From the Beginning to Now ｜ Lawrence Krauss ｜ EP 182 (SF_SwujfiYk)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SF_SwujfiYk

Hello everyone. I’m pleased today, really quite pleased to have Dr. Lawrence Krauss with me. He is an internationally known theoretical physicist, and I’ve wanted to talk to an internationally known theoretical physicist for about 30 years, whose research is focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, including the fundamental structure of matter and the evolution of the universe. Among his numerous important and interesting scientific contributions was his 1995 proposal that most of the energy of the universe resided in empty space. During his career, Professor Krauss has held endowed professorships and distinguished research appointments at major institutions all over the world, including Harvard, Yale and CERN. He is the author of 500 publications and 11 popular books, including the international bestsellers, The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. His most recent book, The Physics of Climate Change, was released in February of this year, 2021. He won a major award from all three of the US National Physics Societies, as well as the 2012 Public Service Award from the National Science Board for his contributions to the public understanding of science. He currently serves as president of the Origins Project Foundation, which celebrates science and culture by connecting scientists, artists, writers and celebrities with the public through special events, online discussions and unique travel opportunities. The Foundation produces the Origins podcast, featuring dialogues with some of the most interesting people in the world, discussing issues that address the global challenges of the 21st century. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. It’s great to be with you virtually, Jordan. Okay, so I have a question and I’m going to jump right into it. I wrote a paper with a couple of my students. I was the final author on the paper. We tried to relate the experience of anxiety to a physical property, to entropy, which I suppose might be well defined as a physical property. The idea was, so you tell me what you think of this as a physicist, if you would. Okay. The idea was that human beings are always trying to calculate a path from one point to another. And the length of the path is going to be proportionate in some sense to the energy used to undertake the task. Right. The longer the path, the more energy. Now, we generally take a path to something that we regard as valuable and sources of energy, for example, are extremely valuable to us. And so that might be a shortcut to doing some work because that’s translatable into goods. Anyways, the cost of the voyage is an important consideration. And so whenever uncertainty is added to a plan, it becomes more and more difficult to formulate a map that lays out the trajectory appropriately. And you need a marker for that, a psychological marker. And so we assume that as the certainty of the path that you’re going to take, given a particular reward, as the uncertainty of that increase, you experience this unease. And the unease was a marker of the increased complexity. So and that would be the increased entropy in some sense of either of the landscape or of your representation of the landscape or maybe of the disjunction between the two. So the first question I would have is, is I guess, first of all, was that a comprehensible explanation? And second of all, is that a reasonable way of construing entropy? Well, yeah. Okay. The answer is it’s not unreasonable in a general sense. I do wear, I’m very wary. I remember, you know, when I was a kid, actually in Canada, and I took, I remember I was always interested in science, but in university I took sociology. And I remember becoming fascinated at the time by various sociologists’ attempts to define concepts, borrow from physics to define concepts. And I thought, wow, this is fascinating. As I got to know more physics, I became more wary of that application because certain things that are well defined and appropriate in physical context become less well defined and perhaps have less utility. They sound good in a social science paper, but whether they actually allow predictive value is the important question. Right. And so that’s exactly why I’m asking the question is because I’m aware of that problem. And that’s I wanted to see if there’s some bedrock there. Well, you know, I think that there, it’s, I think you’ve got something in a sense that in physics, actually in different contexts, there’s trade offs between energy and entropy and different and, and, and, and they’re well defined thermodynamic quantities that, that, that are defined depending upon what you hold fixed and what, and what you don’t and how the system evolves, whether it evolved to assist, assist, situation of least energy or less energy. Which depends on or enthalpy, which, which includes that entropy aspect depends upon the specific circumstances of the physical situation. But that, that the complexity of a path is not just the complexity of the path, but the complexity of the path. And I think that’s the point that I’m trying to make. And maybe it’s probably useful for your listeners who may not be as aware of entropy as you are that what it really describes is a macroscopic system has many different types of And entropy really just describes how many internal states a system has for a given macroscopic configuration of say temperature and overall energy. You know, a single particle in a box may have a restricted configuration, but the atoms in my body and your body can be in very many different configurations and still be at the same temperature. So there’s a lot of entropy associated with, with a, with a macroscopic object. And the more, if you wish, the more internal possibilities that a system has