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Avi Loeb on Aliens, Bob Lazar, Wormholes, Consciousness, SpaceX, and Many Worlds
April 10, 2021
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This is a conversation with the inimitable Avi Loeb. We talk about, well, I was struggling. What can I talk to Avi about that he hasn't covered before because he's been on over 400 podcasts. He tends to give the same answers and be asked the same questions. It took quite some time, but along with the community, we managed to conceive of questions that he hasn't been asked, at least not in the public forum.
such as what are his opinions on Bob Lazar, morality, purpose, a finality to the universe, the beginning of the universe, some technical questions about manifolds and the lower bound on the mass of elementary particles and astrophysical data, God,
Quite a few
and thank you for those of you who are going to just so you know soon i'll be hosting a three-way conversation between myself donald hoffman and bernardo castrop it may be a four-way conversation if we can get jonathan vervecky in as well although i'm unsure if he's available however it's at least going to be bernardo castrop and donald hoffman that's coming shortly we're looking to hit 50 patrons and then i'll be able to conduct that thank you thank you so much i appreciate it and enjoy the interview
I want to know how much did writing your book or writing books in general or articles, how much does that clarify your thinking? Oh, the main purpose for writing the book, as I told the publisher, was to broadcast that excitement that we can have in science, discovering important things that do affect our daily lives. And I told the publisher that if one person around the world will decide to become a scientist after reading my book, I will be satisfied.
And as it turns out, a few weeks ago, I got an email from Malawi, from a woman who wrote, the book is great. And I'm thinking of becoming an astronomer. So I told her the story about the publisher and I asked her, are you the one? Are you that person that will become a scientist thanks to reading my book?
and she said maybe. So I invited her to apply to graduate school at Harvard in astronomy and I very much hope that she will do so and then I can work with her. There was another undergraduate student from Columbia that wrote to me and said the reading about your work changed my life and so I get about a dozen emails of this type every day now and I am really satisfied about writing my book
It wasn't so much for me to clarify my thinking as to communicate my excitement about doing science and, you know, the fact that we can maintain our childhood curiosity, we can be excited about doing it. It's not a job like being in the business world, the commercial world, where you get paid and then you use the money for what you really enjoy. In fact, you know, I would enjoy doing what I'm doing irrespective of whether I get money for it.
There were no problems that you had as ambiguous in your mind that when you started writing, then it helped you elaborate it or cultivate it or disambiguate it. It was already somewhat formed in your mind, now you just got to put it on paper? Yeah, I mean, it's all in my head to start with, and it's just a question of putting it in a way that is compelling.
You know, it's very much the same when I do my science, very often someone comes to my office and says, this is what I'm working on, sort of immediately I come up with suggestions for ideas and how to proceed. And very often that person says, Oh, wow, I, how did you come up with that? I, I didn't really think about it. And it's not as if it takes me a great effort to do that. It's sort of in my head to start with. And I'm just,
Okay, talking about communicating ideas to other scientists, I recall you saying that when you were in your younger years, you would
Speak about ideas and then they would get rebuffed but then someone who is on the periphery listening in would then advance those ideas and maybe they would be advanced to the level of becoming new fields in physics or insights or inventions and so on. Can you give me some examples of that?
Yeah, it happened several times and, you know, early on in my career, I looked for an affirmation for other people to accept an idea that I proposed before I would advocate for it. And very often I was disappointed because I'll give you an example. 21 years ago, I
thought that it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the mass of black holes at the centers of galaxies and the depth of the gravitational potential well that they're embedded in. So in other words, if black holes grow, they behave like kids.
eat as much food as they can from the table until they become too energetic and then they throw off the food from the table and so if that's the case then black holes would grow up to a certain mass at which point they release so much energy they become so energetic that they clean off the food that allows them to continue to grow and so I suggested let's check if black hole masses are correlated with
the depth of the gravitational potential well of the galaxy that hosts them and the way to measure that is by the speed by which stars are moving within that galaxy near the core of the galaxy and
When I suggested that people said no that's not interesting, it's probably there is nothing interesting in that relation and I remember mentioning it at the conference and it was completely rebuffed and then we had a junior faculty search at the astronomy department and as it happens in the shortlist there were two people working exactly on
on the central black holes in galaxies and I suggested to both of them independently to check that and since they were young people they decided to do that and they had all the data in principle I could have done it as well anyway they did it and each of them got so excited a few months later they said wow there is a very tight correlation between the black hole mass and the characteristic speed of stars in the galaxy that hosts it
And then they decided to publish and they published exactly the same time, the two teams. And then they started fighting with each other for the credit because it became the hottest thing in the field.
and for a decade it became the thing that everyone talks about and that was the first indication and then a couple of years later I suggested to call, I had a sabbatical at Princeton and I suggested to a few people that were experts in black holes and the inflow of gas onto black holes I suggested
Perhaps we should calculate what happens when there is a hotspot, a region that is very bright orbiting a black hole very closely so that you can perhaps map the space and time around the black hole this way. And they completely dismissed it and said, well, there would never be a hotspot that maintains its integrity. This is not worth doing. And so I came back to Harvard after the sabbatical and I suggested it to a postdoc of mine and we did the calculation. We wrote a few papers and then
Just a year and a half ago, two years ago, a group in Germany discovered exactly that phenomena. They found a hotspot moving around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, just in the way that I envisioned. And the hotspot was orbiting very close to the black hole. And so once again, and then
I can give you many more examples. I gave, for example, a lecture on gravitational wave astrophysics, which is a new way of doing astrophysics. Astrophysics traditionally, astronomy, was based on light, collecting light. But then, according to Einstein's theory of gravity, when you have massive objects like black holes that are very compact, they distort space and time around them. And when they move close to each other, they can send out waves. And these are called gravitational waves.
At the time it was 2013 I thought it's an important subject for the coming years and I decided to give a lecture about it in a winter school for students and then 10 minutes into my talk one of the other lecturers who was by the way still is 20 years younger than me so it has nothing to do with age but he is very conservative. How long ago was this? This was 2013, January.
And he stood up and said, why are you wasting the time of these graduate students on a subject that will clearly not be important during their lifetime for their careers? And just two years later... He said it's allowed in front of everyone? In front of everyone? Yeah, that's on video. We can find it. And, you know, he was much younger than I am working on staff formation and so forth.
a conservative astronomer so to speak.
but young, relatively young, and so two years later the LIGO collaboration announced or discovered, the announcement came six months later, but then, you know, in August 2015 it was discovered that there was an event, a gravitational wave event discovered by LIGO and that ushered a new era in astrophysics where gravitational waves are being used to discover
objects that otherwise do not emit any light, black holes that come together. And the Nobel Prize was awarded for that a few years ago. And clearly, you know, these the same students that were in the audience were still doing their PhDs where this discovery was made. And so saying, why are you wasting the time of these students on a subject that will never be important was clearly invalid.
and you know it happened to me many times and at some point like five years ago I said to myself the hell with it I don't need confirmation from other people you know it's just well it makes you know it makes me depressed to listen to the criticism and then realize
that this is the hottest thing in the field later on, a few years later. So how is that possible? Well, it is possible because people do not have the vision about the future and they prefer to dismiss new ideas, innovation and so forth just because it takes them out of their comfort zone. They're used to doing business as usual and
And so five years ago or so, I decided to basically not listen and just do what I think is right based on my inner compass. And you can see that nowadays, you know, as a young scientist, I would never be able to sustain the pressure, the social pressure that exists around me right now. But I'm sort of immune to it by now. What social pressure exists around you right now? What are you referring to? Also, why did it take you?
I don't know how old you are, but why did it take you until you're 54? I imagine that if this occurred to you when you were in your late 20s, maybe three times, then by the time you're 33 or 35, you would say, okay, to heck with it, forget what other people think.
Well, maybe I'm a slow learner, maybe I'm also, you know, I do care about what people, I did care about what people think early on and you have to understand the entire structure of academia relies on other people evaluating you throughout the various stages. In order to get tenure you need
tenure committee to recommend and that is based on letters that are obtained from the community at large. So you need to dance to the music of a lot of people in order to be sort of tenured. And then the same is true about getting grants. Grant support is, you know, the selection committee committees are often populated by people that are mainstream and they have their own agenda and they don't welcome innovation as much.
and to me it's still a miracle that the LIGO experiment was funded in the first place. I was told by important people at the National Science Foundation that nowadays at present time the likelihood of it being funded would have been very small. It was the vision of a few people a couple of decades ago that pushed it through. It's really hard to imagine that nowadays the National Science Foundation or other federal agencies would
receive an advice from the scientific community to embark on a risky project of this type. It was not at all clear that it will reach the sensitivity necessary. And so you are dependent throughout your career on many people that will approve your agenda. And as a result, you develop the mentality of listening and paying attention and not deviating too much from the beaten path.
and that is quite common. What is not common is someone like me that reaches leadership positions. I've been chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years and I've chaired many important committees. Someone at that level often behaves
even more as a conformist because of political consideration. You have to understand it's just like looking at the seashells on the beach. When a seashell first arrives at the beach, it looks special and unique. It has special color, special shape, but as time goes on, the waves
rub seashells against each other and then they start to lose their identity and they start to look like each other and eventually you end up with sea sand basically pieces of seashells that are indistinguishable from each other and that's what happens in academia you know each individual researcher starts different but then you rub against many others and you end up being indistinguishable from them
Okay, when I hear that, here's what I'm thinking. There's this, it's not a quote, but it's a story from Steve Jobs. And he said almost the opposite. So there, it's obviously a happy middle. He said, what you want to do is take people who are like rocks that are unpolished and then put them into a rock tumbler because afterward they come out like diamonds. So you want to take intelligent, smart people and have them argue. I can see this.
Well, as long as the argument is accepted, you know, as long as it's allowed. So if you create an environment where people are encouraged to challenge each other to come up with original ideas to be different, then that is I completely agree that that experience of argument and exchanges is helpful. But but if on the other hand, you create an environment where, you know, the
dominant view where there is a group thing where the folklore of a field dominates and anyone that suggests something different is pushed aside. That is bad and that's what I was referring to. So if it's geared toward constructing and also if it's geared toward some goal. Yeah if you look for example I mean the ideal example is the corridor of bell labs
Bell Labs was established by a corporation that has a profit in mind but in that corridor they put very creative people and some of them ended up winning the Nobel Prize. There were lots of inventions that came out of the corridor of Bell Labs and so putting a lot of creative people in the same environment and allowing them to innovate and giving them an incentive to innovate
That is the right right right and so I in that sense I would agree with jobs that you know putting them next to each other is beneficial. But if you on the other hand you put people together and exert pressure so that you know they do not deviate from what everyone else is thinking that's bad.
So right now the incentives are geared towards self-preservation or idea preservation? Yeah. And what can be done to fix this? One of the questions that I had from the audience was, let's imagine there are some wacky ideas. Obviously, you don't want to let in just any idea. There is something to be said about being too fringe, but then there is something to be said about having permeable walls. Right. How do you fix this system quote unquote?
Well, very easily, you basically evaluate each idea on its merit. So the point is you are not evaluating the person that mentioned that you're not using, you know, the
personal traits as a way of dismissing an idea, which is very often done. Very often the attacks are personal. If you see in politics, it's very common. In science, it should not be the case. In science, we should argue about the ideas. And if an idea doesn't make sense, you can easily prove that. So let me give you an example that comes from the opposite side. So for example, with respect to Oumuamua,
I suggested that it may be of artificial origin as a possibility and that was that encountered a lot of opposition. Now the latest alternative to that was that maybe it is a nitrogen iceberg.
That was a suggestion and you can find nitrogen, pure nitrogen as you need in this case in order to explain the fact we haven't seen a cometary tail around Oumuamua and also that it's flat and that it was pushed away from the sun. All of these facts will come into
We could be explained if it was made of pure nitrogen and pure nitrogen, for example, exists on the surface of Pluto. So the suggestion was, let's imagine a lot of Pluto's around other stars and you chip off their surface with a high efficiency more than 10%.
of all the Plutons are being chipped off and then you send out these rocks and one of them is Oumuamua and then okay I said fine and then I wrote a paper just a week and a half ago saying well if you imagine that to be the case and you end up needing more mass than you have in stars in the Milky Way galaxy by a factor of a hundred actually turns out
What do you mean by that? Sorry, what do you mean by that? And are you referring to the work by Desk and Jackson, I believe? Desk and Jackson, yes, exactly. And the reason for that is, you know, the layer of pure nitrogen on the surface of Pluto is relatively thin. So it just makes a few percent of the mass of Pluto, most of the mass
is you know in rock and water ice and so forth so you lose by that and then so for every bit of nitrogen that you produce you need much more rock and water ice to exist and then on top of that you need hydrogen and helium that are much more abundant than rock so if you do that just the mass budget how much
must do you need to process in order to make enough objects so that you would see one of them as a muamua. And we know that you need to produce a certain, you know, number of such objects per unit volume so that we would see one of them coming within a few years of the time that we were observing the sky, you know, with pandas. So basically, if you just go through the math, which is really simple, straightforward,
And also they require that this object would be just half a billion years old, because otherwise it would get completely evaporated. So if you put all of these considerations together, you find that you need 100 times more mass than you have available in stars. So even if you take all the mass in stars, multiply by 100, only then you will have enough surface layers of exo-Plutons or Pluto-like
planets around other stars to make enough objects like Oumuamua so that you would see one of them during that mode of observations.
And so to me, it makes this scenario very unlikely. So I just mentioned that, you know, as an example of how a scientific debate should go, someone proposes an idea, and then you discuss the idea on its merit. And, you know, if you do a calculation that shows that something is problematic with that, you know, that that is a reason for concern and for working on something else. So that is a scientific debate. On the other hand,
If someone goes to Twitter and says something negative about a paper and just doesn't even read it or says something negative about a person without referring to the details of the idea or says something negative about the reference list of a paper rather than the content of the paper.
You know that that is not a viable scientific discussion. So my point is we can maintain a high level of integrity in the scientific process if we just refer to the ideas rather than attack people personally. And that's the way we should proceed. And, you know, most of the time in science, you have to understand most of the time, things are uncertain, we just don't have enough evidence.
and therefore we should contemplate possibilities and that's legitimate, that's part of the scientific process. You can't skip that step, you can't say I know the answer and I don't want to dismiss other possibilities even though there is not enough evidence for your answer to be right. So I think it's good to have ideas on the table that are viable scientifically.
Because then we are exploring all possibilities. And by the way, imagination is extremely important because we can't just always restrict our attention to things that we know from the past. We will never discover new things that way. What's Jackson's and Dash's response to this? I don't know. All I have seen are personal attacks. Not necessarily from them, but from other people. And is that the social pressure that you were referring to before? That previously, let's say five years younger,
That's a low level, you know, that what you find on social media, which I, you know, I don't have any account on social media, so I'm less exposed to that. But and I'm very grateful for that. You know, I decided not to have any account when I married my wife, she asked me not to do that. And so I agreed not to do that. And that was more than 20 years ago. And I'm very glad that I don't have an account on social media, because
then I can think creatively and not be affected. I mean of course I'm losing on some bits of information that are floating around on social media but I benefit much more by not listening to you know low-level discussions. I'm keeping my eyes on the ball so to speak not on the audience and so
So that's one kind of pressure that you find on social media, but I'm sort of resilient to that because I don't monitor it. But then there are of course, you know, there are other ways that people exert pressure through students and postdocs. You know, they are much more vulnerable. They don't have
secure positions. So if you create an atmosphere where some ideas are ridiculed, then postdocs and students are simply afraid of pursuing them.
because of their future careers. And I got a lot of emails from people saying, I completely agree with you, but I cannot express myself because I worry about my job prospects. And that comes from people that are not necessarily at the lowest level of academia, even people that have secure positions are worried about that. And this is unhealthy because we want an open discussion
and scientific discussions a discussion based on content not on on the way things look like or on personal attacks why is it you think aliens are considered to be unconventional or so unconventional that they don't merit an academic response or an academic investigation well there are several aspects first of all as we discussed before
Many ideas are ridiculed for no good reason, even in the context of black holes or gravitation waves, as I mentioned to you. I remember when I started as a postdoc, the idea of inflation, cosmic inflation was ridiculed in some circles of astronomy.
So that happens all the time, and of course the search for extraterrestrial intelligence started 70 years ago, so it has a long history. In the early days it wasn't ridiculed as much, but every now and then there was a very negative response of the community, and since 1993 there is no significant federal funding for this subject, and as a result it was pushed aside. Now the strange thing is,
that for example in particle physics there was the superconducting supercollider a very big experimental project that at some point you know the funding for it stopped and then what happened in theoretical physics is that there was a whole culture that developed after that
that is divorced from feedback from experiments and this culture of theoretical physics became string theory and the discussions of the multiverse and the extra dimensions and so forth ideas that have no evidence to support them. So on the one hand you have a situation where the mainstream in theoretical physics discusses concepts that have no foundation
in experimental data and that is accepted and there are big communities of people working on these ideas and they are not even interested in testing the idea so most of the papers are about mathematical details not about how to test one idea versus another and if you suggest the test
They shy away from it and try to raise enough dust so that you wouldn't be able to rule out the theory. And so that's one culture. And at the same time, you have in astronomy a culture that also as a result of not funding a research area is completely negative about something that is down to earth, so to speak. We have it on earth. It's intelligent life, technological life.
The one thing that we know now that wasn't true 20 years ago is we now know that a big fraction of all the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly at the same separation.
So the earth sun system is not unusual and as a result if you arrange for similar circumstances you might as well get similar outcomes and rather than argue about whether it's likely or not likely, whether we are unique, special or whether we are very common, as common as ants are on a sidewalk, rather than argue about that, and by the way I believe in the latter option as you know,
we should just search. And of course, we will never find the truth if we don't search. And the strange thing is the current situation is there is very little funding, a thousand times less funding for the search for technological signatures than there is for the search for dark matter. And frankly, the nature of dark matter will have zero impact on our daily lives. If Oumuamua was a technological relic, or if we find other technological relics in space, that would have a huge impact on society.
And society, the public is very interested in this subject and it funds science. So I find the current situation unacceptable. It would have an impact on society in the sense of how we view ourselves. Yeah, many different aspects, how we view our place in the universe, you know, and our aspirations for space.
If there are others out there, if there is a smarter kid on the block. And by the way, most stars formed billions of years before the sun and therefore they may have had civilizations like us billions of years before us. So we are arriving relatively late to the game. The way I see it is we are born into this world just like actors that are put on a stage without a script. We don't know what the play is about.
So the first thing to check is whether there are other actors out there, perhaps they know what's going on because they have been around for a while. So that's what like searching for another kid on the block, finding whether there are smarter kids on, you know, most likely there were civilizations that died by now. But we can find relics, technological relics they sent out to space, just like we send Voyager 1, Voyager 2, No Horizons and so forth. So it's a very natural, to me again, it's a common sense to
invest in the search for such things, I call it space archaeology, you know monitoring for example with a camera every object that comes into the solar system from outside that gets close to earth and checking it, you know checking whether it's artificial or natural by a close-up photograph because a picture is worth a thousand words and in my case a picture is worth 66 000 words the number of words in my book. So I think it's very natural to do this search
and invest at least the same amount of money we invest in the search for dark matter, which is also a search in the dark. You know, we don't know what the dark matter is. Why not invest hundreds of millions of dollars or even a billion dollars? That's what we invested in in LIGO. To me, it sounds like a straightforward thing to do, a very common sensical thing to do. But somehow my view is not dominant. They say not only that, but the discussion is being ridiculed.
And moreover, the community doesn't like me saying that, even though that's the reality of the situation. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
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Hmm, when I hear that, what I'm wondering is, is there a way to monetize the search for aliens?
