Audio Player
Starting at:
Harry Collins: The Massively Misleading Michelson–Morley Experiment
September 13, 2024
•
1:01:36
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
ℹ️ Timestamps visible: Timestamps may be inaccurate if the MP3 has dynamically injected ads. Hide timestamps.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
146 sentences
9,497 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 60m 30s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been to Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit BigDealEvent.com for more details.
These famous scientists are giving an incorrect answer, the Micros experiment. In fact, the Maricos experiment and death did not show anything. Were we mistaken about how innovative scientific discoveries really occur? Professor Harry Collins, a pioneer science sociologist, argues that our current understanding of scientific discovery is surrounded by mythology.
In this revealing episode, we reveal this confusing human process of scientific advance. From the detoured experiment by Michael Wilson Millay to the drama of the background of the detection of gravitational waves, the fractal model of Professor Collins' society reveals a controversial reality.
Our beliefs, our skills and even our sense of truth are determined by the social groups in which we live. We explore Colin's radical vision to reimagine scientific education, dismantle competitive structures and research and position science as a vital control against the erosion of truth in public discourse.
Welcome to the podcast theories of everything, this is for the series rethinking the fundamentals of the academy. How can we improve scientific research? Please, you can start. Okay, well, I'm going to talk about the question that was asked, which is how to improve science. But there is a funny version of how to improve science, because I think of science in a very different way from most people.
And the big contrast here in what I'm going to say is between science and a cultural institution, which is what I'm interested in. What science does as a cultural institution is to discover the truth about the observable world. And I believe that it influences society and, in my opinion, it should influence society much more. On the other hand, there is a tension, often a tension, between science as a cultural institution and science as a profession.
Science as a profession creates careers, creates wealth and power. And, sometimes, science as a profession hinders science as a cultural institution. Now, how can science be improved? Well, it depends on what you think science is for.
One of the things that science does is discover true and useful things, such as vaccines, the importance and the consequences of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the causes and consequences of the entire ozone layer and things that lead to economic and military power. And another thing that science does is discover true things, but not so useful, but edifying, such as the fact that there was a big bang, the beginning of time, the fact that there are black holes, which are very strange things, in fact.
The fact that there are gravitational waves, which I put in a square box because it is something about which I know a lot. I spent about 45 years studying or living with scientists who discovered the gravitational waves. Yes, great. But what really interests me is the role of science as a basis for democracy, because I think we need it to prevent the erosion of truth and prevent the erosion of truth.
Science can be a brake and counterweight for pluralist democracies in the same way that the rule of law is a brake and counterweight, if it works, if the rule of law is working and has not been corrupted. And science, even more important, can be an objective lesson on the importance of truth when you are trying to discover things to solve them, discover how to manage them and so on.
And in that sense, it must be at the core of democratic culture now. I believe in it and that's why I'm doing this kind of work today. Now, Western democracy is in greater danger than ever since the 1930s.
So, I will make the overarching observation that saving democracy is probably the most important purpose of science. But using science to save democracy involves some improvements in science along the way. Well, citizens and professionals, note that I say that citizens and professionals must understand how science works and why it is the best institution to discover knowledge about the observable world.
Currently, the way science works is involved in mythology and this is also true for professionals. And we must recognize certain professional activities that are disguised as science and that are not really science. Much of the economy is like this. Perhaps the theory of the strings is like this, as Lies Mollide and several other people would suggest.
And the other thing that I think needs to be done, how the hell are we going to do this, I don't know, is to make the scientific profession less competitive and prevent people from turning it into a commercialized commodity. It has more important roles than that, a commercialized commodity, yes.
It means, well, someone who works at a university for years and years among scientists, there is a tremendous temptation for scientists to sell science as something that is good for the economy and allow science to be judged by how much it contributes to the economy and judge our activities as university professors by how many articles we produce, what kind of impact we have in the world and things like that.
While in fact we need to give more emphasis on discovering the truth as the purpose of science, and this tends to get into tension with all these commercial versions of science. All right. Now, let me illustrate one of the problems that science has. I said that science, the way it works, is involved in mythology. Here's an example. Here are the covers of two books.
A call to the evolution of physics, which was written in 1938 by Albert Einstein and Leopold Enfeld, and the well-known book A Short History of Time, which is supposedly popular, although God knows how many people really understand it. I can't, but it was written by Stephen Hawking, who is probably, you know, one of the most prestigious scientists today. Now, let's see what Einstein and Hawking have to say about the famous experiment, the Michael Molley experiment, which was conducted in 1887.
So, in 1938, Einstein and Enfield said this in view of the small time differences occurring from the theory, very ingenious experimental arrangements had to be thought. The experiment by Michael Somolay should measure the Earth's speed when orbiting the Sun, and should measure this by looking for changes in the apparent speed of light, as measured on the surface of the Earth.
Therefore, having in view the small differences in time occurring from the theory, very ingenious experimental arrangements had to be thought. This was done in the famous Michael Zendmorning. The result was a veredict of death for the theory of a calm ether sea through which all matter moves. No dependence on the speed of light in relation to the direction of the Earth's displacement can be found.
Each experiment gave the same negative result as Michael's and never revealed any dependence on the direction of the Earth's movement. And in 1988, probably echoing this in many, many didactic physics books, which also say the same thing, we check them.
In 1887, Albert Michael Olson and Edward Moly conducted a very careful experiment in the Case School for Applied Science in Cleveland. They compared the speed of light, the direction of the Earth's movement, with that in straight angles to the Earth's movement. To their surprise, they discovered that they were exactly the same. Well, historians who go back to the micro experiment discovered that none of this is true. This is completely incorrect. Both these famous scientists are giving incorrect reports about Misha.
In fact, he didn't show anything. The Misha experiment is very, very difficult. They found nothing and gave up trying to prove that the speed of light is constant, which is what would extend it around 87, 20 years later.
Point. The NHM demanded that you repeat this experiment at several times of the year. This was never done. Marcus and Norley thought they had done a failed experiment. And around 1930, much more repetitions of this experiment were made. And people concluded that yes, there was a difference between the speed of light in the direction of the Earth and the speed of light in the direction of the Earth. Not as much as you would expect, but even so about a tenth of what was expected.
And a man named Miller won an award from the American Physics Association for discovering this and definitively proving that the speed of light was not a constant. Now, the speed of light is a constant, but I think the general consensus among physicists who understand this subject is that, in fact, no experiment of the Michaelson-Molle type that could really show the constant of the speed of light was made until the second half of the 20th century.
But, however, as you see, popular books, you can find the same thing in most of the didactic physics books you get in the library. They say that this was proven in 1887, which was an anomaly, which was not resolved until Einstein presented the theory of relativity in the early 20th century. But this is simply not true. So, to make it clear, both Rock and Einstein had the same incorrect interpretation of Michael Olson Mori's experiment.
They tell a mythological version of him that would say it was made in 1887, and they showed that the speed of light was a constant. It's not true and they didn't do it at all. And what I call a tendency is the tendency of scientists to want to take rabbits out of the cart.
They want to present an image of a scientific experiment in which you do the experiment and then there is a type of scientific logic that forces you to accept the result of the experiment and you discover something almost instantly. Now, I will give you an example of a modern version of this, and it is from the field of physics about which I have a lot of knowledge, which is the detection of gravitational waves.
This is a set of the first pages of newspapers that were published in February 2016, when everyone was celebrating the first discovery or detection of a gravitational wave. Something that I followed in detail. I was in London at a physics meeting to hear the announcement that was made in Washington.
And so, for our great joy, the first item on the news at 18 o'clock that night at the BBC was the discovery of gravitational waves. And I remember going to have one of my physical friends at the time and give him a high five for his wonderful result. I mean, it's a fabulous experience and it's a big part of my life.
Einstein suggested the existence of gravitational waves about 100 years ago and the experiments began about 50 years ago and the history of the experiments is very, very varied, around the decades from 1970 to 1990. During these 20 years, the discovery of the detection of gravitational waves was announced about 6 times by different groups.
But all these allegations were rejected by the scientific community. And only in 2015 was the first detection done that was not rejected by the scientific community. On September 14, 2015. I remember very well.
I was sitting in this room to see my emails when news emerged that some kind of disturbance in the two giant detectors in the United States, one in Louisiana and one in the state of Washington, had registered some signal that seemed promising.
I found out about this more or less as any other person in the community of gravitational waves. So, in a few days, the physicists decided, hey, maybe this is really something. I mean, most of the time you get this kind of signal, and there is only noise that is discarded, and so on. But this one seemed good, and so I followed in detail the next five months of work, an intense work, which was spent trying to find out if this really was a gravitational wave.
Nobody could believe it, you know, we had finally seen a gravitational wave after 50 years, I didn't believe it. I mean, 45 years, and I really ... I was finally close when the important discovery was made. And, sir, when you say you accompanied him, does it mean that you accompanied him from outside, with the information that is accessible to the public, or did you come in? I'm in. Right.
I have all the passwords and everything else to be able to read all the emails that pass through the entire community. And since this community is spread throughout the world, they were doing the research and communicating about it by email. So I was there as much as anyone in science. I was essentially a member of the discipline. It's like having security authorization. Yes, exactly.
Exactly, as far as I know, I was the only person who was not really a member of the gravitational waves community that had all these passwords and was able to consult them. You know, hundreds of emails arrived at my computer every day and I read them and analyzed them all and so on.
Of course, I wasn't making many suggestions. I was keeping myself in silence, but everyone knew I was there and everyone knew I was part of it and so on. And one of the interesting characteristics of this discovery process was that the whole community never met in one place. Everything was done through discussion by email with occasional telecommunications for which I was also invited. I was invited to participate in the telecommunications that were happening.
But of course this community was together for 20 years. So everyone knew each other very well. I don't want to give the impression that science can be done by telecommunications and email, it can't. It has to involve trust and trust in small groups. I mean, this was a big group for a small group, if I can say so. There were about a thousand people scattered around the world, but everyone knew each other as if they were members of a small tribe.
So there was total trust among scientists. Anyway, after almost five months, I decided that yes, we were finally sure that this was really a gravitational wave. It's not someone invading the machines and it's not noise and so on.
