:34.860 | because I look at what he's trying to do,

02:50:38.160 | and it was always, the vitriol would always come

02:50:41.500 | with some element of ad hominem,

02:50:43.180 | and maybe that's his personality,

02:50:45.820 | maybe that engenders this, or whatever.

02:50:48.180 | Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency.

02:50:50.820 | You know, I always get these emails,

02:50:52.100 | Professor Keating, I have a new theory,

02:50:54.660 | Einstein was wrong, I'm gonna prove it,

02:50:56.660 | I'm not good at math, but if you help me,

02:50:59.100 | I will share my Nobel Prize with you.

02:51:01.620 | I'm like, oh, thanks, have you read my books?

02:51:03.420 | In other words, it's always taking down the dragon,

02:51:07.460 | it's always taking down the Kung Fu master, right?

02:51:09.880 | That you get the hit points from D&D,

02:51:11.580 | you get their hit points, you take their cards,

02:51:13.060 | you get their risk tokens from Kamchaka,

02:51:15.480 | and thinking about, with Eric, it's like,

02:51:18.300 | because what he's doing is so aspirational,

02:51:21.180 | it is grandiose in a good sense.

02:51:22.940 | What he's trying to do is construct

02:51:25.060 | a geometric theory of everything

02:51:26.900 | that has aspects of supersymmetry

02:51:28.740 | and stuff embedded in it.

02:51:30.220 | He's trying to meld that, it has very unusual features,

02:51:34.400 | in that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions,

02:51:37.260 | multiple time dimensions, it uses new mathematical objects

02:51:40.780 | that he's invented.

02:51:42.900 | And look, I had him on my show, I've talked with him,

02:51:46.660 | we've had consultations with other physicists,

02:51:49.100 | you know, where he'll come down,

02:51:50.540 | and I have a visitor's office,

02:51:51.860 | and he comes down to San Diego sometimes,

02:51:53.480 | and spends time there.

02:51:54.840 | And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists.

02:51:58.440 | Eric's been out of the academic world for a long time,

02:52:02.620 | and there is, as I said before,

02:52:04.420 | an aspect of persuasion that must take place

02:52:07.460 | in order to get anything through.

02:52:08.860 | And I think there was a slight amount of good nature,

02:52:12.780 | not ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that

02:52:15.700 | if this is right, everyone will recognize it.

02:52:18.220 | If you build a better mousetrap,

02:52:19.700 | the world will beat a path to your door,

02:52:21.620 | as the expression goes.

02:52:22.700 | That's completely untrue.

02:52:23.740 | That doesn't even happen with mousetraps.

02:52:25.740 | I mean, you know how many frickin' mousetrap types

02:52:27.420 | there are?

02:52:28.260 | It's like, no, they don't beat a path to your door.

02:52:29.980 | You have to sell that frickin' thing.

02:52:31.800 | You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon.

02:52:34.860 | I have never, I've had one paper out of 200 papers

02:52:37.620 | I've published in peer-reviewed journals.

02:52:39.420 | I've only had one, half a percent,

02:52:41.540 | published with no referees' comments.

02:52:43.860 | In other words, published like a dream,

02:52:45.380 | I submitted it, it happened to be in a prestigious journal.

02:52:47.700 | I was pretty psyched about that.

02:52:49.460 | But you almost have to crave the response,

02:52:51.260 | getting it back from a journal.

02:52:52.580 | And I think he doesn't, first of all,

02:52:54.220 | he doesn't subscribe to the peer-review process.

02:52:56.380 | He thinks that is anathema to the way science is,

02:52:59.100 | it invests interest in journals, et cetera, et cetera.

02:53:02.500 | I think you can have elements of peer-review

02:53:06.340 | that are substantive and valuable.

02:53:08.780 | I think you have to learn from your critics.

02:53:10.800 | One of my conversations with John Mather,

02:53:12.780 | he talks about loving your critics in this book,

02:53:15.700 | but not being so open to their criticism

02:53:17.780 | that their criticism goes to your heart,

02:53:19.940 | and not being so open to their compliments

02:53:22.540 | that their compliments go to your head.

02:53:24.700 | It's a very tough scylla and charybdis to walk.

02:53:27.580 | - Well, there's something, I mean,

02:53:29.700 | I wanna be careful here because I'd like to talk to Eric

02:53:33.020 | about this directly, but I'll just,

02:53:37.100 | from a perspective of a friend,

02:53:39.540 | when I ask about the

02:53:43.380 | the drug of fame,

02:53:47.460 | so there's also the public

02:53:50.500 | perception of the battles of physics.

02:53:56.580 | And so there's a very narrow community,

02:53:58.740 | but then there's the way that's perceived,

02:54:01.940 | the exploration of ideas is perceived by the public.

02:54:06.220 | And so there is a certain drug to the excitement

02:54:10.780 | that the public can show

02:54:13.060 | when they sense that you have something big.

02:54:15.600 | And that in itself

02:54:18.660 | might become the thing that gives you pleasure.

02:54:23.660 | And I think that with theories of everything,

02:54:27.880 | or with any kind of super, super ambitious projects,

02:54:30.620 | and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious

02:54:34.620 | about trying to understand the origins of the universe,

02:54:37.780 | if you convince yourself that you have an intuition

02:54:41.380 | about the origins of the universe,

02:54:43.780 | and you have a platform, like you do now,

02:54:47.420 | where you start to communicate your intuition,

02:54:50.820 | it's hazy, like all the science, you're still unsure,

02:54:54.460 | but you have a sense, I mean,

02:54:56.020 | perhaps you don't have that as much as an experimentalist

02:54:58.540 | 'cause you always kind of start going,

02:55:00.380 | okay, how can I build a device

02:55:02.140 | to see through the fog?

02:55:05.980 | But if you're more like a theoretician

02:55:08.340 | who kind of works in the realm of ideas,

02:55:11.140 | in the realm of intuitions,

02:55:13.100 | it is also a source of pleasure.

02:55:16.820 | You mentioned dopamine.

02:55:18.420 | A source of dopamine that you can communicate to others

02:55:22.620 | that you're really excited by the possibility

02:55:25.940 | of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe.

02:55:28.780 | So there's some aspect to which you want to be

02:55:32.340 | a Grigori Grisha Perlman,

02:55:35.500 | and go into the hole and get the work done,

02:55:38.580 | and shut the hell up about the,

02:55:40.660 | I'm speaking about myself,

02:55:41.980 | about talking about the dream and planning and exploring

02:55:46.820 | how great it will be if my intuition

02:55:49.780 | turns out to be correct.

02:55:51.700 | If the sketches I have turn out

02:55:54.780 | to actually build the bridge

02:55:56.540 | that takes us to a whole new place.

02:55:58.660 | As a friend of Eric's,

02:56:01.100 | or a friend of, or my friend,

02:56:05.460 | what kind of advice do you give?

02:56:08.660 | What is your role?

02:56:10.020 | Is it to be a supporter,

02:56:12.060 | given that he has many critics?

02:56:14.300 | Or is it to be in private a critic?

02:56:18.940 | Like a lot of my friends will say,

02:56:20.220 | "Hey, shut the hell up.

02:56:22.060 | "Just get it done."

02:56:22.940 | - Well, first of all, I wanna ask you

02:56:24.260 | a question I've asked him.

02:56:25.740 | And it comes from Animal Farm by George--

02:56:29.700 | - Probably my favorite book, yeah.

02:56:31.460 | - So you remember Benjamin the donkey?

02:56:32.980 | - Yes.

02:56:33.820 | - And he's talking to the pig.

02:56:35.180 | I forget the pig's name, you probably know.

02:56:37.220 | Anyway, the pig says to him,

02:56:38.060 | "You got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail.

02:56:41.220 | "You're so lucky.

02:56:42.060 | "I got this short, curly, little squiggly thing

02:56:44.460 | "that does jack squat.

02:56:46.340 | "Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail?"

02:56:49.460 | And Benjamin says, "Well, the good Lord,

02:56:52.140 | "He gave me a tail to swat away the flies."

02:56:56.260 | But you know what?

02:56:57.420 | I'd rather not have the tail if I didn't have the flies.

02:57:01.500 | So I wanna ask you, as I've asked Eric,

02:57:04.460 | is it worth it?

02:57:05.300 | You've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies.

02:57:09.940 | I'm not saying in a negative way.

02:57:11.260 | I'm just saying you get unwanted distractions,

02:57:14.500 | dopamine, it's kind of the highlight, the spotlight effect.

02:57:18.900 | It's obviously allowing you to do things

02:57:21.020 | that you could never do alone.

02:57:22.460 | And I think, first of all,

02:57:24.860 | I'd love to know how you answer that.

02:57:26.140 | 'Cause that's something I don't feel I can relate to myself.

02:57:29.380 | - Well, this has to do with more like--

02:57:33.580 | - Platform.

02:57:34.420 | - With the scale. - Platform stuff.

02:57:36.820 | Oh, I...

02:57:37.860 | That has no, very little effect on me.

02:57:42.580 | I enjoy meeting new people,

02:57:46.620 | but that has nothing to do with platform.

02:57:48.380 | Yeah, no, that has no effect on me.

02:57:50.260 | I'm one somebody that enjoys the act itself.

02:57:57.020 | So this conversation,

02:57:58.340 | the reason I'm doing this podcast with you today

02:58:01.180 | is because that allows me to trick you

02:58:03.780 | into talking to me for a long period of time.

02:58:05.660 | I don't care about platform.

02:58:07.020 | I assume nobody listens.

02:58:08.420 | It really doesn't matter.

02:58:09.900 | - Yeah, I forgot to write.

02:58:11.100 | My whole test of it was a good podcast.

02:58:13.460 | How do you know?

02:58:14.300 | Like podcast's been around, what, 12 years?

02:58:15.980 | How do we know as podcasters we're doing a good job?

02:58:18.300 | Like sometimes someone will say,

02:58:19.140 | "That was the best interview I ever had,"

02:58:20.420 | but that doesn't happen that often, at least for me.

02:58:22.620 | But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card

02:58:26.580 | in that little guy and the Zoom didn't work,

02:58:29.380 | would you do it again?

02:58:30.440 | And I think if you say yes to that,

02:58:32.220 | that was a good podcast.

02:58:33.100 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:58:33.940 | That's exactly it.

02:58:35.060 | So in that space, yeah, all of it is worth it.

02:58:40.060 | But the dream, I'm more referring

02:58:45.820 | to the psychological effects.

02:58:47.900 | Forget the platform, forget all of that.

02:58:50.300 | You know, maybe I shouldn't even brought up the platform

02:58:52.620 | 'cause it really has to do,

02:58:53.740 | even in your own private mind,

02:58:55.900 | which is what I'm struggling with,

02:58:59.100 | I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages

02:59:04.100 | so much that I often don't take projects to completion.

02:59:11.700 | This is a psychological effect

02:59:14.080 | that I'm sure basically everybody, every engineer,

02:59:16.560 | everybody that does anything goes through.

02:59:18.800 | I just, in this case particular, I think it also applies.

02:59:22.780 | And I wonder as a friend, what is the role?

02:59:25.480 | - So yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented.

02:59:27.520 | Everything from planning telescopes to dieting.

02:59:30.260 | So there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get

02:59:34.020 | visualizing how you're gonna feel.

02:59:36.020 | You don't need to know this, but you don't deal,

02:59:38.020 | but losing five pounds.

02:59:39.340 | I say, oh, I'm gonna lose five pounds

02:59:40.940 | and I'm gonna be able to run a minute faster.