to explore within the confines of some external parameter that’s restricting it, like the total energy of the system or its heat content or, or, or some other aspect for its volume. The more internal configurations a system has to explore, the bigger its entropy. So, okay. So I was thinking, for example, I’ll give you a narrative example. It’s actually apropos because my car did break down today. But when you’re in your car and you’re driving along, you’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. You’re in a car. And if you’re driving along and everything is going according to your desires and expectations, then you’re generally in a low anxiety state. But then imagine that the car emits an unexpected noise and starts to buck. Now, one of the things I’ve proposed is that at that point, you’re actually no longer in a car. And that’s why you get upset because the car is actually functionally described as a category. The car is something that gets you from point A to B. And as long as it’s performing that function, then that category was a very low resolution category. That category suffices. But as soon as something goes wrong, same thing happens when your computer does something you don’t want it to. There’s so many different states that that thing could be in that your body signals that, that emergent complexity. And it signals the fact that you can no longer compute the cost of being where you are. And, you know, there’s fantasies that are associated with that that seem like attempts to map it, right? Like this could be wrong. This could be wrong. I might go to a crooked mechanic. I might get ripped off. I might not be able to fix this car. Maybe I can’t afford it. I won’t get to work. Like the whole the whole panoply of possibility expands very, very suddenly. And that produces an intense physiological response, which it should do. I mean, we should have physiological responses to fundamental physical realities. We should. Most of us ignore them. And I think that’s the point. The physiological response you’re talking about is real. But in fact, when the car is operating well, all of those possibilities also exist. You just block them out of your mind. I mean, because well, that’s but that’s an interesting thing, too, right? Because but it’s appropriate in some sense. We were trying to understand to some degree the conditions under which it’s appropriate to block them under out of your mind. And it’s something like as long as your predictions, but they’re based on your desires, but we won’t get into that. As long as your predictions match the ongoing flow of events, then you can take all of the presuppositions that order things for granted. I mean, I agree with you completely that all those things could be going wrong at any time. The same is true of the complexity of your body. Right. It isn’t necessarily the case that just because you feel good right now, you’re going to feel good the next moment. And there’s an endless number of things that can go wrong. But it’s also not helpful to be aware of all of those possibilities if they’re not likely to happen. So it isn’t exactly that you ignore them. It’s that you assume their functional significance is zero as long as your plan is operative. And well, yeah, but I think, you know, it goes back to maybe human reason being the slave of passion. I think the point is we we you’re right. It’s it’s not worthwhile assuming all the negative things that can happen. If it did, you wouldn’t do anything. Right. If you want to take any action, if you assume all the negative things that could result from it, you probably wouldn’t act at all. One of the things that I think we do and one of the problems we have as a society, in fact, it’s related to even my last book, is that is that we tend one of the things that science does, which I think is so useful, is it quantifies uncertainty. And certainty is a central part of science. And often too often journalists and other people talk about uncertainty as if it’s a bad thing. In science, it’s actually a very good thing because we can say we can define we can quantitatively say how accurate our result is or how how likely or unlikely a bunch of possibilities are. I think psychologically and that I would say that’s an anxiety reduction phenomena. I mean, when you enter into a contract, you’re doing that with someone too, because what you’re saying is, well, I could be any number of possibilities, but contractually, I’ll limit myself to this manifestation. And that can make you calm and it can make us able to cooperate. And so I think that it’s not only a scientific theory that provides that function. It’s a science would be a subset of practical theory and practical theories. They’re very useful exactly for that reason. They are. But I think I personally think more people could be I think it would be a better it would help people if they accepted the existence of uncertainty most in a more open way. I think we we people are afraid of of uncertainty. And I think if we, you know, including death and the universe and all sorts of other things we may talk about and I think accepting it as a realistic likelihood is a is a healthy thing because again, it relates to some extent to some of the I think social problems that are happening now of kids being coddled. If you accept that bad things can happen, then when you do any, you know, it’s part of living, then you won’t be so anxious when they do. I think you won’t be so fearful of that. Okay. Yeah, your car can break down, but the world isn’t over. You know, there’s a whole series of other activities you can take place that will allow the world to go on that will allow you to continue to function. But recognizing it, recognizing at some level a spectrum of possibilities in advance, in my opinion, and I’m not a psychologist, but my opinion, certainly personally, I find it psychologically