We are going to announce this and it was announced in February 2016 with enormous acclaim, including these headlines. And I was writing a book at the same time that all this was happening. Oops, and that's how the book looks like, it's called Kiss of Gravity, the detection of gravitational waves.
And it is one of the chapters of the book about what I want to talk about to illustrate this business of taking the rabbit out of the cart, because during these five months we were informed that we should not let the public know that the community was verifying a gravitational wave.
We had to pretend that none of this was happening and that life was normal. And that was very, very difficult. And yet people, journalists and other scientists had the feeling that something strange was happening in the gravitational wave community. It is the same kind of thing that spies discover when they want to find out if the enemy is going to attack or where they are going to gather their forces.
You look, see vehicles going to one place and another where they wouldn't normally go and so on, there were tracks, there was, so it wasn't like there was a leak, it was that there was indirect evidence. We don't know if anyone really leaked throughout the community. But, as far as we know, no one did, but people managed to find out. But I can say that, at the end of the five months, some people had a very good idea of what was happening.
And it was almost as if they knew exactly what would happen when the announcement was made. But, in the meantime, you know, journalists called me and said, I heard this rumor, can you tell me more about it? And I had to say, well, no, I hadn't heard this rumor. And, in fact, this is true, I hadn't heard the specific rumor that someone told me, but of course I knew what was happening and I knew what he was really asking. But I had to disguise and lie.
I had to tell my wife and all the scientists agreed that they had to tell their partners because they would see that something strange was happening. You know, I spent the whole day, every day, on my computer, and the physicists were working on their calculations. But I didn't tell, for example, I didn't tell my son. And at a certain point, my son, who knew that I was working with gravitational waves, heard the rumor that the gravitational waves had been discovered and asked me
And I said, look, I know there's nothing, nothing to say, Joey can't tell you, and this kind of thing is strange. Quotes. Yes, this is very strange for the people who are listening. It sounds like the Manhattan Project. This is not an experiment to develop a weapon. This is, yes, a scientific experiment like Michael Morley's experiment was a scientific experiment. So people are probably thinking this is very strange and it is listed in your book The Kiss of Gravity. The point is that it is not strange for a scientific discovery.
It's the normal way to proceed when you have a great scientific discovery, because what you want to do is announce it with a big alarm, which is what happened and ... Yeah, as I said before, it's like taking a rabbit out of the box, but he wanted to take the rabbit out of the box. Now, I met all these people and kept asking why we were doing this. Why don't we tell people what was going on?
And people seemed to not understand what I was saying. They said, what, you don't want us to do all this verification work before announcing it? I said, no, just say that we are verifying. We haven't found it yet, but we're verifying. And they couldn't understand. And I kept asking people, why not, why, why can't you do it that way?
And the closest thing I heard of a reason not to do it the way I suggested was for other people to start doing calculations based on a guess about what we would see and kind of anticipate what we would announce in some way just assuming what it was. So, in the book, I write all this and present what I suggested should happen.
Quero dizer, digo que há seis estágios para revelar essa descoberta, embora seja puramente arbitrário
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.
You can decide to have 10 or 20 stages or something like that. When you mention that there is a rabbit being taken out of the cart, you are not referring to the magical aspect, but to the spectacle of having an inaugural announcement, the result of a scientific experiment that suddenly exposes this thing. And in the meantime, you should not let anyone know that something is happening because that, so to speak, would suggest that this would work instead of equivalent to some kind of logical process.
Ah, right. That's interesting. So I said, you know, why don't we do it that way? The first pronunciation should be something like enough to make us more busy than normal. And if it doesn't work, how can it not work with all this verification? So you would say, but it was a false alarm. The second stage may be that we are analyzing data that may or may not lead to an interesting direction.
And then we would have to say that if it didn't work, well, it didn't take up any space. The third stage can be to clear the agenda in case we need to make an announcement. If it doesn't work, you would say, sorry, unfortunately we found a mistake. The fourth may be that an article has been sent and is being reviewed. Therefore, it was not accepted. The article is being reviewed or rejected.
And, finally, we will make an announcement on a certain date, unless things go wrong. And if it doesn't work, a more in-depth analysis will show that the result is not reliable. And then you could announce, you could tell the people who were doing this over these five months. You could explain to people the five months of work that were going on. You could explain to people that six or six announcements about the discovery of gravitational waves had already been made, but did not work.
And you know, you could say we can't announce it until we've checked it completely, but that doesn't mean you can't tell people what's going on. And my statement is that it would be much better if you told people what's going on, step by step, because that way they would have a better idea of the immense difficulty of making a scientific discovery.
In this case, this discovery occurred 100 years after Einstein suggested the existence of gravitational waves until the final announcement. It's been 50 years since people started experimenting on it. There were about 6 failed claims and then 5 months of work from a really big sign to being really ready to announce it.
And then people would have some notion of what science really is, instead of having this mythology that science is a logical process. It is not. It is a very arduous and full of doubts and
And one of the things that reassured everyone before the announcement was that a second was discovered during the verification process and everyone kind of breathed relieved.
It will not be the famous monopole, from which a version was discovered and never repeated. So it was probably false, but at the time it was not thought to be false. So that's how science is. It's a hard and long job. Yes, you also mentioned that there are philosophical assumptions that go into discoveries in science or experiments. I don't know what you mean. Logically, you can always doubt something. In this case, the case of this sign, I will give an example.
A possibility was that malicious hackers had invaded the experimental device and placed false signals. And then this had to be verified. And a great analysis was made of how you could get complete signals. And the conclusion was yes, you could get complete signals.
But, by chance, the two detectives who had to report coincidence signs so that this would count were slightly different. And to put a reliable sign, you would have to know this difference. And, therefore, the hacking would have to have been done by people inside. And the community said there were no dishonest people enough to do this job. This is a philosophical assumption. I will give another example.
When this discovery was being discussed at CERN by Berry Barich, who was the director of the project at the time, Berry Barré, someone asked the audience, but all these calculations and so on are not based on the assumption that the speed of gravitational waves is equal to the speed of light.
But this has never been demonstrated directly. I think it was Carlo Halli who raised his hand. He was also in the audience and said, look, yes, this is true. But if we start asking questions like this, we will unveil Iggy's bosom.
In other words, it is a trust. Science works like this, with a trusting community agreeing not to doubt beyond a certain level. Because if you doubt beyond a certain level, you will never discover anything and end up in the scientific margin instead of in the science cern. One of my chapters in another book addresses 25 philosophical assumptions you need to do to discover gravitational waves.
Right. What is the name of this book? So that people can search and I will put an image of it on the screen. The ghost of gravity and the big dog. This refers to two false signs that were deliberately placed by the management of the league to test their detection skills. Understood. So, we are still stuck with rabbits taken from cartels. And this is one of the things that I think we should stop taking rabbits from cartels in science.
We should start introducing people to the fascinating process of scientific discovery that has long been subject to disappointment. Now I'm going to follow in a slightly different direction. Now I'm going to try because, as I said at the beginning, what interests me is the use of science as a support for democracy. This is science as a social institution. So, now I'm going to go back to something that is more in my area as a sociologist.
Not so much, but I will try to explain why science fits into society and why I want to see where it fits changed. So, let me start with something I call the fractal model of society. What is a society? Right? Well, the idea of a fractal allows you to describe a society. All these evapors you see in this diagram are groups in society.
But they start at the top and go down the waterfall to the base, getting smaller and smaller. The one on top is the type of social group that understands, let's say, something the size of a country and is characterized by sets of skills.
The ability to speak the country's natural language, the country's moral sense and an ability that you learn when you are very, very young, to know how to tell the truth. And then, as you go down, the next level is also broad in social terms, but it is more the small things that you understand as a member of a society. You have versions of what is clean and what is dirty. You understand that part of this society you must walk close to someone who approaches you on the sidewalk.
You can walk very close and bump into them or you should be a little further away. This depends on the number of people on the sidewalk, the size of the crowd and what is happening, and so on. People in society understand these things. If you violate the rules, things will go wrong.
And you know that in Western societies like ours, you will understand a little to have a common understanding of a certain amount of politics. And then we go down and we have smaller groups that are members of this society. The parents are a group. You are different if you are a father or mother or if you are not a father or mother. And there are certain things that you learn when you become a father or mother and mix with other parents. Car drivers are a very large group in most societies.
Scientists, of course, are another group, but they learn that everyone acts in more or less similar ways.
Wait, but many of them do not come to Christians. Bird observers are a group, soccer players are a group, farmers, car mechanics. And now, as we go down, you see two of the three small groups that originate from scientists, physicists, physicists of gravitational waves and then there are molecular biologists that originate from biologists who are higher and at the bottom I have BRL, ARS, neo-Nazis and enchanters.
Now I call it the fractal model. The fractal is very useful to think about it because, in some ways First, there is something genuinely in common with the fractal and the structure of society. The small groups you see at the bottom are also members of the big groups you see at the top. In fact, they are the big groups you see at the top.
And the big groups you see at the top form the ideas and the thoughts of the members of the small groups at the bottom.
You know a popular analogy for the mathematical version of a fractal, a cauliflower. In a cauliflower, you have the entire cauliflower, and then the cauliflower can be transformed into a flower, and then it has subflorates inside it, and so on. And, of course, the cauliflower are all flowers, but, at the same time, you can choose any flower and eat it.
So, it's a bit like this, the fractal model of society. And the other characteristic that the fractal likes is that all these groups are the same, except the users of each arse that I have here and other groups of people. They are the same in the sense that to become a member of these groups you have to learn to socialize in the way the members of these groups behave. And then there are characteristics of this thing similar to a fractal that does not correspond exactly to the mathematical fractal.
One thing is that you can be a member of several of these groups and this does not match much with the fractal. And also the incorporation here is very multidimensional, while in a cauliflower or in a mathematical fractal it is unidimensional. So you know it's an analogy, but a useful analogy with some literal similarities. I see that the unidimensional aspect of the cauliflower is just joint inclusion. You mean?
Well, probably I shouldn't have said unidimensional because the cauliflower is a three-dimensional thing, but what I mean is that there is only one dimension of incorporation, a waterfall in the cauliflower, while here, yes, there are all kinds of strange incorporations. Originally, I designed this diagram to represent the physics of gravitational waves when I was trying to understand what kind of society I was investigating. So, this should be the physics of gravitational waves and their division of work.