02:59:43.340 | So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet

02:59:45.460 | and the meals and the exercise

02:59:47.100 | that I get a little bit of that thrill

02:59:49.220 | and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower

02:59:51.300 | to actually complete the task

02:59:52.140 | that will take me to that goal.

02:59:53.500 | So that's a documented effect.

02:59:54.660 | And that happens in project planning and project management.

02:59:57.920 | It's a very, very important thing to guard against

03:00:00.560 | as a manager of a big project.

03:00:02.640 | With Eric, it's interesting because with him,

03:00:05.720 | first of all, we relate extremely well

03:00:08.800 | on a friendship level and very close.

03:00:11.880 | He does remind me a lot of my father.

03:00:14.280 | And I've told him that just as a mathematician,

03:00:17.360 | as a big thinker, as in his case, as a father,

03:00:21.600 | the father kind of figure that I didn't have in a sense.

03:00:24.520 | But that he is a true lover of life.

03:00:27.260 | He knows he's got a huge platform.

03:00:28.900 | He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does.

03:00:31.540 | And I jokingly say, well, it's one thing,

03:00:34.740 | like how do you know, Lex, that someone's an expert?

03:00:37.100 | So experts say.

03:00:39.060 | There's a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in "Principles."

03:00:41.440 | He says, "An expert is someone

03:00:42.500 | "who's done something three times successfully."

03:00:44.960 | Like you can do something correctly once,

03:00:47.220 | you could do something correctly.

03:00:48.500 | It's very hard to pull off like three projects,

03:00:51.220 | three telescopes, three whatever, right?

03:00:53.940 | So look for, it's arbitrary,

03:00:56.300 | it could be four, it could be two, right?

03:00:58.460 | But the point is, look at Eric.

03:00:59.740 | So how many things has he contributed to

03:01:01.500 | and made pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts

03:01:05.820 | for different people?

03:01:06.820 | I would say he's been right many times.

03:01:09.180 | Does that mean he's infallible, that he's ineffable?

03:01:11.420 | No, of course not.

03:01:12.740 | For me, so what I'm saying is I get a little bit

03:01:15.180 | of the joy of kind of learning something purely

03:01:19.120 | as a scientist, something completely outside

03:01:21.660 | of what I do, mathematics, gauge theory,

03:01:25.260 | the kind of very advanced geometry,

03:01:29.700 | topology that he's interested in.

03:01:31.860 | But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want,

03:01:35.500 | you know, I've told him, I'm gonna turn your son

03:01:36.940 | into an experimentalist despite you.

03:01:38.540 | You know, like he is not gonna be a theorist.

03:01:40.300 | Zev is not gonna be a theorist.

03:01:41.300 | He is working with me, he is learning from me.

03:01:43.460 | We're trying to get him into, he wants to bypass

03:01:46.300 | all of the kind of nonsense of undergraduate

03:01:48.700 | and go straight to graduate school.

03:01:50.140 | And I've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it,

03:01:52.580 | maybe he can't, but there's no other way than to try.

03:01:55.180 | And so I've prepared a whole curriculum for Zev

03:01:57.660 | to basically bypass all of undergraduate.

03:01:59.620 | And to his credit, he's earned all the credit.

03:02:01.980 | He's learned it to a level that matches

03:02:04.020 | many of my graduates.

03:02:05.100 | - Okay, hold on a second.

03:02:06.020 | I have to push back and this is me saying it

03:02:08.500 | and I'm sure I'll talk to Eric about this.

03:02:11.620 | But to say, you said Eric's done,

03:02:15.740 | was right on multiple things.

03:02:19.260 | I think Eric has a great deep insight about human nature

03:02:24.260 | and how societies work.

03:02:27.660 | And he says a lot of wise words on that world.

03:02:31.460 | But I think if we're talking about experts,

03:02:34.740 | you kind of have to prove, you know,

03:02:36.180 | it's like Michael Jordan playing baseball.

03:02:38.520 | Like he's proved it many times that he can play basketball,

03:02:42.140 | but he's also got to prove that he can play baseball.

03:02:44.500 | And I would say the whole point of radical ideas

03:02:49.500 | is you're not, I mean, it's very hard to be sitting

03:02:53.820 | on a track record.

03:02:55.900 | When you're swinging for the fences always,

03:02:58.100 | there's not a track record to sit on.

03:03:00.840 | And like Max Tegmark is an example of somebody

03:03:05.240 | who has a huge track record of more like acceptable stuff,

03:03:09.300 | but he also keeps swinging for the fences

03:03:11.500 | in every other world.

03:03:12.940 | So he has that track record.

03:03:14.780 | With Eric, if you look at just the number of publications,

03:03:17.700 | all this stuff, he really, he chose not to travel

03:03:20.640 | the academic route.

03:03:21.480 | So there's no proof of expertise except sort of

03:03:26.180 | an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance.

03:03:30.980 | But that's not how physics works, right?

03:03:32.860 | - There's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist

03:03:35.300 | and say he or she, they really know

03:03:37.780 | the history of physics very well.

03:03:40.060 | Like, physics is always lovely.

03:03:41.340 | Sean Carroll always jokes about,

03:03:43.260 | physicists should never talk about history of physics.

03:03:46.460 | But it's more than that.

03:03:47.540 | So Eric has certainly contributed in finance specifically,

03:03:52.540 | and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics

03:03:57.400 | and non-cosmological--

03:03:58.240 | - But that's yet, hold on a second,

03:03:59.660 | that's yet to be proven.

03:04:00.940 | He has a lot of powerful--

03:04:02.780 | - But gauge theory is calculus, it's calculus proven.

03:04:04.940 | I mean, he has a gauge model for currency exchanges

03:04:10.940 | between different nations that is explanatory.

03:04:13.540 | It's not, you know, is this something,

03:04:16.700 | in other words, it's a model,

03:04:18.340 | and it's used for pedagogical purposes.

03:04:20.140 | - And it might be, okay.

03:04:21.860 | - It's unique to him, I mean, him and Pia.

03:04:23.860 | - Yes, right.

03:04:25.220 | It might be a powerful model.

03:04:27.540 | It might be one that actually deserves

03:04:29.620 | a huge amount of applause and celebration,

03:04:32.400 | but does not yet receive that.

03:04:34.180 | And that's one of the things that Eric talks about,

03:04:35.980 | it has not received the attention it deserves.

03:04:38.020 | But it has not yet received the attention it deserves.

03:04:41.020 | And so like the proven expertise thing,

03:04:43.700 | I mean, there's a lot of people that go to their grave

03:04:47.140 | without the recognition they deserve, and it's a tragedy.

03:04:50.420 | But the fact is, like, you have to fight

03:04:54.420 | for that recognition.

03:04:55.700 | The tragedy happens for a reason.

03:04:57.280 | You can't just say, this person is obviously brilliant,

03:05:00.700 | and therefore they deserve the credit

03:05:03.380 | in every single domain.

03:05:06.940 | It doesn't like transfer immediately.

03:05:09.420 | There's nobody that's, well, at least I wouldn't argue,

03:05:12.020 | Eric is one of the special minds in our generation.

03:05:15.540 | But you still have to fight the fight of physics

03:05:18.740 | and prove it within the community.

03:05:20.420 | And I think the same applies in economics.

03:05:22.740 | You can't, I mean, as somebody that,

03:05:26.260 | I've gone through the academic journey,

03:05:30.780 | just like you said, the peer review,

03:05:33.340 | all of those things, flawed as they are,

03:05:35.860 | that's the part of the process.

03:05:37.580 | You have to convince your peers,

03:05:39.460 | the people that are as obsessed,

03:05:42.620 | for whatever the hell reason,

03:05:44.140 | about that particular thing that you're working on.

03:05:46.700 | Yes, there's egos.

03:05:48.020 | Yes, there's politics.

03:05:49.260 | It's a giant mess.

03:05:50.900 | But I think it's a beautiful mess

03:05:52.820 | through which you have to go through

03:05:56.180 | in order to reveal the power of your idea

03:06:00.540 | to yourself and to the world.

03:06:02.500 | - Well, let me use an example.

03:06:03.380 | So you know of James Clerk Maxwell,

03:06:05.980 | and he invented the laws of electromagnetism,

03:06:08.500 | which is the first example of a unification principle

03:06:10.780 | ever displayed by the human mind in history.

03:06:13.460 | Purely mathematics, unifying

03:06:16.500 | completely disparate phenomena.

03:06:17.900 | In one case, electricity charges,

03:06:20.300 | static electricity, lightning,

03:06:21.900 | and the other magnets, bar magnets,

03:06:23.420 | currents, et cetera, unify them.

03:06:25.220 | You know what he did?

03:06:27.100 | I like to do a thought experiment.

03:06:28.700 | Imagine Twitter exists 1864.

03:06:31.020 | Maxwell's working away, and he goes,

03:06:32.700 | "I have this wonderful idea with fluxions

03:06:34.820 | "and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah,

03:06:37.660 | "and it revolves on this thing called an ether.

03:06:39.860 | "And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears,

03:06:42.700 | "and the gears have these planetary things,

03:06:44.380 | "and they suck up vortices,

03:06:45.380 | "and the vortices determine the density

03:06:46.900 | "of the electromagnetic potential."

03:06:49.020 | You'd be like, "This guy's a freaking moron."

03:06:51.140 | And what would you do?

03:06:52.500 | Come on, honestly, you would say

03:06:53.820 | everything this guy does is wrong.

03:06:55.580 | I mean, he's got this idiotic idea.

03:06:57.300 | And it would be falsified a couple decades later

03:07:00.100 | by Michelson and Morley.

03:07:02.060 | And in so doing, you would have thrown out

03:07:04.540 | a very beautiful baby with bathwater.

03:07:07.420 | Or imagine Twitter, imagine the twitstorm

03:07:09.420 | @ClerkMaxwell1 would get.

03:07:13.660 | It would be brutal, right?

03:07:14.980 | And to the detriment, and that might even set back history.

03:07:17.580 | Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing,

03:07:19.340 | Chern, Simons, a lot of these things are very fantastic.

03:07:22.180 | But why, Lex?

03:07:23.260 | Why does Ed Witten, why does Juan Maldacena,

03:07:26.660 | let me give a good example, Juan Gast,

03:07:28.900 | brilliant guy, I love him.

03:07:30.700 | He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded

03:07:33.500 | his black hole information paradox loss issue.

03:07:36.380 | What did he concede based upon Maldacena's calculation

03:07:40.300 | in ADS-CFT and five-dimensional wormholes?

03:07:43.900 | Is any of that, first of all, we don't live in an ADS universe.

03:07:47.420 | Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable,

03:07:49.940 | if they exist even.

03:07:51.860 | These are devices, you know,

03:07:52.980 | Kip Thorne has popularized for movies.

03:07:55.140 | Like, to say that this is something

03:07:56.980 | on which I will concede a bet,

03:07:58.300 | no, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity.

03:08:00.820 | Why does Maldacena, and he's got a pretty high H-index,

03:08:04.460 | pretty well-respected guy at IAS,

03:08:06.540 | love talking to him, brilliant guy.

03:08:08.220 | By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work

03:08:12.180 | on gauge theory and economics,

03:08:14.300 | originally and won, I believe, the Breakthrough Prize,

03:08:16.540 | I can't remember exactly what,

03:08:17.620 | but partially credit some of the work that he did,

03:08:20.580 | which appears there's a footnote to Pia Malani's thesis

03:08:23.980 | and some conversations with Eric, I think, in it.

03:08:26.340 | Anyway, getting back to that,

03:08:27.820 | why is there not the same skeptic?

03:08:30.300 | Is it because Maldacena,

03:08:32.060 | who's an eminent physicist, obviously,

03:08:34.140 | has published realistic work and done,

03:08:37.380 | what about Witten?