helpful. Well, you do. It is definitely the case that that’s promoted among psychologists. I mean, behavioral psychologists. You may imagine that one thing you want is a theoretical configuration that encapsulates uncertainty. That’s a belief system, let’s say, and you measure it by its functional utility. Does it allow you to to acquire what you desire when you act it out? But you need a codicil along with that, which is well, what do you do when your theory goes wrong? And one of the answers that’s been provided to that question from the behavioral perspective, it’s coded in narrative as well, though, is. Approach uncertainty voluntarily and cautiously. Don’t avoid it. And that triggers another mechanism, which is the capacity to explore, to generate new theories, to select among them, especially in collaboration with other people and to regenerate your pre-existing models. So you need the model and you need a system for updating the model. And I see you see that expressed in pretty formally in science, in the scientific technique. Oh, it’s a central part of the scientific method. And I would also argue in business and many other areas of human activity that people don’t realize. What I try and convince people of, they don’t realize that scientists actually really like to be wrong. At least, you know, and whether personally they do is a different question. But the process of science, it’s exciting to be wrong because it means there’s more to learn. First of all, it might mean you discovered something. It means it often means you’ve discovered something. And one of the things, you know, I was chairman of a physics department for a long time and and then we started a program, a master’s degree in physics entrepreneurship, which the business school dean said was an oxymoron. But I don’t think so, because I think scientists and business people are very similar because often what I realize we don’t do well enough for children, for students or whatever, is teach them how to fail effectively. We give them problem sets that they’re guaranteed that have direct answers and they can get the correct. We even give them PhDs where they’re more or less guaranteed to at least come to some conclusion. But in the real world of research and business and many other things, you may find that you have to learn how well the question I was asking was really not a good question. How can I use what I’ve already accumulated to nevertheless provide me something useful, maybe ask a different question and go around? Training to fail effectively, namely to find that the thing you were trying to show is wrong. But nevertheless, the process by which you discover that is very useful and can be useful somewhere else is a central part of science. But I actually think it’s probably very useful again in real life. And I think most business people, you know, when I learned about entrepreneurs, I asked the physicists who become entrepreneurs what they hadn’t learned. And it was just that how to fail effectively, because often startups, you know, well-known entrepreneurs have a three or four or five startups that have failed before they get to where they’re going. And I think but it’s the same of any researcher in your research, I’m sure, as in mine. There have been many false starts, many, many roadblocks, many times when you just discover, hey, this problem is really not amenable to being solved. But maybe I can ask a slightly different question. So I think being aware, being less anxious of the fact that your planned trajectory is not going to go where you took it is actually a wonderful part of life. As a as a again, as a scientist, I often say when I write, you know, you probably have this problem, too. You know, you write grant proposals and you write some fiction of what you’re going to be studying in three years. And my I always say that if I’m really doing what I thought I was going to be doing in three years, it’s pretty boring because what I really hope will happen is I’ll be looking at something completely different because some new discovery will have come up either from the outside world of experiment or from something I’m doing. Well, is it reasonable to ask you, can you remember times when that specifically happened in your career where you had to reconfigure and you discovered something that was worthwhile as a consequence of it? Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s hard to imagine when it hasn’t happened in some sense. I think the well, let me give you an example. The the one you mentioned, the discovery that the energy of empty space is the dominant energy of the universe. I was. Look, I was studying cosmology and of course, and the amazing thing about cosmology is it’s over the last 30 years turned from or 40 years from an art to a science. You know, I think people used to say cosmologists were never right, but never in doubt. And and and and but wonderfully what’s happened because science is an empirical discipline is that all new whole new data sets were coming on new machines and new telescopes, which were allowing you to make precision tests of the universe and therefore derive models that could be disproved, which is really the central part of science. And when I was trying to understand that, and I’ve been working on on the subject called dark matter for many years, how to detect it, the fact that most of the mass in our galaxy and all galaxies appears to not shine. And and now we’re reasonably certain it’s made of some elementary particle that’s different than the particles that make you and I up. It’s a fascinating thing, and I’ve spent a lot of my career thinking about it. But one of the reasons we became confident that that was the case that these particles, this dark matter was not made of protons and neutrons and the same stuff as you and I was because we built cosmological models. And we found that if this dark matter