And here you see physics of gravitational waves, all doing their specialization. So, one of them calculates patterns of forms of gravitational waves. One of them is projecting a suspension project of interferometer. One of them is a laser specialist and so on. Note that what unites them, what makes the division of work work, is the common language.
They cannot do the work of one another, but they can coordinate the work of one another because they all speak the common language of the physics of gravitational waves. It is what I call having an inter-actual experience. The top of the title of this slide. And one of the things that emerged from my study is the extraordinary importance of language. Many philosophers nowadays tend to want to elevate the importance of practice, but the language is forgotten.
The language is absolutely vital. Otherwise, it is not possible to have division of work, because people cannot do the practices of each other, but they can speak the language. And at the bottom there is that smiling figure without a hammer and a mustache. And this is you, and this is me. Exactly. It's me. Because I prefer to speak the language, but I can't make physical contributions the way others do.
It's not quite true, I mean, I spent enough time talking about the physics of gravitational waves to make some minor contributions, actually, but this is not my job, so I'm not going to talk about it. Of course, yes, I understand. One, and that's me, but it's also someone like Gary Sanders, who was the project manager for the LIGO device, who agreed with me and we wrote an article together on the notion of international specialization, because he doesn't do the real practice.
He manages and coordinates this work and makes decisions about where they will go next. So, I believe that this idea of specialization and interaction is very important. I can send the article to anyone, or you can send the article to anyone who wants it. The article was written by me and Gary Sanders. Of course, the link will be in the description and I will also show a brief image of him on the screen now, right?
Well, the other thing to understand about this little diagram that we have here is that these people in this group are very, very careful in patrolling their limits. They don't let anyone in, anyone in. They don't let anyone in, unless they want to, unless they can make a contribution.
That's why I said I was the only person, up to where I know, who had all these passwords and who actively participated in discussions about gravitational waves over decades. I didn't understand. It wasn't easy for me to understand. I had to work harder.
But, well, this is part of the work of the sociologist, just an observation here. This characterizes data collection or also theorization. For example, there is another universe, a multiverse where Professor Harry Collins is giving a lecture on the community of string theory.
I do not imagine that what the community of the theory of the strings faces under a password similar to this one, where you need authorization, but I imagine that for the biceps, for example, with the Brian Kedin project, there was. Yes, what do you think is the crucial difference between the theory of the strings and the biceps? The fact that one of them is theory. Experimentalists are involved. Yes, I don't think that's it. I don't think we're going to confuse stealth with protection of limits.
Right, remember that I'm arguing that these people should open their limits so that everyone can see what's going on. But that's not the same as accepting someone to help them with the project. Yes. Understood. So, for me, I was there, I knew I had to keep my mouth shut and not start telling people how to do their job.
And this is important, this is very important, as we will see.
So, by the way, people don't really understand what individuals are. These are some individuals. I drew some individuals here overlapped in the fractal model in a specific society. And you see that the individuals are people who shared different collections of these groups, of which the whole fractal is made. Each individual has a head in the higher level groups, otherwise, they would not be members of the society, the nation or whatever it is.
But if you look at your arms and legs, they impact on different subgroups. Individuals are subgroup collections. The fractal, usually, people think they are like that object in the upper left corner. They think they have all the knowledge in their head. But we are encouraged to think about it when we are educated at school, if you understand what the teacher is telling you. In some way they tell you that it is because you are very smart.
But, in fact, it is because you are very good at absorbing what you are receiving from society. Interesting, the analogy I like to use is that of a thermometer in a beaker. You imagine a thermometer in a beaker with water, the thermometer is in there saying, hey, I'm 78 degrees Celsius, but it's not the thermometer that's 78 degrees C, it's the water. Does that mean that, in your opinion, QI is more like a porous sponge?
Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs.
But luckily, there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into… Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer.
The key to artificial intelligence is not to create a brain, but to create a brain that is able to absorb the power of the social groups in which it is inserted. And these two things are different. So, I imagine that intelligence involves both the ability to learn quickly and the ability to manipulate and produce something new.
Intelligence can be considered an orthogonal dimension to what we are talking about, because if someone is autistic, for example, they may not have any of that. They may not be able to join social groups if they have a high rate of autism or something like that. But they wouldn't be able to have it if they were dead.
Therefore, all the characteristics of a living body, such as having blood circulating and a beating heart, among others, are necessary to obtain things from the group in which you are. But all these things are an orthogonal dimension to what we are talking about, which is the fact that you obtain what you know from the group or groups in which you are inserted. Right? Yes, understood.
So, this is the individual, which is very important when you start thinking about economy, and economy, which speaks about utility functions and so on, because they, they, they depend a lot on the imagination of free markets with independent individuals, but individuals are not independent. The reason, one of the reasons why I speak English and not Chinese is that I was raised in England.
China has nothing to do with my choice. This is sociology of knowledge. Most of what you know is a function of where and when you were created. Anyway, let's continue here. Ah, here we are, exactly the question you were asking. There is an interesting brain model invented by a man named Kurt Weill, one of the specialists in artificial intelligence that sees it as a hierarchically organized series of patterns recognition.
I think this is a very good brain model. I mean, brain specialists say it's very simple and so on, but it seems to me that it captures a lot of what a brain is. But the problem with that, and that comes from a book I wrote about deep learning a few years ago.
The problem with this brain model, the obsession with the brain that you find in artificial intelligence is that it does not take into account that, in fact, the brain looks like that. That's what I call social. I call the guy on the left Sam or the girl on the left Sam. She can be Samantha. But, on the right, this is the social Sam. Nah.
True, those recognizing hierarchical patterns need another level, and they are all the other brains of society, or those parts of society with which they interact. And all these other brains feed the brain of the social san through the senses, mainly the ears. Much of this is conversation, right? It will also be written language.
And this is the difference between artificial intelligence and what is conceived today. Artificial intelligence needs to be, it needs to have this extra layer. But notice in the previous slides that this extra layer needs to be restricted. It can't be anyone, because that's not how you are socialized. You are socialized by entering restricted groups, all consistent, who know something and know the same thing.
And this starts in childhood. You learn the language with your caregivers in childhood. You receive a consistent world in childhood. Your caregiver says rabbit. Rabbit. Your caregiver doesn't say rabbit. Oh, no. Maybe it's a dog. Otherwise, you would never learn the word rabbit. The caregiver says it's red. The caregiver says it's red. But philosophers or other people would call it blue.
You get this consistency in a very limited community that is the family and, as you grow, the limits spread a little to the tribe or school and, eventually, to the university and, finally, to those other groups that we saw in the fractal model.
Now you can probably anticipate what I'm going to say, but the great learning models of which we hear a lot today, like the GPT chat, the difficulty with them is that they get their contribution from anywhere, from the whole web. And that's why they do what is called hallucination, because they were not created in small limited groups. And this is a problem that will have to be solved. They try to solve it.
Retrospectively, giving them rules to say what they can't say, you shouldn't be misogynist, you should explain people how to make bombs, etc, etc. But all this is an attempt to make a retrospective socialization because it didn't get its natural socialization of limited groups.
So, once we have this idea, we can see what happens in the case of social media. In the case of social networks, the small nice groups of which there is an example, with its delimited perimeter, suddenly begin to receive information from everywhere, such as those lines drawn that I put there. They come from anyone. Anyone can say if the gravitational waves were discovered or not. Anyone can say why they are not gravitational waves that were discovered.
You know, anyone can invent some conspiracy theory to show that they are not gravitational waves. All the philosophical assumptions that had to be included to get to the gravitational waves can be violated by anyone, anywhere. And instead of obtaining that delimited group that you see in S becomes something that looks like C with its amorphous pattern, and the fractal model that you have in D becomes something that looks like I, where there are no clear delimited groups.
This creates a society that is perfectly ready to have groups of power emerging from within it just by the use of power. These ugly stars that I put on the panel is and is what is happening with our society now. The Erosion of Truth The truth is made in a fractal model such as that if we want to maintain civilization as we know it. That's why I'm saying that science is such an important institution. I believe that science is a unique institution because it is obsessed with truth.
Your redefinition, or to use a more technical sociological language, your founding aspirations are the search for the truth. She wants to find the corresponding truth. The corresponding truth is the truth about how the world works. And then, if you enter one of these groups of the type I described earlier, you will discover that, to collectively discover the corresponding truth, you need to get involved in moral truth.
The moral truth is the easiest thing, it is his decision. I will not lie. Your mother asks, did you break the vase? You will say, I broke it or not, you are a morally true person if you tell the truth to her. Right? And the scientists who work in these small groups discover that they will not get anywhere unless they tell the truth to each other. Therefore, science is an institution invested in truth.
The corresponding truth leads to the moral truth. And so, as the moral truth is easier than anything else, it is easier than the corresponding truth, but it is not trivially easy because there are several types of biases. And so scientists invent methods to try to eliminate biases, such as double blind experiments. But what we know now is that none of these methods is infallible.
They are very good things to try to do because they help, but they are not infallible. I mean, let's take what is frequently described as the science's gold standard, which is a double blind experiment. Well, suppose you're doing a double blind experiment on the safety and effectiveness of a drug. You give a group a placebo.
You give another group the genuine medicine and do not tell them which one they are taking. And then you look at the result. But suppose that the genuine medicine has some side effects. The placebo does not have. Everyone will know if they are taking the placebo or the medicine. And it is still a good thing to do, but it is not infallible. And it cannot be used everywhere. That is to say, one of the coolest jokes I know about double blind experiments is the advice of never using a parachute because they have never been tested in double blind.
And then, but you know, let's think that all methods in science are good things, but we should think of them more as values, more as philosophical decisions to use them instead of absolutely infallible things. But this is the important point. What I'm saying here because I want to be as provocative as possible is that there are no other institutions like science in terms of obsession with the truth.
And one of the things that me and one of my colleagues will do well, the next thing we will do is sit and have a long discussion about whether the law competes with science as a truly generating institution. I don't think so. At the moment, he is a law teacher and thinks so, and I will convince him that he is wrong. But you can start thinking about all the institutions that exist, and that's what we'll do.