Because then you can get the private industry, the private sector, definitely, definitely. And then number two, what do you think about Elon Musk's mission to Mars? OK, so those are two questions, privatizing the search for aliens and then Musk. Definitely. I think if there are individuals interested in the search, I have some good ideas about how to do space archaeology, how to examine interstellar objects that enter the solar system and come close to Earth and take a photograph of them. And, you know, that that could be
a new frontier in astronomy that was never pursued and it's simply because just a few years ago we discovered the first interstellar object Muamua so right now you know we have our eyes open it's
It's a wake-up call for us and I would be glad to discuss with wealthy individuals what can be done to advance this frontier. I think it would be a very exciting frontier, even more exciting than gravitation wave astrophysics or the search for dark matter. It could be the most important
discovery that humanity ever made if we find conclusive evidence for alien technology floating in space. So given that I think we should definitely pursue it with the private sector because that is completely independent and is known for its innovation you know because there are very wealthy individuals that became wealthy as a result of taking risks
So I think it would be fantastic to open up new scientific frontiers that they can pursue with their wealth. The second question about going to Mars, I think one aspect of that that was not explored enough and should be explored before we go on that ship that brings us to Mars is the health concern.
down here on earth we are protected by the earth's magnetic field from very energetic particles cosmic rays and by the atmosphere of the earth and the environment of the space station floating just hovering above earth is also relatively protected but if you go to mars and you spend a year actually a significant fraction of your brain cells can be damaged as a result of energetic particles
going through the helmet I mean you can you have to be in a cave underground or to have some special shielding around you to be protected and there was not enough attention given to that and I think that should be addressed because we don't want it to be a one-way trip where after a year everyone that goes there dies. So there's too much of a focus on building the atmosphere not much of
Well, yeah, so I mean, one thing is, of course, to create a habitat that allows people to breathe and you don't need to build a whole atmosphere to terraform Mars, you can just do it inside a closed vessel, you know, and but at the same time worrying about how to protect humans so that they can live there for more than a year is, I think, a major challenge that was not addressed enough.
and of course you can do it in steps you can go first to the moon and then because the moon is closer to us and we can ship people back and forth more easily and that could be a stepping stone to mars what do you think of sean carroll's many worlds well it's not his many worlds interpretation but he seems to think it's the only game in town with regard to quantum mechanical interpretations and he seems to think it's not as arbitrary as people say
and that maybe there's some evidence for it, at least if you quote unquote follow the math. So what do you make of that argument? Well, so quantum mechanics was discovered experimentally. And that's an important lesson for us to maintain our humility as scientists. You know, sometimes we need the experiments to give us an insight about nature that we haven't expected. And it takes us out of our comfort zone.
And he took Albert Einstein out of his comfort zone because he thought that you can't have quantum mechanics with spooky action at a distance. It makes no sense to him. And so he wrote a paper about it, the Einstein Podolsky-Rosen paper, trying to propose an experiment that will demonstrate that spooky action at a distance does not exist. Versions of that experiment were done and he was proven wrong.
and indeed we are a century later after quantum mechanics was discovered still feeling uneasy about how to interpret it and this is an excellent example for why we need experiments because very often
Experiments open our eyes to facts that we haven't anticipated. Our imagination is more limited than nature's imagination, in a way. Science is basically just being a student for life. As a scientist, you have to be humble and modest enough to admit that perhaps nature
is different than your preconceptions. And if you were to say, I don't need verification, I know the truth in advance, I know that there are extra dimensions, or I know that Oumuamua was a rock, or I know that this and that without even checking, then you are just like the philosophers during the days of Galileo that didn't want to look through his telescope, because they knew that the sun moves around the Earth.
So I just wanted to make that point that quantum mechanics is really an excellent example for why as scientists we should always regard ourselves as students of nature. But coming back to the question of what's the meaning of quantum mechanics, as you mentioned there was the many world interpretation and Sean Carroll puts it in a modern context.
Does Sean Carroll add anything that hasn't been said before on the Many Worlds interpretation from Everett? There are some new nuances now that relate to how to define the wave function and the possible existence of the multiverse that some people contemplate as the actual
reality is much bigger than what we can experiment with within the observable universe that we see. But then I would say that the verdict is still out. I mean every year or two I read an interesting essay that offers new insights to quantum mechanics, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but we are not there yet. We haven't converged on something that everyone agrees on.
and again i think the way to converge would be to be guided by experiments and and it's quite possible you know that the one thing we're missing is the connection with gravity that we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that was tested experimentally and perhaps in the context of such a theory the the concerns we have will go away because one thing that you recognize in quantum mechanics at least the traditional way it was formulated in
is that time plays a special role relative to space and whereas in the general theory of relativity time and space are just dimensions of space-time and they can be curved by objects and so forth and so perhaps once we identify a winning theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity many of them
ambiguities that we have right now in physics. And by the way, there are many, not just the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There is the information paradox in the context of black holes. We don't know what happens to information that falls into a black hole. Stephen Hawking
demonstrated that black holes evaporate eventually into thermal radiation that doesn't carry that information. So the question is, if the black hole goes away, where is all the information that we threw into it when we made it? And that's a fundamental question because quantum mechanics argues that information cannot be destroyed. And so this is one puzzle that is also unsolved.
modern physics. Then there is a question of what happens in the singularities of either the singularity of a black hole where the curvature of space and time diverges or the singularity of the big bang what happened before the big bang. Do you believe that there are singularities within? No, it's clear that singularities are just appearing in Einstein's theory of gravity because it doesn't it's not unified with quantum mechanics because once you get to very large curvatures of space and time
have to correct the equations that Einstein wrote because quantum mechanics comes into play. So again the singularities are just symptoms of us having an incomplete theory and what we need is to unify quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity of Einstein and of course string theory is a very popular contender but when you ask string theorists can you tell me what
What happens at the singularity of a black hole? They say, oh, that's a too difficult question. We can't really address it at this point. When you ask them what happens at the Big Bang, just before the Big Bang, they say, oh, that's too difficult. We can't really. And then there are people that try to formulate some guesses as to how string theory would behave. But so first of all, there is not a unique answer from string theory right now.
And the theory is not unique in its predictions. And second, on the issues that matter, it doesn't put any skin in the game. It doesn't say here is a prediction that you can test experimentally. And if you find one answer, then string theory is right. If you find another answer, then it's wrong. No, they prefer not to put skin in the game so that it will still be right forever.
And then there is even the claim that if by some philosophers that if physicists agree on something for a decade, it must be right. And I find that really embarrassing that people argue that. Which philosophers? Oh, there is, there is Hegel. No, there is a philosopher with that, that wrote a book about string theory and suggesting that, you know, we should adjust our
conception of what physics is supposed to mean, that experiments may not be needed, and that, in fact, physics is what physicists do. And once again, from my perspective, I hold exactly the opposite view. I think that nature educates us. We are just students of nature. So we should be modest and learn from experiments. We can't imagine that we will know the truth in advance. To me, it sounds like hallucinations.
You are high on drugs if you believe that reality always reflects what you think it is. That's what people that hallucinate think. But you can think that you are the wealthiest person in the world and when you go to the bank and check how much money you have in your checking account, you realize that that's an experiment and you realize that
You cannot cash it. So I mean, of course people can feel happy. I have nothing against that. They can do mathematical gymnastics and feel happy. I just have the objection I have is about that applying to reality. A reality check needs to happen at some point. Right. Exactly. Otherwise, I mean, you can just celebrate something that is not real. Okay.
Let's talk about Bob Lazar. I sent you an email and I asked you if you had the time to please watch this video. It was a technical explanation of Bob Lazar and his younger years. Did you have a chance to even skim it? Yeah, I skimmed it. And what I found on the web is that he made a lot of statements without showing any evidence. And here I give usually the example of Napoleon. There were many people over the years that claimed that they are Napoleon.
How do you check that? Once again, experimentally, you ask them, show me your ID. And if they can't show you the idea that says that they are Napoleon, and if they keep insisting that they are Napoleon without showing you evidence for that, you know, there are places where you can put them. And my point is evidence is the key. That's the way that science gets credibility.
That's the way for us to make progress, as I discussed before, for us to learn new things through experiments, through evidence. And it's not just a nuance. Looking for evidence is not just something that you can give up on. It's a necessity. That's the only thing that will keep you sane and making relevant statements. And you can make a lot of statements that look
bizarre, interesting, intriguing, emotionally appealing. You know, you can make a lot of statements like that. And in fact, our culture is full of that. You have all kinds of myths in our culture. You know, if you can think about lots of them, I mean, Santa Claus. I mean, there are lots of myths that are accepted. And they're part of our culture, but they're not regarded as part of- You're crushing me right now. I thought Santa Claus is real.
My point is, when I checked a lot of the things he said, he didn't bring credible evidence to support them. And that's what makes me worry that, you know, that he's not real. I see. I see. Did you take a look at any of his explanations as to how the spacecraft would work? And is it feasible in your mind? Is it untenable? Is it ridiculous?
No, I mean, once again, suppose he had a good idea for making a spacecraft that we currently do not have, that NASA is not developing, he could have made a fortune out of it. How? Very simply, instead of talking about it, he could have built it and then it would fly. What's the problem? I mean, that's a straight point. I don't understand why we need to talk about it even. I mean, any reasonable person that has an idea that is not being used
and that could make millions or even billions of dollars, you know, first of all establishes a patent on that. And secondly, you know, tries to build this thing. And if it's real, you will make that profit. You know, it would be bigger than Tesla. It would be bigger than SpaceX because you would find a technology that NASA can use that nobody thought about. So, you know, it makes zero sense to say, I know how to do something.
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
Okay, I believe what he was saying is that he doesn't know how it works. What happened was he was told
to work on some craft and he believes they're of alien or extraterrestrial origin and that the US government knows how to pilot them to some degree in the same way that you can learn how to use a phone or a tablet like they've dropped phones and tribes and they know how to turn it on but they don't know how it works and he said possibly the way that it works is with this element called element 115 and there's a strong nuclear force which turns into a gravitational force and that I find interesting I don't know how it works but to me if that's true that's
That's one way of unifying quantum field theory with gravity. Either way, what do you think about that? From the point of view of a physicist, this is just nonsense. I mean, it makes no sense. I've never heard about how you turn the nuclear force into a gravitational force in any piece of equipment. Of course, if you reach the Planck scale, you might be able to do something, but no accelerator gets even closer. The only time when we reached that scale perhaps was at the Big Bang.
or near a singularity of a black hole. But so I would say this is just not, I mean, it makes no scientific sense to me. And moreover, let's imagine that he did not know the details, but someone else has that equipment. Why do you think that someone else will keep it secret? Why won't they just use it or develop it and, you know, get a great advantage relative to others by using it?
I was listening to one of you actually, I believe you said this plenty of times that someone said to you, deflation is not disprovable. I'm sorry, inflation is not disprovable. Yeah. Okay. Do you mind explaining why? Okay, so here is the thing that cosmic inflation is a theory that was proposed about 40 years ago.
It was meant to explain some very peculiar facts about the universe, one of which, let me just mention because it's really simple to follow. When we look in one direction on the sky, we find the cosmic microwave background relic from the Big Bang with some temperature. Then we look at the opposite direction on the sky and we find the cosmic microwave background having exactly the same temperature. Now, how is that possible?
the age of the universe for the this light to arrive to us from these two points on the sky and these two points on the sky did not have time to communicate with each other because it would take twice as long at least or more than that for the light to arrive from one point to another to the other. So how come the universe was arranged in a way such that conditions are the same or throughout the entire sky
In terms of the cosmic microwave background temperature, for example. So we know the universe had similar initial conditions to one part in a hundred thousand throughout the region that we can see. Meaning that in one part in a hundred thousand, it's the same temperature or what? Yes. Yes. And how, how come it was prepared in such a state, which is very special.
If you would imagine just a random state, you would have very different temperatures in different places. So inflation attempts to explain that. The idea is that everything that we see came from a very small patch that was stretched exponentially in time, very quickly. So points that were in contact with each other were separated very fast
faster than light from
time. And then that took a small region of space where points were connected to each other, had the same conditions
The cosmological constant is equivalent to the vacuum having some mass density, some energy density, which by the way today is called dark energy. I mean, it's basically the energy of the vacuum.
So by the vacuum, I mean, if you clean up all the matter, whatever you have left is the vacuum. And the vacuum could have a uniform energy density, the same energy density everywhere. Because it's the vacuum, it's the ground state. So if you just imagine early cosmic time, the vacuum had a large energy density, and that went away. It was sort of a false vacuum, the vacuum was excited to some higher state.
and then it decayed into the vacuum we have today, then that will create an exponential expansion that is called a cosmic inflation early on and would explain some facts about the universe. It could also generate, it will make the universe have the same conditions everywhere, but also through quantum mechanics generates small ripples in the density of matter. One percent ripples?
Small fluctuations because of quantum mechanics that later grow and become the galaxies that we see today or the objects that we see today. So that's the nice, the beauty of the concept of cosmic inflation that it explains a lot of things and that's why it was widely accepted after a while in the scientific community.
Sorry, I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So is the way that they put a bound on the time that the cosmological constant was extremely high, is it with by observing the cosmic background radiation and saying, okay, there's a 1% difference about one in 100 you said, right? No, one in 100,000. Yes. Okay, one in 100,000. So then that means that there's a
There is a lower limit on how long it persisted, which is you need to inflate enough so that the small patch would become as big as the universe today. That's the minimum you need to expand by, but it could have expanded much more than that. We just don't know. So inflation could have lasted
much more. We have no upper limit on how long it lasted but we have a lower limit and we know that it should have ended so that we will end up with universe full of matter that made all the objects we see now. So the vacuum could not have continued to dominate the expansion forever because then we wouldn't exist. So the vacuum dominated for a while and that while lasted at least
60 periods of exponential expansion, at least 60. And then after that, you know, we don't know how much more, but eventually it decayed and became the matter that we have today. And the universe entered into its expansion the way we see it. So anyway, it's unfalsifiable because, okay, no. So that idea as it was formulated initially was a very interesting idea because you can test it. There are various predictions.
One of them is that the geometry of the universe would be flat and so forth. And by the way, it was confirmed that the universe is flat. You know, if you draw a triangle, the sum of the angles is 180 degrees and so forth. But at some point, it became clear that to account for inflation, you actually come up with the multiverse.
there are lots of other regions inside of which conditions could be very different. So anything that is possible happens an infinite number of times in such a theory of cosmic inflation. So once you allow for not just our reality to exist, but you have all kinds of regions where things, everything that can happen happens an infinite number of times.
then it starts losing its predictability, because anything that you find about our universe, it's a very flexible theory now that can explain anything. And so I had a panel discussion with Alan Guth, that is one of the pioneers of inflation, in which I asked him a simple question. I said, and that was about five years ago, I asked him, is inflation forcifiable?
Is there an experiment by which you will detect something about the cosmic micro background or about the universe that will demonstrate that inflation is wrong? Can you envision something? I'm not saying necessarily that it's wrong. I'm just saying, is there a way to test it? Skin in the game, as you would call it. Yeah. And he said, that's a silly question. He said, any observational fact
In the universe, inflation right now as a theory is sufficiently flexible that it can accommodate any fact that you detect. And to me, a theory of everything is not very far from being a theory of nothing. Because if you can explain anything that you find, then what's the value of the theory? It doesn't give you any added value because first you find it and then the theory says, yes, yes, of course a version of the theory would make it.
So what did I learn? I didn't learn that theory is right. I didn't learn that theory, I cannot learn that theory is wrong. And therefore it loses its scientific value in my view, not in the view of Alan Guth. He thinks that it makes the theory very robust because it can agree with anything that is being found. And you know, that is the shift in the culture that I'm worried about. You see this with string theory as well. Yes.
I'm not sure if Alan is a string theorist. Well, no, he's not. But the two cultures celebrate the same view about how physics can be done nowadays. They both, I mean, also in the context of string theory, for example, there was a suggestion that it has a landscape and it's landscape, the landscape of string theory.
accounts for some versions of inflation. And so I asked the person that worked on that, I said, okay, so this connection that you make between the natural incarnation of string theory and inflation, suppose we measure
something in the cosmic micro background about inflation. And we show that the kind of inflation that you are advocating is wrong. Would that prove string theory wrong? And that person said, no, string theory will always be right. What it will prove is the connection that I made between string theory and inflation. That connection is wrong. So you see, the psychology is always to retreat to a place that cannot be shown wrong.
and although it sounds very appealing and comfortable because you can maintain your image as, you know, being always right and you don't put any skin in the game, it's not really what physics is about. This flatness that you mentioned of space-time, is this why we can say that a galaxy is moving away from us at a certain speed? And the reason why I say that is in a manifold, you can't technically
to get a bit technical, can't technically compare two different velocities unless they're brought at the same point, unless you have a horizontal or vertical subspace given by connection and so on. So how can you compare different velocities when you're at different points in a manifold is what I'm wondering. No, so first of all, I should say that in Einstein's theory of gravity, you can get a very distant galaxy to move away from us faster than light. And that is because it's far away.
So space and time can expand faster than light when you're dealing with points that are separated by a large distance. That's allowed by Einstein's theory. And that's why we lose contact with galaxies once they start moving faster than light relative to us. And so in an accelerating universe, two points that were in contact are separated eventually so that they are not in contact anymore after a while.
Of course, that time that it takes is the time that it takes them to reach the speed of light, basically. That's the time that they're still in contact and after that they're not in contact, that they cannot communicate. But to your second question, that has to do with how can we measure that the universe is flat? And that is simply just like you check if a piece of paper is flat. You draw a triangle and you check the sum of the angles.
If the sum of the angles is 180 degrees, you know that this piece of paper is flat. But if it sits on top of a ball, for example, then the sum of the angle can be bigger than 180 degrees. You can take a line from the pole to the equator, go along the equator, and go back to the pole. And each of these angles would be 90 degrees. So 90 plus 90 plus 90, if you're doing it, that would be
270, it's more than 180 degrees, then you know that the surface is not flat. It's actually curved like a ball, positive. So how do we check the sums of the angles of a triangle in the universe? Well, we just need a standard ruler and we have that. In the early universe, you know, a sound wave would propagate a certain distance that we can calculate. So at a given time after the Big Bang, we know how far
a sound wave can propagate. And it turns out that this is the distance where you can have correlations between the temperature of the microwave background, because sound waves correlate different points in the sky where the temperature of the microwave background knows about another point. Sorry, why are you using sound waves? Because sound waves require a medium. Yes, there is a medium. The matter in the universe is the medium. I mean, there is ordinary matter and there is light.
And there is dark matter. So there is matter. And the sound waves, we can calculate the speed by which they move. And so if we look at a certain time after the Big Bang, we can tell how far sound waves could propagate. And that defines the standard ruler. That's the distance over which different points in the sky would be correlated with each other because they could speak via sound waves with each other. And so when we look at the microwave background, we can measure the angle that that yardstick occupies
And we can figure out whether the sums of the angles in that triangle, the base of the triangle is the yardstick, the distance that sound traveled at that time. And then the other sides of the triangle go to the observer. So the observer looks at this yardstick and we can look at what is the angle that this yardstick occupies. And from that, we can figure out whether the universe is flat or not. And this experiment was done in the year 2000.
we already knew that the universe is flat, that it's the simplest geometry you can think of. That's absolutely interesting. Of a flat space. A priori, is there a reason why it should be flat? I see it's as simple, but and also is there a margin of error with this? Well, there should be a margin of error. Yeah, there is a margin of error right now. The precision right now is a few percent, but then
Cosmic inflation naturally, you know, in the old incarnation of it, where not everything was possible, but if you were to take the models from 1980, they would expect the universe to be flat because you take a small patch of space, you might have some curvature of space and time in that patch, but then you inflate it. And when you inflate it, you stretch it to huge dimensions. So all the curvature that you had on small scales is now being ironed out.
and you can think of it as a cosmic iron you basically iron out by expansion you you make the universe flat the geometry flat and it happens to be the case that the universe is flat indeed that seems to me to be evidence for the inflation yes it is but in the original incarnation of the 1980s what happened afterwards is that the theory was appended supplemented by ingredients that make it much less predictive
that it can accommodate anything. That's the part that I resist. I see, I see. Let's imagine, I think Wolfram predicts that there's a lower bound to the elementary particle masses, or at least he says he can get to that. I think you mentioned that astrophysical data can validate this. How? Well, Wolfram has a different way of looking at physics, which is related to
something he worked on for a while. It's diagrams of hypergraphs and so on. And then it has a group of people working with him and it's a very ambitious project. He's very bright. I haven't seen yet that the effort yield predictions that we can test experimentally. So far, he's trying to reproduce things we know about.