was just snowballs or you know, or something that you couldn’t see, then plugging them into our models, you couldn’t get a universe that looked like what we look like today. Starting from a hot Big Bang, you couldn’t form galaxies. There wasn’t enough time. And so dark matter, it turns out if dark matter doesn’t interact with light, it’s easier for it to collapse early on in the history of the universe. And that gives a jumpstart to galaxies and etc, etc, etc. So we’re trying to come up with a model that really was in agreement with observation. The problem was the observations ultimately weren’t in agreement with that model. And so the question then becomes, do you know, what do you do? And so I was reasonably convinced at the time that the reason that was the case that some of the observations are wrong, which is also something very important to realize in science is that if there are many different observations, likely some of them are wrong. And again, too often journalists don’t hit on that fact. You know, they concentrate on this one exciting observation, which is likely to be wrong. And when it’s later on shown to be wrong, they never report on it. And that’s part of the problem. But so I basically was convinced that some of these key observations were wrong because they’re very difficult. And so somewhat heretically, I made this proposal. I looked with it was a colleague of mine at University of Chicago and I spent a year or two looking at at all the data and saying how could it be consistent with with with what we with dark matter and and and what would be required. And the answer was, if none of the observations are wrong, then it looks to us and look to me at the time like you’d have to have most of the energy in the universe reside in literally nothing because it observations weren’t consistent with the picture otherwise. And I was convinced at the time that the reason I was doing that was so that people could focus on which observations were wrong. And so they could see that because the result because the proposition was so ridiculous that empty space actually weighs something. You get rid of all the particles and radiation, everything that’s there. And yet empty space weighs something that seems so crazy that surely it’s wrong. And there must be something else to violate the very presupposition that enables us to identify mass. I mean, mass by definition appears to be something. Well, mass, but mass is different than energy. And and energy and and if you put energy in empty space, it’s very and Einstein realized this. If you put energy in empty space, it behaves very differently than it does. If you put energy in matter like particles. In fact, what general relativity tells us is that mass isn’t the key part that produces gravity. It’s energy. So there’s this relationship between energy and gravity and energy in different forms produces different types of gravitational attraction. And in fact, that’s relevant to the history of the universe. Early on in the history of the universe, most of the energy in the universe resided in radiation, hot stuff like particles of light moving at the speed of light. They gravitate very differently than if most of the energy in the universe resides in planets or galaxies, you know, matter that’s saying so. And so the expansion of the universe, which is gravity’s response to to the presence of energy, is different early on in the history of the universe when it’s dominated by radiation. Is that is that one of the things that contributes to the rapid inflation at the beginning? Well, in fact, it’s not quite you’re almost there. It turns out rapid inflation happens if at very early times in the history of the universe empty space gets energy empty because it turns out if for some reason you you. Empty space gets stuck and somehow it possesses energy, even if in the case of inflation, eventually it’s going to release it in a hot Big Bang. If that energy gets stuck in empty space, empty space carries with it this property we call energy that energy is gravitationally repulsive, not attractive. That’s the key difference between energy when you put it in matter and when you put it in nothing. OK, so you said you said a couple of things that I want to follow up on. OK, sure. And maybe you can take us back. So you said in the last 25 years that cosmology has transformed itself from an art to a science. And so maybe you could tell us the science. Let’s go back to the beginning. That’s 14 billion years and walk through it. And because I’m sure that while I certainly don’t understand the role of dark matter or anything about dark matter, and I kind of had some sense of what the current cosmological theories were 20 years ago, but I really don’t know what they are now. So let’s go back 14 billion years and start at the beginning. Sure, we’ll try and spend less than 14 million years in describing it. But OK, by the way, let before we get there, let me just end the last story by saying we made this crazy proposal because we’re sure the experiments are wrong. It turned out the experiments are right and the craziness was true. And no one was more surprised by it than me that this proposal that the energy of empty space dominates the energy universe was right. It was just incredibly surprising. It was so surprising. Eventually, the observers who who confirmed that fact won the Nobel Prize 10 year 11 years later. Well, in your book, the greatest story ever told so far, you document a large number of cases where theoretical physicists were driven to posit something they regarded as completely absurd because it seemed to fit the data, assuming that something was wrong and were later shown to be right, even though they wouldn’t necessarily accept that themselves. Yeah, exactly. In fact, in fact, one of the one of the founders of quantum mechanics, a Dirac, who was a very interesting