03:08:38.620 | You know, Witten gets a pass.

03:08:40.020 | I mean, if you--

03:08:40.860 | - Well, Witten gets a pass on which aspect,

03:08:42.860 | the string theory?

03:08:43.700 | - Well, yeah, that M-theory is correct.

03:08:45.220 | I mean, here's, let me just say Hawking.

03:08:46.580 | Hawking gets the ultimate pass.

03:08:48.420 | Hawking would say things like M-theory,

03:08:50.820 | there's zero evidence for it.

03:08:52.140 | I mean, there's the famous meme

03:08:53.540 | that went around this weekend,

03:08:54.420 | like, what is string theory predicted?

03:08:56.140 | And it's nothing.

03:08:56.980 | By the way, that's actually wrong.

03:08:57.900 | I talked to Cumrun, I know you talked to Cumrun.

03:08:59.780 | Cumrun says that string theory does make predictions.

03:09:02.260 | It predicts the mass of the electron

03:09:03.540 | lies between 10 to the minus one Planck mass

03:09:05.980 | and 10 to the minus 30 Planck mass.

03:09:07.620 | Okay, whatever, you know, our electron.

03:09:09.620 | - It's a big range.

03:09:10.460 | - It's a huge range.

03:09:11.700 | Is that, imagine Cumrun comes up,

03:09:13.500 | and again, he's just some nobody,

03:09:15.620 | but he actually, you know, he doesn't have a profile.

03:09:17.180 | He's not at Harvard.

03:09:18.460 | Has zero H-index or whatever Eric's is.

03:09:21.300 | Why do we not, like, in other words,

03:09:22.980 | why are we more harsh on people that are trying?

03:09:25.820 | - You know the answer to that.

03:09:27.580 | So I get a million emails just like you said,

03:09:30.620 | you yourself, where they provenize,

03:09:33.460 | in my world, it's artificial intelligence,

03:09:36.020 | the equivalence of that.

03:09:38.020 | I figured out how to build consciousness,

03:09:40.420 | how to engineer intelligence, how to, and sometimes--

03:09:44.420 | - You should send your emails to me,

03:09:45.860 | and I'll send my emails to you.

03:09:46.700 | - And we'll reply to you.

03:09:48.020 | I mean, and I don't want to sort of mock this,

03:09:50.380 | because I think it's very possible

03:09:52.380 | that there is either kernels of interesting ideas

03:09:55.620 | or in whole, like, there is geniuses out there

03:09:58.860 | that are unheard, but because there's so much noise,

03:10:03.020 | you do have to weigh, like,

03:10:06.700 | higher the Ed Wittens of the world

03:10:10.500 | when they make statements,

03:10:12.260 | and that's why you build up a track record.

03:10:14.820 | As you said with Ray Dalio,

03:10:16.860 | you have to show that you can,

03:10:20.260 | like, if you're Pollock, and you show us a painting

03:10:24.420 | of a bunch of chaos, you have to,

03:10:26.980 | and this is a bad example, probably,

03:10:28.460 | because he probably never showed this proof.

03:10:29.940 | - I think he could do it, right?

03:10:30.780 | - Yeah.

03:10:31.620 | - Impressionist master.

03:10:32.460 | - It's much more comforting to see

03:10:36.580 | that they can paint a good, accurate picture--

03:10:39.780 | - Of still life.

03:10:40.620 | - Of still life, of an apple on the table.

03:10:43.420 | So there's--

03:10:44.260 | - Meteorite and a--

03:10:45.220 | - Because then, I mean,

03:10:46.340 | because then there's something

03:10:49.980 | about the scientific community

03:10:51.380 | that they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit sensor

03:10:54.820 | to where they're not going to give the full effort

03:10:57.220 | of their attention if you don't have the track record.

03:11:00.220 | Now, you could say that's a kind of club

03:11:02.580 | that only, you have to, like,

03:11:04.300 | you have to have 10, you have to have this,

03:11:05.860 | yes, that exists, but there's some aspect

03:11:08.780 | in which you have to play the game a little bit

03:11:11.580 | to get the machine of science going.

03:11:13.860 | Otherwise, if you're always saying,

03:11:16.500 | "Well, I have my ball, and I don't wanna play your game.

03:11:20.140 | "Your game sucks," then nobody's gonna wanna play with you.

03:11:23.500 | - That's true, and look, inherent in all of this

03:11:26.220 | is an underlying grandiosity.

03:11:28.100 | Look, how could you talk about doing what Kaku said

03:11:31.500 | on here and elsewhere?

03:11:33.500 | We're looking for the umbilical cord

03:11:34.980 | that connects our universe to another universe

03:11:36.860 | that will then reveal in a one-inch equation

03:11:38.860 | that we'll surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God, the--

03:11:41.460 | - That's like a prerequisite, I guess,

03:11:42.980 | to tackle these questions.

03:11:44.180 | - I think it's detrimental.

03:11:46.980 | I think doing that, first of all,

03:11:48.860 | I think there's an element of almost snarkiness,

03:11:50.780 | 'cause none of these scientists are believing Gnostics.

03:11:54.540 | They're not theists, right?

03:11:55.720 | So they're using it as kind of a stand-in,

03:11:57.660 | and they always talk about Einstein,

03:11:58.860 | and he was like a Spinozan, and he wasn't a theist.

03:12:02.060 | - God doesn't play dice.

03:12:03.060 | - God doesn't play dice.

03:12:03.900 | - Yeah, Einstein's mentions of God, yeah.

03:12:05.220 | - Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says,

03:12:07.380 | "If when we get M-theory understood,

03:12:09.580 | "we'll know the mind of God."

03:12:11.560 | That's the title of Kaku's book,

03:12:13.780 | the God Particle, the God Equation.

03:12:17.700 | Do any of them really believe in God?

03:12:19.020 | Now, is that a prerequisite?

03:12:20.340 | No, I'm not saying that.

03:12:21.420 | But the point being, you're talking about something

03:12:24.060 | that has to do with God, right?

03:12:25.140 | I mean, where else do you go from there?

03:12:26.580 | I mean, I think God, for now, enjoys a little bit more

03:12:29.780 | kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right?

03:12:33.180 | So God's got a pretty good H-index himself.

03:12:37.300 | - He has, by the way, a Twitter account,

03:12:39.180 | just so you know, it's pretty good.

03:12:40.380 | - The tweets of God.

03:12:41.340 | - Yeah, the tweets of God.

03:12:43.320 | - So if you look at that, you have to go in there.

03:12:46.020 | Again, you have to go in with some swagger.

03:12:47.700 | You have to have a little bit of arrogance,

03:12:50.380 | but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of humility.

03:12:52.820 | So he's doing something, he comes from outside of academia.

03:12:55.960 | Now, if he rails against, I'm talking about Eric now,

03:12:58.240 | if he's just railing, "Oh, the system,

03:12:59.620 | "and I'm not gonna publish, 'cause F that,

03:13:01.120 | "and that's only created by greedy journals,"

03:13:03.460 | I don't think he's doing himself any favors.

03:13:05.620 | On the other hand, if he's shopping it,

03:13:07.260 | if he's talking it, if he's willing to expose it

03:13:10.820 | to criticism and to even embrace people

03:13:14.980 | who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps,

03:13:18.100 | but in the sense of they're not arguing solely

03:13:21.460 | to get to the truth, with a capital T,

03:13:23.900 | what they're trying to do is take down Eric.

03:13:25.660 | Hopefully those people aren't out there.

03:13:27.660 | But on the other hand, looking at what Eric does

03:13:31.260 | for other people, looking at the fact that he has courtesy,

03:13:34.540 | he will look at Wolfram, he will look at Lisey,

03:13:36.660 | who's one of his closest friends.

03:13:38.000 | I mean, he calls him his, not his aunt.

03:13:40.260 | - Nemesis. - Nemesis, right, right.

03:13:41.980 | And I think that's interesting,

03:13:43.120 | that they're loving friends.

03:13:44.260 | - I really enjoyed that portal conversation

03:13:46.180 | between Gary Lisey, Eric is torn about that conversation

03:13:49.820 | because, I guess, because of the nemesis

03:13:53.340 | of the beautiful dance of minds playing with these ideas

03:13:56.100 | and theories of everything.

03:13:56.940 | - Some of these things, you know, look,

03:13:57.860 | so fundamentally, now I may disagree with him,

03:14:00.660 | Eric, on a different aspect,

03:14:02.060 | which is the only one I'm capable of,

03:14:03.460 | but let me say one thing, which is experimental,

03:14:05.300 | but let me say one thing.

03:14:06.700 | I understand probably a third

03:14:08.820 | of what Eric's talking about with GU.

03:14:10.620 | I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics,

03:14:13.900 | I understand some group theory, fiber bone,

03:14:16.420 | I can get a little of it, the age theory,

03:14:19.140 | but I also understand what I don't understand,

03:14:21.980 | and I understand that there are people

03:14:23.260 | like Witten, Maldacena, Nima, other people

03:14:26.380 | that can't understand it,

03:14:28.220 | and they're not trying to understand it.

03:14:29.820 | Sabina, she can understand it.

03:14:31.100 | She makes all these, you know,

03:14:32.500 | oh, I don't understand it, I don't wanna understand it,

03:14:34.140 | I don't have time.

03:14:35.220 | And then she makes a video, a music video,

03:14:37.460 | you know, kinda mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett.

03:14:40.300 | I'm like, oh, you have a time to do,

03:14:41.420 | and I love Sabina,

03:14:42.380 | and I've actually promoted my show on her,

03:14:44.460 | and I love her, and she's doing a wonderful job,

03:14:47.100 | but you have a video that you said yourself

03:14:49.860 | takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish,

03:14:51.460 | and you couldn't have spent, you know,

03:14:53.220 | 30 minutes, two hours.

03:14:54.540 | I, Brian Keating, have done it

03:14:55.900 | as an experimental cosmologist,

03:14:57.780 | and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting.

03:15:00.260 | It's part of the Assayer Project,

03:15:01.980 | and it actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people.

03:15:04.020 | There are very few.

03:15:04.860 | Louis Alvarez-Gomez at SUNY Stony Brook,

03:15:08.140 | the Simon Center for Geometrical Physics.

03:15:10.100 | So he and I are running this seminar,

03:15:12.260 | hopefully this summer.

03:15:13.100 | We're gonna reenact the famous

03:15:14.420 | Shelter Island Conferences of the 1900s,

03:15:17.500 | where, you know, Feynman got together,

03:15:19.180 | and they calculated the Lamb shift, and all that,

03:15:21.020 | but what did that feature?

03:15:23.260 | The harmony, the resonant minds

03:15:25.660 | behind the best experimentalists in cosmology,

03:15:28.500 | particle physics, condensed matter physics

03:15:30.540 | is now teaching us tremendous things

03:15:31.940 | about, you know, lower dimensional systems

03:15:33.980 | that can be applied.

03:15:34.940 | Theorists and experimentalists, observers,

03:15:37.780 | cosmologists, astronomers, we all get together,

03:15:40.620 | and we're just gonna do it out of a spirit of love.

03:15:43.340 | But if it's just like, oh, this guy's like a loudmouth,

03:15:46.060 | I don't have time for that.

03:15:46.900 | I really don't.

03:15:47.740 | I don't think it's an interesting way to spend my time.

03:15:50.340 | - There is a aspect that I hope to see,

03:15:52.940 | and it goes back to our sort of discussion

03:15:56.460 | about Joe Rogan.

03:15:57.980 | I do hope to see sort of love and humility

03:16:00.460 | in the presentation.