And then he's actually not far from where I live and he's relatively local. How many minutes are we driving? Yeah, at some point I hope to have a conversation with him walking together in the woods and trying to get the latest on his work. But as far as I know, it's not yet at the point where the theory predicts new things that we can test beyond what we already know.
I see, I see. So what do you think of his model? I think it's too preliminary. It's nice to have people thinking independently, you know, and I very much I salute his effort intellectually, because it's very ambitious, you know, to come up with a completely new way of looking at physics. And his courage for taking on this task, and his intellect, I mean, he's he's brilliant. When you listen to
Have you heard of Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity? Have you researched into it and what do you think about it? I did not look into it in detail, no, so I cannot comment. But I know that he's very bright. Do you think that innovation in physics is going to necessarily come from the outside because of these selective pressures that you mentioned in academia? Yeah, well, I think what happens is that
This pressure is reducing the efficiency of science that fewer people are attempting to deviate from the beaten path. And especially the young people, you know, if you think about Albert Einstein, he was not deterred by oppression. He in one year had five seminal papers. And I very much hope that this tradition will come back where young people will not be afraid to innovate.
I think even with social pressure, as long as we continue to do experiments, that's the key. Because experiments and collecting evidence will eventually tell us that we are wrong. It takes more time if we are not open-minded. And if you look, for example, the perfect example is the Mayan culture. When I visited Mexico, I went to Chichen Itza.
And the tour guide was bragging about the Mayan culture and saying that the astronomers in that culture were held at a very high regard. They were considered astronomer priests, the highest level in society. And I was wondering why, and turns out that politicians, the rulers of the Mayans, they thought that by knowing the positions of planets and stars on the sky,
You can forecast the future. So you can tell the outcome of a war. You can decide when to go out to a war so that it will be successful, so that you would win based on the locations of planets. So they put astronomers that monitor the sky, the planets. Where did they get that idea from? Just from the predictive powers of the weather and then extrapolating that? No, it's sort of like horoscopes nowadays, you know, astrology.
It's a natural tendency of people to believe that there are powers that extend way beyond what reality is. Alchemy was one example where people thought that their beliefs or emotions affect materials, the nature of materials. So anyway, they thought that the motion of stars and planets affect human history, and that's astrology fundamentally.
That was their belief system. And then the astronomers collected huge amounts of data over thousands of years and amazing data. But it was not used for the purpose of finding Newton's law of gravity. It was for the political purpose of winning a war. And if you think about it from a modern perspective, we now know that the motion of Mars or Venus
have nothing to do with whether the Gulf War was successful or a disaster. And so we nowadays have a different view about planets and stars. And collecting all this exquisite data was not enough. If you have the wrong conception, good data is not enough. So you need to be open-minded for other interpretations and to think about the data that you get in ways that are not traditional. And I bring this up because
If you always think that you know the answer in advance, you might not even collect the data. That's even more dangerous. The Mayans were, in a way, more advanced than those people that say, we don't need data. We know the answer without it. You know, those philosophers that say, if physicists agree on something, that's enough. That's much more primitive than the Mayans belief system, because the Mayans were collecting data about the sky.
I think that's the most important thing that we can maintain in terms of the integrity of science is its reliance on evidence rather than on what people say. And I hope if that stays, even if some ideas are ridiculed now, eventually there would be data and evidence that would
And that's what happened to me, you know, in the examples that we discussed at the beginning of our conversation, you know, that eventually data came along and demonstrated that what I'm saying is correct. And so that is, you know, great. I mean, and by the way, it's not about me being right. It's not about us. It's about, it's about the dialogue we have with nature.
I recall reading in one of your Scientific American articles about the limitations of knowing a theory of everything and you cited Gödel. I'm not sure if you were citing Gödel to say that what Gödel's incompleteness theorem has to say is something about whether or not we can ultimately find the laws that govern us or you're using that to say well look there are limitations so let's be a bit more humble. Which one was it? Does Gödel's theorem have anything to do?
It was the second one. I think we should be humble because we will never have a complete theory of everything. Logically, that was demonstrated by Gödel. But also, you know, the scientific process is work in progress. You know, it turns out that when we discover new things, we can ask more questions. It's not that we ask less questions. So the illusion that, you know, physics will get to an end and that would be it.
You know, that was advocated a hundred years ago before Einstein came, more than a hundred years, 120 years ago, before Einstein came with special relativity and quantum mechanics was discovered and clearly physics was revolutionized. And it was said in recent decades by some people. And again, I think they're completely misguided because
knowledge is just an island in an ocean of ignorance we know so little and the way for us to maintain the integrity of science is to stay modest and say look we don't know so much and it's work in progress and sometimes we may be wrong so let's be open-minded and let's continue to collect evidence and make progress through that. Why does Gödel's incompleteness theorem have anything to do with whether or not we can learn fundamental laws?
because what Gadel demonstrated is that you cannot build a self-consistent logical system that can be proven and be self-contained, so to speak. I see, I see. You're talking about whether or not we can prove that our theory of everything is the theory of everything. So there will always be some loopholes, even at the logical level,
But what I'm referring to in addition to that is the fact that reality, you know, it will take us a long while before we figure out all the details of reality through experiments, in addition to the logical issues. I recall you mentioned that science, sorry, that religion can learn from science, obviously, in the sense that we investigate nature, it tells us more about God, as well as it allows us a deeper appreciation of that nature.
And this is an old view, actually, which says that if you have an interpretation of the Bible, the Christian Bible, and you find that nature contradicts that, then it's not that nature is wrong, it's that your interpretation of the Bible is wrong. Nature is always right, because nature is what God made. Nature is God in some way, actually. So then I'm wondering, that means that religion can learn from science. Okay. Can science learn from religion? And if so, how? Well, yeah, so, you know,
Being a physicist is just like trying to figure out what the building is made of. You know, you're trying to figure out the bricks and mortar that make the building. That's the fundamental laws of physics. And when we look at the universe, we're trying to figure out what it's made of, what the composition of the universe, what are the laws that are governing it. And lo and behold, we find that most of the matter in the universe is in some form that we don't know what it is.
We are not made of it. It's called dark matter. So we still have to figure it out. It's a puzzle and we're trying to figure out also the laws that govern the behavior of the universe. But if you look at the building, there is more to it than the bricks and mortar that make the building. There is the design and there is the purpose of the building and there is the meaning of the building.
That goes beyond physics. That's the metaphysics. Now, a physicist can take a practical approach and say, I don't really care about that. I want to figure out how reality operates because that's the only tangible thing that I can later use in developing technology. I don't want to think about things that I cannot test empirically that involve beauty. Is the building beautiful? Is the building serving a bigger purpose? That's not of my interest.
But if you are an architect, then you care mostly about that. You don't care about the bricks and mortar. As an architect, you draw a blueprint of a building. And in principle, the construction workers could use different materials to make that. Of course, the materials affect the durability of the building and so forth, but not so much the way it appears.
and functions. And so from the point of view of an architect, it's a completely different question, you know, than from the point of view of a construction worker, what the building represents. And so the way I see that is that reality, you know, has many facets to it. And one of the facets is indeed what the physics is dealing with. But another facet is what the humanities are dealing with. And that includes philosophy and theology and religion.
and you know as a human you are incomplete if you were not to consider all the facets I mean you can of course narrow yourself to one of them and just say I don't care about anything else that's fine but that's in a way narrow-minded you know it's just like looking at the small piece of the of the big picture and I think you are not fully satisfied living like that I mean I don't think that ignoring the humanity is a good practice
I'm reminded by Aristotle who had a concept of causation which unified what you're referring to. So material cause, efficient cause, formal and final. So material is what you brick some mortar and then the efficient is essentially causation as we understand it as physicists and the formal is, okay, the
Okay, so traditional religion that has a goal that looks over your shoulder and affects what happens to you, you know, that is
That you can falsify. In principle, bad things happen to good people and vice versa. If you are using the scientific method, you can test those predictions. If there is a way by which you can forecast what will happen and you see that not happening. Or if
the biblical story of Abraham in the Bible. If Abraham heard the voice of God and he had a cell phone where he had a voice memo app and he would have pressed the button, he could have recorded the voice of God. So, you know, in principle, it's possible to test some of these direct interactions between a divine entity and the human. But if you believe more in the concept, the philosophical concept like Spinoza did, where he identified God with nature,
And, you know, there is something to it because nature itself is not completely random. You know, it's organized and that's quite striking that the laws of physics create some order in the universe that otherwise would not exist. And the fact that the same laws of physics that we find here on earth apply everywhere is remarkable in my view. And, you know, discovering the laws of physics gives you a sense of, oh, of the type that a religious person may feel.
You know, because you are feeling something about nature that you uncovered that is remarkable, that applies everywhere. And it's much greater than we are because it applies everywhere. So you can call it a religious sense, a sense of awe, but you're doing it through a scientific lens. And frankly, it's not obvious to me that there is a bigger meaning to life. You know, like that, because if you think about the meanings that we assign to life,
They're usually confined to Earth. All of our ambitions are confined to Earth. And within a billion years, the Sun will boil off all the oceans on Earth. So nothing that we care about, that is dear to our heart, will stay around for more than a billion years. So then you ask yourself, is that really a valuable meaning?
something that will go away okay it will go away in a billion years not in a in a hundred years but qualitatively speaking it will go away it's just like something that goes away in a week i mean it may be meaningful for a while but then it's not anymore so there is no absolute meaning to our existence if you think about the big picture and you know one thing that people ask me what is the one thing you would like to ask an alien
If you were to be in contact, that is the question I would like to ask. Is there a meaning to this or what is the meaning of this play? And as I said at the beginning, we are put on the stage like actors without a script. What is the play about? I would like to know that. Do you think that because we can zoom out and say that over across a billion years, let's say that we'll no longer be here, therefore it's meaningless. Do you think that that means it's meaningless or do you think that means that that view that we zoom out and look at
There is a meaning, but it's temporary, of course.
And of course it means the world to us because we are also short-lived. We live just for decades, a hundred years or so. And so during that time, that's what matters to us, what happens during that time. But when I was referring to meaning, I was referring to something bigger that is not going to go away, something that stays forever.
That's the thing that we need to give up on, I think. And again, staying modest, I think, allows you not to want too much, not to think that, oh, I really want something that will stay forever. Perhaps we should, as you said, perhaps we should admit that everything is temporary, everything changes all the time. We should just adapt to changing circumstances. And the meaning that we have is
Something I was toying with was I wonder if there's a way that the world of experience can last forever and the reason is
Let's say in general relativity, right beside a black hole, you can watch your person, your friend, enter the black hole infinitely for the rest of time. Obviously, they'd have to send photons back to you, but you can watch them. It's almost as if they're frozen right at the event horizon. But then for them, it's as if they passed into the black hole. Now let's imagine in reverse, right before you're about to die, your experience of life gets stretched infinitely. To everyone else, it's as if it ended.
But then, just like in general relativity, you can say that your frame of reference is the correct one, that your friend's is just as valid. So I'm wondering, does your experience, it's not something we can test, but I'm wondering, right before you die, does it get stretched infinitely? And that's one of the reasons why they say heaven and hell exist, and also heaven and hell
is dependent on how you live your life right now, because if you live as if you're in heaven, or you live properly, or you live as if you're in hell and you hate everyone, if you were to die, you're going to feel that stretched out for the rest of your life. Now you won't be able to see other people, but somehow phenomenologically or experientially, it will get stretched. And that's in a huge speculative jump. Well, that's, that's an interesting thought. But if you ask me from my opinion, I think that we are just our bodies, just like a computer.
When you unplug it from the wall, it shuts off, all the systems shut off. And that's the experience of death. Basically, your, you know, your, your cord is taken out of the outlet. Do you have any ideas as to consciousness or its origins? Is it emergent? Is consciousness emergent? Yeah, that's what I think. I think that we are very complex systems and we are subject to a lot of
inputs from our environment. And that's what makes us unpredictable. So when people talk about free will, it's sort of the confluence of a lot of ingredients, each of which can change the outcome. And as a result, we are not that predictable. And of course, according to quantum mechanics, things are not predictable. There is a probabilistic outcome. But in general, I think
both free will and consciousness are incarnations of very complex systems. So it's the way that a complex system, the human, appears. But it doesn't mean that the building blocks of making a human are anything different than the physical elements that we know about. You just put them together in some way and you get phenomena like consciousness, by which we mean that
the system itself recognizes that it exists and acts based on the feedback that it gets from reality. But in principle, I can imagine us constructing entities that will behave the same way in the future, you know, robots that are sufficiently advanced with AI and so forth. I don't see a qualitative difference between the human body and
and the materials that it's made of. It's just that the materials are organized in a way that gives the human body special qualities and abilities. But when we die, it's just like taking the computer cord out of the outlet. I'm sure you've heard of the hard problem of consciousness. That is how can we get experience from what's fundamentally not experiencing? Do you have any ideas as to that?
You mentioned, well, when you have a feedback, when you have a system looking at itself, but then that's self-consciousness. I'm just referring to experience in and of itself. Yeah, because the experience is being sensed by our body. And, you know, our body can play tricks on us and can give us senses that do not really exist outside of the body. And they are just self-created. So you can imagine phenomena like that. But it's all,
related to physical processes that are happening. Do you believe that there are wormholes or stable wormholes, possibly aliens are using them? No, at the moment there are people suggesting how to construct wormholes, how to perhaps build time machines, but all of these suggestions again are highly speculative because we don't have a quantum mechanical theory of gravity and without it
As for the fine-tuning of the universe, do you have any inklings as to why it is the way that it is? Do you take Lee Smolin's evolutionary black hole model? No.
I, you know, I think that the conditions we have in the universe were dictated by how it started, you know, around the Big Bang. And so, you know, just like cosmic inflation tries to explain various facts. And once we have a quantum theory of gravity, we'll be figure out where the universe came from, you know, what is the womb that the biblical code of the universe was connected to. And that would explain to us why it has the properties that it has.
So rather than guess it, I would rather go to that womb that created the universe and ask what are the reasons that we have the conditions we have. So you believe that we can derive the fundamental constants in some way? Potentially, yeah. If we figure out what happened before the Big Bang using a quantum theory of gravity, perhaps once again, what we find in the universe will be emerging out of those conditions, early conditions and the theory and the unifying theory, which we don't have at the moment.
Before I get to audience questions, the last question I have, well, two, I want to know what you think is the difference between wisdom and intelligence. And then I wanted to know what you thought of Wigner's friend's thought experiment or the thought experiment of Wigner's friend. I'm sure you've heard of it about the collapse of the wave function. Yeah. So first with respect to intelligence and wisdom, there is a very big difference between them.
is the ability to identify the essential elements necessary to answer questions and learn about the world. So it's a way of improving the efficiency of us figuring out the truth. And someone that is wise gives you a shortcut. You can be very intelligent and just examine all the exits from the highway.
Many of them would lead you into bad neighborhoods. But if you are wise, you will try to figure out which exit is the right one. Intelligence may be an essential skill in pursuing science, and you can become a world expert in a particular niche, just like taking an exit from the highway.
If you're wise, how do you determine which one matters? Which one is the right one? I imagine that depends on the goal, but then I'm wondering, well, how do you decide on the goal? You have to decide about the guiding principles first. So for example,
To some people, what matters the most are subjects of relevance to society, if it has an impact on society. Because after all, we live in a society. And whether we address how many extra dimensions exist, or whether we address how to find a vaccine to COVID-19, these are two different questions with very different impacts on society.
So you might use that when you evaluate what you want to do. If you want to help people, then you work on some questions that matter to them. Now, it doesn't mean that they all have to be medical. They could be questions that people care about, right? So in that way, since the public is funding science, you are paying respect to the public.
If, on the other hand, you ask yourself how many angels can sit on the tip of a pin, and you get funded by the public, and then you say, I don't care what the public says, and I don't care if I have experiments to test my ideas, then that's a betrayal of the trust that the society has in academia. And that is a good reason for the public to say that academia is part of the elite, because it's divorcing itself from the interests of the public.
So, being wise is attending to the interests of those who fund you. That's an example. Okay, what about if there's no capitalism? There's no funding. Well, sorry, in socialism you're also funded. There's no money. We're hunter-gatherers. Can you be wise? Yeah, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you still have a purpose, right? You are trying to hunt.
So for that purpose, you develop tools that are relevant. So instead of the relevance being to society, to the people that fund you, here the relevance is to your objectives. Sorry, what I'm trying to get at is how do you know which goals, you're presuming a goal already. So what I'm wondering is how do you determine which goal you should follow? Oh, okay. I think, well, the way I determine is personally, that doesn't mean that everyone should operate this way.
I pay attention to the goals that are most important, that will make the biggest difference. You see, you can always work on something in the periphery that makes very little difference to anyone and nobody would bother you and you will be happy. You'll earn your living, you'll go to work, you will smile and people will smile at you and that's it. But the question is, does it matter to anyone or to yourself?
Do you feel, will you feel at the age of 90 that you actually fulfilled your life interests? And the answer may be no, you should have been more daring, more risk taking, more willing to embark on things that are difficult, that will take a while to figure out, but matter more. So I look at myself at that stage, at the late age and ask, what would I advise myself now to do
Okay, well, let's get to some audience questions. Steve Scully here says, is it possible that the universe is infinite, that there is no end to how large or small objects in the universe can be relative to one another, and that if the overall system is to be comprehensible, it is only by us recognizing how all of these apparently separate and distinct different systems actually share the same underlying mechanics.
Yes. Read the question. You understood the question? Yeah, I understood that. Okay. Well, most of the answer to most of the question is yes. It's quite possible that in each direction, you know, it's an infinite series of sizes and scales. And, uh, but to me, the most interesting part of the question is, uh, will the laws of physics apply everywhere the same way or will you have the, and then so far,
The amazing thing is that in the region that we can see, that we can observe, it appears like the laws of physics apply everywhere the same way. And that's remarkable, but it's not guaranteed by any means. And of course, people are searching for deviations, because if you find a deviation, you get an overprice.
Right, right. That brings me to a question that I have for you, but it's more for an experimentalist. Do you always need a theory to interpret the data? Or can you just interpret the data without a theory? So for example, collecting astronomical data, we're assuming that we're at no special place in the universe and that the laws are pretty much the same throughout time. Hmm. So can you
Interpret the data without a theory. Can you even make sense of the data without a theory? I don't think so. I think you always have to have something in the back of your mind because otherwise the data is not telling you anything. You have to put it in a context. So just to give you an example, when I was a postdoc, you know,
astrophysical journals used to come in print. It was not on the internet. And so I went to the library at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and I saw that before the 1980s there were photographs published in print where you can see giant arcs of light surrounding clusters of galaxies and people just ignore them. The data was there. It was
It was printed in images that were put in papers, and nobody asked anything about those arcs. Why are there arcs? Like lightning strikes between galaxies? Like sparks almost? Well, they look like arcs. And then in the 1980s, the subject of gravitational lensing became singular. And then people explained those arcs as
focusing of light by the force of gravity. You know, so you have a cluster of galaxies that acts on light from a background source behind it. Let's say a galaxy sits far away behind the cluster and then the light that comes from that galaxy is being gravitationally bent and focused at the observer and you end up with what is called an Einstein ring. Einstein already thought that this could happen in 1940. So you can get a giant arc
of a background source that is part of sort of a ring of light that comes from gravitational lensing. And once they realized that, they said, oh, that's a good explanation for those arcs. But the arcs existed in the literature before, and people just didn't think about it in that context. So you can have data, it's just without a sense of what the data may mean, you might actually not pay attention to it.
Barfiman362 asks, do you still learn math and physics in the same way you did as you were when you were younger? And if not, how has aging and experience changed your learning process? Right. So I was always, I'm not a good example because from a young age, I was always most interested in ideas and then in the mathematical techniques that are used to
perfect them or demonstrate them. And so in that sense, I'm actually more efficient now than I was because I know the field much better. And so if I were to meet a younger version of myself, I could teach myself quite a bit.