man, psychologically, among other things, once said his equation was smarter than he was because he developed this equation and he predicted this new particle in nature, antimatter. And he didn’t believe it. And he said it was equation and turned out to be true. But anyway, let’s let’s go back to the beginning. And and well, when we go back to the beginning, this is an important difference between in my mind, science and say religion. When I go back to being, I go back to as far as I can extrapolate my understanding of the laws of physics back before that almost anything goes and science we can make and part of my job as a theoretical physicist was make speculations, but to recognize that they were just that and look for signatures that might suggest whether those speculations were right or wrong. So, for example, actually wrote a book called Adam, which takes you back to the for an individual oxygen atom from the beginning of the universe to the end, one that’s in your glass of water that you’re drinking right now or somewhere during this podcast. And I took it back to not t equals zero, because literally, we don’t know what happened at t equals zero, because the laws of physics, as we understand the breakdown, because the universe, if we extrapolate it back, our universe becomes infinitely dense. And that seems crazy. And the laws of gravity don’t work with quantum mechanics. So we really can talk a lot about it. But we it’s not more than talk, in my opinion, right now. But but very shortly thereafter. After that time, the there’s no reason to suspect that the current laws of physics don’t describe what happened in the history of the universe. And again, so as soon as it comes into being the laws come into being as well. Yeah, well, in fact, in the universe or nothing, I suggested that’s certainly a possibility. Maybe they pre existed, maybe they don’t those that you know, those are metaphysical questions. But, but what I did show in that book, which is fascinating to me and the fact that 30 years ago, we wouldn’t even been able to ask the question, much less answer it is that it’s quite likely that our universe could and did spontaneously arise out of nothing, no space, no time, and maybe no laws. And if you ask, what would be the properties of the universe today, 14 billion years later, that arose from nothing spontaneously without any supernatural shenanigans, the properties of that universe would be precisely the properties of the universe we observe. Now, that doesn’t prove that’s the case. That just makes it plausible. But to me, that’s a fascinating thing. And again, we never 30 years ago, we didn’t have the tools to even in some sense, ask that question. But very We’re still estimating the birth of about 14 billion years ago. 13.8. Yeah, 13. Now, if you actually look at the numbers, which we can measure, we now know that number 13.8 to an accuracy of, you know, plus or minus of maybe a few 100 million years or two 13.75, I think is the most recent number. And it’s amazing. The fact that you can get beyond one decimal place in cosmology is just remarkable. And I really it really is a testament to the developments. When I was even a young assistant professor at Yale. I remember talking to an older colleague who said that nature would always conspire so that we could never measure the fundamental quantities of the universe better than within a factor of two, because that’s always been the case up to that point. Every time someone claimed to have a better measurement, you’d go out and look at astrophysical uncertainties and realize it was wrong. And now we’re talking about measuring things to four or five or six decimal places. It’s really, it’s, it’s, it’s really a transformation and one we’re celebrating, which is what I tried to do in that book. But the early picture that the fact that we evolved from a Big Bang is it is not in dispute. Let me make that clear. The Big Bang happened just like the just like evolution happened and the earth is round and all the other things we know. There’s no doubt that we be that the early history of the universe was a hot Big Bang. Now. So, and in fact, everything we now see all, you know, every, all the galaxies we now see and all the particles in those galaxies, the 100 billion stars in each galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies, all of that material was contained in a region smaller than the size of a single atom. And that’s just so okay. Let me ask you a question about that. Sure. I mean, is it reasonable to conceptualize the universe in a way that it’s not a single atom? I mean, is it reasonable to conceptualize something like that as having a size? Because we’re, we’re considering size within the universe. And it’s almost when you say that the universe at the beginning had a size, it’s like it was an object in a universe that had a size. Let me so really good question and I should be clear in my language. The universe could be infinite. I want to ask as a physicist and Wheeler would have liked this Einstein certainly that operational questions. I don’t know how big the universe is, whether it’s in for not. But what I do know is how big is the visible universe. So if I ask you how big was the region which now comprises the visible universe today at an earlier time that that has a good that’s that’s well defined that region the size of an atom could have existed in a universe which is infinite. Even then there could have been it could have been an infinitely dense universe that was infinitely big. Okay. So all we can ask and this is really a big change also from when I was a student. We know because we used to when I was a kid or when I even a student we talk about universe and universe would mean everything. A kind of ill defined quantity everything what is the heck is everything. Now we’re much more well defined. We say our universe a good definition of our universe