03:16:01.300 | Like, let go of this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen,

03:16:06.020 | and the ego that's inherent to the scientific pursuit,

03:16:09.460 | and now that everybody is established and known entities,

03:16:14.460 | let go of that a little bit,

03:16:17.340 | so we can explore and celebrate ideas.

03:16:20.140 | I would love to see more of that,

03:16:21.340 | just because you're saying,

03:16:22.540 | especially with these big ideas of theories of everything.

03:16:26.140 | - And I've talked, I mean,

03:16:26.980 | this isn't talking tails out of school,

03:16:28.540 | but I mean, he has made claims

03:16:30.060 | that I fundamentally disagree with,

03:16:31.820 | you know, in terms of like, you know,

03:16:33.540 | he's had this Twitter baiting, you know,

03:16:35.820 | loving trolling of Elon,

03:16:37.340 | why are you spending all this money to get to Mars?

03:16:38.860 | You know, we should be spending money

03:16:39.980 | on interdimensional travel, and we can unlock it.

03:16:42.700 | And I said to him, and he makes the point,

03:16:44.540 | you know, that, oh, the atomic theory,

03:16:47.300 | you know, that unleashed the nuclear age,

03:16:49.500 | and that, you know, could lead to planetary destruction.

03:16:52.660 | But I make the point, pushing back with love on him,

03:16:56.100 | and I say, look, nobody looked into the equations,

03:16:58.420 | you know, like, Fermi didn't look into all these equations

03:17:01.220 | of the unification, which still doesn't exist, by the way.

03:17:03.980 | We spend all this time, Lex, and I don't know why it is,

03:17:06.340 | it's a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics.

03:17:08.500 | People are looking for the toe,

03:17:10.900 | and they're overlooking the gut.

03:17:12.900 | In other words, they're spending all this time

03:17:14.100 | in a theory of everything, the God,

03:17:16.020 | and there's this gut that unifies

03:17:17.580 | the three stronger forces.

03:17:18.700 | We don't have a single theory for that.

03:17:20.260 | And people like Lashon, they've tried and failed at it.

03:17:22.940 | - Yeah, for people who don't know,

03:17:23.900 | there's four forces, gut, grant, unification theories

03:17:27.300 | that unifies the three forces, stuff,

03:17:29.420 | and Donald trying to get a shortcut

03:17:30.860 | to the theory of everything, which unifies the four.

03:17:33.460 | And then there's this whole thing

03:17:35.780 | that maybe quantum gravity's not even a thing.

03:17:38.140 | So we're trying to solve the puzzle of everything

03:17:43.140 | at the physics level, and then already before solving it,

03:17:51.500 | already saying, once we solve it,

03:17:53.220 | here's going to be all the beautiful--

03:17:55.020 | - Or just like, level jumping it,

03:17:56.740 | going to level 256.

03:17:59.060 | - Time-exiting thing.

03:18:00.820 | Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I suppose you need

03:18:03.940 | that kind of ego, that confidence,

03:18:06.700 | that ambition in order to even have a chance

03:18:09.340 | at some of these--

03:18:10.180 | - The only two people in this book of nine Nobel laureates

03:18:13.100 | who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome

03:18:16.100 | were two theorists, Frank Wilczek and Sheldon Glashow.

03:18:19.460 | And Frank is a pretty interesting,

03:18:21.020 | and I know eventually we're gonna talk

03:18:22.140 | about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank.

03:18:25.260 | Frank invented this theory along with his advisor

03:18:27.660 | and another, a third person in the early 1970s,

03:18:31.980 | which from 1974, three, when he was at Princeton,

03:18:34.620 | all the way up until 2004 when he won the Nobel Prize,

03:18:36.980 | every day of his life, imagine this, Lex,

03:18:39.660 | you're gonna have this startup,

03:18:41.060 | actually, someone tells you you're gonna win the lottery.

03:18:43.220 | You're gonna win the lottery in 40 years.

03:18:45.140 | What becomes your singular focus in your life

03:18:48.040 | from now until the next 40 years?

03:18:49.840 | - Well, I'm not sure.

03:18:54.100 | I mean, would it be winning the lottery?

03:18:56.380 | Or if I'm so confident--

03:18:57.220 | - You're guaranteed to win a lottery.

03:18:59.140 | There's this, here's this wallet, Bitcoin wallet,

03:19:00.940 | it's gonna guarantee to have as much money,

03:19:02.260 | it's a stable coin, whatever.

03:19:04.140 | You're gonna win it, but you have to wait 40 years.

03:19:06.380 | To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years.

03:19:09.140 | You wouldn't leave your house.

03:19:10.540 | You would cover, go out in a bubble wrap hat.

03:19:12.500 | You wouldn't go out without 20 masks on, right?

03:19:14.660 | Your whole life would be consumed with,

03:19:17.140 | now imagine everyone's telling you

03:19:18.380 | you're gonna win the Nobel Prize,

03:19:19.420 | which is bigger than the lottery.

03:19:20.800 | I mean, many prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize,

03:19:23.220 | and every person who wins a prize

03:19:25.100 | that's worth three times the money, like Maldecena,

03:19:27.300 | he would trade that breakthrough prize

03:19:29.280 | for a Nobel Prize in a heartbeat.

03:19:30.700 | So these guys had to wait 40 years.

03:19:33.820 | Imagine the excruciating pain.

03:19:35.540 | What got him through it?

03:19:36.540 | He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it.

03:19:38.460 | He felt like, hell yeah, I earned it.

03:19:40.540 | He has that swagger.

03:19:42.420 | And what I'm looking for in this asset

03:19:44.340 | is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now,

03:19:47.520 | 'cause I don't know if I'm gonna be here in 40 years,

03:19:49.300 | I hope I am, but can we bypass, can we get shortcuts

03:19:51.820 | to what's called the low energy regime?

03:19:53.660 | And to me, that's what's interesting.

03:19:55.620 | Like, what can we do now?

03:19:56.700 | I don't care, like Isaac Newton came up with color theory,

03:19:59.620 | and he did something really interesting.

03:20:00.620 | Next time I come, I'll bring you some prisms.

03:20:02.100 | So what did he do?

03:20:03.100 | He took a white light, he took a prism,

03:20:05.140 | from the sun, actually, he put it through a slit,

03:20:06.780 | put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow,

03:20:09.540 | like you've seen.

03:20:10.500 | And then he took another prism, and he put it upside down,

03:20:13.740 | like, you know, dark side of the moon, whatever,

03:20:15.580 | and the light went through the first prism,

03:20:17.260 | turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow

03:20:18.980 | went into a prism and came out a white light.

03:20:21.500 | That's pretty cool.

03:20:22.780 | Then he took a popsicle stick or whatever,

03:20:24.780 | it's probably, you know, pipe tobacco,

03:20:26.420 | and he put it in the beam, like, blocked out the orange,

03:20:29.700 | and it didn't make white light come out.

03:20:31.740 | So he showed, like, colors of synthesis.

03:20:34.100 | It's a combination.

03:20:34.940 | He didn't use, like, the Large Hadron Collider to do that.

03:20:38.100 | You know, he used a very low-energy experiment

03:20:40.180 | to prove a unification in this color physics,

03:20:42.460 | and different kind of color physics

03:20:43.700 | than in quantum chromodynamics.

03:20:45.380 | But nevertheless, can we find things like that?

03:20:47.820 | Are we spending way too much time and energy

03:20:49.780 | thinking about the future circular collider,

03:20:52.180 | which, even if it gets built,

03:20:53.180 | will cost $30 billion just to build?

03:20:55.260 | By the way, anytime, from now on,

03:20:56.700 | if I leave you with anything,

03:20:57.940 | anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number,

03:21:00.140 | always double it, maybe triple it.

03:21:01.980 | - How much is it gonna cost?

03:21:03.220 | - To operate it.

03:21:04.100 | So, like, do we build an aircraft carrier

03:21:06.220 | to build an aircraft carrier?

03:21:07.700 | Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility?

03:21:10.420 | And the rule of thumb that works pretty well

03:21:12.020 | in project management is it costs about 10% per year

03:21:14.860 | to operate a given object of sufficient complexity.

03:21:18.140 | And in this case, so, in 10 years,

03:21:19.700 | it'll cost double the cost.

03:21:20.820 | So never believe a number,

03:21:22.400 | whether it's from our mutual friend Harry or whoever,

03:21:24.780 | don't believe the number, double it,

03:21:26.140 | and then say, is it worth it?

03:21:27.660 | And so, building a solar system-sized accelerator,

03:21:30.420 | even if it were possible, do we have to do that?

03:21:32.740 | Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects

03:21:35.780 | colliding together to test the number

03:21:38.620 | of large extraspatial dimensions?

03:21:40.340 | Can we do that?

03:21:41.180 | People are working on it.

03:21:42.000 | I think it's fascinating.

03:21:43.100 | - So, focus on building detectors.

03:21:46.140 | - Experiments.

03:21:46.980 | - That, like, where the cosmos

03:21:53.260 | is part of the experiment, I suppose.

03:21:56.020 | That's doing the hard work.

03:21:57.340 | 'Cause when you're saying low energy regime,

03:22:00.260 | 'cause for some of these, especially big questions

03:22:02.620 | like theories of everything,

03:22:03.820 | you need some high energy events.

03:22:07.380 | And so, somehow figure out how the high energy events

03:22:10.260 | that are already happening out there,

03:22:12.660 | how to leverage them here on Earth.

03:22:16.140 | - So, one of the alternative theories of cosmology

03:22:19.140 | that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring,

03:22:22.100 | as the Big Bang and inflation are,

03:22:23.940 | is, are these balancing models.

03:22:26.100 | Some of them feature a similar kind of entity

03:22:29.100 | called a quantum field.

03:22:30.660 | And that quantum field in the initial stages

03:22:33.380 | of the universe of our current, after the bounce,

03:22:35.460 | which is not a singularity,

03:22:36.700 | it compresses to a classical kind of rebound,

03:22:39.340 | and the universe starts expanding.

03:22:41.560 | During that process, the expansion is governed

03:22:44.740 | by what's called a scalar field,

03:22:46.420 | of which we only know one that exists,

03:22:48.300 | that's called the Higgs boson.

03:22:49.260 | Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle,

03:22:51.700 | a fundamental field.

03:22:53.500 | That field then later does double duty,

03:22:56.340 | and it becomes dark energy.

03:22:59.540 | So, it solves two problems.

03:23:01.020 | And I'm not saying it's correct, we don't know yet.

03:23:02.740 | But are there observations of,

03:23:04.620 | and so dark energy is manifest today,

03:23:06.320 | it's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions,

03:23:10.220 | et cetera, et cetera.

03:23:11.220 | We see the effects of accelerating universe

03:23:13.220 | caused by presumably dark energy.

03:23:15.100 | Is dark energy a constant, or does it vary?

03:23:18.260 | That has to vary in order for this theory to be true,

03:23:20.780 | because that eventually has to decay

03:23:22.380 | so that the universe can not support itself

03:23:24.380 | and collapse again, again classically.

03:23:26.660 | So, we could use low energy phenomena,

03:23:28.580 | it's hard to think of supernova

03:23:29.820 | as being a low energy phenomenon,

03:23:31.460 | but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field,

03:23:34.160 | and see, does it change, or is it a constant?

03:23:36.580 | That's an example of a low energy limit

03:23:38.140 | to prove a high energy phenomenon,

03:23:40.180 | like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model.

03:23:42.980 | - Speaking of things that cost a lot,

03:23:45.000 | but are super exciting.

03:23:46.480 | - Page two.

03:23:51.300 | - No, we'll wrap it up.

03:23:52.900 | - No.

03:23:53.740 | - There's more than page two.