So I feel that I'm much stronger now than I was at a younger age, because I don't waste as much time in directions that would not prove useful. But in terms of the techniques, it's true that after a certain age you stop learning new techniques, most people.
And so you continue to use what you've learned during your studies, during your PhD, and you continue to use that. But you use it on subjects that are new. Very few people do learn new techniques and by that rejuvenate their skills. People do that. But since I was always about ideas, about thinking on things that other people do not think about, then
The techniques were not particularly important for me. And I remember when I came as a postdoc, I was asked what kind of computer skills you have. And I said, very minimal. During my PhD, I just used whatever I needed in order to solve the differential equations that I had. I didn't master anything beyond that. And the person who hired me was stunned. He said, how come you didn't learn
And I should say that I had a very rather productive career, even though I didn't learn much more computer skills since then, even. So it's possible still. Yeah, because a lot of people have the technical skills, but they lack the imagination or the ideas. So you play more in the realm of concepts and ideas and how they relate than you do with the mathematical pedantry?
Yeah, so it's sort of like, you know, sketching a blueprint of a building rather than building it. So then who does the mathematical work? You just graduate students, students, postdocs, a lot of people that I collaborate with. And with regard to learning new techniques and constantly staying updated, you said that some people do. But generally, let's say past the age of
It's not this, I know of people that are in their 50s that are learning machine learning now and AI and so it really is a matter of people that enjoy the technical gymnastics and there are some people that enjoy that and there are not many but I mean there are minority
Do you think that instead of focusing on artificial intelligence, like you mentioned, we should focus on wisdom. So artificial wisdom. So, ah, instead of AI, do you think that that's something we should be focusing on? Or do you see like, how the heck would we even start that project? I do think that it's an interesting, very interesting idea. I haven't thought about it before, but yeah, you can think about designing a system that will be wise, more efficient, basically, rather than go and explore all possibilities.
Brian Keating asks, our mutual friend Brian Keating, and by the way, for those listening, Brian Keating, a link to his YouTube channel will be below. He said, I'd love to know what his daily routine is. So that is you and whether you've expected and even regret the backlash to your new fame. So daily routine and the backlash and how you feel about it. Well, every since the pandemic started, since it's more than a year now,
Every morning at 5 a.m. I go out and jog in the company of birds, ducks and rabbits and wild turkeys. They are very loud. I see the same wild turkeys for a year now along my path. What city are you in? I'm in a suburb near Boston. Okay, so it's cold. Oh yeah, I go out in any weather, whether it snows, whether it rains, whether it's freezing.
It's just an aspect of nature that I enjoy. I enjoy very much being in the company of nature rather than... And I don't regard people or my colleagues in particular as part of nature because nature is always gracious. You always learn something. I always enjoy nature. I grew up on a farm. So my day starts at 5 a.m. and I should say over the months of January, February and half of March,
I would have back-to-back interviews from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. There were about 450 of them altogether. It was a huge, huge exhausting marathon that I had to be engaged in just because of the interest in my book. But that's very untypical because by now it sort of is fading away. I mean, the book is already out for two months now. And then
By now I'm getting back to my regular routine, which is writing papers and commentaries. So I should say the past 12 months were the most productive in my scientific career because I didn't have to drive to work. I didn't have people getting into my office uninvited. I didn't have the administrative distractions that I usually have. And so I could focus on creative work and
I wrote of the order of 46 scientific papers and 52 commentaries, mostly in Scientific American. And then a couple of books. One of them is the one that was published two months ago. And there is another one, a textbook coming out at the end of June about life in the cosmos. So it has been a very productive time. And frankly, I can continue like that for the next
the next few years without a problem. There is always something interesting to work on and I enjoy the creative work. I used to do leadership positions just as a service to the community because at some point I realized that other people are not doing their job properly when they are leading a department or doing something else, chairing a committee.
So I thought I should do it just to make sure that things are done according to the proper guiding principles. What were they doing? And what did you do that corrected it? Many times they would state the right ideas, but they would not really accomplish them in practice. And that was a puzzle to me because I could always see what needs to be done. Do you mind giving a specific example? No, because that will offend some people.
Okay, you can be vague. I'm sorry, give an example. You can just change it because I don't understand what you mean by what I mean is, you know, like, for example, when I became department chair in 2011, I continued three terms that was the longest service in the history of the department. I was the longest serving department chair. And then one thing from the beginning was that I was always straightforward with people, I would tell them,
the situation as is, right? I never manipulate people. I never hide things from them. And you might think that that's a negative politically because very often in politics you have to maneuver in a way that would people would not know exactly what is going on. But I found it to be a I didn't care so much because I said, you know, if, if I give up on my service, I would go back to research and I'll be happy at that. I'm doing the service
You know, just in order to serve the community. And so I was straightforward and it turned out to be a great asset because people never suspected me doing things behind their back and they always trusted my dealings with things. And then I put an important item to promote minorities and women in the department. And, you know, I hired in that direction and there was not much resistance from my colleagues to that.
So I, you know, I felt that I did accomplish something in nine years. So, you know, transparency, allowing people from underprivileged circumstances to have the proper training so that they can become leaders. You know, these are the kinds of principles that I felt strongly about and I tried to promote and that previously I didn't feel were promoted enough.
But now, you know, that I finished my third term and just, you know, in July 2020, then I can go back to doing creative work. And that's what I enjoy the most. You wrote this book while you were the chair? The book was, yes. That's right. You were a productive man. Well, I'm a no-nonsense kind of
person in the sense that when I have a task, I work on it and I work most of the day. How do you balance that with spending time with your wife? And I'm not sure if you have kids, but whatever your personal life. I have two daughters. I do spend time with them, but one of them is 15. The other one is 19.
They are sort of independent by now. I'm surrounded by three wonderful women that were the muses for my book and they support me in a lot of different ways, provide the right balance for my life. So I'm sort of at this point in my life I'm
self sustained and can do creative work. You know, that's the best you can hope for that you don't depend on other people that have agendas that are not necessarily aligned with your principles. So that that's a good place to be in. And I'm very happy to be in that place. When you were doing podcasts for 11 hours a day, back a couple months ago, including now even,
Why do you say that you had to do it? Your publisher pushed you to do it or you wanted to do it? No, no. I felt that it's a platform that allows me to communicate what I believe in to the public. Had nothing to do. Some people argue that maybe I'm doing it to sell my book.
I told my my publicist that it's not for that purpose that I'm doing it to convey a message. The publicist was saying good job Avi and I said I'm not trying to sell my book even so when the book became a bestseller that was not my objective at all. I wouldn't care less if it you know if it sold just a few hundred copies and that's it and what I would like to communicate is a message to the public and I communicate
Through my book and through these appearances and and it got them huge attention from from the public I should say, you know, like there was a vice video that received the one and a half million views within a week and a half and you know, there was of course the interviews with Joe Rogan and some other
Do the views make you feel happy? Do you feel giddy? Do you share the news with your wife? Like, look, this got a million views or do you read the comments? How do you view your own appearances?
I let the publicist look into that. And there were of course other opportunities that were opened up that involve documentaries or films. There were of other 25 filmmakers and producers that approached us as a result. But we should see if anything comes up.
Back then, there were some versions of it.
MySpace, I'm assuming. Yeah, yeah, MySpace. I forgot, but usually I do not deviate if I agree to something and I maintain the course. And when Facebook appeared and Twitter and so forth, I kept my promise to her. She just knows how attractive you were and how much girls will be messaging you. It wasn't about
Can you ask him about virtual black holes and spin network evolution?
How might a superposition of spin network evolutions, brackets, spin foams, fluctuate?
Um.
Well, so again, the structure of space and time is a matter of the unified theory of quantum gravity, which we don't have at the moment. So John Wheeler was a physicist who thought about the space-time form as the way that space and time appear on very tiny scales. That's not the way that string theory thinks of it right now. And there are all these extra dimensions.
So I would say the verdict is still out as to what's going on with space and time. And let's just keep an open mind. Jeff B says, number one, have they confirmed yet if BLC one narrowband radio signal detected in December 2020 by the parks radio telescope? Hopefully you know about this came from Proxima Centauri or was it just earth based local interference?
That's an excellent question and most likely it's earth-based. The reason I say that is because the frequency was very steady, didn't really drift much and it was a very narrow band of frequencies that was detected. If it were to come from a habitable planet around Proxima Centauri, then you would see some drift in the frequency because of the motion of that planet, well beyond the limits.
but of course it could have come from a planet not in the habitable zone. Based on the fact that it was one telescope in Australia I think we should be very suspicious because the same telescope reported the fast radio burst repeating fast radio burst a few years ago that ended up being the they found that it comes only during lunchtime and
then realized that it's the door of a microwave oven that was opened prematurely by a person in the hotel. So I would say there is a high likelihood that it's local and the only way to find out is to have another observatory at a different location finding the same source. So we really need the confirmation before we assume that it is associated with Proxima Centauri.
RabbitSkywalker says, I really would like to hear his opinion about the claims from former Israeli director of the space program Ham Asher brought forward. You must have heard about it. He must have heard about it referring to you. And I wonder what Avi thinks about the story. Yeah. So my reply to that is he didn't really provide any evidence. And that goes back to what we discussed before that
If you don't have a document supporting your claim or some other type of evidence, then to me it sounds like no journalist should cover that story because otherwise you create a lot of noise in the system without much signal.
about there being evidence there's someone named kevin newth i don't or kevin knuth i don't know if you've heard of him he's a physicist from albany you've heard of him yes definitely okay well i'm speaking to him in a few hours just for the people listening too i was speaking to him in a few hours he says that he's analyzed some of the data of the ufos or uap as i believe they're called now and he has showed that through analysis the amount of acceleration is incomparable to anything that we can produce and it's well i guess you can take that as evidence
What do you think about that? Have you seen that paper of his? So anything to do with unidentified flying objects or aerial phenomena, my take on those is simple that we should deploy state-of-the-art instruments, cameras or audio sensors in the same locations and try to collect data just like a scientific experiment
rather than rely on instruments that were not optimized for that purpose that you know pilots have access to and or rely on reports that came from many years ago that we cannot really check. And so I think that all the UFO and UAP supporters should fund a scientific mission experiment to monitor the earth
Yeah, monitor those locations if you think that they are and basically if we see anything unusual it will be documented in a scientifically credible way rather than rely on those unoptimized reports that you know the images are always fuzzy it could be something in the instrument it could be
Something else in the sky that is an optical illusion could be many things. So I would highly recommend doing a scientific credible scientific experiment and you know, it shouldn't be too expensive and it would save us a lot of time instead of discussing it. Let's just let we should let the evidence
Yes, of course. Of course. I know you got to go. How do you, but how can we do that? Because I imagine that the UFOs are so small and they're so sporadic that to monitor the entire earth is not cheap. So how can conceivably that be done? You don't need the entire earth. You can just do it in the spots where detections were reported. And nowadays we have technologies that didn't exist decades ago. And
Amjad Hussein had a couple questions that I wasn't able to get to during the interview, but I emailed Avi directly. And here's the exchange.
Professor Avi, are there aliens on earth, living, sharing the planet with us, in a non-electromagnetic realm, dimension, consciousness, like dark matter, energy, where we don't know their existence? And then he had another question, number two, do fundamental particles in nature have proto-consciousness, meaning that an electron feels its own intrinsic state of charge, spin, etc., does consciousness equal existence? Avi replied saying the answers to both questions are no, as far as we know scientifically.
Avi, you gotta go. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. It was a pleasure talking to you. It was a pleasure to answer all these questions and they were excellent questions, all of them. I enjoyed it very much.
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"text": " and thank you for those of you who are going to just so you know soon i'll be hosting a three-way conversation between myself donald hoffman and bernardo castrop it may be a four-way conversation if we can get jonathan vervecky in as well although i'm unsure if he's available however it's at least going to be bernardo castrop and donald hoffman that's coming shortly we're looking to hit 50 patrons and then i'll be able to conduct that thank you thank you so much i appreciate it and enjoy the interview"
},
{
"end_time": 245.094,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 218.063,
"text": " I want to know how much did writing your book or writing books in general or articles, how much does that clarify your thinking? Oh, the main purpose for writing the book, as I told the publisher, was to broadcast that excitement that we can have in science, discovering important things that do affect our daily lives. And I told the publisher that if one person around the world will decide to become a scientist after reading my book, I will be satisfied."
},
{
"end_time": 265.367,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 245.469,
"text": " And as it turns out, a few weeks ago, I got an email from Malawi, from a woman who wrote, the book is great. And I'm thinking of becoming an astronomer. So I told her the story about the publisher and I asked her, are you the one? Are you that person that will become a scientist thanks to reading my book?"
},
{
"end_time": 295.128,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 265.828,
"text": " and she said maybe. So I invited her to apply to graduate school at Harvard in astronomy and I very much hope that she will do so and then I can work with her. There was another undergraduate student from Columbia that wrote to me and said the reading about your work changed my life and so I get about a dozen emails of this type every day now and I am really satisfied about writing my book"
},
{
"end_time": 324.326,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 295.418,
"text": " It wasn't so much for me to clarify my thinking as to communicate my excitement about doing science and, you know, the fact that we can maintain our childhood curiosity, we can be excited about doing it. It's not a job like being in the business world, the commercial world, where you get paid and then you use the money for what you really enjoy. In fact, you know, I would enjoy doing what I'm doing irrespective of whether I get money for it."
},
{
"end_time": 346.118,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 326.271,
"text": " There were no problems that you had as ambiguous in your mind that when you started writing, then it helped you elaborate it or cultivate it or disambiguate it. It was already somewhat formed in your mind, now you just got to put it on paper? Yeah, I mean, it's all in my head to start with, and it's just a question of putting it in a way that is compelling."
},
{
"end_time": 373.439,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 346.493,
"text": " You know, it's very much the same when I do my science, very often someone comes to my office and says, this is what I'm working on, sort of immediately I come up with suggestions for ideas and how to proceed. And very often that person says, Oh, wow, I, how did you come up with that? I, I didn't really think about it. And it's not as if it takes me a great effort to do that. It's sort of in my head to start with. And I'm just,"
},
{
"end_time": 393.046,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 373.695,
"text": " Okay, talking about communicating ideas to other scientists, I recall you saying that when you were in your younger years, you would"
},
{
"end_time": 410.213,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 394.377,
"text": " Speak about ideas and then they would get rebuffed but then someone who is on the periphery listening in would then advance those ideas and maybe they would be advanced to the level of becoming new fields in physics or insights or inventions and so on. Can you give me some examples of that?"
},
{
"end_time": 433.268,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 410.555,
"text": " Yeah, it happened several times and, you know, early on in my career, I looked for an affirmation for other people to accept an idea that I proposed before I would advocate for it. And very often I was disappointed because I'll give you an example. 21 years ago, I"
},
{
"end_time": 453.319,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 433.814,
"text": " thought that it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the mass of black holes at the centers of galaxies and the depth of the gravitational potential well that they're embedded in. So in other words, if black holes grow, they behave like kids."
},
{
"end_time": 481.664,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 453.797,
"text": " eat as much food as they can from the table until they become too energetic and then they throw off the food from the table and so if that's the case then black holes would grow up to a certain mass at which point they release so much energy they become so energetic that they clean off the food that allows them to continue to grow and so I suggested let's check if black hole masses are correlated with"
},
{
"end_time": 493.695,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 482.193,
"text": " the depth of the gravitational potential well of the galaxy that hosts them and the way to measure that is by the speed by which stars are moving within that galaxy near the core of the galaxy and"
},
{
"end_time": 514.94,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 494.053,
"text": " When I suggested that people said no that's not interesting, it's probably there is nothing interesting in that relation and I remember mentioning it at the conference and it was completely rebuffed and then we had a junior faculty search at the astronomy department and as it happens in the shortlist there were two people working exactly on"
},
{
"end_time": 541.476,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 515.23,
"text": " on the central black holes in galaxies and I suggested to both of them independently to check that and since they were young people they decided to do that and they had all the data in principle I could have done it as well anyway they did it and each of them got so excited a few months later they said wow there is a very tight correlation between the black hole mass and the characteristic speed of stars in the galaxy that hosts it"
},
{
"end_time": 553.677,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 541.903,
"text": " And then they decided to publish and they published exactly the same time, the two teams. And then they started fighting with each other for the credit because it became the hottest thing in the field."
},
{
"end_time": 577.346,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 554.07,
"text": " and for a decade it became the thing that everyone talks about and that was the first indication and then a couple of years later I suggested to call, I had a sabbatical at Princeton and I suggested to a few people that were experts in black holes and the inflow of gas onto black holes I suggested"
},
{
"end_time": 606.357,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 577.346,
"text": " Perhaps we should calculate what happens when there is a hotspot, a region that is very bright orbiting a black hole very closely so that you can perhaps map the space and time around the black hole this way. And they completely dismissed it and said, well, there would never be a hotspot that maintains its integrity. This is not worth doing. And so I came back to Harvard after the sabbatical and I suggested it to a postdoc of mine and we did the calculation. We wrote a few papers and then"
},
{
"end_time": 632.108,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 606.869,
"text": " Just a year and a half ago, two years ago, a group in Germany discovered exactly that phenomena. They found a hotspot moving around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, just in the way that I envisioned. And the hotspot was orbiting very close to the black hole. And so once again, and then"
},
{
"end_time": 660.077,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 632.432,
"text": " I can give you many more examples. I gave, for example, a lecture on gravitational wave astrophysics, which is a new way of doing astrophysics. Astrophysics traditionally, astronomy, was based on light, collecting light. But then, according to Einstein's theory of gravity, when you have massive objects like black holes that are very compact, they distort space and time around them. And when they move close to each other, they can send out waves. And these are called gravitational waves."
},
{
"end_time": 687.312,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 660.077,
"text": " At the time it was 2013 I thought it's an important subject for the coming years and I decided to give a lecture about it in a winter school for students and then 10 minutes into my talk one of the other lecturers who was by the way still is 20 years younger than me so it has nothing to do with age but he is very conservative. How long ago was this? This was 2013, January."
},
{
"end_time": 715.026,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 687.705,
"text": " And he stood up and said, why are you wasting the time of these graduate students on a subject that will clearly not be important during their lifetime for their careers? And just two years later... He said it's allowed in front of everyone? In front of everyone? Yeah, that's on video. We can find it. And, you know, he was much younger than I am working on staff formation and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 718.456,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 715.367,
"text": " a conservative astronomer so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 745.998,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 718.882,
"text": " but young, relatively young, and so two years later the LIGO collaboration announced or discovered, the announcement came six months later, but then, you know, in August 2015 it was discovered that there was an event, a gravitational wave event discovered by LIGO and that ushered a new era in astrophysics where gravitational waves are being used to discover"
},
{
"end_time": 771.032,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 745.998,
"text": " objects that otherwise do not emit any light, black holes that come together. And the Nobel Prize was awarded for that a few years ago. And clearly, you know, these the same students that were in the audience were still doing their PhDs where this discovery was made. And so saying, why are you wasting the time of these students on a subject that will never be important was clearly invalid."
},
{
"end_time": 788.763,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 771.681,
"text": " and you know it happened to me many times and at some point like five years ago I said to myself the hell with it I don't need confirmation from other people you know it's just well it makes you know it makes me depressed to listen to the criticism and then realize"
},
{
"end_time": 813.302,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 789.172,
"text": " that this is the hottest thing in the field later on, a few years later. So how is that possible? Well, it is possible because people do not have the vision about the future and they prefer to dismiss new ideas, innovation and so forth just because it takes them out of their comfort zone. They're used to doing business as usual and"
},
{
"end_time": 843.353,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 813.66,
"text": " And so five years ago or so, I decided to basically not listen and just do what I think is right based on my inner compass. And you can see that nowadays, you know, as a young scientist, I would never be able to sustain the pressure, the social pressure that exists around me right now. But I'm sort of immune to it by now. What social pressure exists around you right now? What are you referring to? Also, why did it take you?"