We will begin to think about many institutions in the factual model to try to find out if there is something else that has obsession with the truth in the same way as science. And I don't think there is. Now, you can see why I was so disappointed.
I will not say even surprise, but fascinated by the fact that the physicists of the gravitational waves have spent five months lying to journalists when I describe them as an institution obsessed with the truth. And you can see why I thought it would be better for them to tell the truth during these five months than to lie to the newspapers. So that's what I want to happen. Science.
What do we need to do to make this happen? Well, first of all, I think we need to change the teaching of science and focus less on training for scientific careers. Only a very small number of people who learn science follow scientific careers.
Therefore, science teaching should be more widespread to larger groups of people, but it should be taught in a way that eliminates mythology and uses the kind of idea of the image of science that I am trying to present here. So, teach more sciences, focusing on its essential nature, teaching to all those who need it in their work, for example, all those who are in government. Okay, so that's something we can do.
I have no idea how this could be done, but I think we should end the competition in science. Ending the awards, I mean, one of the reasons why the physicists of the gravitational waves wanted to take the rabbit out of the cart is because they were afraid to be preferred.
Well, if it happened, it wouldn't matter to the public. I mean, what did the public gain from the discovery of gravitational waves? Something edifying. And it wouldn't matter if it happened a little before or a little later, or it wouldn't matter who really did it. Who cares about individual scientists among the public in general? What matters is what was discovered. This is what is edifying, not who discovered it, right?
And so I already said that, for the process of transforming scientific knowledge into a commercialized commodity. We need the discoveries of science, but we need even more of its culture to save democratic society. I think we are in a terrible moment in history at the moment, especially in America. It scares me a lot, and I think we need more of that. And I think we need to change our educational system to teach this kind of thing in schools and universities. That's what I'm defending.
Thank you, sir. Wonderful presentation. No, thank you. So, I'm curious about prize elimination. Even if we eliminated all the prizes, wouldn't there be an emergent one, like those who have more quotes? Yes, period. I mean, I said I don't know how you're going to get rid of the priorities. I'll say that to the gravitational wave community I was in.
I heard many times one of the most important people in the community of gravitational waves who won a Nobel Prize. He always said that we should get rid of the Nobel Prize, this creates a lot of competition, and he had already been harmed in previous incidents. By people who committed themselves and tried to predict who would win the Nobel Prize, and he did not find it very pleasant that I was very satisfied to hear this type of conversation.
So, I mean, there would be a group of scientists who would be in favor of getting out of the Nobel Prize, including the Nobel Prize, but if that really happens, I don't know, it's not the most important thing, but it's that kind of thing that creates competition. Did people look at your list of quotes or do you know that I'm always looking at my list of quotes? 1. So, but I mean, you know you keep it to yourself, I mean, it's not public, so. Yes, it's cool to be quoted, but I don't know how you get it right, I don't know how you do any of that.
I know what you would put in a new type of science teaching program in schools, but I don't know what you would do to prevent university institutions from being stuck in competition. I also know that we should stop marketing science in the same way. But I know how this could be done by a voluntary government, but I'm not sure if there are governments willing to do this and what to do.
So, what does sociology of science mean? And also, how did you get involved in it? Can you give me some context and give it to myself and the public? Well, I think I got into it by accident. When I was in school, which is middle school, as Americans think. I specialized in sciences, MHM. And the British educational system is very specialized in middle school. I specialized in sciences.
Then I became a sociologist by a series of strange coincidences and then I saw myself doing a master's degree in sociology and I had to do some kind of small practical research at the end of the master's degree. Just a little thing. And I thought, well, it would be fun to go back to the science laboratories.
And then I wandered through the science lab at the University of Essex and I came across these people trying to build a new type of laser called the carbon dioxide laser of atmospheric pressure excited transversally or laser T to abbreviate. And I thought, I know what I'm going to do, I'll try to see how they learn to do this later because I learned from them that it is very difficult to make this work.
And then my first small master's dissertation project was to wander around everywhere in Great Britain where there was a tea laser and find out if they could make it work and how they made it work. And that ended up being written in an article in 1974, which is still highly cited, for my satisfaction, although they were just small things stuck at the end of mine.
Master's dissertation, because it was all about tactical knowledge, had the transfer of tactical knowledge instead of explicit knowledge. And after that, I continued doing my PhD and decided that I would continue with this type of study, but I wanted more areas where people were competing, and one of the scientific domains that I studied was the detection of gravitational waves.
To shorten the story, this ended up resulting in another article that was a big advance. I got a job and I've been working on it since then. Well, Professor Harry Collins, thank you very much. Your work is on the screen now and in the description for the people who want to follow, and we definitely need to make another podcast. So, if you're listening to this and have any questions, I'm sure you are. Leave them in the comments section below. Thank you, Professor. Thank you.
Also, thanks to our partner, The Economies.
First of all, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Now there is a site Kurtjongle.org that has a discussion list. The reason is that large platforms like YouTube and Patreon can disable it for any reason, whenever they want. This is part of the service terms. Now, a direct discussion list guarantees that I have uninterrupted communication with you. In addition, I will soon be launching a PDF of a page with my 10 main fingers.
It's not as Quinton Tarantino as it seems. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed yet or clicked the like button, now it's time to do it. Why? Because each subscription, each like helps YouTube to bring this content to more people like you. In addition, it helps to like it directly, also known as me.
I also discovered last year that external links count a lot for the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, let's say, on Facebook, or even on Reddit, etc., YouTube shows that people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which, in turn, helps a lot in YouTube distribution. Third, there is a Discord and a notably active subreddit for theories of everything, where people explain their strengths, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community their own strong point.
The links for both are in the description. In fourth place, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, Spotify and all audio platforms. All you need to do is type theories of everything and you will find it. Personally, I gained by watching lectures and podcasts again. Also read in the comments that the listeners also gain by listening again. So, how about listening again on these platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, whatever podcast you use. And, finally, if you want to support more conversations like this,
For example, this episode that you are listening to now was released a few days ago.
Each dollar helps a lot more than you imagine. Anyway, your audience is generous enough. Thank you very much.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 4597,
"audio_duration_seconds": 3630.13,
"completed_at": "2025-11-30T23:15:59Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 93.422,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.852,
"text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been to Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit BigDealEvent.com for more details."
},
{
"end_time": 119.787,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 94.377,
"text": " These famous scientists are giving an incorrect answer, the Micros experiment. In fact, the Maricos experiment and death did not show anything. Were we mistaken about how innovative scientific discoveries really occur? Professor Harry Collins, a pioneer science sociologist, argues that our current understanding of scientific discovery is surrounded by mythology."
},
{
"end_time": 139.036,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 120.64,
"text": " In this revealing episode, we reveal this confusing human process of scientific advance. From the detoured experiment by Michael Wilson Millay to the drama of the background of the detection of gravitational waves, the fractal model of Professor Collins' society reveals a controversial reality."
},
{
"end_time": 159.599,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 139.36,
"text": " Our beliefs, our skills and even our sense of truth are determined by the social groups in which we live. We explore Colin's radical vision to reimagine scientific education, dismantle competitive structures and research and position science as a vital control against the erosion of truth in public discourse."
},
{
"end_time": 187.295,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 164.138,
"text": " Welcome to the podcast theories of everything, this is for the series rethinking the fundamentals of the academy. How can we improve scientific research? Please, you can start. Okay, well, I'm going to talk about the question that was asked, which is how to improve science. But there is a funny version of how to improve science, because I think of science in a very different way from most people."
},
{
"end_time": 217.159,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 187.995,
"text": " And the big contrast here in what I'm going to say is between science and a cultural institution, which is what I'm interested in. What science does as a cultural institution is to discover the truth about the observable world. And I believe that it influences society and, in my opinion, it should influence society much more. On the other hand, there is a tension, often a tension, between science as a cultural institution and science as a profession."
},
{
"end_time": 235.026,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 218.439,
"text": " Science as a profession creates careers, creates wealth and power. And, sometimes, science as a profession hinders science as a cultural institution. Now, how can science be improved? Well, it depends on what you think science is for."
},
{
"end_time": 264.428,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 235.708,
"text": " One of the things that science does is discover true and useful things, such as vaccines, the importance and the consequences of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the causes and consequences of the entire ozone layer and things that lead to economic and military power. And another thing that science does is discover true things, but not so useful, but edifying, such as the fact that there was a big bang, the beginning of time, the fact that there are black holes, which are very strange things, in fact."
},
{
"end_time": 291.237,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 266.305,
"text": " The fact that there are gravitational waves, which I put in a square box because it is something about which I know a lot. I spent about 45 years studying or living with scientists who discovered the gravitational waves. Yes, great. But what really interests me is the role of science as a basis for democracy, because I think we need it to prevent the erosion of truth and prevent the erosion of truth."
},
{
"end_time": 317.09,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 291.732,
"text": " Science can be a brake and counterweight for pluralist democracies in the same way that the rule of law is a brake and counterweight, if it works, if the rule of law is working and has not been corrupted. And science, even more important, can be an objective lesson on the importance of truth when you are trying to discover things to solve them, discover how to manage them and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 335.862,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 318.422,
"text": " And in that sense, it must be at the core of democratic culture now. I believe in it and that's why I'm doing this kind of work today. Now, Western democracy is in greater danger than ever since the 1930s."
},
{
"end_time": 364.394,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 336.323,
"text": " So, I will make the overarching observation that saving democracy is probably the most important purpose of science. But using science to save democracy involves some improvements in science along the way. Well, citizens and professionals, note that I say that citizens and professionals must understand how science works and why it is the best institution to discover knowledge about the observable world."
},
{
"end_time": 388.456,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 365.691,
"text": " Currently, the way science works is involved in mythology and this is also true for professionals. And we must recognize certain professional activities that are disguised as science and that are not really science. Much of the economy is like this. Perhaps the theory of the strings is like this, as Lies Mollide and several other people would suggest."
},
{
"end_time": 408.558,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 389.531,
"text": " And the other thing that I think needs to be done, how the hell are we going to do this, I don't know, is to make the scientific profession less competitive and prevent people from turning it into a commercialized commodity. It has more important roles than that, a commercialized commodity, yes."