03:23:56.500 | What do you think this is?

03:23:58.540 | This is--

03:23:59.380 | - A thesis.

03:24:00.200 | (Lex laughing)

03:24:01.040 | Actually, well, Louis de Broglie's thesis

03:24:02.220 | was three pages long,

03:24:03.060 | and he won the Nobel Prize for the wave-particle duality.

03:24:06.020 | - So, size matters in different dimensions in life.

03:24:10.740 | I think the lessons I've learned about life

03:24:13.460 | is the shorter the paper, or the shorter the thesis.

03:24:16.880 | Actually, the shorter the paper,

03:24:18.940 | some of the greatest papers ever written are short.

03:24:21.700 | I feel like some of the best ideas in this world,

03:24:25.980 | not to sound like a contradiction of Feynman,

03:24:28.420 | a contradiction on top of a contradiction,

03:24:30.420 | but it could be written on a napkin, honestly.

03:24:32.700 | Which just kind of tells you something about ideas.

03:24:37.160 | What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope?

03:24:45.540 | Is this, as somebody who likes telescopes,

03:24:49.940 | and this is one of the, I think it says,

03:24:52.720 | took 20 years to build, $9.7 billion.

03:24:56.780 | Is that way too much, too little?

03:24:59.340 | Are you excited about this thing?

03:25:01.340 | - It's sufficiently different from what I do in my field

03:25:04.180 | that it's incredibly interesting to me,

03:25:06.000 | 'cause I have no horse in that race,

03:25:09.700 | and so I'm not competing with them for time,

03:25:11.860 | or money, or resources, or people, or whatever.

03:25:14.420 | So I can purely be an advocate and an aficionado of science.

03:25:18.980 | It is, in some sense, the successor to Hubble.

03:25:21.900 | It will do things that Hubble can't do.

03:25:24.680 | It will also, may or may not have the impact

03:25:27.700 | on a visceral, kind of artistic level that Hubble had.

03:25:31.540 | What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did?

03:25:34.300 | The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the Pillars of Creation,

03:25:37.820 | storms and imaging of these twisted deep sky galaxies.

03:25:43.020 | Those resonated with the public.

03:25:44.980 | - Just visually, they were beautiful.

03:25:46.460 | - Visually, yeah, when you look at these images,

03:25:48.980 | the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in,

03:25:51.540 | you'll show every speck of light except for one.

03:25:54.020 | 4,000 blobs of light, there's one star in our galaxy,

03:25:57.740 | the rest are galaxies.

03:25:58.980 | Now, that image is less than 1/10 of your fingernail

03:26:02.220 | held out at arm's length, it contains 4,000 galaxies.

03:26:05.780 | So now you can figure out how many galaxies there are

03:26:08.480 | in the whole sky just by seeing how long does it take you

03:26:11.340 | to move your fingernail over the whole sky?

03:26:13.140 | So we have another couple hours.

03:26:15.180 | But no, so it comes out to be,

03:26:16.280 | that's how we get 500 billion or more galaxies.

03:26:18.900 | Now, it's not exact to the galaxy,

03:26:20.340 | but it's a good order of magnitude estimate,

03:26:22.820 | maybe even better.

03:26:24.480 | Hubble produced that, and it was basically serendipitous.

03:26:26.900 | They pointed to some dark, blank piece of sky,

03:26:29.140 | what they thought was blank, and they saw it.

03:26:30.780 | Same thing that happened with the CMB.

03:26:32.540 | They were looking for something they didn't find.

03:26:34.420 | Same thing they found when they were looking

03:26:35.820 | for the deceleration of the universe

03:26:38.260 | and found it was accelerating.

03:26:40.260 | So what I sometimes hear is that we don't know

03:26:43.100 | what we're gonna discover.

03:26:44.380 | I never think that's a good idea

03:26:45.980 | to spend billions of dollars on something.

03:26:48.060 | You should have some guaranteed low-hanging fruit,

03:26:51.100 | and then there should be swinging for the fences.

03:26:53.300 | And I think in this case, it was really everything

03:26:55.620 | is swinging for the fences 'cause it's either,

03:26:57.060 | it's kind of a single-point failure.

03:26:58.500 | If that telescope, which is this origami construction

03:27:01.800 | of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly

03:27:05.380 | and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth,

03:27:08.160 | beyond the Earth-Moon distance by a factor of four,

03:27:10.960 | and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth,

03:27:15.240 | get solar energy, keep it away from the sun.

03:27:17.620 | You don't wanna look through the telescope of the sun

03:27:19.620 | with your remaining good eye.

03:27:20.940 | And you do that, and you cover, it's gonna be phenomenal

03:27:23.980 | for science, for sure, if it works.

03:27:27.940 | There are a lot of people think, it's so risky,

03:27:30.540 | NASA sunk so much of their budget, it ate up,

03:27:33.580 | and what if it does fail?

03:27:34.660 | I mean, there's no guarantee.

03:27:35.920 | Yes, it's insured, but so what?

03:27:37.700 | You're not gonna get back those 20 years of people,

03:27:39.980 | well, let's start building it again.

03:27:41.380 | They didn't build two copies of it.

03:27:43.420 | - And then if it fails, it kinda has a dampening effect

03:27:48.420 | on the prospects and the inspiration of the public

03:27:51.980 | for what science can do, what science engineering can do

03:27:54.500 | is out in space.

03:27:55.980 | - It will make a huge impact scientifically.

03:27:57.620 | Let's hope for the best, let's assume it does succeed.

03:28:00.060 | It's launched in a couple weeks.

03:28:01.620 | And when it does, it will transform our understanding of,

03:28:06.140 | we just discovered not only extrasolar planets

03:28:10.040 | that have moons on them and asteroid belt,

03:28:12.060 | we discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy.

03:28:15.060 | This'll be able to see crazy stuff like that,

03:28:16.940 | spectroscopy, imaging, but it'll be able to go back

03:28:21.740 | farther in time such that we will be doing,

03:28:25.020 | Hubble did some cosmology, it measured the Hubble constant,

03:28:27.460 | that was its key project when it was designed and launched.

03:28:30.900 | But because it is an optical telescope,

03:28:33.460 | it's sensitive to more close-in redshifts,

03:28:35.660 | so shorter distances.

03:28:37.100 | Now, James Webb is much, much higher redshift,

03:28:39.340 | it can probe the darker, deeper, distant universe.

03:28:42.260 | - Okay, let's talk about not the distant universe,

03:28:44.440 | but our neighboring planets.

03:28:47.100 | First, I gotta ask you about the moon.

03:28:49.460 | So there's a piece of the moon on this table

03:28:55.140 | that you've given me that we didn't have to pick up

03:28:58.660 | that arrived here.

03:29:00.220 | - That's right.

03:29:01.060 | - So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth?

03:29:03.360 | - So this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered

03:29:06.660 | by the Apollo and NASA missions,

03:29:10.300 | you and I would be guilty of a felony right now,

03:29:12.820 | 'cause it's illegal to own pieces of the moon

03:29:14.580 | collected by the Apollo astronauts.

03:29:16.500 | So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston.

03:29:19.640 | This piece of moon rock was delivered

03:29:21.340 | via the old-fashioned way, by gravity.

03:29:23.540 | So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off

03:29:27.620 | because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids.

03:29:31.820 | Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon

03:29:34.760 | into space, and it will then orbit

03:29:37.580 | the common moon-Earth system,

03:29:41.100 | and it will then eventually enter our atmosphere.

03:29:44.260 | If the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper,

03:29:46.660 | it can land intact, and this one landed

03:29:48.640 | with a few hundred grams worth, and they sliced it up,

03:29:52.420 | and then it was delivered via US Postal Service to my house.

03:29:56.340 | So you can buy these pieces,

03:29:57.500 | and actually, you can buy a piece of Mars.

03:29:59.660 | You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route.

03:30:02.660 | Now, what's so interesting about that?

03:30:04.240 | Well, if a piece of Mars can get here,

03:30:06.540 | a piece of Earth can get there.

03:30:08.580 | Some piece of Earth has some life forms on it.

03:30:11.420 | It could get there, and if that can happen

03:30:13.740 | in our solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy.

03:30:16.420 | So I'm actually not of the opinion

03:30:18.420 | that there is life elsewhere in the universe,

03:30:21.360 | at least technological life, that we can,

03:30:23.540 | I see this look of horror on your face.

03:30:25.980 | I view it, I am personally extremely pessimistic,

03:30:30.140 | would be extremely surprised.

03:30:31.380 | - I'm just, I'm curious by the transition,

03:30:34.500 | because you just said that life could have arrived

03:30:38.380 | from Mars, or like from planet to planet,

03:30:40.660 | but because of the meteorite striking it and so on,

03:30:43.420 | and then you went to, you don't think

03:30:45.700 | there might be life out there in the universe.

03:30:48.740 | - Technological life.

03:30:49.780 | - Technological life, yeah,

03:30:52.140 | advanced intelligent civilizations, okay.

03:30:55.500 | - Okay, so go on.

03:30:57.100 | - So that's the generalization

03:30:58.540 | of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called,

03:31:01.100 | I know this is a PG-13, it's called panspermia.

03:31:04.740 | Panspermia.

03:31:06.480 | - Beep that out, please.

03:31:07.320 | - Yeah, yeah, please.

03:31:08.140 | And that's the exchange of genetic life form material

03:31:12.520 | from other reaches on Earth,

03:31:14.380 | which explains the origin of life on Earth,

03:31:16.860 | but not the origin of life itself,

03:31:18.420 | which I think is a much grander mystery

03:31:20.220 | and much more interesting.

03:31:22.140 | How did life get here?

03:31:23.180 | And you've talked with many eminent people about that.

03:31:25.740 | I'm not gonna add that much,

03:31:26.860 | but just thinking about the reverse process.

03:31:29.540 | Let's say life started on the Earth somehow,

03:31:32.460 | and then made its way out into the universe.

03:31:34.700 | Is there enough time for whatever material

03:31:37.000 | went from Earth via panspermic direction,

03:31:40.540 | spraying the love gun out into the universe,

03:31:42.880 | did that then have enough time to incubate

03:31:45.180 | and go onto a planet that could support it?

03:31:47.440 | Certainly not within our solar system,

03:31:49.660 | which traveling at the meteorite speeds

03:31:51.400 | would require hundreds of millions of years.

03:31:53.900 | Then looking at the evolutionary history

03:31:55.720 | from bacteria to Bach, from rocks to Rachmaninoff,

03:32:00.660 | I don't know, I can do this all day.

03:32:01.880 | - Oh wow, that's pretty good.

03:32:02.880 | - How do you get from those very simple,

03:32:05.080 | inanimate objects to life?

03:32:06.320 | I just simply think there's not enough time

03:32:07.800 | for Earth to seed life, technological life

03:32:10.000 | throughout the galaxy.

03:32:10.840 | I don't think there's any evidence for that.

03:32:13.160 | - So you really think that the origin of life on Earth

03:32:18.120 | is a really special event?

03:32:19.960 | - Yeah, if it did originate on Earth.

03:32:22.720 | My question for those that search for life

03:32:24.760 | outside the Earth is what if you had a letter from God

03:32:28.400 | and the letter said life didn't originate on Earth?

03:32:32.800 | Would you choose a different profession?

03:32:35.280 | It would seem hopeless.

03:32:36.600 | In other words, we only have a sample of one.

03:32:38.240 | In fact, we only know of one conscious life form,

03:32:40.280 | let alone one planet that has life on it.

03:32:42.760 | What if you knew for sure it didn't start here?

03:32:45.040 | That means that there's almost nothing about Earth

03:32:48.040 | that is originated, it didn't originate the life process.