},
{
"end_time": 861.22,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 844.735,
"text": " I don't know how old you are, but why did it take you until you're 54? I imagine that if this occurred to you when you were in your late 20s, maybe three times, then by the time you're 33 or 35, you would say, okay, to heck with it, forget what other people think."
},
{
"end_time": 882.841,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 861.613,
"text": " Well, maybe I'm a slow learner, maybe I'm also, you know, I do care about what people, I did care about what people think early on and you have to understand the entire structure of academia relies on other people evaluating you throughout the various stages. In order to get tenure you need"
},
{
"end_time": 910.828,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 882.841,
"text": " tenure committee to recommend and that is based on letters that are obtained from the community at large. So you need to dance to the music of a lot of people in order to be sort of tenured. And then the same is true about getting grants. Grant support is, you know, the selection committee committees are often populated by people that are mainstream and they have their own agenda and they don't welcome innovation as much."
},
{
"end_time": 939.787,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 910.828,
"text": " and to me it's still a miracle that the LIGO experiment was funded in the first place. I was told by important people at the National Science Foundation that nowadays at present time the likelihood of it being funded would have been very small. It was the vision of a few people a couple of decades ago that pushed it through. It's really hard to imagine that nowadays the National Science Foundation or other federal agencies would"
},
{
"end_time": 968.507,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 940.179,
"text": " receive an advice from the scientific community to embark on a risky project of this type. It was not at all clear that it will reach the sensitivity necessary. And so you are dependent throughout your career on many people that will approve your agenda. And as a result, you develop the mentality of listening and paying attention and not deviating too much from the beaten path."
},
{
"end_time": 988.336,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 969.019,
"text": " and that is quite common. What is not common is someone like me that reaches leadership positions. I've been chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years and I've chaired many important committees. Someone at that level often behaves"
},
{
"end_time": 1011.22,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 988.882,
"text": " even more as a conformist because of political consideration. You have to understand it's just like looking at the seashells on the beach. When a seashell first arrives at the beach, it looks special and unique. It has special color, special shape, but as time goes on, the waves"
},
{
"end_time": 1039.684,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1011.425,
"text": " rub seashells against each other and then they start to lose their identity and they start to look like each other and eventually you end up with sea sand basically pieces of seashells that are indistinguishable from each other and that's what happens in academia you know each individual researcher starts different but then you rub against many others and you end up being indistinguishable from them"
},
{
"end_time": 1062.483,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1040.452,
"text": " Okay, when I hear that, here's what I'm thinking. There's this, it's not a quote, but it's a story from Steve Jobs. And he said almost the opposite. So there, it's obviously a happy middle. He said, what you want to do is take people who are like rocks that are unpolished and then put them into a rock tumbler because afterward they come out like diamonds. So you want to take intelligent, smart people and have them argue. I can see this."
},
{
"end_time": 1089.889,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1062.892,
"text": " Well, as long as the argument is accepted, you know, as long as it's allowed. So if you create an environment where people are encouraged to challenge each other to come up with original ideas to be different, then that is I completely agree that that experience of argument and exchanges is helpful. But but if on the other hand, you create an environment where, you know, the"
},
{
"end_time": 1116.92,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1090.52,
"text": " dominant view where there is a group thing where the folklore of a field dominates and anyone that suggests something different is pushed aside. That is bad and that's what I was referring to. So if it's geared toward constructing and also if it's geared toward some goal. Yeah if you look for example I mean the ideal example is the corridor of bell labs"
},
{
"end_time": 1143.643,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1117.159,
"text": " Bell Labs was established by a corporation that has a profit in mind but in that corridor they put very creative people and some of them ended up winning the Nobel Prize. There were lots of inventions that came out of the corridor of Bell Labs and so putting a lot of creative people in the same environment and allowing them to innovate and giving them an incentive to innovate"
},
{
"end_time": 1162.346,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1144.07,
"text": " That is the right right right and so I in that sense I would agree with jobs that you know putting them next to each other is beneficial. But if you on the other hand you put people together and exert pressure so that you know they do not deviate from what everyone else is thinking that's bad."
},
{
"end_time": 1185.316,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1163.114,
"text": " So right now the incentives are geared towards self-preservation or idea preservation? Yeah. And what can be done to fix this? One of the questions that I had from the audience was, let's imagine there are some wacky ideas. Obviously, you don't want to let in just any idea. There is something to be said about being too fringe, but then there is something to be said about having permeable walls. Right. How do you fix this system quote unquote?"
},
{
"end_time": 1204.241,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1185.691,
"text": " Well, very easily, you basically evaluate each idea on its merit. So the point is you are not evaluating the person that mentioned that you're not using, you know, the"
},
{
"end_time": 1232.705,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1204.735,
"text": " personal traits as a way of dismissing an idea, which is very often done. Very often the attacks are personal. If you see in politics, it's very common. In science, it should not be the case. In science, we should argue about the ideas. And if an idea doesn't make sense, you can easily prove that. So let me give you an example that comes from the opposite side. So for example, with respect to Oumuamua,"
},
{
"end_time": 1247.227,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1233.183,
"text": " I suggested that it may be of artificial origin as a possibility and that was that encountered a lot of opposition. Now the latest alternative to that was that maybe it is a nitrogen iceberg."
},
{
"end_time": 1264.974,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1247.534,
"text": " That was a suggestion and you can find nitrogen, pure nitrogen as you need in this case in order to explain the fact we haven't seen a cometary tail around Oumuamua and also that it's flat and that it was pushed away from the sun. All of these facts will come into"
},
{
"end_time": 1281.63,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1265.316,
"text": " We could be explained if it was made of pure nitrogen and pure nitrogen, for example, exists on the surface of Pluto. So the suggestion was, let's imagine a lot of Pluto's around other stars and you chip off their surface with a high efficiency more than 10%."
},
{
"end_time": 1309.002,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1282.073,
"text": " of all the Plutons are being chipped off and then you send out these rocks and one of them is Oumuamua and then okay I said fine and then I wrote a paper just a week and a half ago saying well if you imagine that to be the case and you end up needing more mass than you have in stars in the Milky Way galaxy by a factor of a hundred actually turns out"
},
{
"end_time": 1334.07,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1309.514,
"text": " What do you mean by that? Sorry, what do you mean by that? And are you referring to the work by Desk and Jackson, I believe? Desk and Jackson, yes, exactly. And the reason for that is, you know, the layer of pure nitrogen on the surface of Pluto is relatively thin. So it just makes a few percent of the mass of Pluto, most of the mass"
},
{
"end_time": 1359.718,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1334.428,
"text": " is you know in rock and water ice and so forth so you lose by that and then so for every bit of nitrogen that you produce you need much more rock and water ice to exist and then on top of that you need hydrogen and helium that are much more abundant than rock so if you do that just the mass budget how much"
},
{
"end_time": 1383.763,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1360.077,
"text": " must do you need to process in order to make enough objects so that you would see one of them as a muamua. And we know that you need to produce a certain, you know, number of such objects per unit volume so that we would see one of them coming within a few years of the time that we were observing the sky, you know, with pandas. So basically, if you just go through the math, which is really simple, straightforward,"
},
{
"end_time": 1411.937,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1384.258,
"text": " And also they require that this object would be just half a billion years old, because otherwise it would get completely evaporated. So if you put all of these considerations together, you find that you need 100 times more mass than you have available in stars. So even if you take all the mass in stars, multiply by 100, only then you will have enough surface layers of exo-Plutons or Pluto-like"
},
{
"end_time": 1421.647,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1412.312,
"text": " planets around other stars to make enough objects like Oumuamua so that you would see one of them during that mode of observations."
},
{
"end_time": 1448.507,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1421.817,
"text": " And so to me, it makes this scenario very unlikely. So I just mentioned that, you know, as an example of how a scientific debate should go, someone proposes an idea, and then you discuss the idea on its merit. And, you know, if you do a calculation that shows that something is problematic with that, you know, that that is a reason for concern and for working on something else. So that is a scientific debate. On the other hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 1466.032,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1448.507,
"text": " If someone goes to Twitter and says something negative about a paper and just doesn't even read it or says something negative about a person without referring to the details of the idea or says something negative about the reference list of a paper rather than the content of the paper."
},
{
"end_time": 1490.401,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1466.493,
"text": " You know that that is not a viable scientific discussion. So my point is we can maintain a high level of integrity in the scientific process if we just refer to the ideas rather than attack people personally. And that's the way we should proceed. And, you know, most of the time in science, you have to understand most of the time, things are uncertain, we just don't have enough evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 1515.947,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1491.067,
"text": " and therefore we should contemplate possibilities and that's legitimate, that's part of the scientific process. You can't skip that step, you can't say I know the answer and I don't want to dismiss other possibilities even though there is not enough evidence for your answer to be right. So I think it's good to have ideas on the table that are viable scientifically."
},
{
"end_time": 1546.578,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1516.63,
"text": " Because then we are exploring all possibilities. And by the way, imagination is extremely important because we can't just always restrict our attention to things that we know from the past. We will never discover new things that way. What's Jackson's and Dash's response to this? I don't know. All I have seen are personal attacks. Not necessarily from them, but from other people. And is that the social pressure that you were referring to before? That previously, let's say five years younger,"
},
{
"end_time": 1572.841,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1546.92,
"text": " That's a low level, you know, that what you find on social media, which I, you know, I don't have any account on social media, so I'm less exposed to that. But and I'm very grateful for that. You know, I decided not to have any account when I married my wife, she asked me not to do that. And so I agreed not to do that. And that was more than 20 years ago. And I'm very glad that I don't have an account on social media, because"
},
{
"end_time": 1594.667,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1573.131,
"text": " then I can think creatively and not be affected. I mean of course I'm losing on some bits of information that are floating around on social media but I benefit much more by not listening to you know low-level discussions. I'm keeping my eyes on the ball so to speak not on the audience and so"
},
{
"end_time": 1617.927,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1595.145,
"text": " So that's one kind of pressure that you find on social media, but I'm sort of resilient to that because I don't monitor it. But then there are of course, you know, there are other ways that people exert pressure through students and postdocs. You know, they are much more vulnerable. They don't have"
},
{
"end_time": 1627.739,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1618.336,
"text": " secure positions. So if you create an atmosphere where some ideas are ridiculed, then postdocs and students are simply afraid of pursuing them."
},
{
"end_time": 1657.654,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1628.268,
"text": " because of their future careers. And I got a lot of emails from people saying, I completely agree with you, but I cannot express myself because I worry about my job prospects. And that comes from people that are not necessarily at the lowest level of academia, even people that have secure positions are worried about that. And this is unhealthy because we want an open discussion"
},
{
"end_time": 1681.323,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1658.012,
"text": " and scientific discussions a discussion based on content not on on the way things look like or on personal attacks why is it you think aliens are considered to be unconventional or so unconventional that they don't merit an academic response or an academic investigation well there are several aspects first of all as we discussed before"
},
{
"end_time": 1699.292,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1681.817,
"text": " Many ideas are ridiculed for no good reason, even in the context of black holes or gravitation waves, as I mentioned to you. I remember when I started as a postdoc, the idea of inflation, cosmic inflation was ridiculed in some circles of astronomy."
},
{
"end_time": 1728.865,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1699.77,
"text": " So that happens all the time, and of course the search for extraterrestrial intelligence started 70 years ago, so it has a long history. In the early days it wasn't ridiculed as much, but every now and then there was a very negative response of the community, and since 1993 there is no significant federal funding for this subject, and as a result it was pushed aside. Now the strange thing is,"
},
{
"end_time": 1752.892,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1729.258,
"text": " that for example in particle physics there was the superconducting supercollider a very big experimental project that at some point you know the funding for it stopped and then what happened in theoretical physics is that there was a whole culture that developed after that"
},
{
"end_time": 1782.602,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1753.234,
"text": " that is divorced from feedback from experiments and this culture of theoretical physics became string theory and the discussions of the multiverse and the extra dimensions and so forth ideas that have no evidence to support them. So on the one hand you have a situation where the mainstream in theoretical physics discusses concepts that have no foundation"
},
{
"end_time": 1804.224,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1783.148,
"text": " in experimental data and that is accepted and there are big communities of people working on these ideas and they are not even interested in testing the idea so most of the papers are about mathematical details not about how to test one idea versus another and if you suggest the test"
},
{
"end_time": 1829.155,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1804.599,
"text": " They shy away from it and try to raise enough dust so that you wouldn't be able to rule out the theory. And so that's one culture. And at the same time, you have in astronomy a culture that also as a result of not funding a research area is completely negative about something that is down to earth, so to speak. We have it on earth. It's intelligent life, technological life."
},
{
"end_time": 1845.452,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1829.633,
"text": " The one thing that we know now that wasn't true 20 years ago is we now know that a big fraction of all the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly at the same separation."
},
{
"end_time": 1867.159,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1845.708,
"text": " So the earth sun system is not unusual and as a result if you arrange for similar circumstances you might as well get similar outcomes and rather than argue about whether it's likely or not likely, whether we are unique, special or whether we are very common, as common as ants are on a sidewalk, rather than argue about that, and by the way I believe in the latter option as you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1896.63,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1867.705,
"text": " we should just search. And of course, we will never find the truth if we don't search. And the strange thing is the current situation is there is very little funding, a thousand times less funding for the search for technological signatures than there is for the search for dark matter. And frankly, the nature of dark matter will have zero impact on our daily lives. If Oumuamua was a technological relic, or if we find other technological relics in space, that would have a huge impact on society."
},
{
"end_time": 1919.189,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1897.193,
"text": " And society, the public is very interested in this subject and it funds science. So I find the current situation unacceptable. It would have an impact on society in the sense of how we view ourselves. Yeah, many different aspects, how we view our place in the universe, you know, and our aspirations for space."
},
{
"end_time": 1946.51,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1919.462,
"text": " If there are others out there, if there is a smarter kid on the block. And by the way, most stars formed billions of years before the sun and therefore they may have had civilizations like us billions of years before us. So we are arriving relatively late to the game. The way I see it is we are born into this world just like actors that are put on a stage without a script. We don't know what the play is about."
},
{
"end_time": 1976.118,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1946.954,
"text": " So the first thing to check is whether there are other actors out there, perhaps they know what's going on because they have been around for a while. So that's what like searching for another kid on the block, finding whether there are smarter kids on, you know, most likely there were civilizations that died by now. But we can find relics, technological relics they sent out to space, just like we send Voyager 1, Voyager 2, No Horizons and so forth. So it's a very natural, to me again, it's a common sense to"
},
{
"end_time": 2005.879,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1976.323,
"text": " invest in the search for such things, I call it space archaeology, you know monitoring for example with a camera every object that comes into the solar system from outside that gets close to earth and checking it, you know checking whether it's artificial or natural by a close-up photograph because a picture is worth a thousand words and in my case a picture is worth 66 000 words the number of words in my book. So I think it's very natural to do this search"
},
{
"end_time": 2035.776,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2006.186,
"text": " and invest at least the same amount of money we invest in the search for dark matter, which is also a search in the dark. You know, we don't know what the dark matter is. Why not invest hundreds of millions of dollars or even a billion dollars? That's what we invested in in LIGO. To me, it sounds like a straightforward thing to do, a very common sensical thing to do. But somehow my view is not dominant. They say not only that, but the discussion is being ridiculed."
},
{
"end_time": 2062.875,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2036.391,
"text": " And moreover, the community doesn't like me saying that, even though that's the reality of the situation. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2091.357,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2062.875,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 2107.705,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2091.357,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 2130.077,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2107.705,
"text": " Hmm, when I hear that, what I'm wondering is, is there a way to monetize the search for aliens?"
},
{
"end_time": 2159.753,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2130.486,
"text": " Because then you can get the private industry, the private sector, definitely, definitely. And then number two, what do you think about Elon Musk's mission to Mars? OK, so those are two questions, privatizing the search for aliens and then Musk. Definitely. I think if there are individuals interested in the search, I have some good ideas about how to do space archaeology, how to examine interstellar objects that enter the solar system and come close to Earth and take a photograph of them. And, you know, that that could be"
},
{
"end_time": 2176.425,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2160.043,
"text": " a new frontier in astronomy that was never pursued and it's simply because just a few years ago we discovered the first interstellar object Muamua so right now you know we have our eyes open it's"
},
{
"end_time": 2199.019,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2176.8,
"text": " It's a wake-up call for us and I would be glad to discuss with wealthy individuals what can be done to advance this frontier. I think it would be a very exciting frontier, even more exciting than gravitation wave astrophysics or the search for dark matter. It could be the most important"
},
{
"end_time": 2226.135,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2199.343,
"text": " discovery that humanity ever made if we find conclusive evidence for alien technology floating in space. So given that I think we should definitely pursue it with the private sector because that is completely independent and is known for its innovation you know because there are very wealthy individuals that became wealthy as a result of taking risks"
},
{
"end_time": 2256.135,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2228.626,
"text": " So I think it would be fantastic to open up new scientific frontiers that they can pursue with their wealth. The second question about going to Mars, I think one aspect of that that was not explored enough and should be explored before we go on that ship that brings us to Mars is the health concern."
},
{
"end_time": 2284.633,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2256.561,
"text": " down here on earth we are protected by the earth's magnetic field from very energetic particles cosmic rays and by the atmosphere of the earth and the environment of the space station floating just hovering above earth is also relatively protected but if you go to mars and you spend a year actually a significant fraction of your brain cells can be damaged as a result of energetic particles"
},
{
"end_time": 2312.688,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2284.974,
"text": " going through the helmet I mean you can you have to be in a cave underground or to have some special shielding around you to be protected and there was not enough attention given to that and I think that should be addressed because we don't want it to be a one-way trip where after a year everyone that goes there dies. So there's too much of a focus on building the atmosphere not much of"
},
{
"end_time": 2340.896,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2312.995,
"text": " Well, yeah, so I mean, one thing is, of course, to create a habitat that allows people to breathe and you don't need to build a whole atmosphere to terraform Mars, you can just do it inside a closed vessel, you know, and but at the same time worrying about how to protect humans so that they can live there for more than a year is, I think, a major challenge that was not addressed enough."
},
{
"end_time": 2369.855,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2341.425,
"text": " and of course you can do it in steps you can go first to the moon and then because the moon is closer to us and we can ship people back and forth more easily and that could be a stepping stone to mars what do you think of sean carroll's many worlds well it's not his many worlds interpretation but he seems to think it's the only game in town with regard to quantum mechanical interpretations and he seems to think it's not as arbitrary as people say"
},
{
"end_time": 2397.449,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2370.196,
"text": " and that maybe there's some evidence for it, at least if you quote unquote follow the math. So what do you make of that argument? Well, so quantum mechanics was discovered experimentally. And that's an important lesson for us to maintain our humility as scientists. You know, sometimes we need the experiments to give us an insight about nature that we haven't expected. And it takes us out of our comfort zone."
},
{
"end_time": 2424.531,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2398.012,
"text": " And he took Albert Einstein out of his comfort zone because he thought that you can't have quantum mechanics with spooky action at a distance. It makes no sense to him. And so he wrote a paper about it, the Einstein Podolsky-Rosen paper, trying to propose an experiment that will demonstrate that spooky action at a distance does not exist. Versions of that experiment were done and he was proven wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 2441.988,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2424.94,
"text": " and indeed we are a century later after quantum mechanics was discovered still feeling uneasy about how to interpret it and this is an excellent example for why we need experiments because very often"
},
{
"end_time": 2472.312,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2442.568,
"text": " Experiments open our eyes to facts that we haven't anticipated. Our imagination is more limited than nature's imagination, in a way. Science is basically just being a student for life. As a scientist, you have to be humble and modest enough to admit that perhaps nature"
},
{
"end_time": 2497.125,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2472.671,
"text": " is different than your preconceptions. And if you were to say, I don't need verification, I know the truth in advance, I know that there are extra dimensions, or I know that Oumuamua was a rock, or I know that this and that without even checking, then you are just like the philosophers during the days of Galileo that didn't want to look through his telescope, because they knew that the sun moves around the Earth."