},
{
"end_time": 434.855,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 410.128,
"text": " It means, well, someone who works at a university for years and years among scientists, there is a tremendous temptation for scientists to sell science as something that is good for the economy and allow science to be judged by how much it contributes to the economy and judge our activities as university professors by how many articles we produce, what kind of impact we have in the world and things like that."
},
{
"end_time": 463.114,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 438.097,
"text": " While in fact we need to give more emphasis on discovering the truth as the purpose of science, and this tends to get into tension with all these commercial versions of science. All right. Now, let me illustrate one of the problems that science has. I said that science, the way it works, is involved in mythology. Here's an example. Here are the covers of two books."
},
{
"end_time": 495.93,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 467.807,
"text": " A call to the evolution of physics, which was written in 1938 by Albert Einstein and Leopold Enfeld, and the well-known book A Short History of Time, which is supposedly popular, although God knows how many people really understand it. I can't, but it was written by Stephen Hawking, who is probably, you know, one of the most prestigious scientists today. Now, let's see what Einstein and Hawking have to say about the famous experiment, the Michael Molley experiment, which was conducted in 1887."
},
{
"end_time": 522.534,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 496.34,
"text": " So, in 1938, Einstein and Enfield said this in view of the small time differences occurring from the theory, very ingenious experimental arrangements had to be thought. The experiment by Michael Somolay should measure the Earth's speed when orbiting the Sun, and should measure this by looking for changes in the apparent speed of light, as measured on the surface of the Earth."
},
{
"end_time": 546.578,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 525.043,
"text": " Therefore, having in view the small differences in time occurring from the theory, very ingenious experimental arrangements had to be thought. This was done in the famous Michael Zendmorning. The result was a veredict of death for the theory of a calm ether sea through which all matter moves. No dependence on the speed of light in relation to the direction of the Earth's displacement can be found."
},
{
"end_time": 563.439,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 547.039,
"text": " Each experiment gave the same negative result as Michael's and never revealed any dependence on the direction of the Earth's movement. And in 1988, probably echoing this in many, many didactic physics books, which also say the same thing, we check them."
},
{
"end_time": 593.302,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 563.439,
"text": " In 1887, Albert Michael Olson and Edward Moly conducted a very careful experiment in the Case School for Applied Science in Cleveland. They compared the speed of light, the direction of the Earth's movement, with that in straight angles to the Earth's movement. To their surprise, they discovered that they were exactly the same. Well, historians who go back to the micro experiment discovered that none of this is true. This is completely incorrect. Both these famous scientists are giving incorrect reports about Misha."
},
{
"end_time": 619.684,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 594.753,
"text": " In fact, he didn't show anything. The Misha experiment is very, very difficult. They found nothing and gave up trying to prove that the speed of light is constant, which is what would extend it around 87, 20 years later."
},
{
"end_time": 651.237,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 622.073,
"text": " Point. The NHM demanded that you repeat this experiment at several times of the year. This was never done. Marcus and Norley thought they had done a failed experiment. And around 1930, much more repetitions of this experiment were made. And people concluded that yes, there was a difference between the speed of light in the direction of the Earth and the speed of light in the direction of the Earth. Not as much as you would expect, but even so about a tenth of what was expected."
},
{
"end_time": 677.824,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 652.295,
"text": " And a man named Miller won an award from the American Physics Association for discovering this and definitively proving that the speed of light was not a constant. Now, the speed of light is a constant, but I think the general consensus among physicists who understand this subject is that, in fact, no experiment of the Michaelson-Molle type that could really show the constant of the speed of light was made until the second half of the 20th century."
},
{
"end_time": 714.599,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 691.715,
"text": " But, however, as you see, popular books, you can find the same thing in most of the didactic physics books you get in the library. They say that this was proven in 1887, which was an anomaly, which was not resolved until Einstein presented the theory of relativity in the early 20th century. But this is simply not true. So, to make it clear, both Rock and Einstein had the same incorrect interpretation of Michael Olson Mori's experiment."
},
{
"end_time": 734.599,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 714.923,
"text": " They tell a mythological version of him that would say it was made in 1887, and they showed that the speed of light was a constant. It's not true and they didn't do it at all. And what I call a tendency is the tendency of scientists to want to take rabbits out of the cart."
},
{
"end_time": 763.046,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 737.227,
"text": " They want to present an image of a scientific experiment in which you do the experiment and then there is a type of scientific logic that forces you to accept the result of the experiment and you discover something almost instantly. Now, I will give you an example of a modern version of this, and it is from the field of physics about which I have a lot of knowledge, which is the detection of gravitational waves."
},
{
"end_time": 793.234,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 768.063,
"text": " This is a set of the first pages of newspapers that were published in February 2016, when everyone was celebrating the first discovery or detection of a gravitational wave. Something that I followed in detail. I was in London at a physics meeting to hear the announcement that was made in Washington."
},
{
"end_time": 817.79,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 794.07,
"text": " And so, for our great joy, the first item on the news at 18 o'clock that night at the BBC was the discovery of gravitational waves. And I remember going to have one of my physical friends at the time and give him a high five for his wonderful result. I mean, it's a fabulous experience and it's a big part of my life."
},
{
"end_time": 845.469,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 820.742,
"text": " Einstein suggested the existence of gravitational waves about 100 years ago and the experiments began about 50 years ago and the history of the experiments is very, very varied, around the decades from 1970 to 1990. During these 20 years, the discovery of the detection of gravitational waves was announced about 6 times by different groups."
},
{
"end_time": 869.428,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 847.961,
"text": " But all these allegations were rejected by the scientific community. And only in 2015 was the first detection done that was not rejected by the scientific community. On September 14, 2015. I remember very well."
},
{
"end_time": 884.923,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 869.923,
"text": " I was sitting in this room to see my emails when news emerged that some kind of disturbance in the two giant detectors in the United States, one in Louisiana and one in the state of Washington, had registered some signal that seemed promising."
},
{
"end_time": 913.319,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 884.923,
"text": " I found out about this more or less as any other person in the community of gravitational waves. So, in a few days, the physicists decided, hey, maybe this is really something. I mean, most of the time you get this kind of signal, and there is only noise that is discarded, and so on. But this one seemed good, and so I followed in detail the next five months of work, an intense work, which was spent trying to find out if this really was a gravitational wave."
},
{
"end_time": 939.906,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 915.026,
"text": " Nobody could believe it, you know, we had finally seen a gravitational wave after 50 years, I didn't believe it. I mean, 45 years, and I really ... I was finally close when the important discovery was made. And, sir, when you say you accompanied him, does it mean that you accompanied him from outside, with the information that is accessible to the public, or did you come in? I'm in. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 966.51,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 941.476,
"text": " I have all the passwords and everything else to be able to read all the emails that pass through the entire community. And since this community is spread throughout the world, they were doing the research and communicating about it by email. So I was there as much as anyone in science. I was essentially a member of the discipline. It's like having security authorization. Yes, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 985.06,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 966.937,
"text": " Exactly, as far as I know, I was the only person who was not really a member of the gravitational waves community that had all these passwords and was able to consult them. You know, hundreds of emails arrived at my computer every day and I read them and analyzed them all and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 1013.336,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 985.879,
"text": " Of course, I wasn't making many suggestions. I was keeping myself in silence, but everyone knew I was there and everyone knew I was part of it and so on. And one of the interesting characteristics of this discovery process was that the whole community never met in one place. Everything was done through discussion by email with occasional telecommunications for which I was also invited. I was invited to participate in the telecommunications that were happening."
},
{
"end_time": 1042.517,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1014.036,
"text": " But of course this community was together for 20 years. So everyone knew each other very well. I don't want to give the impression that science can be done by telecommunications and email, it can't. It has to involve trust and trust in small groups. I mean, this was a big group for a small group, if I can say so. There were about a thousand people scattered around the world, but everyone knew each other as if they were members of a small tribe."
},
{
"end_time": 1061.391,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1043.899,
"text": " So there was total trust among scientists. Anyway, after almost five months, I decided that yes, we were finally sure that this was really a gravitational wave. It's not someone invading the machines and it's not noise and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 1079.957,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1062.125,
"text": " We are going to announce this and it was announced in February 2016 with enormous acclaim, including these headlines. And I was writing a book at the same time that all this was happening. Oops, and that's how the book looks like, it's called Kiss of Gravity, the detection of gravitational waves."
},
{
"end_time": 1097.654,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1082.363,
"text": " And it is one of the chapters of the book about what I want to talk about to illustrate this business of taking the rabbit out of the cart, because during these five months we were informed that we should not let the public know that the community was verifying a gravitational wave."
},
{
"end_time": 1126.323,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1099.957,
"text": " We had to pretend that none of this was happening and that life was normal. And that was very, very difficult. And yet people, journalists and other scientists had the feeling that something strange was happening in the gravitational wave community. It is the same kind of thing that spies discover when they want to find out if the enemy is going to attack or where they are going to gather their forces."
},
{
"end_time": 1152.91,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1127.705,
"text": " You look, see vehicles going to one place and another where they wouldn't normally go and so on, there were tracks, there was, so it wasn't like there was a leak, it was that there was indirect evidence. We don't know if anyone really leaked throughout the community. But, as far as we know, no one did, but people managed to find out. But I can say that, at the end of the five months, some people had a very good idea of what was happening."
},
{
"end_time": 1180.742,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1153.695,
"text": " And it was almost as if they knew exactly what would happen when the announcement was made. But, in the meantime, you know, journalists called me and said, I heard this rumor, can you tell me more about it? And I had to say, well, no, I hadn't heard this rumor. And, in fact, this is true, I hadn't heard the specific rumor that someone told me, but of course I knew what was happening and I knew what he was really asking. But I had to disguise and lie."
},
{
"end_time": 1208.49,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1181.476,
"text": " I had to tell my wife and all the scientists agreed that they had to tell their partners because they would see that something strange was happening. You know, I spent the whole day, every day, on my computer, and the physicists were working on their calculations. But I didn't tell, for example, I didn't tell my son. And at a certain point, my son, who knew that I was working with gravitational waves, heard the rumor that the gravitational waves had been discovered and asked me"
},
{
"end_time": 1237.483,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1208.951,
"text": " And I said, look, I know there's nothing, nothing to say, Joey can't tell you, and this kind of thing is strange. Quotes. Yes, this is very strange for the people who are listening. It sounds like the Manhattan Project. This is not an experiment to develop a weapon. This is, yes, a scientific experiment like Michael Morley's experiment was a scientific experiment. So people are probably thinking this is very strange and it is listed in your book The Kiss of Gravity. The point is that it is not strange for a scientific discovery."