03:32:52.200 | So to study purely the origin of life,

03:32:53.960 | not life itself, I think that's still fascinating.

03:32:55.920 | But how could we learn about the origin of,

03:32:59.200 | remember, you have to go from inanimate object

03:33:01.080 | to a living object, whatever that definition of life is.

03:33:04.240 | And I'm not an expert in many definitions,

03:33:06.320 | Max, Sarah, many different definitions.

03:33:09.440 | But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate?

03:33:13.720 | It's a huge question.

03:33:14.760 | - Yeah, but then you don't have to be the place

03:33:17.300 | where life originated to replicate the origin.

03:33:20.480 | Yeah, that's one way to understand something

03:33:23.480 | is to build it.

03:33:26.040 | But another way is to just observe it.

03:33:27.720 | You don't have to truly re-engineer from scratch.

03:33:31.480 | But then, yes, if it didn't originate on Earth,

03:33:37.240 | then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites

03:33:41.800 | of life are off.

03:33:43.640 | - What's the governing principle?

03:33:46.840 | - And then you could have just almost an arbitrary number

03:33:50.360 | of possible, like if life didn't start on Earth.

03:33:54.500 | To me, that's exciting because it's like,

03:33:59.080 | we know even less than we thought.

03:34:01.200 | The thing is, it can prosper on Earth, though.

03:34:05.220 | - Yeah.

03:34:06.060 | - So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different

03:34:08.940 | from the maintenance of life.

03:34:11.220 | - Right, and maybe the existence

03:34:13.220 | of the Earth-life symbiosis is critical.

03:34:16.680 | I think Sarah, you talked about Sarah Walker,

03:34:18.940 | that it's a planetary phenomenon, et cetera, et cetera.

03:34:22.120 | So doesn't that make it less like, in other words,

03:34:24.680 | not only do you need special life conditions

03:34:27.120 | to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say,

03:34:31.580 | that also has to be maintained

03:34:33.860 | under very specific circumstances by very specific planets

03:34:37.020 | and with very specific tectonic activity and moon.

03:34:39.540 | And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby.

03:34:41.520 | You need an Earth and a moon system

03:34:43.780 | so that you don't get bombarded too early.

03:34:46.000 | And I always think this, technological life,

03:34:48.760 | I haven't said this before, really, so I'm just speaking,

03:34:50.640 | I usually like to write down before I say a different thing.

03:34:52.800 | But one of the things I thought about--

03:34:53.840 | - Somebody host a podcast.

03:34:55.280 | (Lex laughing)

03:34:56.120 | You should probably accept the fact

03:34:57.660 | that you're going to say stupid things every once in a while.

03:35:00.160 | - Not every once in a while, every while.

03:35:02.840 | I claim that to get to sending people to the moon,

03:35:07.580 | our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right?

03:35:12.200 | You don't make a solar panel from another solar panel.

03:35:14.960 | You made a solar panel from a factory

03:35:17.080 | that melted down glass, silica, aluminum,

03:35:20.160 | extruded that using fossil fuels.

03:35:21.700 | Where do those fossil fuels come from?

03:35:23.360 | Like, so any civilization that's gonna be a Dyson,

03:35:26.400 | Kardashev's, did they have dinosaurs?

03:35:29.560 | Did they have prebiotic life?

03:35:31.260 | Did they have a great oxygenation event?

03:35:32.880 | Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic, eukaryotic?

03:35:37.360 | All those hurdles, let's say you give each one,

03:35:39.120 | let's say there's eight hurdles,

03:35:40.880 | and each one of those has a probability

03:35:42.480 | of one in a thousand to go from,

03:35:44.600 | eukaryotic, prokaryotic, whatever.

03:35:46.720 | Let's say there's a one in a thousand chance.

03:35:48.080 | I think it's like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever,

03:35:50.440 | if you really do it, but let's say it's first generous

03:35:52.520 | nature, one in 10 to the three.

03:35:55.040 | Let's say there's eight of those hurdles.

03:35:57.040 | That means you have 10 to the 24th power,

03:36:01.080 | different possibility, and that's just with eight.

03:36:04.500 | Like the moon has to be there,

03:36:05.720 | Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs have to be there,

03:36:07.840 | all the different things that we have

03:36:08.880 | to get to technological life.

03:36:11.000 | There's only 10 to the, only,

03:36:12.760 | there's 10 to the 22nd, we think,

03:36:15.200 | Earth, not Earth, planets in the observable universe,

03:36:18.880 | not the galaxy.

03:36:20.400 | So that's 100 times fewer than the probability

03:36:23.760 | to get 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles

03:36:27.360 | of one in a thousand.

03:36:28.800 | - That's fascinating, 'cause now I really need

03:36:30.720 | to listen to your conversation with Lee Cronin,

03:36:32.880 | who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite.

03:36:36.440 | - Yes, I know.

03:36:37.560 | Yeah, I wanna have a debate with him.

03:36:39.720 | He believes that the way biology evolved on Earth

03:36:44.720 | could have evolved almost an infinite number of other ways.

03:36:48.920 | So like if you ran Earth over and over and over,

03:36:51.200 | you would keep getting life, and it would be very different.

03:36:54.320 | So the fact that our particular life seems unique

03:36:59.320 | is just like, well, 'cause every freaking life

03:37:02.320 | is gonna seem unique, but it'll be very different.

03:37:05.080 | It's not like, we shouldn't be asking the question

03:37:07.680 | of what's the likelihood of getting a human-like thing,

03:37:11.240 | because that seems to be super special.

03:37:15.320 | It's more like, (laughs)

03:37:18.520 | how easy is it to make-- - Slime mold.

03:37:21.520 | - Anything that has the skills of a human,

03:37:23.960 | and I don't mean like something with thumbs,

03:37:26.040 | but achieving basically a technological civilization.

03:37:29.600 | And according to Lee, at least, it's trivial.

03:37:33.840 | - I know, we fought, I fought a little bit.

03:37:35.560 | I'd love to debate him, I think it'd be a lot of fun,

03:37:37.000 | 'cause we debate with love.

03:37:38.040 | When I talk with Lee, I love him,

03:37:39.120 | and he loves me, I think, I hope.

03:37:40.920 | But let me ask you a question.

03:37:42.480 | I asked this of him and Sarah on our Clubhouse once.

03:37:45.960 | So what do you think would happen the next day?

03:37:47.880 | Let's say we discover life, it's Proxima Centauri B.

03:37:52.320 | It looks just like slime mold,

03:37:54.960 | like you got on your brie cheese or whatever.

03:37:57.840 | We discover it.

03:37:58.960 | What would happen the next day?

03:38:00.520 | And they were like, "Oh, this would be transformative."

03:38:04.000 | And I'm not trying to be like total Cassandra about this,

03:38:06.960 | but I said, "I don't think anything would happen."

03:38:09.800 | And they're like, "What are you talking about?

03:38:10.640 | "It would be transformational."

03:38:12.160 | I'm like, "I stipulate that life exists.

03:38:14.160 | "Go down to the river, I'm in San Diego,

03:38:16.680 | "go down to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up a glass.

03:38:19.240 | "You're gonna find life in there."

03:38:22.680 | And what are we doing?

03:38:23.640 | What are we doing to our Earth?

03:38:25.400 | We're destroying it callously.

03:38:27.320 | We're pumping crap into there.

03:38:29.280 | We have this toxic waste spill a couple months ago

03:38:31.160 | in San Diego, I couldn't go to the beach.

03:38:33.640 | Let me take it a step further.

03:38:35.240 | You know how many people, I'm sorry that you do know,

03:38:38.080 | but how many people died in the 20th century, killed?

03:38:41.520 | These are advanced civilization, this isn't a slime mold.

03:38:44.160 | We kill, we maim, we harm, we hurt, we hate.

03:38:48.280 | I don't think anything would happen the next day.

03:38:50.200 | Then we go back to what we had.

03:38:51.040 | And I said, "If that weren't proof enough,

03:38:52.880 | "life has been discovered at least two or three times

03:38:55.220 | "just in my professional career.

03:38:56.480 | "Once in 1996, these Allen Land Hills meteorites

03:39:00.340 | "in Antarctica, microbial respiration processes.

03:39:04.340 | "Still, we don't know."

03:39:05.360 | It was a press conference held by Bill Clinton

03:39:07.240 | on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie,

03:39:09.040 | "Contact," repurpose for that movie.

03:39:12.060 | And then there's this phosphorus life,

03:39:17.240 | this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake.

03:39:20.960 | Many, you know, extremophile, we don't give a crap.

03:39:24.320 | We continue to treat.

03:39:25.480 | So why are we thinking that like our salvation,

03:39:27.760 | from whence will our salvation come, as the Bible says?

03:39:30.680 | Like, it's not gonna change how we are.

03:39:32.640 | It's not gonna magnify how I treat you or you treat me.

03:39:36.240 | And we're pretty knowledgeable people, you and I,

03:39:38.400 | compared to, you know, lay people.

03:39:39.880 | - Okay, that's interesting.

03:39:40.720 | That's a really interesting argument.

03:39:41.940 | I wonder if you're right, but my intuition is,

03:39:45.840 | I can maybe present a different argument

03:39:50.360 | that you can think about in the realm of things

03:39:52.620 | you care about even deeper, which is like,

03:39:55.800 | what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe?

03:39:58.820 | Like, how would that change your life?

03:40:00.720 | - I would say there are certain discoveries

03:40:03.440 | that even in their very idea

03:40:05.020 | will change the fabric of society.

03:40:07.280 | I tend to see if there's definitive proof

03:40:10.200 | that there's life, and the more complex,

03:40:12.200 | the more powerful that idea is elsewhere,

03:40:16.760 | that I'm not exactly sure how it will change society,

03:40:20.540 | because it's such a slap in the face.

03:40:24.600 | It's such a humbling force, or maybe not.

03:40:28.040 | Or maybe it's a motivator to say,

03:40:30.140 | yeah, I don't know which force would take over.

03:40:33.040 | Maybe it would be governments with military

03:40:36.160 | start to think like, well, how do we kill it?

03:40:38.980 | If there's a lot of life out there,

03:40:41.520 | how do we create the defenses?

03:40:43.040 | - How do we extract it?

03:40:44.080 | - Or yeah, or mine it for benefits.

03:40:47.920 | - I mean, I just see like,

03:40:48.840 | there's a hundred million literal counter examples of that.

03:40:51.720 | I mean, right now there's like 700 million kids in poverty,

03:40:56.560 | and how do we go about our life

03:40:58.880 | and just not deal with that?

03:41:00.080 | I mean, look, I put it aside.

03:41:01.720 | I eat hamburgers, and in a hundred years,

03:41:04.100 | I'll be canceled for being a carnivore or whatever.

03:41:07.380 | But so obviously to get through life,

03:41:09.640 | you have to make certain compromise.

03:41:10.760 | You're not gonna think about certain things.

03:41:12.720 | But I just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment.

03:41:15.760 | Like every time there's,

03:41:17.000 | why are we going to Mars and digging

03:41:18.260 | and flying this cool ass helicopter?

03:41:20.400 | We're looking for water.

03:41:21.240 | Like stipulate that water was there.

03:41:23.680 | Like, I believe there was water.

03:41:25.000 | I think we should investigate

03:41:26.160 | and see what the geology was like.

03:41:28.160 | - But don't you think, so you're saying--

03:41:29.840 | - I don't think you're gonna get meaning from it.

03:41:31.180 | That's all I'm saying.

03:41:32.020 | I'm not saying it's not worth doing.

03:41:33.720 | I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect

03:41:36.640 | that people will find meaning for life from science.

03:41:39.820 | - Okay, but there's a complicated line here.