},
{
"end_time": 2525.077,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2497.705,
"text": " So I just wanted to make that point that quantum mechanics is really an excellent example for why as scientists we should always regard ourselves as students of nature. But coming back to the question of what's the meaning of quantum mechanics, as you mentioned there was the many world interpretation and Sean Carroll puts it in a modern context."
},
{
"end_time": 2552.449,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2525.572,
"text": " Does Sean Carroll add anything that hasn't been said before on the Many Worlds interpretation from Everett? There are some new nuances now that relate to how to define the wave function and the possible existence of the multiverse that some people contemplate as the actual"
},
{
"end_time": 2580.896,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2553.166,
"text": " reality is much bigger than what we can experiment with within the observable universe that we see. But then I would say that the verdict is still out. I mean every year or two I read an interesting essay that offers new insights to quantum mechanics, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but we are not there yet. We haven't converged on something that everyone agrees on."
},
{
"end_time": 2607.79,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2581.22,
"text": " and again i think the way to converge would be to be guided by experiments and and it's quite possible you know that the one thing we're missing is the connection with gravity that we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that was tested experimentally and perhaps in the context of such a theory the the concerns we have will go away because one thing that you recognize in quantum mechanics at least the traditional way it was formulated in"
},
{
"end_time": 2631.544,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2608.148,
"text": " is that time plays a special role relative to space and whereas in the general theory of relativity time and space are just dimensions of space-time and they can be curved by objects and so forth and so perhaps once we identify a winning theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity many of them"
},
{
"end_time": 2650.64,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2631.92,
"text": " ambiguities that we have right now in physics. And by the way, there are many, not just the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There is the information paradox in the context of black holes. We don't know what happens to information that falls into a black hole. Stephen Hawking"
},
{
"end_time": 2675.879,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2651.408,
"text": " demonstrated that black holes evaporate eventually into thermal radiation that doesn't carry that information. So the question is, if the black hole goes away, where is all the information that we threw into it when we made it? And that's a fundamental question because quantum mechanics argues that information cannot be destroyed. And so this is one puzzle that is also unsolved."
},
{
"end_time": 2704.991,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2676.254,
"text": " modern physics. Then there is a question of what happens in the singularities of either the singularity of a black hole where the curvature of space and time diverges or the singularity of the big bang what happened before the big bang. Do you believe that there are singularities within? No, it's clear that singularities are just appearing in Einstein's theory of gravity because it doesn't it's not unified with quantum mechanics because once you get to very large curvatures of space and time"
},
{
"end_time": 2731.118,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2705.418,
"text": " have to correct the equations that Einstein wrote because quantum mechanics comes into play. So again the singularities are just symptoms of us having an incomplete theory and what we need is to unify quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity of Einstein and of course string theory is a very popular contender but when you ask string theorists can you tell me what"
},
{
"end_time": 2756.954,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2731.425,
"text": " What happens at the singularity of a black hole? They say, oh, that's a too difficult question. We can't really address it at this point. When you ask them what happens at the Big Bang, just before the Big Bang, they say, oh, that's too difficult. We can't really. And then there are people that try to formulate some guesses as to how string theory would behave. But so first of all, there is not a unique answer from string theory right now."
},
{
"end_time": 2779.838,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2757.363,
"text": " And the theory is not unique in its predictions. And second, on the issues that matter, it doesn't put any skin in the game. It doesn't say here is a prediction that you can test experimentally. And if you find one answer, then string theory is right. If you find another answer, then it's wrong. No, they prefer not to put skin in the game so that it will still be right forever."
},
{
"end_time": 2808.831,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2780.503,
"text": " And then there is even the claim that if by some philosophers that if physicists agree on something for a decade, it must be right. And I find that really embarrassing that people argue that. Which philosophers? Oh, there is, there is Hegel. No, there is a philosopher with that, that wrote a book about string theory and suggesting that, you know, we should adjust our"
},
{
"end_time": 2838.422,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2809.531,
"text": " conception of what physics is supposed to mean, that experiments may not be needed, and that, in fact, physics is what physicists do. And once again, from my perspective, I hold exactly the opposite view. I think that nature educates us. We are just students of nature. So we should be modest and learn from experiments. We can't imagine that we will know the truth in advance. To me, it sounds like hallucinations."
},
{
"end_time": 2860.862,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2838.797,
"text": " You are high on drugs if you believe that reality always reflects what you think it is. That's what people that hallucinate think. But you can think that you are the wealthiest person in the world and when you go to the bank and check how much money you have in your checking account, you realize that that's an experiment and you realize that"
},
{
"end_time": 2884.053,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2861.459,
"text": " You cannot cash it. So I mean, of course people can feel happy. I have nothing against that. They can do mathematical gymnastics and feel happy. I just have the objection I have is about that applying to reality. A reality check needs to happen at some point. Right. Exactly. Otherwise, I mean, you can just celebrate something that is not real. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2913.933,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2884.582,
"text": " Let's talk about Bob Lazar. I sent you an email and I asked you if you had the time to please watch this video. It was a technical explanation of Bob Lazar and his younger years. Did you have a chance to even skim it? Yeah, I skimmed it. And what I found on the web is that he made a lot of statements without showing any evidence. And here I give usually the example of Napoleon. There were many people over the years that claimed that they are Napoleon."
},
{
"end_time": 2941.186,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2914.667,
"text": " How do you check that? Once again, experimentally, you ask them, show me your ID. And if they can't show you the idea that says that they are Napoleon, and if they keep insisting that they are Napoleon without showing you evidence for that, you know, there are places where you can put them. And my point is evidence is the key. That's the way that science gets credibility."
},
{
"end_time": 2968.166,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2941.647,
"text": " That's the way for us to make progress, as I discussed before, for us to learn new things through experiments, through evidence. And it's not just a nuance. Looking for evidence is not just something that you can give up on. It's a necessity. That's the only thing that will keep you sane and making relevant statements. And you can make a lot of statements that look"
},
{
"end_time": 2997.807,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2968.712,
"text": " bizarre, interesting, intriguing, emotionally appealing. You know, you can make a lot of statements like that. And in fact, our culture is full of that. You have all kinds of myths in our culture. You know, if you can think about lots of them, I mean, Santa Claus. I mean, there are lots of myths that are accepted. And they're part of our culture, but they're not regarded as part of- You're crushing me right now. I thought Santa Claus is real."
},
{
"end_time": 3028.183,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2998.456,
"text": " My point is, when I checked a lot of the things he said, he didn't bring credible evidence to support them. And that's what makes me worry that, you know, that he's not real. I see. I see. Did you take a look at any of his explanations as to how the spacecraft would work? And is it feasible in your mind? Is it untenable? Is it ridiculous?"
},
{
"end_time": 3057.176,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3028.524,
"text": " No, I mean, once again, suppose he had a good idea for making a spacecraft that we currently do not have, that NASA is not developing, he could have made a fortune out of it. How? Very simply, instead of talking about it, he could have built it and then it would fly. What's the problem? I mean, that's a straight point. I don't understand why we need to talk about it even. I mean, any reasonable person that has an idea that is not being used"
},
{
"end_time": 3086.101,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3057.807,
"text": " and that could make millions or even billions of dollars, you know, first of all establishes a patent on that. And secondly, you know, tries to build this thing. And if it's real, you will make that profit. You know, it would be bigger than Tesla. It would be bigger than SpaceX because you would find a technology that NASA can use that nobody thought about. So, you know, it makes zero sense to say, I know how to do something."
},
{
"end_time": 3110.333,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3086.323,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 3132.005,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3110.964,
"text": " Okay, I believe what he was saying is that he doesn't know how it works. What happened was he was told"
},
{
"end_time": 3161.374,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3132.449,
"text": " to work on some craft and he believes they're of alien or extraterrestrial origin and that the US government knows how to pilot them to some degree in the same way that you can learn how to use a phone or a tablet like they've dropped phones and tribes and they know how to turn it on but they don't know how it works and he said possibly the way that it works is with this element called element 115 and there's a strong nuclear force which turns into a gravitational force and that I find interesting I don't know how it works but to me if that's true that's"
},
{
"end_time": 3192.295,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3162.295,
"text": " That's one way of unifying quantum field theory with gravity. Either way, what do you think about that? From the point of view of a physicist, this is just nonsense. I mean, it makes no sense. I've never heard about how you turn the nuclear force into a gravitational force in any piece of equipment. Of course, if you reach the Planck scale, you might be able to do something, but no accelerator gets even closer. The only time when we reached that scale perhaps was at the Big Bang."
},
{
"end_time": 3220.196,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3193.012,
"text": " or near a singularity of a black hole. But so I would say this is just not, I mean, it makes no scientific sense to me. And moreover, let's imagine that he did not know the details, but someone else has that equipment. Why do you think that someone else will keep it secret? Why won't they just use it or develop it and, you know, get a great advantage relative to others by using it?"
},
{
"end_time": 3246.135,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3221.442,
"text": " I was listening to one of you actually, I believe you said this plenty of times that someone said to you, deflation is not disprovable. I'm sorry, inflation is not disprovable. Yeah. Okay. Do you mind explaining why? Okay, so here is the thing that cosmic inflation is a theory that was proposed about 40 years ago."
},
{
"end_time": 3275.674,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3246.63,
"text": " It was meant to explain some very peculiar facts about the universe, one of which, let me just mention because it's really simple to follow. When we look in one direction on the sky, we find the cosmic microwave background relic from the Big Bang with some temperature. Then we look at the opposite direction on the sky and we find the cosmic microwave background having exactly the same temperature. Now, how is that possible?"
},
{
"end_time": 3305.947,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3276.152,
"text": " the age of the universe for the this light to arrive to us from these two points on the sky and these two points on the sky did not have time to communicate with each other because it would take twice as long at least or more than that for the light to arrive from one point to another to the other. So how come the universe was arranged in a way such that conditions are the same or throughout the entire sky"
},
{
"end_time": 3331.817,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3306.271,
"text": " In terms of the cosmic microwave background temperature, for example. So we know the universe had similar initial conditions to one part in a hundred thousand throughout the region that we can see. Meaning that in one part in a hundred thousand, it's the same temperature or what? Yes. Yes. And how, how come it was prepared in such a state, which is very special."
},
{
"end_time": 3360.947,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3332.841,
"text": " If you would imagine just a random state, you would have very different temperatures in different places. So inflation attempts to explain that. The idea is that everything that we see came from a very small patch that was stretched exponentially in time, very quickly. So points that were in contact with each other were separated very fast"
},
{
"end_time": 3391.374,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3361.391,
"text": " faster than light from"
},
{
"end_time": 3400.64,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3391.596,
"text": " time. And then that took a small region of space where points were connected to each other, had the same conditions"
},
{
"end_time": 3427.79,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3401.323,
"text": " The cosmological constant is equivalent to the vacuum having some mass density, some energy density, which by the way today is called dark energy. I mean, it's basically the energy of the vacuum."
},
{
"end_time": 3457.21,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3428.66,
"text": " So by the vacuum, I mean, if you clean up all the matter, whatever you have left is the vacuum. And the vacuum could have a uniform energy density, the same energy density everywhere. Because it's the vacuum, it's the ground state. So if you just imagine early cosmic time, the vacuum had a large energy density, and that went away. It was sort of a false vacuum, the vacuum was excited to some higher state."
},
{
"end_time": 3483.131,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3457.346,
"text": " and then it decayed into the vacuum we have today, then that will create an exponential expansion that is called a cosmic inflation early on and would explain some facts about the universe. It could also generate, it will make the universe have the same conditions everywhere, but also through quantum mechanics generates small ripples in the density of matter. One percent ripples?"
},
{
"end_time": 3506.288,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3483.712,
"text": " Small fluctuations because of quantum mechanics that later grow and become the galaxies that we see today or the objects that we see today. So that's the nice, the beauty of the concept of cosmic inflation that it explains a lot of things and that's why it was widely accepted after a while in the scientific community."
},
{
"end_time": 3528.831,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3507.039,
"text": " Sorry, I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So is the way that they put a bound on the time that the cosmological constant was extremely high, is it with by observing the cosmic background radiation and saying, okay, there's a 1% difference about one in 100 you said, right? No, one in 100,000. Yes. Okay, one in 100,000. So then that means that there's a"
},
{
"end_time": 3558.404,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3529.206,
"text": " There is a lower limit on how long it persisted, which is you need to inflate enough so that the small patch would become as big as the universe today. That's the minimum you need to expand by, but it could have expanded much more than that. We just don't know. So inflation could have lasted"
},
{
"end_time": 3586.493,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3559.07,
"text": " much more. We have no upper limit on how long it lasted but we have a lower limit and we know that it should have ended so that we will end up with universe full of matter that made all the objects we see now. So the vacuum could not have continued to dominate the expansion forever because then we wouldn't exist. So the vacuum dominated for a while and that while lasted at least"
},
{
"end_time": 3616.34,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3586.852,
"text": " 60 periods of exponential expansion, at least 60. And then after that, you know, we don't know how much more, but eventually it decayed and became the matter that we have today. And the universe entered into its expansion the way we see it. So anyway, it's unfalsifiable because, okay, no. So that idea as it was formulated initially was a very interesting idea because you can test it. There are various predictions."
},
{
"end_time": 3645.299,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3616.903,
"text": " One of them is that the geometry of the universe would be flat and so forth. And by the way, it was confirmed that the universe is flat. You know, if you draw a triangle, the sum of the angles is 180 degrees and so forth. But at some point, it became clear that to account for inflation, you actually come up with the multiverse."
},
{
"end_time": 3670.026,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3645.896,
"text": " there are lots of other regions inside of which conditions could be very different. So anything that is possible happens an infinite number of times in such a theory of cosmic inflation. So once you allow for not just our reality to exist, but you have all kinds of regions where things, everything that can happen happens an infinite number of times."
},
{
"end_time": 3694.599,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3670.691,
"text": " then it starts losing its predictability, because anything that you find about our universe, it's a very flexible theory now that can explain anything. And so I had a panel discussion with Alan Guth, that is one of the pioneers of inflation, in which I asked him a simple question. I said, and that was about five years ago, I asked him, is inflation forcifiable?"
},
{
"end_time": 3720.299,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3695.213,
"text": " Is there an experiment by which you will detect something about the cosmic micro background or about the universe that will demonstrate that inflation is wrong? Can you envision something? I'm not saying necessarily that it's wrong. I'm just saying, is there a way to test it? Skin in the game, as you would call it. Yeah. And he said, that's a silly question. He said, any observational fact"
},
{
"end_time": 3749.411,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3720.964,
"text": " In the universe, inflation right now as a theory is sufficiently flexible that it can accommodate any fact that you detect. And to me, a theory of everything is not very far from being a theory of nothing. Because if you can explain anything that you find, then what's the value of the theory? It doesn't give you any added value because first you find it and then the theory says, yes, yes, of course a version of the theory would make it."
},
{
"end_time": 3778.234,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3749.923,
"text": " So what did I learn? I didn't learn that theory is right. I didn't learn that theory, I cannot learn that theory is wrong. And therefore it loses its scientific value in my view, not in the view of Alan Guth. He thinks that it makes the theory very robust because it can agree with anything that is being found. And you know, that is the shift in the culture that I'm worried about. You see this with string theory as well. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 3807.773,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3778.558,
"text": " I'm not sure if Alan is a string theorist. Well, no, he's not. But the two cultures celebrate the same view about how physics can be done nowadays. They both, I mean, also in the context of string theory, for example, there was a suggestion that it has a landscape and it's landscape, the landscape of string theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3825.452,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3808.063,
"text": " accounts for some versions of inflation. And so I asked the person that worked on that, I said, okay, so this connection that you make between the natural incarnation of string theory and inflation, suppose we measure"
},
{
"end_time": 3854.684,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3825.828,
"text": " something in the cosmic micro background about inflation. And we show that the kind of inflation that you are advocating is wrong. Would that prove string theory wrong? And that person said, no, string theory will always be right. What it will prove is the connection that I made between string theory and inflation. That connection is wrong. So you see, the psychology is always to retreat to a place that cannot be shown wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 3882.688,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3855.367,
"text": " and although it sounds very appealing and comfortable because you can maintain your image as, you know, being always right and you don't put any skin in the game, it's not really what physics is about. This flatness that you mentioned of space-time, is this why we can say that a galaxy is moving away from us at a certain speed? And the reason why I say that is in a manifold, you can't technically"
},
{
"end_time": 3911.015,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3883.114,
"text": " to get a bit technical, can't technically compare two different velocities unless they're brought at the same point, unless you have a horizontal or vertical subspace given by connection and so on. So how can you compare different velocities when you're at different points in a manifold is what I'm wondering. No, so first of all, I should say that in Einstein's theory of gravity, you can get a very distant galaxy to move away from us faster than light. And that is because it's far away."
},
{
"end_time": 3936.578,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3911.715,
"text": " So space and time can expand faster than light when you're dealing with points that are separated by a large distance. That's allowed by Einstein's theory. And that's why we lose contact with galaxies once they start moving faster than light relative to us. And so in an accelerating universe, two points that were in contact are separated eventually so that they are not in contact anymore after a while."
},
{
"end_time": 3965.725,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3936.749,
"text": " Of course, that time that it takes is the time that it takes them to reach the speed of light, basically. That's the time that they're still in contact and after that they're not in contact, that they cannot communicate. But to your second question, that has to do with how can we measure that the universe is flat? And that is simply just like you check if a piece of paper is flat. You draw a triangle and you check the sum of the angles."
},
{
"end_time": 3995.657,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3965.947,
"text": " If the sum of the angles is 180 degrees, you know that this piece of paper is flat. But if it sits on top of a ball, for example, then the sum of the angle can be bigger than 180 degrees. You can take a line from the pole to the equator, go along the equator, and go back to the pole. And each of these angles would be 90 degrees. So 90 plus 90 plus 90, if you're doing it, that would be"
},
{
"end_time": 4024.77,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3996.254,
"text": " 270, it's more than 180 degrees, then you know that the surface is not flat. It's actually curved like a ball, positive. So how do we check the sums of the angles of a triangle in the universe? Well, we just need a standard ruler and we have that. In the early universe, you know, a sound wave would propagate a certain distance that we can calculate. So at a given time after the Big Bang, we know how far"
},
{
"end_time": 4053.695,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4025.077,
"text": " a sound wave can propagate. And it turns out that this is the distance where you can have correlations between the temperature of the microwave background, because sound waves correlate different points in the sky where the temperature of the microwave background knows about another point. Sorry, why are you using sound waves? Because sound waves require a medium. Yes, there is a medium. The matter in the universe is the medium. I mean, there is ordinary matter and there is light."
},
{
"end_time": 4082.807,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4054.07,
"text": " And there is dark matter. So there is matter. And the sound waves, we can calculate the speed by which they move. And so if we look at a certain time after the Big Bang, we can tell how far sound waves could propagate. And that defines the standard ruler. That's the distance over which different points in the sky would be correlated with each other because they could speak via sound waves with each other. And so when we look at the microwave background, we can measure the angle that that yardstick occupies"
},
{
"end_time": 4112.739,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4083.183,
"text": " And we can figure out whether the sums of the angles in that triangle, the base of the triangle is the yardstick, the distance that sound traveled at that time. And then the other sides of the triangle go to the observer. So the observer looks at this yardstick and we can look at what is the angle that this yardstick occupies. And from that, we can figure out whether the universe is flat or not. And this experiment was done in the year 2000."
},
{
"end_time": 4137.005,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4113.2,
"text": " we already knew that the universe is flat, that it's the simplest geometry you can think of. That's absolutely interesting. Of a flat space. A priori, is there a reason why it should be flat? I see it's as simple, but and also is there a margin of error with this? Well, there should be a margin of error. Yeah, there is a margin of error right now. The precision right now is a few percent, but then"
},
{
"end_time": 4166.271,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4137.381,
"text": " Cosmic inflation naturally, you know, in the old incarnation of it, where not everything was possible, but if you were to take the models from 1980, they would expect the universe to be flat because you take a small patch of space, you might have some curvature of space and time in that patch, but then you inflate it. And when you inflate it, you stretch it to huge dimensions. So all the curvature that you had on small scales is now being ironed out."