},
{
"end_time": 1263.183,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1241.749,
"text": " It's the normal way to proceed when you have a great scientific discovery, because what you want to do is announce it with a big alarm, which is what happened and ... Yeah, as I said before, it's like taking a rabbit out of the box, but he wanted to take the rabbit out of the box. Now, I met all these people and kept asking why we were doing this. Why don't we tell people what was going on?"
},
{
"end_time": 1287.295,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1264.224,
"text": " And people seemed to not understand what I was saying. They said, what, you don't want us to do all this verification work before announcing it? I said, no, just say that we are verifying. We haven't found it yet, but we're verifying. And they couldn't understand. And I kept asking people, why not, why, why can't you do it that way?"
},
{
"end_time": 1316.834,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1290.64,
"text": " And the closest thing I heard of a reason not to do it the way I suggested was for other people to start doing calculations based on a guess about what we would see and kind of anticipate what we would announce in some way just assuming what it was. So, in the book, I write all this and present what I suggested should happen."
},
{
"end_time": 1326.852,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1318.473,
"text": " Quero dizer, digo que há seis estágios para revelar essa descoberta, embora seja puramente arbitrário"
},
{
"end_time": 1356.118,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1327.346,
"text": " This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state."
},
{
"end_time": 1385.896,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1356.715,
"text": " You can decide to have 10 or 20 stages or something like that. When you mention that there is a rabbit being taken out of the cart, you are not referring to the magical aspect, but to the spectacle of having an inaugural announcement, the result of a scientific experiment that suddenly exposes this thing. And in the meantime, you should not let anyone know that something is happening because that, so to speak, would suggest that this would work instead of equivalent to some kind of logical process."
},
{
"end_time": 1406.032,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1386.305,
"text": " Ah, right. That's interesting. So I said, you know, why don't we do it that way? The first pronunciation should be something like enough to make us more busy than normal. And if it doesn't work, how can it not work with all this verification? So you would say, but it was a false alarm. The second stage may be that we are analyzing data that may or may not lead to an interesting direction."
},
{
"end_time": 1426.084,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1406.903,
"text": " And then we would have to say that if it didn't work, well, it didn't take up any space. The third stage can be to clear the agenda in case we need to make an announcement. If it doesn't work, you would say, sorry, unfortunately we found a mistake. The fourth may be that an article has been sent and is being reviewed. Therefore, it was not accepted. The article is being reviewed or rejected."
},
{
"end_time": 1454.667,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1426.084,
"text": " And, finally, we will make an announcement on a certain date, unless things go wrong. And if it doesn't work, a more in-depth analysis will show that the result is not reliable. And then you could announce, you could tell the people who were doing this over these five months. You could explain to people the five months of work that were going on. You could explain to people that six or six announcements about the discovery of gravitational waves had already been made, but did not work."
},
{
"end_time": 1477.654,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1455.981,
"text": " And you know, you could say we can't announce it until we've checked it completely, but that doesn't mean you can't tell people what's going on. And my statement is that it would be much better if you told people what's going on, step by step, because that way they would have a better idea of the immense difficulty of making a scientific discovery."
},
{
"end_time": 1501.527,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1479.07,
"text": " In this case, this discovery occurred 100 years after Einstein suggested the existence of gravitational waves until the final announcement. It's been 50 years since people started experimenting on it. There were about 6 failed claims and then 5 months of work from a really big sign to being really ready to announce it."
},
{
"end_time": 1518.285,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1503.097,
"text": " And then people would have some notion of what science really is, instead of having this mythology that science is a logical process. It is not. It is a very arduous and full of doubts and"
},
{
"end_time": 1545.862,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1520.282,
"text": " And one of the things that reassured everyone before the announcement was that a second was discovered during the verification process and everyone kind of breathed relieved."
},
{
"end_time": 1576.596,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1547.261,
"text": " It will not be the famous monopole, from which a version was discovered and never repeated. So it was probably false, but at the time it was not thought to be false. So that's how science is. It's a hard and long job. Yes, you also mentioned that there are philosophical assumptions that go into discoveries in science or experiments. I don't know what you mean. Logically, you can always doubt something. In this case, the case of this sign, I will give an example."
},
{
"end_time": 1599.616,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1578.012,
"text": " A possibility was that malicious hackers had invaded the experimental device and placed false signals. And then this had to be verified. And a great analysis was made of how you could get complete signals. And the conclusion was yes, you could get complete signals."
},
{
"end_time": 1630.486,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1600.538,
"text": " But, by chance, the two detectives who had to report coincidence signs so that this would count were slightly different. And to put a reliable sign, you would have to know this difference. And, therefore, the hacking would have to have been done by people inside. And the community said there were no dishonest people enough to do this job. This is a philosophical assumption. I will give another example."
},
{
"end_time": 1656.578,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1638.422,
"text": " When this discovery was being discussed at CERN by Berry Barich, who was the director of the project at the time, Berry Barré, someone asked the audience, but all these calculations and so on are not based on the assumption that the speed of gravitational waves is equal to the speed of light."
},
{
"end_time": 1677.398,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1663.097,
"text": " But this has never been demonstrated directly. I think it was Carlo Halli who raised his hand. He was also in the audience and said, look, yes, this is true. But if we start asking questions like this, we will unveil Iggy's bosom."
},
{
"end_time": 1703.968,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1678.285,
"text": " In other words, it is a trust. Science works like this, with a trusting community agreeing not to doubt beyond a certain level. Because if you doubt beyond a certain level, you will never discover anything and end up in the scientific margin instead of in the science cern. One of my chapters in another book addresses 25 philosophical assumptions you need to do to discover gravitational waves."
},
{
"end_time": 1731.698,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1704.258,
"text": " Right. What is the name of this book? So that people can search and I will put an image of it on the screen. The ghost of gravity and the big dog. This refers to two false signs that were deliberately placed by the management of the league to test their detection skills. Understood. So, we are still stuck with rabbits taken from cartels. And this is one of the things that I think we should stop taking rabbits from cartels in science."
},
{
"end_time": 1760.64,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1733.114,
"text": " We should start introducing people to the fascinating process of scientific discovery that has long been subject to disappointment. Now I'm going to follow in a slightly different direction. Now I'm going to try because, as I said at the beginning, what interests me is the use of science as a support for democracy. This is science as a social institution. So, now I'm going to go back to something that is more in my area as a sociologist."
},
{
"end_time": 1789.07,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1762.142,
"text": " Not so much, but I will try to explain why science fits into society and why I want to see where it fits changed. So, let me start with something I call the fractal model of society. What is a society? Right? Well, the idea of a fractal allows you to describe a society. All these evapors you see in this diagram are groups in society."
},
{
"end_time": 1806.766,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1790.435,
"text": " But they start at the top and go down the waterfall to the base, getting smaller and smaller. The one on top is the type of social group that understands, let's say, something the size of a country and is characterized by sets of skills."
},
{
"end_time": 1838.422,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1808.558,
"text": " The ability to speak the country's natural language, the country's moral sense and an ability that you learn when you are very, very young, to know how to tell the truth. And then, as you go down, the next level is also broad in social terms, but it is more the small things that you understand as a member of a society. You have versions of what is clean and what is dirty. You understand that part of this society you must walk close to someone who approaches you on the sidewalk."
},
{
"end_time": 1854.206,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1838.985,
"text": " You can walk very close and bump into them or you should be a little further away. This depends on the number of people on the sidewalk, the size of the crowd and what is happening, and so on. People in society understand these things. If you violate the rules, things will go wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 1878.183,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1854.206,
"text": " And you know that in Western societies like ours, you will understand a little to have a common understanding of a certain amount of politics. And then we go down and we have smaller groups that are members of this society. The parents are a group. You are different if you are a father or mother or if you are not a father or mother. And there are certain things that you learn when you become a father or mother and mix with other parents. Car drivers are a very large group in most societies."
},
{
"end_time": 1903.336,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1878.183,
"text": " Scientists, of course, are another group, but they learn that everyone acts in more or less similar ways."
},
{
"end_time": 1931.271,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1903.541,
"text": " Wait, but many of them do not come to Christians. Bird observers are a group, soccer players are a group, farmers, car mechanics. And now, as we go down, you see two of the three small groups that originate from scientists, physicists, physicists of gravitational waves and then there are molecular biologists that originate from biologists who are higher and at the bottom I have BRL, ARS, neo-Nazis and enchanters."
},
{
"end_time": 1958.643,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1932.619,
"text": " Now I call it the fractal model. The fractal is very useful to think about it because, in some ways First, there is something genuinely in common with the fractal and the structure of society. The small groups you see at the bottom are also members of the big groups you see at the top. In fact, they are the big groups you see at the top."
},
{
"end_time": 1966.869,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1959.514,
"text": " And the big groups you see at the top form the ideas and the thoughts of the members of the small groups at the bottom."
},
{
"end_time": 1989.974,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1967.517,
"text": " You know a popular analogy for the mathematical version of a fractal, a cauliflower. In a cauliflower, you have the entire cauliflower, and then the cauliflower can be transformed into a flower, and then it has subflorates inside it, and so on. And, of course, the cauliflower are all flowers, but, at the same time, you can choose any flower and eat it."
},
{
"end_time": 2019.343,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1989.974,
"text": " So, it's a bit like this, the fractal model of society. And the other characteristic that the fractal likes is that all these groups are the same, except the users of each arse that I have here and other groups of people. They are the same in the sense that to become a member of these groups you have to learn to socialize in the way the members of these groups behave. And then there are characteristics of this thing similar to a fractal that does not correspond exactly to the mathematical fractal."