03:41:44.160 | What if it's this intelligent civilization

03:41:47.840 | living obviously probably not on Mars,

03:41:51.540 | but somewhere like in a neighboring galaxy that we,

03:41:55.280 | sorry, in a neighboring--

03:41:58.400 | - Star system.

03:41:59.240 | - Star system that we discover.

03:42:02.280 | Don't you think that profound change in meaning?

03:42:05.360 | - I mean, I guess, again,

03:42:06.240 | I assume that because of this pan-subramanic process

03:42:09.120 | or whatever, that the probability

03:42:11.400 | is much, much greater than zero.

03:42:12.960 | I mean, it's not one 100%,

03:42:14.920 | but it's much likelier than not

03:42:16.580 | that at least some living material from Earth

03:42:19.000 | has ejaculated itself into the solar system,

03:42:22.080 | into the universe, right, into our galaxy.

03:42:23.480 | - Beep that, please.

03:42:24.320 | (both laughing)

03:42:25.680 | - As well.

03:42:26.520 | - That's right.

03:42:27.340 | So the fact that that could happen

03:42:29.560 | and that you're holding a piece from a planetary body,

03:42:32.280 | one that couldn't support life as far as we know,

03:42:34.560 | but I could give next time if you play nice

03:42:37.600 | and you come on my podcast someday,

03:42:39.000 | I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars.

03:42:40.960 | So Mars theoretically could support stuff, right?

03:42:42.960 | - Moving on up.

03:42:43.800 | - So yeah, so I believe that there could be remnants

03:42:46.080 | of Earth in this, so that means there could be evolution.

03:42:49.020 | I don't think there's any chance that there's

03:42:51.400 | people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff

03:42:53.860 | in proximate and term.

03:42:54.700 | - No, there's some chance though, right?

03:42:57.280 | So it's--

03:42:59.520 | - Again, yeah, I think the, well,

03:43:01.040 | obviously the simple statement to say

03:43:02.880 | it's much, much, much higher probability

03:43:04.800 | that life exists than technological life exists, right?

03:43:07.560 | I don't think we can argue that.

03:43:09.360 | It doesn't mean it's forbidden.

03:43:10.400 | Again, I'm not saying any of this is forbidden,

03:43:12.000 | not worth studying, not interesting.

03:43:13.560 | - It's a likelihood thing.

03:43:14.560 | - Yeah, and to answer your,

03:43:15.960 | I think you're wise to push back

03:43:17.680 | and like what does it matter what I'm doing?

03:43:20.140 | And I like to think about that, you know,

03:43:21.880 | because it's like what is the value of what you're doing?

03:43:24.160 | Like you have to answer that question

03:43:25.840 | or else at the end of your life,

03:43:27.100 | you'll have these existential, you know,

03:43:28.540 | kind of crises, right?

03:43:30.160 | So when I think about like who I am,

03:43:32.100 | part of my identity is answering

03:43:33.980 | and asking scientific questions.

03:43:35.900 | For me though, there is a religious kind of undercurrent

03:43:38.340 | that does undergird in some sense this quest.

03:43:41.440 | Again, I'm not like a practicing,

03:43:42.940 | I'm not like where I am, you know,

03:43:44.480 | like I'm not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism,

03:43:49.640 | but at the same token, I think as, you know,

03:43:52.540 | one of the things Einstein did say is that, you know,

03:43:54.000 | religion without science is blind or is lame

03:43:57.620 | and science without religion is lame, is blind and lame.

03:44:02.060 | Anyway, the point is that like you can't get meaning,

03:44:05.120 | you know, from just knowing facts.

03:44:07.480 | Like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know,

03:44:10.160 | right, it has no wisdom.

03:44:11.760 | You know, wisdom, it means sapien,

03:44:13.880 | the word wisdom in Latin is sapien, we are wise.

03:44:16.600 | And by the way, do you know what we're,

03:44:18.360 | what our real name is Homo sapien sapien.

03:44:21.240 | So it's man who knows that he knows.

03:44:23.200 | Do you know what he knows?

03:44:24.600 | Do you know what the knowing is?

03:44:25.680 | It's that he's gonna die.

03:44:27.480 | We're the only creatures that know that we are gonna die.

03:44:29.600 | We don't know when we're gonna die.

03:44:31.400 | But like, you know, I have a cat,

03:44:33.920 | a fierce attack cat, it's beautiful.

03:44:36.560 | She doesn't know when she's gonna die.

03:44:38.280 | Doesn't mean I'm more valuable than her, I think I am.

03:44:40.800 | - The survival instinct is much,

03:44:42.440 | it's fundamentally different from like the knowledge

03:44:45.860 | of death and that's where the Ernest Becker comes in

03:44:48.120 | with the terror of death.

03:44:49.720 | And that's a creative force that seems to be more feature

03:44:54.240 | than bug about the human condition is that,

03:44:58.060 | I mean, it's a gift of knowing our own mortality.

03:45:05.060 | Yeah, to me, I mean, that's why, you know,

03:45:09.960 | I agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens

03:45:13.520 | not being a thing that solves all mysteries.

03:45:17.080 | That's why, you know, my love has always been

03:45:19.520 | the human mind, so understanding who we are,

03:45:23.960 | what the hell are we?

03:45:25.480 | And I think your love has been an echo of that,

03:45:29.100 | which is where do we come from?

03:45:31.480 | - Yeah.

03:45:32.320 | - Or basically, as cheesy as it sounds, you know,

03:45:35.520 | Michio Kaku is away with words.

03:45:39.160 | If you can just like enjoy the, you know--

03:45:42.880 | - Oh, he speaks in complete,

03:45:43.840 | he's like Sam Harris of cosmology.

03:45:45.680 | I mean, he speaks in complete paragraphs.

03:45:47.480 | - But like also unapologetically, he says, you know,

03:45:51.560 | we will know God or we will know the mind of God

03:45:54.440 | or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things.

03:45:56.740 | That's exciting that physics might be able to find equations

03:46:03.480 | that unlock our origins at the very core

03:46:07.480 | and like the fabric of it all too, and not just our origins.

03:46:10.660 | You know, what's at the beginning?

03:46:15.460 | Something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand

03:46:18.000 | what's at the beginning, but--

03:46:19.240 | - I think we should be humble in that way.

03:46:21.200 | I mean, again, another thing is, you know,

03:46:23.240 | you ever hear the saying, like, we share 99% of our DNA

03:46:28.320 | with chimps or bonobos or whatever?

03:46:31.320 | I share like probably more than that.

03:46:33.000 | You know, sometimes I wish we shared like 100%.

03:46:35.440 | Like, that'd be so much more interesting.

03:46:37.280 | Like, oh, there's 50% of a fruit fly or a banana.

03:46:40.360 | Like, no, no, no, there's something,

03:46:42.580 | but that should make us feel more precious.

03:46:44.680 | And I almost feel like discovering life

03:46:46.620 | on another planet, whatever solar system,

03:46:49.900 | would cause a diminution of humanity.

03:46:52.200 | Like, the one thing I do hold fast to from religion,

03:46:54.560 | I don't know where I am with God.

03:46:55.960 | Like, do I believe in God?

03:46:57.120 | I think that's an unanswerable question,

03:46:59.480 | but I have some thoughts about it.

03:47:02.520 | But by the same token, I think the one thing

03:47:05.900 | I do get from religion is that every human

03:47:07.520 | has infinite worth, 'cause we are, in a religious capacity,

03:47:10.660 | considered to be equal to God.

03:47:12.640 | In other words, we are gods, not to be like,

03:47:15.320 | but we can contemplate what God did.

03:47:17.000 | We have aspects of God.

03:47:18.240 | We have free will.

03:47:19.080 | God had free will if he exists.

03:47:21.360 | Again, I can't prove that God exists,

03:47:23.000 | otherwise you wouldn't have any credit

03:47:24.680 | for believing in God. - This is interesting.

03:47:26.160 | I mean, it's like I'm talking to Einstein here,

03:47:29.840 | but let me ask anyway.

03:47:31.160 | - Can you clip that for my clips, John?

03:47:32.960 | (both laughing)

03:47:34.640 | - For somebody who's looking at the young universe,

03:47:39.020 | at the early universe,

03:47:42.360 | and are talking about God and are agnostic,

03:47:47.200 | who do you think is God?

03:47:49.460 | - So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts.

03:47:54.760 | It was Sam Harris this past summer.

03:47:56.980 | And one of the things I liked about that conversation

03:48:01.000 | is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation.

03:48:04.880 | And he said something that's really resonated with me,

03:48:06.640 | and I've been working it around

03:48:07.720 | and trying to work on it my own way.

03:48:09.240 | But he said like, "You can never be happy.

03:48:12.960 | You can only become happy."

03:48:16.240 | And I'm trying to take it a little bit further than that,

03:48:18.440 | 'cause I think it's interesting.

03:48:19.480 | Like meditation is like, you're not like,

03:48:21.320 | "Oh, I'm happy and now like,

03:48:23.040 | oh, my kid came in and now I'm not happy."

03:48:24.680 | They're like, "No, you can be satisfied."

03:48:26.800 | Kurt Vonnegut said like,

03:48:27.920 | you ever catch this sometimes, Alex?

03:48:29.200 | You're like walking around, you're like,

03:48:30.320 | "Life is fricking amazing.

03:48:32.000 | Like I'm happy."

03:48:32.840 | And Kurt Vonnegut said,

03:48:34.400 | "You should say to yourself every time that happens,

03:48:36.340 | like a little mantra, like,

03:48:37.560 | 'If this isn't goodness, if this isn't happiness,

03:48:40.200 | nothing is.'"

03:48:41.200 | Just remind yourself how awesome it is,

03:48:43.160 | every breath, everything that you do,

03:48:45.200 | when you make an impact.

03:48:46.080 | Even some of the bad stuff that happens, good, it's good.

03:48:49.520 | So Sam said that, and it made me think,

03:48:51.800 | 'cause I was like, "Well, what does it really mean

03:48:55.000 | to be happy?"

03:48:56.880 | Because like, I can think of about two or three ways

03:49:01.880 | that right now I could double my happiness.

03:49:04.840 | Now like, win the lottery or whatever,

03:49:06.480 | like I could double my happiness.

03:49:07.560 | There's only a few ways though, right?

03:49:08.960 | Like, you know, I had this kind of thought,

03:49:12.400 | like how many boats can you water ski behind?

03:49:15.320 | Like you had twice as many followers,

03:49:17.080 | now you got 2 million followers, 5 million, whatever.

03:49:19.480 | It doesn't do anything.

03:49:20.720 | It's called the hedonic treadmill.

03:49:22.000 | Like once you get to a certain level,

03:49:23.200 | it takes a lot more, you know, change and followers,

03:49:26.320 | money, impact, women, whatever you want

03:49:28.880 | to make you have one more quanta of happiness, right?

03:49:32.280 | On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy.

03:49:36.220 | I can make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways.

03:49:39.640 | In other words, there's more space to make your life

03:49:42.240 | unhappy than happy.

03:49:44.520 | And so I thought about that in the context

03:49:46.200 | of what Sam said about happiness.

03:49:48.740 | So it's sort of like, yeah, it's an expression of entropy.

03:49:52.360 | And that what you should be doing in life

03:49:54.940 | is doing that which will cause you devastation

03:49:59.040 | if it goes away.

03:50:00.720 | Because those are the things that like,

03:50:02.680 | are where you're reducing entropy.

03:50:05.360 | Like a kid, like anyone who's a parent

03:50:08.160 | knows instantly what I'm talking about.

03:50:10.320 | Like how to make your life a billion times worse.