},
{
"end_time": 4196.834,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4167.005,
"text": " and you can think of it as a cosmic iron you basically iron out by expansion you you make the universe flat the geometry flat and it happens to be the case that the universe is flat indeed that seems to me to be evidence for the inflation yes it is but in the original incarnation of the 1980s what happened afterwards is that the theory was appended supplemented by ingredients that make it much less predictive"
},
{
"end_time": 4224.565,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4197.312,
"text": " that it can accommodate anything. That's the part that I resist. I see, I see. Let's imagine, I think Wolfram predicts that there's a lower bound to the elementary particle masses, or at least he says he can get to that. I think you mentioned that astrophysical data can validate this. How? Well, Wolfram has a different way of looking at physics, which is related to"
},
{
"end_time": 4251.323,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4225.23,
"text": " something he worked on for a while. It's diagrams of hypergraphs and so on. And then it has a group of people working with him and it's a very ambitious project. He's very bright. I haven't seen yet that the effort yield predictions that we can test experimentally. So far, he's trying to reproduce things we know about."
},
{
"end_time": 4281.118,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4251.852,
"text": " And then he's actually not far from where I live and he's relatively local. How many minutes are we driving? Yeah, at some point I hope to have a conversation with him walking together in the woods and trying to get the latest on his work. But as far as I know, it's not yet at the point where the theory predicts new things that we can test beyond what we already know."
},
{
"end_time": 4309.07,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4281.732,
"text": " I see, I see. So what do you think of his model? I think it's too preliminary. It's nice to have people thinking independently, you know, and I very much I salute his effort intellectually, because it's very ambitious, you know, to come up with a completely new way of looking at physics. And his courage for taking on this task, and his intellect, I mean, he's he's brilliant. When you listen to"
},
{
"end_time": 4336.544,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4310.282,
"text": " Have you heard of Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity? Have you researched into it and what do you think about it? I did not look into it in detail, no, so I cannot comment. But I know that he's very bright. Do you think that innovation in physics is going to necessarily come from the outside because of these selective pressures that you mentioned in academia? Yeah, well, I think what happens is that"
},
{
"end_time": 4364.599,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4337.056,
"text": " This pressure is reducing the efficiency of science that fewer people are attempting to deviate from the beaten path. And especially the young people, you know, if you think about Albert Einstein, he was not deterred by oppression. He in one year had five seminal papers. And I very much hope that this tradition will come back where young people will not be afraid to innovate."
},
{
"end_time": 4390.06,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4365.06,
"text": " I think even with social pressure, as long as we continue to do experiments, that's the key. Because experiments and collecting evidence will eventually tell us that we are wrong. It takes more time if we are not open-minded. And if you look, for example, the perfect example is the Mayan culture. When I visited Mexico, I went to Chichen Itza."
},
{
"end_time": 4415.367,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4390.674,
"text": " And the tour guide was bragging about the Mayan culture and saying that the astronomers in that culture were held at a very high regard. They were considered astronomer priests, the highest level in society. And I was wondering why, and turns out that politicians, the rulers of the Mayans, they thought that by knowing the positions of planets and stars on the sky,"
},
{
"end_time": 4442.927,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4415.623,
"text": " You can forecast the future. So you can tell the outcome of a war. You can decide when to go out to a war so that it will be successful, so that you would win based on the locations of planets. So they put astronomers that monitor the sky, the planets. Where did they get that idea from? Just from the predictive powers of the weather and then extrapolating that? No, it's sort of like horoscopes nowadays, you know, astrology."
},
{
"end_time": 4472.056,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4443.37,
"text": " It's a natural tendency of people to believe that there are powers that extend way beyond what reality is. Alchemy was one example where people thought that their beliefs or emotions affect materials, the nature of materials. So anyway, they thought that the motion of stars and planets affect human history, and that's astrology fundamentally."
},
{
"end_time": 4501.766,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4472.551,
"text": " That was their belief system. And then the astronomers collected huge amounts of data over thousands of years and amazing data. But it was not used for the purpose of finding Newton's law of gravity. It was for the political purpose of winning a war. And if you think about it from a modern perspective, we now know that the motion of Mars or Venus"
},
{
"end_time": 4530.742,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4502.056,
"text": " have nothing to do with whether the Gulf War was successful or a disaster. And so we nowadays have a different view about planets and stars. And collecting all this exquisite data was not enough. If you have the wrong conception, good data is not enough. So you need to be open-minded for other interpretations and to think about the data that you get in ways that are not traditional. And I bring this up because"
},
{
"end_time": 4559.906,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4531.032,
"text": " If you always think that you know the answer in advance, you might not even collect the data. That's even more dangerous. The Mayans were, in a way, more advanced than those people that say, we don't need data. We know the answer without it. You know, those philosophers that say, if physicists agree on something, that's enough. That's much more primitive than the Mayans belief system, because the Mayans were collecting data about the sky."
},
{
"end_time": 4580.23,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4560.23,
"text": " I think that's the most important thing that we can maintain in terms of the integrity of science is its reliance on evidence rather than on what people say. And I hope if that stays, even if some ideas are ridiculed now, eventually there would be data and evidence that would"
},
{
"end_time": 4601.954,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4580.896,
"text": " And that's what happened to me, you know, in the examples that we discussed at the beginning of our conversation, you know, that eventually data came along and demonstrated that what I'm saying is correct. And so that is, you know, great. I mean, and by the way, it's not about me being right. It's not about us. It's about, it's about the dialogue we have with nature."
},
{
"end_time": 4623.49,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4602.227,
"text": " I recall reading in one of your Scientific American articles about the limitations of knowing a theory of everything and you cited Gödel. I'm not sure if you were citing Gödel to say that what Gödel's incompleteness theorem has to say is something about whether or not we can ultimately find the laws that govern us or you're using that to say well look there are limitations so let's be a bit more humble. Which one was it? Does Gödel's theorem have anything to do?"
},
{
"end_time": 4650.964,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4623.729,
"text": " It was the second one. I think we should be humble because we will never have a complete theory of everything. Logically, that was demonstrated by Gödel. But also, you know, the scientific process is work in progress. You know, it turns out that when we discover new things, we can ask more questions. It's not that we ask less questions. So the illusion that, you know, physics will get to an end and that would be it."
},
{
"end_time": 4675.503,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4651.408,
"text": " You know, that was advocated a hundred years ago before Einstein came, more than a hundred years, 120 years ago, before Einstein came with special relativity and quantum mechanics was discovered and clearly physics was revolutionized. And it was said in recent decades by some people. And again, I think they're completely misguided because"
},
{
"end_time": 4704.258,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4676.015,
"text": " knowledge is just an island in an ocean of ignorance we know so little and the way for us to maintain the integrity of science is to stay modest and say look we don't know so much and it's work in progress and sometimes we may be wrong so let's be open-minded and let's continue to collect evidence and make progress through that. Why does Gödel's incompleteness theorem have anything to do with whether or not we can learn fundamental laws?"
},
{
"end_time": 4730.265,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4704.684,
"text": " because what Gadel demonstrated is that you cannot build a self-consistent logical system that can be proven and be self-contained, so to speak. I see, I see. You're talking about whether or not we can prove that our theory of everything is the theory of everything. So there will always be some loopholes, even at the logical level,"
},
{
"end_time": 4758.183,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4730.794,
"text": " But what I'm referring to in addition to that is the fact that reality, you know, it will take us a long while before we figure out all the details of reality through experiments, in addition to the logical issues. I recall you mentioned that science, sorry, that religion can learn from science, obviously, in the sense that we investigate nature, it tells us more about God, as well as it allows us a deeper appreciation of that nature."
},
{
"end_time": 4787.585,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4758.933,
"text": " And this is an old view, actually, which says that if you have an interpretation of the Bible, the Christian Bible, and you find that nature contradicts that, then it's not that nature is wrong, it's that your interpretation of the Bible is wrong. Nature is always right, because nature is what God made. Nature is God in some way, actually. So then I'm wondering, that means that religion can learn from science. Okay. Can science learn from religion? And if so, how? Well, yeah, so, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4815.998,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4788.166,
"text": " Being a physicist is just like trying to figure out what the building is made of. You know, you're trying to figure out the bricks and mortar that make the building. That's the fundamental laws of physics. And when we look at the universe, we're trying to figure out what it's made of, what the composition of the universe, what are the laws that are governing it. And lo and behold, we find that most of the matter in the universe is in some form that we don't know what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 4845.538,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4816.493,
"text": " We are not made of it. It's called dark matter. So we still have to figure it out. It's a puzzle and we're trying to figure out also the laws that govern the behavior of the universe. But if you look at the building, there is more to it than the bricks and mortar that make the building. There is the design and there is the purpose of the building and there is the meaning of the building."
},
{
"end_time": 4875.179,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4845.896,
"text": " That goes beyond physics. That's the metaphysics. Now, a physicist can take a practical approach and say, I don't really care about that. I want to figure out how reality operates because that's the only tangible thing that I can later use in developing technology. I don't want to think about things that I cannot test empirically that involve beauty. Is the building beautiful? Is the building serving a bigger purpose? That's not of my interest."
},
{
"end_time": 4903.882,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4875.589,
"text": " But if you are an architect, then you care mostly about that. You don't care about the bricks and mortar. As an architect, you draw a blueprint of a building. And in principle, the construction workers could use different materials to make that. Of course, the materials affect the durability of the building and so forth, but not so much the way it appears."
},
{
"end_time": 4933.114,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4904.394,
"text": " and functions. And so from the point of view of an architect, it's a completely different question, you know, than from the point of view of a construction worker, what the building represents. And so the way I see that is that reality, you know, has many facets to it. And one of the facets is indeed what the physics is dealing with. But another facet is what the humanities are dealing with. And that includes philosophy and theology and religion."
},
{
"end_time": 4963.609,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4933.626,
"text": " and you know as a human you are incomplete if you were not to consider all the facets I mean you can of course narrow yourself to one of them and just say I don't care about anything else that's fine but that's in a way narrow-minded you know it's just like looking at the small piece of the of the big picture and I think you are not fully satisfied living like that I mean I don't think that ignoring the humanity is a good practice"
},
{
"end_time": 4980.265,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4964.599,
"text": " I'm reminded by Aristotle who had a concept of causation which unified what you're referring to. So material cause, efficient cause, formal and final. So material is what you brick some mortar and then the efficient is essentially causation as we understand it as physicists and the formal is, okay, the"
},
{
"end_time": 5010.572,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4980.691,
"text": " Okay, so traditional religion that has a goal that looks over your shoulder and affects what happens to you, you know, that is"
},
{
"end_time": 5038.49,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5012.056,
"text": " That you can falsify. In principle, bad things happen to good people and vice versa. If you are using the scientific method, you can test those predictions. If there is a way by which you can forecast what will happen and you see that not happening. Or if"
},
{
"end_time": 5068.251,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5038.865,
"text": " the biblical story of Abraham in the Bible. If Abraham heard the voice of God and he had a cell phone where he had a voice memo app and he would have pressed the button, he could have recorded the voice of God. So, you know, in principle, it's possible to test some of these direct interactions between a divine entity and the human. But if you believe more in the concept, the philosophical concept like Spinoza did, where he identified God with nature,"
},
{
"end_time": 5097.79,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5068.643,
"text": " And, you know, there is something to it because nature itself is not completely random. You know, it's organized and that's quite striking that the laws of physics create some order in the universe that otherwise would not exist. And the fact that the same laws of physics that we find here on earth apply everywhere is remarkable in my view. And, you know, discovering the laws of physics gives you a sense of, oh, of the type that a religious person may feel."
},
{
"end_time": 5128.302,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5098.422,
"text": " You know, because you are feeling something about nature that you uncovered that is remarkable, that applies everywhere. And it's much greater than we are because it applies everywhere. So you can call it a religious sense, a sense of awe, but you're doing it through a scientific lens. And frankly, it's not obvious to me that there is a bigger meaning to life. You know, like that, because if you think about the meanings that we assign to life,"
},
{
"end_time": 5155.196,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5128.507,
"text": " They're usually confined to Earth. All of our ambitions are confined to Earth. And within a billion years, the Sun will boil off all the oceans on Earth. So nothing that we care about, that is dear to our heart, will stay around for more than a billion years. So then you ask yourself, is that really a valuable meaning?"
},
{
"end_time": 5183.763,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5155.606,
"text": " something that will go away okay it will go away in a billion years not in a in a hundred years but qualitatively speaking it will go away it's just like something that goes away in a week i mean it may be meaningful for a while but then it's not anymore so there is no absolute meaning to our existence if you think about the big picture and you know one thing that people ask me what is the one thing you would like to ask an alien"
},
{
"end_time": 5213.387,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5184.07,
"text": " If you were to be in contact, that is the question I would like to ask. Is there a meaning to this or what is the meaning of this play? And as I said at the beginning, we are put on the stage like actors without a script. What is the play about? I would like to know that. Do you think that because we can zoom out and say that over across a billion years, let's say that we'll no longer be here, therefore it's meaningless. Do you think that that means it's meaningless or do you think that means that that view that we zoom out and look at"
},
{
"end_time": 5238.66,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5213.899,
"text": " There is a meaning, but it's temporary, of course."
},
{
"end_time": 5266.664,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5239.292,
"text": " And of course it means the world to us because we are also short-lived. We live just for decades, a hundred years or so. And so during that time, that's what matters to us, what happens during that time. But when I was referring to meaning, I was referring to something bigger that is not going to go away, something that stays forever."
},
{
"end_time": 5295.862,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5267.517,
"text": " That's the thing that we need to give up on, I think. And again, staying modest, I think, allows you not to want too much, not to think that, oh, I really want something that will stay forever. Perhaps we should, as you said, perhaps we should admit that everything is temporary, everything changes all the time. We should just adapt to changing circumstances. And the meaning that we have is"
},
{
"end_time": 5324.872,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5296.374,
"text": " Something I was toying with was I wonder if there's a way that the world of experience can last forever and the reason is"
},
{
"end_time": 5349.599,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5325.179,
"text": " Let's say in general relativity, right beside a black hole, you can watch your person, your friend, enter the black hole infinitely for the rest of time. Obviously, they'd have to send photons back to you, but you can watch them. It's almost as if they're frozen right at the event horizon. But then for them, it's as if they passed into the black hole. Now let's imagine in reverse, right before you're about to die, your experience of life gets stretched infinitely. To everyone else, it's as if it ended."
},
{
"end_time": 5369.77,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5350.657,
"text": " But then, just like in general relativity, you can say that your frame of reference is the correct one, that your friend's is just as valid. So I'm wondering, does your experience, it's not something we can test, but I'm wondering, right before you die, does it get stretched infinitely? And that's one of the reasons why they say heaven and hell exist, and also heaven and hell"
},
{
"end_time": 5398.097,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5370.401,
"text": " is dependent on how you live your life right now, because if you live as if you're in heaven, or you live properly, or you live as if you're in hell and you hate everyone, if you were to die, you're going to feel that stretched out for the rest of your life. Now you won't be able to see other people, but somehow phenomenologically or experientially, it will get stretched. And that's in a huge speculative jump. Well, that's, that's an interesting thought. But if you ask me from my opinion, I think that we are just our bodies, just like a computer."
},
{
"end_time": 5426.578,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5398.524,
"text": " When you unplug it from the wall, it shuts off, all the systems shut off. And that's the experience of death. Basically, your, you know, your, your cord is taken out of the outlet. Do you have any ideas as to consciousness or its origins? Is it emergent? Is consciousness emergent? Yeah, that's what I think. I think that we are very complex systems and we are subject to a lot of"
},
{
"end_time": 5456.63,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5427.193,
"text": " inputs from our environment. And that's what makes us unpredictable. So when people talk about free will, it's sort of the confluence of a lot of ingredients, each of which can change the outcome. And as a result, we are not that predictable. And of course, according to quantum mechanics, things are not predictable. There is a probabilistic outcome. But in general, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 5483.592,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5456.869,
"text": " both free will and consciousness are incarnations of very complex systems. So it's the way that a complex system, the human, appears. But it doesn't mean that the building blocks of making a human are anything different than the physical elements that we know about. You just put them together in some way and you get phenomena like consciousness, by which we mean that"
},
{
"end_time": 5512.534,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5484.326,
"text": " the system itself recognizes that it exists and acts based on the feedback that it gets from reality. But in principle, I can imagine us constructing entities that will behave the same way in the future, you know, robots that are sufficiently advanced with AI and so forth. I don't see a qualitative difference between the human body and"
},
{
"end_time": 5541.067,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5513.183,
"text": " and the materials that it's made of. It's just that the materials are organized in a way that gives the human body special qualities and abilities. But when we die, it's just like taking the computer cord out of the outlet. I'm sure you've heard of the hard problem of consciousness. That is how can we get experience from what's fundamentally not experiencing? Do you have any ideas as to that?"
},
{
"end_time": 5568.899,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5541.425,
"text": " You mentioned, well, when you have a feedback, when you have a system looking at itself, but then that's self-consciousness. I'm just referring to experience in and of itself. Yeah, because the experience is being sensed by our body. And, you know, our body can play tricks on us and can give us senses that do not really exist outside of the body. And they are just self-created. So you can imagine phenomena like that. But it's all,"
},
{
"end_time": 5598.541,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5569.411,
"text": " related to physical processes that are happening. Do you believe that there are wormholes or stable wormholes, possibly aliens are using them? No, at the moment there are people suggesting how to construct wormholes, how to perhaps build time machines, but all of these suggestions again are highly speculative because we don't have a quantum mechanical theory of gravity and without it"
},
{
"end_time": 5628.131,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5598.814,
"text": " As for the fine-tuning of the universe, do you have any inklings as to why it is the way that it is? Do you take Lee Smolin's evolutionary black hole model? No."
},
{
"end_time": 5655.947,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5628.524,
"text": " I, you know, I think that the conditions we have in the universe were dictated by how it started, you know, around the Big Bang. And so, you know, just like cosmic inflation tries to explain various facts. And once we have a quantum theory of gravity, we'll be figure out where the universe came from, you know, what is the womb that the biblical code of the universe was connected to. And that would explain to us why it has the properties that it has."
},
{
"end_time": 5686.271,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5656.323,
"text": " So rather than guess it, I would rather go to that womb that created the universe and ask what are the reasons that we have the conditions we have. So you believe that we can derive the fundamental constants in some way? Potentially, yeah. If we figure out what happened before the Big Bang using a quantum theory of gravity, perhaps once again, what we find in the universe will be emerging out of those conditions, early conditions and the theory and the unifying theory, which we don't have at the moment."
},
{
"end_time": 5713.08,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5687.159,
"text": " Before I get to audience questions, the last question I have, well, two, I want to know what you think is the difference between wisdom and intelligence. And then I wanted to know what you thought of Wigner's friend's thought experiment or the thought experiment of Wigner's friend. I'm sure you've heard of it about the collapse of the wave function. Yeah. So first with respect to intelligence and wisdom, there is a very big difference between them."
},
{
"end_time": 5742.995,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5713.66,
"text": " is the ability to identify the essential elements necessary to answer questions and learn about the world. So it's a way of improving the efficiency of us figuring out the truth. And someone that is wise gives you a shortcut. You can be very intelligent and just examine all the exits from the highway."
},
{
"end_time": 5773.114,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5744.104,
"text": " Many of them would lead you into bad neighborhoods. But if you are wise, you will try to figure out which exit is the right one. Intelligence may be an essential skill in pursuing science, and you can become a world expert in a particular niche, just like taking an exit from the highway."
},
{
"end_time": 5803.336,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5773.49,
"text": " If you're wise, how do you determine which one matters? Which one is the right one? I imagine that depends on the goal, but then I'm wondering, well, how do you decide on the goal? You have to decide about the guiding principles first. So for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 5832.312,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5803.729,
"text": " To some people, what matters the most are subjects of relevance to society, if it has an impact on society. Because after all, we live in a society. And whether we address how many extra dimensions exist, or whether we address how to find a vaccine to COVID-19, these are two different questions with very different impacts on society."