},
{
"end_time": 2044.48,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2019.94,
"text": " One thing is that you can be a member of several of these groups and this does not match much with the fractal. And also the incorporation here is very multidimensional, while in a cauliflower or in a mathematical fractal it is unidimensional. So you know it's an analogy, but a useful analogy with some literal similarities. I see that the unidimensional aspect of the cauliflower is just joint inclusion. You mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 2071.323,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2044.48,
"text": " Well, probably I shouldn't have said unidimensional because the cauliflower is a three-dimensional thing, but what I mean is that there is only one dimension of incorporation, a waterfall in the cauliflower, while here, yes, there are all kinds of strange incorporations. Originally, I designed this diagram to represent the physics of gravitational waves when I was trying to understand what kind of society I was investigating. So, this should be the physics of gravitational waves and their division of work."
},
{
"end_time": 2096.903,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2071.323,
"text": " And here you see physics of gravitational waves, all doing their specialization. So, one of them calculates patterns of forms of gravitational waves. One of them is projecting a suspension project of interferometer. One of them is a laser specialist and so on. Note that what unites them, what makes the division of work work, is the common language."
},
{
"end_time": 2126.886,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2097.995,
"text": " They cannot do the work of one another, but they can coordinate the work of one another because they all speak the common language of the physics of gravitational waves. It is what I call having an inter-actual experience. The top of the title of this slide. And one of the things that emerged from my study is the extraordinary importance of language. Many philosophers nowadays tend to want to elevate the importance of practice, but the language is forgotten."
},
{
"end_time": 2153.985,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2127.961,
"text": " The language is absolutely vital. Otherwise, it is not possible to have division of work, because people cannot do the practices of each other, but they can speak the language. And at the bottom there is that smiling figure without a hammer and a mustache. And this is you, and this is me. Exactly. It's me. Because I prefer to speak the language, but I can't make physical contributions the way others do."
},
{
"end_time": 2183.643,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2154.445,
"text": " It's not quite true, I mean, I spent enough time talking about the physics of gravitational waves to make some minor contributions, actually, but this is not my job, so I'm not going to talk about it. Of course, yes, I understand. One, and that's me, but it's also someone like Gary Sanders, who was the project manager for the LIGO device, who agreed with me and we wrote an article together on the notion of international specialization, because he doesn't do the real practice."
},
{
"end_time": 2207.056,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2185.862,
"text": " He manages and coordinates this work and makes decisions about where they will go next. So, I believe that this idea of specialization and interaction is very important. I can send the article to anyone, or you can send the article to anyone who wants it. The article was written by me and Gary Sanders. Of course, the link will be in the description and I will also show a brief image of him on the screen now, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2226.954,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2208.336,
"text": " Well, the other thing to understand about this little diagram that we have here is that these people in this group are very, very careful in patrolling their limits. They don't let anyone in, anyone in. They don't let anyone in, unless they want to, unless they can make a contribution."
},
{
"end_time": 2243.183,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2227.5,
"text": " That's why I said I was the only person, up to where I know, who had all these passwords and who actively participated in discussions about gravitational waves over decades. I didn't understand. It wasn't easy for me to understand. I had to work harder."
},
{
"end_time": 2260.23,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2243.763,
"text": " But, well, this is part of the work of the sociologist, just an observation here. This characterizes data collection or also theorization. For example, there is another universe, a multiverse where Professor Harry Collins is giving a lecture on the community of string theory."
},
{
"end_time": 2286.886,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2260.23,
"text": " I do not imagine that what the community of the theory of the strings faces under a password similar to this one, where you need authorization, but I imagine that for the biceps, for example, with the Brian Kedin project, there was. Yes, what do you think is the crucial difference between the theory of the strings and the biceps? The fact that one of them is theory. Experimentalists are involved. Yes, I don't think that's it. I don't think we're going to confuse stealth with protection of limits."
},
{
"end_time": 2307.671,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2288.097,
"text": " Right, remember that I'm arguing that these people should open their limits so that everyone can see what's going on. But that's not the same as accepting someone to help them with the project. Yes. Understood. So, for me, I was there, I knew I had to keep my mouth shut and not start telling people how to do their job."
},
{
"end_time": 2337.193,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2308.183,
"text": " And this is important, this is very important, as we will see."
},
{
"end_time": 2366.664,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2337.568,
"text": " So, by the way, people don't really understand what individuals are. These are some individuals. I drew some individuals here overlapped in the fractal model in a specific society. And you see that the individuals are people who shared different collections of these groups, of which the whole fractal is made. Each individual has a head in the higher level groups, otherwise, they would not be members of the society, the nation or whatever it is."
},
{
"end_time": 2394.206,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2367.295,
"text": " But if you look at your arms and legs, they impact on different subgroups. Individuals are subgroup collections. The fractal, usually, people think they are like that object in the upper left corner. They think they have all the knowledge in their head. But we are encouraged to think about it when we are educated at school, if you understand what the teacher is telling you. In some way they tell you that it is because you are very smart."
},
{
"end_time": 2420.026,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2394.48,
"text": " But, in fact, it is because you are very good at absorbing what you are receiving from society. Interesting, the analogy I like to use is that of a thermometer in a beaker. You imagine a thermometer in a beaker with water, the thermometer is in there saying, hey, I'm 78 degrees Celsius, but it's not the thermometer that's 78 degrees C, it's the water. Does that mean that, in your opinion, QI is more like a porous sponge?"
},
{
"end_time": 2438.695,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2420.998,
"text": " Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs."
},
{
"end_time": 2464.428,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2439.07,
"text": " But luckily, there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into… Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer."
},
{
"end_time": 2485.879,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2464.838,
"text": " The key to artificial intelligence is not to create a brain, but to create a brain that is able to absorb the power of the social groups in which it is inserted. And these two things are different. So, I imagine that intelligence involves both the ability to learn quickly and the ability to manipulate and produce something new."
},
{
"end_time": 2506.715,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2486.169,
"text": " Intelligence can be considered an orthogonal dimension to what we are talking about, because if someone is autistic, for example, they may not have any of that. They may not be able to join social groups if they have a high rate of autism or something like that. But they wouldn't be able to have it if they were dead."
},
{
"end_time": 2532.483,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2507.773,
"text": " Therefore, all the characteristics of a living body, such as having blood circulating and a beating heart, among others, are necessary to obtain things from the group in which you are. But all these things are an orthogonal dimension to what we are talking about, which is the fact that you obtain what you know from the group or groups in which you are inserted. Right? Yes, understood."
},
{
"end_time": 2560.486,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2533.063,
"text": " So, this is the individual, which is very important when you start thinking about economy, and economy, which speaks about utility functions and so on, because they, they, they depend a lot on the imagination of free markets with independent individuals, but individuals are not independent. The reason, one of the reasons why I speak English and not Chinese is that I was raised in England."
},
{
"end_time": 2591.305,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2562.671,
"text": " China has nothing to do with my choice. This is sociology of knowledge. Most of what you know is a function of where and when you were created. Anyway, let's continue here. Ah, here we are, exactly the question you were asking. There is an interesting brain model invented by a man named Kurt Weill, one of the specialists in artificial intelligence that sees it as a hierarchically organized series of patterns recognition."
},
{
"end_time": 2606.834,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2591.92,
"text": " I think this is a very good brain model. I mean, brain specialists say it's very simple and so on, but it seems to me that it captures a lot of what a brain is. But the problem with that, and that comes from a book I wrote about deep learning a few years ago."
},
{
"end_time": 2629.923,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2608.097,
"text": " The problem with this brain model, the obsession with the brain that you find in artificial intelligence is that it does not take into account that, in fact, the brain looks like that. That's what I call social. I call the guy on the left Sam or the girl on the left Sam. She can be Samantha. But, on the right, this is the social Sam. Nah."
},
{
"end_time": 2653.183,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2630.794,
"text": " True, those recognizing hierarchical patterns need another level, and they are all the other brains of society, or those parts of society with which they interact. And all these other brains feed the brain of the social san through the senses, mainly the ears. Much of this is conversation, right? It will also be written language."
},
{
"end_time": 2683.575,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2653.712,
"text": " And this is the difference between artificial intelligence and what is conceived today. Artificial intelligence needs to be, it needs to have this extra layer. But notice in the previous slides that this extra layer needs to be restricted. It can't be anyone, because that's not how you are socialized. You are socialized by entering restricted groups, all consistent, who know something and know the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 2714.684,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2685.333,
"text": " And this starts in childhood. You learn the language with your caregivers in childhood. You receive a consistent world in childhood. Your caregiver says rabbit. Rabbit. Your caregiver doesn't say rabbit. Oh, no. Maybe it's a dog. Otherwise, you would never learn the word rabbit. The caregiver says it's red. The caregiver says it's red. But philosophers or other people would call it blue."
},
{
"end_time": 2736.681,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2715.606,
"text": " You get this consistency in a very limited community that is the family and, as you grow, the limits spread a little to the tribe or school and, eventually, to the university and, finally, to those other groups that we saw in the fractal model."
},
{
"end_time": 2765.452,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2738.302,
"text": " Now you can probably anticipate what I'm going to say, but the great learning models of which we hear a lot today, like the GPT chat, the difficulty with them is that they get their contribution from anywhere, from the whole web. And that's why they do what is called hallucination, because they were not created in small limited groups. And this is a problem that will have to be solved. They try to solve it."
},
{
"end_time": 2782.483,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2765.828,
"text": " Retrospectively, giving them rules to say what they can't say, you shouldn't be misogynist, you should explain people how to make bombs, etc, etc. But all this is an attempt to make a retrospective socialization because it didn't get its natural socialization of limited groups."
},
{
"end_time": 2810.794,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2782.961,
"text": " So, once we have this idea, we can see what happens in the case of social media. In the case of social networks, the small nice groups of which there is an example, with its delimited perimeter, suddenly begin to receive information from everywhere, such as those lines drawn that I put there. They come from anyone. Anyone can say if the gravitational waves were discovered or not. Anyone can say why they are not gravitational waves that were discovered."
},
{
"end_time": 2840.265,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2811.357,
"text": " You know, anyone can invent some conspiracy theory to show that they are not gravitational waves. All the philosophical assumptions that had to be included to get to the gravitational waves can be violated by anyone, anywhere. And instead of obtaining that delimited group that you see in S becomes something that looks like C with its amorphous pattern, and the fractal model that you have in D becomes something that looks like I, where there are no clear delimited groups."