03:50:13.840 | But there's no way to make your life a billion times better.

03:50:16.480 | And so thinking about that,

03:50:17.840 | now turning it to the question of God's existence,

03:50:21.120 | I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God,

03:50:24.440 | to misquote Sam, but there's ways that you can become

03:50:28.420 | a believer in God.

03:50:29.400 | In other words, you could increase

03:50:31.460 | the Bayesian confidence level that there is some,

03:50:34.640 | and let's not call it God 'cause that's a freighted term.

03:50:36.720 | Let's just call it some infinite source of goodness

03:50:38.920 | or our beautiful power in the universe, right?

03:50:42.760 | Simple things can do that.

03:50:44.040 | You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life.

03:50:47.800 | And we have this bias as humans towards negativity,

03:50:50.480 | negativity bias, well-known fact.

03:50:52.160 | So what I wanna do is, let's call God good, right?

03:50:56.280 | That's where it comes from, God good, same words in German.

03:50:59.680 | And when we think about what is good,

03:51:02.600 | let's do those things that would devastate us.

03:51:06.920 | And a lot of that could be relationships.

03:51:09.920 | And there's a powerful concept from network theory,

03:51:14.600 | which is that the number of connections in a network,

03:51:18.160 | you know, I'm just saying it for your own,

03:51:19.640 | it grows as the square of the elements in the matrix,

03:51:21.680 | in the number, right?

03:51:22.640 | So you think of a matrix with N people,

03:51:24.600 | you know person one, two, three, four,

03:51:26.560 | and then there's four other people.

03:51:28.000 | There's 16 different pairs, but half of them overlap.

03:51:31.640 | The diagonal is where you know yourself.

03:51:34.600 | But that still grows as N squared.

03:51:37.040 | So those connections increase and decrease, right?

03:51:41.800 | You ever have two friends that are fighting,

03:51:43.640 | and like you're kinda upset,

03:51:44.880 | even though you're not fighting with either one of them?

03:51:46.600 | So like a network grows like that.

03:51:48.400 | So you wanna increase your network as much as possible,

03:51:50.560 | but only the kind of high quality interstices between them.

03:51:54.720 | And I think in doing so, you make yourself fragile,

03:51:58.760 | not anti-fragile.

03:51:59.800 | And I think that is where purpose

03:52:02.360 | and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.

03:52:05.640 | - So that is a source of meaning,

03:52:08.080 | maximizing the goodness in life,

03:52:10.960 | and the way you know it's good,

03:52:13.120 | is if it's taken away, it would devastate you.

03:52:16.560 | - That's one way.

03:52:17.400 | Think about it, your brand, your business,

03:52:21.240 | your spouse, your kids.

03:52:23.400 | I mean, parents can't, I've known parents that have,

03:52:26.680 | Jim Simons, here's a perfect example.

03:52:28.640 | He's one of my oldest friends and mentors.

03:52:30.800 | He is one of the richest people on earth.

03:52:35.200 | Gulf Stream, Mega Yacht,

03:52:36.920 | this is all documented, books about him.

03:52:39.760 | He lost two sons as adults.

03:52:41.640 | And I hear people say, "Oh, I'm so jealous of Jim Simons."

03:52:46.320 | Would you take everything?

03:52:47.680 | I don't know where he has that strength

03:52:51.040 | in his wife, Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara.

03:52:53.840 | I'm not like that.

03:52:57.040 | But some people are, there are angels that walk among us.

03:53:00.320 | And there's this famous prayer, it's like,

03:53:04.280 | God, there's an old saying,

03:53:07.600 | one of the hardest tests there are in life

03:53:09.360 | is to be given a lot of money.

03:53:10.720 | And you see it happens with people that win the lottery

03:53:13.480 | or whatever, or NFL football players

03:53:15.600 | after their career's over, they're broke, right?

03:53:18.800 | And I always joke, "God, please test me with money,

03:53:20.800 | "that'd be great."

03:53:21.640 | But in reality, you should never say,

03:53:23.920 | I'm gonna, I want what X person has,

03:53:26.600 | unless you're willing to take everything.

03:53:28.200 | And you'll find you won't wanna take everything.

03:53:30.600 | - Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects

03:53:36.720 | of fame, of money, of power on people.

03:53:39.840 | It blinds people.

03:53:45.560 | And I wonder about that for myself,

03:53:50.280 | because it seems like in themselves,

03:53:53.720 | these are definitely not the goals

03:53:55.200 | I'm pretty much afraid, I'm not desirous,

03:53:59.800 | and I'm definitely afraid of each of those things,

03:54:03.040 | money, fame, and power.

03:54:07.280 | But it seems the dreams I have as consequences

03:54:11.840 | can often have these things.

03:54:14.240 | And I'm really afraid of becoming something

03:54:16.760 | that would disappoint me when I was younger,

03:54:20.680 | that I wouldn't recognize.

03:54:24.120 | You know, 'cause change happens gradually.

03:54:26.360 | - But are you using yourself as the touchstone

03:54:30.560 | to use the assay or not?

03:54:32.400 | What is your rubric to apprise if you have lived up

03:54:36.040 | to that 12-year-old, whatever-year-old Lex?

03:54:38.880 | How will you know or not know if you've let yourself down?

03:54:41.880 | Or, I always think, live to impress yourself.

03:54:45.080 | I don't care if I have followers.

03:54:47.680 | It's nice, or whatever, but it's hedonic,

03:54:50.360 | and it's just never-ending,

03:54:51.640 | 'cause you'll always see the next level.

03:54:53.640 | But I think it's pretty damn cool

03:54:54.840 | that I've gotten to go to these places,

03:54:56.560 | the South Pole, and I've done these things,

03:54:58.160 | and I've made a family,

03:54:59.560 | and I'm able to teleport my values into the future

03:55:04.000 | through my children, and I've had ideological children.

03:55:07.320 | So by what metric have you not already, A, impressed yourself

03:55:12.160 | and, B, could you let yourself down?

03:55:13.280 | I don't wanna turn this into therapy.

03:55:14.360 | - I think some of it is psychology.

03:55:15.920 | For me, I'm very much just never,

03:55:19.280 | I'm highly self-critical.

03:55:21.520 | I'm never happy, never happy with what I've done,

03:55:24.360 | but I'm always happy in the way that you describe,

03:55:27.080 | which is that the Vonnegut thing,

03:55:29.880 | where you just, often during the day,

03:55:32.600 | I will feel, I don't know,

03:55:34.640 | I just remember just eating beef jerky

03:55:39.200 | and being truly happy.

03:55:40.840 | That was just last night, and I have that all the time.

03:55:44.640 | And that, to me, is why, I mean,

03:55:48.940 | that feels to me like a healthy way to live life,

03:55:51.280 | and at least for me, it's the one I really enjoy.

03:55:55.000 | A lot of people tell me that maybe being so self-critical,

03:55:57.600 | so hard on yourself, is not a good way to go,

03:56:00.480 | but more and more as I get older,

03:56:02.120 | I realize it's just who I am.

03:56:04.560 | You have to at a certain point accept,

03:56:08.000 | this is how I'm always going to be, this self-critical.

03:56:10.680 | - It's like the Oracle of Delphi, right?

03:56:12.160 | You know thyself.

03:56:13.760 | But I wanna leave you with one last thing,

03:56:15.080 | which is to say, just on this topic,

03:56:16.960 | it could be different, right?

03:56:19.940 | We could go down to the ocean and get some krill

03:56:22.800 | instead of the 7-Eleven.

03:56:24.800 | It could be that we have no other taste buds,

03:56:28.320 | and Eric's talked, the four dimensions of,

03:56:32.040 | the vibration of your tongue, right?

03:56:33.440 | It could be like there's one,

03:56:35.920 | and it's just like, not Memphis barbecue,

03:56:39.400 | or whatever you like in your slim gym.

03:56:42.680 | It could be something, it could be very boring.

03:56:44.440 | Similarly, what if that's a clue?

03:56:47.480 | What if that's giving us evidence?

03:56:49.040 | Here's another clue.

03:56:50.660 | There are many animals, most animals,

03:56:52.040 | have single monocolor vision.

03:56:54.380 | They only see in black and white intensity.

03:56:56.940 | They only have rods and no cones.

03:56:59.040 | We could be like that, but we're not.

03:57:03.040 | Why is that not a clue?

03:57:04.860 | God's not gonna hit you over the head

03:57:08.940 | and say, "Here I am,"

03:57:10.080 | 'cause then everybody would believe in him.

03:57:11.340 | And there's very simplistic, I've had debates,

03:57:12.860 | even with famous atheists like Lawrence Krauss,

03:57:15.500 | who's self-declared militant atheist.

03:57:18.580 | And I was like, "Well, I don't believe in the same God

03:57:20.880 | "you don't believe in,

03:57:21.780 | "like some guy in a white beard and a chair.

03:57:24.240 | "That's infantile.

03:57:25.660 | "I gave that away a long time ago."

03:57:27.940 | But what if there are clues?

03:57:29.360 | What if Yang-Mills theory, Maxwell's equation,

03:57:33.200 | those are beautiful.

03:57:35.040 | If you've ever seen, expressed in tensor notation,

03:57:38.680 | Einstein's equations, or Maxwell's equations,

03:57:41.640 | and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's,

03:57:44.920 | it's unbelievably beautiful.

03:57:47.720 | It doesn't have to be that way.

03:57:49.420 | That we can comprehend it, that's a crack.

03:57:52.540 | Maybe that's where the light gets in,

03:57:54.020 | and the light is what reveals what's beautiful.

03:57:56.940 | So I don't believe in God.

03:57:59.060 | I think that's a stupid notion.

03:58:00.540 | Do I believe in God?

03:58:02.200 | Sometimes I wonder if God believes in me

03:58:04.940 | more than if I believe in,

03:58:06.340 | he needs Brian Keating.

03:58:07.540 | It's like one of my friends is a rapper,

03:58:11.180 | he's like, "What would I be doing if I were God?"

03:58:14.780 | Exactly what God's doing right now.

03:58:16.420 | You think I know more than God?

03:58:17.760 | Give me a break.

03:58:18.600 | - Leaving clues of beauty for these hairless apes.

03:58:23.300 | - Yeah.

03:58:24.220 | - And to see what they do with this,

03:58:26.140 | and then marvel at both the tragedy

03:58:31.140 | of what those apes do to each other,

03:58:34.540 | and the rare moments of when they have,

03:58:39.500 | when they understand, understand deeply

03:58:41.520 | about how the world works.

03:58:43.420 | Brian, you're an incredible human being.

03:58:45.260 | I'm a big fan, and I'm really honored that you was,

03:58:48.500 | first of all, shower me with rocks from the moon.

03:58:51.780 | - From space.

03:58:52.760 | - From space.

03:58:53.820 | - Space dust.

03:58:54.660 | - Space dust.

03:58:55.660 | - And crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals.

03:58:59.140 | - Yeah.

03:58:59.980 | - That you can use for good.

03:59:01.780 | - And tell me your story,

03:59:03.640 | and spend your really valuable time with me today.

03:59:05.780 | This was amazing.

03:59:06.740 | - That was a great pleasure for me, Lex.

03:59:08.020 | Thank you so much.

03:59:08.940 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:59:11.700 | with Brian Keating.

03:59:12.860 | To support this podcast,

03:59:14.260 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:59:17.340 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:59:19.400 | from Galileo Galilei.

03:59:21.080 | In questions of science,

03:59:23.620 | the authority of a thousand

03:59:25.300 | is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

03:59:29.640 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:59:32.600 | (upbeat music)

03:59:35.180 | (upbeat music)

03:59:37.760 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize | Lex Fridman Podcast #257

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