},
{
"end_time": 5857.858,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5832.585,
"text": " So you might use that when you evaluate what you want to do. If you want to help people, then you work on some questions that matter to them. Now, it doesn't mean that they all have to be medical. They could be questions that people care about, right? So in that way, since the public is funding science, you are paying respect to the public."
},
{
"end_time": 5888.712,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5858.78,
"text": " If, on the other hand, you ask yourself how many angels can sit on the tip of a pin, and you get funded by the public, and then you say, I don't care what the public says, and I don't care if I have experiments to test my ideas, then that's a betrayal of the trust that the society has in academia. And that is a good reason for the public to say that academia is part of the elite, because it's divorcing itself from the interests of the public."
},
{
"end_time": 5912.961,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5889.991,
"text": " So, being wise is attending to the interests of those who fund you. That's an example. Okay, what about if there's no capitalism? There's no funding. Well, sorry, in socialism you're also funded. There's no money. We're hunter-gatherers. Can you be wise? Yeah, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you still have a purpose, right? You are trying to hunt."
},
{
"end_time": 5943.746,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5913.865,
"text": " So for that purpose, you develop tools that are relevant. So instead of the relevance being to society, to the people that fund you, here the relevance is to your objectives. Sorry, what I'm trying to get at is how do you know which goals, you're presuming a goal already. So what I'm wondering is how do you determine which goal you should follow? Oh, okay. I think, well, the way I determine is personally, that doesn't mean that everyone should operate this way."
},
{
"end_time": 5972.722,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5944.087,
"text": " I pay attention to the goals that are most important, that will make the biggest difference. You see, you can always work on something in the periphery that makes very little difference to anyone and nobody would bother you and you will be happy. You'll earn your living, you'll go to work, you will smile and people will smile at you and that's it. But the question is, does it matter to anyone or to yourself?"
},
{
"end_time": 6002.927,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5973.097,
"text": " Do you feel, will you feel at the age of 90 that you actually fulfilled your life interests? And the answer may be no, you should have been more daring, more risk taking, more willing to embark on things that are difficult, that will take a while to figure out, but matter more. So I look at myself at that stage, at the late age and ask, what would I advise myself now to do"
},
{
"end_time": 6032.261,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6003.473,
"text": " Okay, well, let's get to some audience questions. Steve Scully here says, is it possible that the universe is infinite, that there is no end to how large or small objects in the universe can be relative to one another, and that if the overall system is to be comprehensible, it is only by us recognizing how all of these apparently separate and distinct different systems actually share the same underlying mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 6062.449,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6034.445,
"text": " Yes. Read the question. You understood the question? Yeah, I understood that. Okay. Well, most of the answer to most of the question is yes. It's quite possible that in each direction, you know, it's an infinite series of sizes and scales. And, uh, but to me, the most interesting part of the question is, uh, will the laws of physics apply everywhere the same way or will you have the, and then so far,"
},
{
"end_time": 6083.2,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6062.824,
"text": " The amazing thing is that in the region that we can see, that we can observe, it appears like the laws of physics apply everywhere the same way. And that's remarkable, but it's not guaranteed by any means. And of course, people are searching for deviations, because if you find a deviation, you get an overprice."
},
{
"end_time": 6106.186,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6083.558,
"text": " Right, right. That brings me to a question that I have for you, but it's more for an experimentalist. Do you always need a theory to interpret the data? Or can you just interpret the data without a theory? So for example, collecting astronomical data, we're assuming that we're at no special place in the universe and that the laws are pretty much the same throughout time. Hmm. So can you"
},
{
"end_time": 6132.671,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6106.544,
"text": " Interpret the data without a theory. Can you even make sense of the data without a theory? I don't think so. I think you always have to have something in the back of your mind because otherwise the data is not telling you anything. You have to put it in a context. So just to give you an example, when I was a postdoc, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6162.875,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6133.49,
"text": " astrophysical journals used to come in print. It was not on the internet. And so I went to the library at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and I saw that before the 1980s there were photographs published in print where you can see giant arcs of light surrounding clusters of galaxies and people just ignore them. The data was there. It was"
},
{
"end_time": 6188.797,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6163.592,
"text": " It was printed in images that were put in papers, and nobody asked anything about those arcs. Why are there arcs? Like lightning strikes between galaxies? Like sparks almost? Well, they look like arcs. And then in the 1980s, the subject of gravitational lensing became singular. And then people explained those arcs as"
},
{
"end_time": 6218.012,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6189.514,
"text": " focusing of light by the force of gravity. You know, so you have a cluster of galaxies that acts on light from a background source behind it. Let's say a galaxy sits far away behind the cluster and then the light that comes from that galaxy is being gravitationally bent and focused at the observer and you end up with what is called an Einstein ring. Einstein already thought that this could happen in 1940. So you can get a giant arc"
},
{
"end_time": 6247.483,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6219.087,
"text": " of a background source that is part of sort of a ring of light that comes from gravitational lensing. And once they realized that, they said, oh, that's a good explanation for those arcs. But the arcs existed in the literature before, and people just didn't think about it in that context. So you can have data, it's just without a sense of what the data may mean, you might actually not pay attention to it."
},
{
"end_time": 6279.343,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6250.23,
"text": " Barfiman362 asks, do you still learn math and physics in the same way you did as you were when you were younger? And if not, how has aging and experience changed your learning process? Right. So I was always, I'm not a good example because from a young age, I was always most interested in ideas and then in the mathematical techniques that are used to"
},
{
"end_time": 6305.674,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6279.787,
"text": " perfect them or demonstrate them. And so in that sense, I'm actually more efficient now than I was because I know the field much better. And so if I were to meet a younger version of myself, I could teach myself quite a bit."
},
{
"end_time": 6327.688,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6306.152,
"text": " So I feel that I'm much stronger now than I was at a younger age, because I don't waste as much time in directions that would not prove useful. But in terms of the techniques, it's true that after a certain age you stop learning new techniques, most people."
},
{
"end_time": 6357.79,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6328.097,
"text": " And so you continue to use what you've learned during your studies, during your PhD, and you continue to use that. But you use it on subjects that are new. Very few people do learn new techniques and by that rejuvenate their skills. People do that. But since I was always about ideas, about thinking on things that other people do not think about, then"
},
{
"end_time": 6386.305,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6358.131,
"text": " The techniques were not particularly important for me. And I remember when I came as a postdoc, I was asked what kind of computer skills you have. And I said, very minimal. During my PhD, I just used whatever I needed in order to solve the differential equations that I had. I didn't master anything beyond that. And the person who hired me was stunned. He said, how come you didn't learn"
},
{
"end_time": 6414.138,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6386.51,
"text": " And I should say that I had a very rather productive career, even though I didn't learn much more computer skills since then, even. So it's possible still. Yeah, because a lot of people have the technical skills, but they lack the imagination or the ideas. So you play more in the realm of concepts and ideas and how they relate than you do with the mathematical pedantry?"
},
{
"end_time": 6440.674,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6414.855,
"text": " Yeah, so it's sort of like, you know, sketching a blueprint of a building rather than building it. So then who does the mathematical work? You just graduate students, students, postdocs, a lot of people that I collaborate with. And with regard to learning new techniques and constantly staying updated, you said that some people do. But generally, let's say past the age of"
},
{
"end_time": 6467.602,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6441.34,
"text": " It's not this, I know of people that are in their 50s that are learning machine learning now and AI and so it really is a matter of people that enjoy the technical gymnastics and there are some people that enjoy that and there are not many but I mean there are minority"
},
{
"end_time": 6497.517,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6468.541,
"text": " Do you think that instead of focusing on artificial intelligence, like you mentioned, we should focus on wisdom. So artificial wisdom. So, ah, instead of AI, do you think that that's something we should be focusing on? Or do you see like, how the heck would we even start that project? I do think that it's an interesting, very interesting idea. I haven't thought about it before, but yeah, you can think about designing a system that will be wise, more efficient, basically, rather than go and explore all possibilities."
},
{
"end_time": 6523.746,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6499.462,
"text": " Brian Keating asks, our mutual friend Brian Keating, and by the way, for those listening, Brian Keating, a link to his YouTube channel will be below. He said, I'd love to know what his daily routine is. So that is you and whether you've expected and even regret the backlash to your new fame. So daily routine and the backlash and how you feel about it. Well, every since the pandemic started, since it's more than a year now,"
},
{
"end_time": 6553.473,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6524.07,
"text": " Every morning at 5 a.m. I go out and jog in the company of birds, ducks and rabbits and wild turkeys. They are very loud. I see the same wild turkeys for a year now along my path. What city are you in? I'm in a suburb near Boston. Okay, so it's cold. Oh yeah, I go out in any weather, whether it snows, whether it rains, whether it's freezing."
},
{
"end_time": 6581.92,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6553.763,
"text": " It's just an aspect of nature that I enjoy. I enjoy very much being in the company of nature rather than... And I don't regard people or my colleagues in particular as part of nature because nature is always gracious. You always learn something. I always enjoy nature. I grew up on a farm. So my day starts at 5 a.m. and I should say over the months of January, February and half of March,"
},
{
"end_time": 6608.49,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6582.79,
"text": " I would have back-to-back interviews from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. There were about 450 of them altogether. It was a huge, huge exhausting marathon that I had to be engaged in just because of the interest in my book. But that's very untypical because by now it sort of is fading away. I mean, the book is already out for two months now. And then"
},
{
"end_time": 6636.903,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6609.036,
"text": " By now I'm getting back to my regular routine, which is writing papers and commentaries. So I should say the past 12 months were the most productive in my scientific career because I didn't have to drive to work. I didn't have people getting into my office uninvited. I didn't have the administrative distractions that I usually have. And so I could focus on creative work and"
},
{
"end_time": 6665.572,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6637.159,
"text": " I wrote of the order of 46 scientific papers and 52 commentaries, mostly in Scientific American. And then a couple of books. One of them is the one that was published two months ago. And there is another one, a textbook coming out at the end of June about life in the cosmos. So it has been a very productive time. And frankly, I can continue like that for the next"
},
{
"end_time": 6687.022,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6665.794,
"text": " the next few years without a problem. There is always something interesting to work on and I enjoy the creative work. I used to do leadership positions just as a service to the community because at some point I realized that other people are not doing their job properly when they are leading a department or doing something else, chairing a committee."
},
{
"end_time": 6714.633,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6687.278,
"text": " So I thought I should do it just to make sure that things are done according to the proper guiding principles. What were they doing? And what did you do that corrected it? Many times they would state the right ideas, but they would not really accomplish them in practice. And that was a puzzle to me because I could always see what needs to be done. Do you mind giving a specific example? No, because that will offend some people."
},
{
"end_time": 6740.555,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6715.162,
"text": " Okay, you can be vague. I'm sorry, give an example. You can just change it because I don't understand what you mean by what I mean is, you know, like, for example, when I became department chair in 2011, I continued three terms that was the longest service in the history of the department. I was the longest serving department chair. And then one thing from the beginning was that I was always straightforward with people, I would tell them,"
},
{
"end_time": 6769.258,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6741.169,
"text": " the situation as is, right? I never manipulate people. I never hide things from them. And you might think that that's a negative politically because very often in politics you have to maneuver in a way that would people would not know exactly what is going on. But I found it to be a I didn't care so much because I said, you know, if, if I give up on my service, I would go back to research and I'll be happy at that. I'm doing the service"
},
{
"end_time": 6797.927,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6769.889,
"text": " You know, just in order to serve the community. And so I was straightforward and it turned out to be a great asset because people never suspected me doing things behind their back and they always trusted my dealings with things. And then I put an important item to promote minorities and women in the department. And, you know, I hired in that direction and there was not much resistance from my colleagues to that."
},
{
"end_time": 6825.52,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6798.387,
"text": " So I, you know, I felt that I did accomplish something in nine years. So, you know, transparency, allowing people from underprivileged circumstances to have the proper training so that they can become leaders. You know, these are the kinds of principles that I felt strongly about and I tried to promote and that previously I didn't feel were promoted enough."
},
{
"end_time": 6855.452,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6826.203,
"text": " But now, you know, that I finished my third term and just, you know, in July 2020, then I can go back to doing creative work. And that's what I enjoy the most. You wrote this book while you were the chair? The book was, yes. That's right. You were a productive man. Well, I'm a no-nonsense kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 6876.954,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6855.776,
"text": " person in the sense that when I have a task, I work on it and I work most of the day. How do you balance that with spending time with your wife? And I'm not sure if you have kids, but whatever your personal life. I have two daughters. I do spend time with them, but one of them is 15. The other one is 19."
},
{
"end_time": 6896.527,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6877.483,
"text": " They are sort of independent by now. I'm surrounded by three wonderful women that were the muses for my book and they support me in a lot of different ways, provide the right balance for my life. So I'm sort of at this point in my life I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 6922.995,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6896.869,
"text": " self sustained and can do creative work. You know, that's the best you can hope for that you don't depend on other people that have agendas that are not necessarily aligned with your principles. So that that's a good place to be in. And I'm very happy to be in that place. When you were doing podcasts for 11 hours a day, back a couple months ago, including now even,"
},
{
"end_time": 6938.029,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6923.763,
"text": " Why do you say that you had to do it? Your publisher pushed you to do it or you wanted to do it? No, no. I felt that it's a platform that allows me to communicate what I believe in to the public. Had nothing to do. Some people argue that maybe I'm doing it to sell my book."
},
{
"end_time": 6962.688,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6938.575,
"text": " I told my my publicist that it's not for that purpose that I'm doing it to convey a message. The publicist was saying good job Avi and I said I'm not trying to sell my book even so when the book became a bestseller that was not my objective at all. I wouldn't care less if it you know if it sold just a few hundred copies and that's it and what I would like to communicate is a message to the public and I communicate"
},
{
"end_time": 6991.698,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6962.688,
"text": " Through my book and through these appearances and and it got them huge attention from from the public I should say, you know, like there was a vice video that received the one and a half million views within a week and a half and you know, there was of course the interviews with Joe Rogan and some other"
},
{
"end_time": 7016.903,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6992.176,
"text": " Do the views make you feel happy? Do you feel giddy? Do you share the news with your wife? Like, look, this got a million views or do you read the comments? How do you view your own appearances?"
},
{
"end_time": 7042.944,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7017.244,
"text": " I let the publicist look into that. And there were of course other opportunities that were opened up that involve documentaries or films. There were of other 25 filmmakers and producers that approached us as a result. But we should see if anything comes up."
},
{
"end_time": 7063.729,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7044.07,
"text": " Back then, there were some versions of it."
},
{
"end_time": 7087.995,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7064.275,
"text": " MySpace, I'm assuming. Yeah, yeah, MySpace. I forgot, but usually I do not deviate if I agree to something and I maintain the course. And when Facebook appeared and Twitter and so forth, I kept my promise to her. She just knows how attractive you were and how much girls will be messaging you. It wasn't about"
},
{
"end_time": 7113.951,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7088.609,
"text": " Can you ask him about virtual black holes and spin network evolution?"
},
{
"end_time": 7135.589,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7114.394,
"text": " How might a superposition of spin network evolutions, brackets, spin foams, fluctuate?"
},
{
"end_time": 7152.278,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7137.346,
"text": " Um."
},
{
"end_time": 7184.616,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7155.23,
"text": " Well, so again, the structure of space and time is a matter of the unified theory of quantum gravity, which we don't have at the moment. So John Wheeler was a physicist who thought about the space-time form as the way that space and time appear on very tiny scales. That's not the way that string theory thinks of it right now. And there are all these extra dimensions."
},
{
"end_time": 7210.998,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7185.555,
"text": " So I would say the verdict is still out as to what's going on with space and time. And let's just keep an open mind. Jeff B says, number one, have they confirmed yet if BLC one narrowband radio signal detected in December 2020 by the parks radio telescope? Hopefully you know about this came from Proxima Centauri or was it just earth based local interference?"
},
{
"end_time": 7242.278,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7213.063,
"text": " That's an excellent question and most likely it's earth-based. The reason I say that is because the frequency was very steady, didn't really drift much and it was a very narrow band of frequencies that was detected. If it were to come from a habitable planet around Proxima Centauri, then you would see some drift in the frequency because of the motion of that planet, well beyond the limits."
},
{
"end_time": 7268.848,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7242.637,
"text": " but of course it could have come from a planet not in the habitable zone. Based on the fact that it was one telescope in Australia I think we should be very suspicious because the same telescope reported the fast radio burst repeating fast radio burst a few years ago that ended up being the they found that it comes only during lunchtime and"
},
{
"end_time": 7296.357,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7268.848,
"text": " then realized that it's the door of a microwave oven that was opened prematurely by a person in the hotel. So I would say there is a high likelihood that it's local and the only way to find out is to have another observatory at a different location finding the same source. So we really need the confirmation before we assume that it is associated with Proxima Centauri."
},
{
"end_time": 7320.93,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7297.432,
"text": " RabbitSkywalker says, I really would like to hear his opinion about the claims from former Israeli director of the space program Ham Asher brought forward. You must have heard about it. He must have heard about it referring to you. And I wonder what Avi thinks about the story. Yeah. So my reply to that is he didn't really provide any evidence. And that goes back to what we discussed before that"
},
{
"end_time": 7338.302,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7321.544,
"text": " If you don't have a document supporting your claim or some other type of evidence, then to me it sounds like no journalist should cover that story because otherwise you create a lot of noise in the system without much signal."
},
{
"end_time": 7366.647,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7338.473,
"text": " about there being evidence there's someone named kevin newth i don't or kevin knuth i don't know if you've heard of him he's a physicist from albany you've heard of him yes definitely okay well i'm speaking to him in a few hours just for the people listening too i was speaking to him in a few hours he says that he's analyzed some of the data of the ufos or uap as i believe they're called now and he has showed that through analysis the amount of acceleration is incomparable to anything that we can produce and it's well i guess you can take that as evidence"
},
{
"end_time": 7390.401,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7367.619,
"text": " What do you think about that? Have you seen that paper of his? So anything to do with unidentified flying objects or aerial phenomena, my take on those is simple that we should deploy state-of-the-art instruments, cameras or audio sensors in the same locations and try to collect data just like a scientific experiment"
},
{
"end_time": 7415.265,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7390.998,
"text": " rather than rely on instruments that were not optimized for that purpose that you know pilots have access to and or rely on reports that came from many years ago that we cannot really check. And so I think that all the UFO and UAP supporters should fund a scientific mission experiment to monitor the earth"
},
{
"end_time": 7433.951,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7415.93,
"text": " Yeah, monitor those locations if you think that they are and basically if we see anything unusual it will be documented in a scientifically credible way rather than rely on those unoptimized reports that you know the images are always fuzzy it could be something in the instrument it could be"
},
{
"end_time": 7453.695,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7433.951,
"text": " Something else in the sky that is an optical illusion could be many things. So I would highly recommend doing a scientific credible scientific experiment and you know, it shouldn't be too expensive and it would save us a lot of time instead of discussing it. Let's just let we should let the evidence"
},
{
"end_time": 7476.613,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7454.036,
"text": " Yes, of course. Of course. I know you got to go. How do you, but how can we do that? Because I imagine that the UFOs are so small and they're so sporadic that to monitor the entire earth is not cheap. So how can conceivably that be done? You don't need the entire earth. You can just do it in the spots where detections were reported. And nowadays we have technologies that didn't exist decades ago. And"
},
{
"end_time": 7505.674,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7477.056,
"text": " Amjad Hussein had a couple questions that I wasn't able to get to during the interview, but I emailed Avi directly. And here's the exchange."
},
{
"end_time": 7534.991,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7505.981,
"text": " Professor Avi, are there aliens on earth, living, sharing the planet with us, in a non-electromagnetic realm, dimension, consciousness, like dark matter, energy, where we don't know their existence? And then he had another question, number two, do fundamental particles in nature have proto-consciousness, meaning that an electron feels its own intrinsic state of charge, spin, etc., does consciousness equal existence? Avi replied saying the answers to both questions are no, as far as we know scientifically."
},
{
"end_time": 7550.213,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7537.927,
"text": " Avi, you gotta go. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. It was a pleasure talking to you. It was a pleasure to answer all these questions and they were excellent questions, all of them. I enjoyed it very much."
}
]
}No transcript available.