},
{
"end_time": 2870.725,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2841.886,
"text": " This creates a society that is perfectly ready to have groups of power emerging from within it just by the use of power. These ugly stars that I put on the panel is and is what is happening with our society now. The Erosion of Truth The truth is made in a fractal model such as that if we want to maintain civilization as we know it. That's why I'm saying that science is such an important institution. I believe that science is a unique institution because it is obsessed with truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2896.937,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2870.725,
"text": " Your redefinition, or to use a more technical sociological language, your founding aspirations are the search for the truth. She wants to find the corresponding truth. The corresponding truth is the truth about how the world works. And then, if you enter one of these groups of the type I described earlier, you will discover that, to collectively discover the corresponding truth, you need to get involved in moral truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2922.381,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2897.585,
"text": " The moral truth is the easiest thing, it is his decision. I will not lie. Your mother asks, did you break the vase? You will say, I broke it or not, you are a morally true person if you tell the truth to her. Right? And the scientists who work in these small groups discover that they will not get anywhere unless they tell the truth to each other. Therefore, science is an institution invested in truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2945.998,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2922.773,
"text": " The corresponding truth leads to the moral truth. And so, as the moral truth is easier than anything else, it is easier than the corresponding truth, but it is not trivially easy because there are several types of biases. And so scientists invent methods to try to eliminate biases, such as double blind experiments. But what we know now is that none of these methods is infallible."
},
{
"end_time": 2963.882,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2945.998,
"text": " They are very good things to try to do because they help, but they are not infallible. I mean, let's take what is frequently described as the science's gold standard, which is a double blind experiment. Well, suppose you're doing a double blind experiment on the safety and effectiveness of a drug. You give a group a placebo."
},
{
"end_time": 2992.09,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2963.882,
"text": " You give another group the genuine medicine and do not tell them which one they are taking. And then you look at the result. But suppose that the genuine medicine has some side effects. The placebo does not have. Everyone will know if they are taking the placebo or the medicine. And it is still a good thing to do, but it is not infallible. And it cannot be used everywhere. That is to say, one of the coolest jokes I know about double blind experiments is the advice of never using a parachute because they have never been tested in double blind."
},
{
"end_time": 3018.541,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2992.602,
"text": " And then, but you know, let's think that all methods in science are good things, but we should think of them more as values, more as philosophical decisions to use them instead of absolutely infallible things. But this is the important point. What I'm saying here because I want to be as provocative as possible is that there are no other institutions like science in terms of obsession with the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 3042.654,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3020.06,
"text": " And one of the things that me and one of my colleagues will do well, the next thing we will do is sit and have a long discussion about whether the law competes with science as a truly generating institution. I don't think so. At the moment, he is a law teacher and thinks so, and I will convince him that he is wrong. But you can start thinking about all the institutions that exist, and that's what we'll do."
},
{
"end_time": 3059.428,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3043.729,
"text": " We will begin to think about many institutions in the factual model to try to find out if there is something else that has obsession with the truth in the same way as science. And I don't think there is. Now, you can see why I was so disappointed."
},
{
"end_time": 3087.807,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3061.493,
"text": " I will not say even surprise, but fascinated by the fact that the physicists of the gravitational waves have spent five months lying to journalists when I describe them as an institution obsessed with the truth. And you can see why I thought it would be better for them to tell the truth during these five months than to lie to the newspapers. So that's what I want to happen. Science."
},
{
"end_time": 3113.387,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3088.66,
"text": " What do we need to do to make this happen? Well, first of all, I think we need to change the teaching of science and focus less on training for scientific careers. Only a very small number of people who learn science follow scientific careers."
},
{
"end_time": 3141.698,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3115.316,
"text": " Therefore, science teaching should be more widespread to larger groups of people, but it should be taught in a way that eliminates mythology and uses the kind of idea of the image of science that I am trying to present here. So, teach more sciences, focusing on its essential nature, teaching to all those who need it in their work, for example, all those who are in government. Okay, so that's something we can do."
},
{
"end_time": 3156.459,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3142.278,
"text": " I have no idea how this could be done, but I think we should end the competition in science. Ending the awards, I mean, one of the reasons why the physicists of the gravitational waves wanted to take the rabbit out of the cart is because they were afraid to be preferred."
},
{
"end_time": 3179.172,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3156.852,
"text": " Well, if it happened, it wouldn't matter to the public. I mean, what did the public gain from the discovery of gravitational waves? Something edifying. And it wouldn't matter if it happened a little before or a little later, or it wouldn't matter who really did it. Who cares about individual scientists among the public in general? What matters is what was discovered. This is what is edifying, not who discovered it, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3206.374,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3179.548,
"text": " And so I already said that, for the process of transforming scientific knowledge into a commercialized commodity. We need the discoveries of science, but we need even more of its culture to save democratic society. I think we are in a terrible moment in history at the moment, especially in America. It scares me a lot, and I think we need more of that. And I think we need to change our educational system to teach this kind of thing in schools and universities. That's what I'm defending."
},
{
"end_time": 3231.101,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3206.954,
"text": " Thank you, sir. Wonderful presentation. No, thank you. So, I'm curious about prize elimination. Even if we eliminated all the prizes, wouldn't there be an emergent one, like those who have more quotes? Yes, period. I mean, I said I don't know how you're going to get rid of the priorities. I'll say that to the gravitational wave community I was in."
},
{
"end_time": 3256.869,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3232.466,
"text": " I heard many times one of the most important people in the community of gravitational waves who won a Nobel Prize. He always said that we should get rid of the Nobel Prize, this creates a lot of competition, and he had already been harmed in previous incidents. By people who committed themselves and tried to predict who would win the Nobel Prize, and he did not find it very pleasant that I was very satisfied to hear this type of conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 3293.251,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3265.555,
"text": " So, I mean, there would be a group of scientists who would be in favor of getting out of the Nobel Prize, including the Nobel Prize, but if that really happens, I don't know, it's not the most important thing, but it's that kind of thing that creates competition. Did people look at your list of quotes or do you know that I'm always looking at my list of quotes? 1. So, but I mean, you know you keep it to yourself, I mean, it's not public, so. Yes, it's cool to be quoted, but I don't know how you get it right, I don't know how you do any of that."
},
{
"end_time": 3318.951,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3293.916,
"text": " I know what you would put in a new type of science teaching program in schools, but I don't know what you would do to prevent university institutions from being stuck in competition. I also know that we should stop marketing science in the same way. But I know how this could be done by a voluntary government, but I'm not sure if there are governments willing to do this and what to do."
},
{
"end_time": 3348.131,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3319.548,
"text": " So, what does sociology of science mean? And also, how did you get involved in it? Can you give me some context and give it to myself and the public? Well, I think I got into it by accident. When I was in school, which is middle school, as Americans think. I specialized in sciences, MHM. And the British educational system is very specialized in middle school. I specialized in sciences."
},
{
"end_time": 3372.449,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3351.51,
"text": " Then I became a sociologist by a series of strange coincidences and then I saw myself doing a master's degree in sociology and I had to do some kind of small practical research at the end of the master's degree. Just a little thing. And I thought, well, it would be fun to go back to the science laboratories."
},
{
"end_time": 3399.343,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3374.718,
"text": " And then I wandered through the science lab at the University of Essex and I came across these people trying to build a new type of laser called the carbon dioxide laser of atmospheric pressure excited transversally or laser T to abbreviate. And I thought, I know what I'm going to do, I'll try to see how they learn to do this later because I learned from them that it is very difficult to make this work."
},
{
"end_time": 3429.189,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3402.295,
"text": " And then my first small master's dissertation project was to wander around everywhere in Great Britain where there was a tea laser and find out if they could make it work and how they made it work. And that ended up being written in an article in 1974, which is still highly cited, for my satisfaction, although they were just small things stuck at the end of mine."
},
{
"end_time": 3454.087,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3430.811,
"text": " Master's dissertation, because it was all about tactical knowledge, had the transfer of tactical knowledge instead of explicit knowledge. And after that, I continued doing my PhD and decided that I would continue with this type of study, but I wanted more areas where people were competing, and one of the scientific domains that I studied was the detection of gravitational waves."
},
{
"end_time": 3484.753,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3456.596,
"text": " To shorten the story, this ended up resulting in another article that was a big advance. I got a job and I've been working on it since then. Well, Professor Harry Collins, thank you very much. Your work is on the screen now and in the description for the people who want to follow, and we definitely need to make another podcast. So, if you're listening to this and have any questions, I'm sure you are. Leave them in the comments section below. Thank you, Professor. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 3489.531,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3486.391,
"text": " Also, thanks to our partner, The Economies."
},
{
"end_time": 3518.063,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3491.715,
"text": " First of all, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Now there is a site Kurtjongle.org that has a discussion list. The reason is that large platforms like YouTube and Patreon can disable it for any reason, whenever they want. This is part of the service terms. Now, a direct discussion list guarantees that I have uninterrupted communication with you. In addition, I will soon be launching a PDF of a page with my 10 main fingers."
},
{
"end_time": 3536.834,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3518.063,
"text": " It's not as Quinton Tarantino as it seems. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed yet or clicked the like button, now it's time to do it. Why? Because each subscription, each like helps YouTube to bring this content to more people like you. In addition, it helps to like it directly, also known as me."
},
{
"end_time": 3565.196,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3536.834,
"text": " I also discovered last year that external links count a lot for the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, let's say, on Facebook, or even on Reddit, etc., YouTube shows that people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which, in turn, helps a lot in YouTube distribution. Third, there is a Discord and a notably active subreddit for theories of everything, where people explain their strengths, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community their own strong point."
},
{
"end_time": 3595.162,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3565.452,
"text": " The links for both are in the description. In fourth place, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, Spotify and all audio platforms. All you need to do is type theories of everything and you will find it. Personally, I gained by watching lectures and podcasts again. Also read in the comments that the listeners also gain by listening again. So, how about listening again on these platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, whatever podcast you use. And, finally, if you want to support more conversations like this,"
},
{
"end_time": 3623.473,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3595.162,
"text": " For example, this episode that you are listening to now was released a few days ago."
},
{
"end_time": 3630.128,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3623.473,
"text": " Each dollar helps a lot more than you imagine. Anyway, your audience is generous enough. Thank you very much."
}
]
}No transcript available.