is that region with which we could have interacted in the past. And with which we will be able to interact into the future even if the future is infinitely long and that may not be everything right that could be just a small region of a much bigger thing which we now call a multiverse. So so it’s reasonable to describe our universe as that region into which we could have had causal contact namely which which cause could have produced effect right and if there’s any region outside of it which we can never affect or be affected by. That’s might as well not be considered part of our universe right distance that causal causally interactable distance that’s defined or limited by the speed of light the speed of light and the age of the universe. So for example in the early history of the universe that’s called the horizon in analogy with the earth when you look out at the earth you can you know when it curves you can only see out to a certain distance and and we call the causal horizon that region with which light could have traveled to interact with us since the beginning of time. And obviously that’s the universe as far as we’re concerned because nothing outside of that can affect us in any way. Exactly so operationally it’s a much better definition of the universe to be that which we can be causally affected by and so and and and because that that changes with time that’s that’s what is our observable universe changes with time and we’ll get to it because things have changed a lot in in the last few years. Does that mean that our are the universe that causally affects us is we’re at the center of it? No well we’re well actually yes and no we’re always at the center of our own universe right I mean psychologically and physically. Well but because of the causality argument that you just laid out it seems to imply that there’s a lot of causality in the universe. Well it certainly does in the sense that if you want to think of it and that this is one of the confusions that many confusions which I may add to during this podcast but we’ll try not to is that you know when we look out at this thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation it’s a residual radiation that’s going to affect us. And it comes from a sphere if you wish that’s located with us at the center because it it it early on in history you know we’re not going to be able to see the whole universe in a single light. We’re going to be able to see the whole universe in a single light. We’re going to be able to see the whole universe in a single light. We’re going to be able to see the whole universe in a single light. We’re going to be able to see the whole universe in a single light. We’re going to be able to see the whole universe in a single light. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that’s why I say that it’s important to think about the cosmic microwave background radiation. And that meant that that radiation, which was kind of trapped early on when the universe was 300,000 years old, And that meant that that radiation, which was kind of trapped early on when the universe was 300,000 years old, could suddenly travel freely through the universe without really interacting. And when we look out, basically we see space and the light could travel and travel and travel. And when we look out, basically we see space and the light could travel and travel and travel. But we’re looking back further in time when we look out. And if we look out in that direction, back to a time when the universe was 300,000 years old, we’re looking at the wall, if you wish, because we can’t see before that time, because the light couldn’t have propagated out, just like it can’t propagate out through a wall. Only from the surface of the wall can we see it. And of course, so when I look at the microwave background from Earth, I’m looking, if you wish, at the sphere located almost 13, well, actually it’s because the expansion of the universe is more than, it’s about 26 billion light years in each direction, because the universe has expanded during the time that the light has been traveling. That complexity. We’re looking at a sphere located a certain, let’s say, 10 to 20 billion light years away from us in all directions, and we literally can’t see beyond that. But the sphere we’re looking at depends upon where we are. So that if we were doing the same experiment on an intelligent species in another galaxy located 100 million light years away, literally the cosmic microwave background that they would see would be slightly different. Because it’d be a sphere centered on a different place. And that’s why, actually, the predictions we can make in some sense as cosmologists are somewhat statistical. Because we’re talking about a thermal distribution and galaxies and lots of disorder, and so the picture, and we’ve taken pictures of the microwave background, it’s won at least two Nobel prizes for those pictures, the picture that we see has statistical properties, to those observed by another observer 100 million light years away. But the specifics, the hot spots and the cold spots would be different. Because they’d be looking at a different slice of a statistical distribution. Okay, so that does, correct me if I’m wrong, that does seem to imply that the universe is a globe around us, let’s say. Our visible universe. Our visible universe, sorry, I want to be precise with my words too. So I move halfway across the universe and the globe is still there, but now it’s shifted that far, and so then I could move another halfway and it would shift again, so this globe moves with the observer, so to speak. And that certainly seems to imply that it extends beyond the globe that we see, because if you move, it moves. Exactly, and it wouldn’t if there was some edge, but there’s no evidence of any edge, okay? I think that the point is that even before the weirdness of empty space and inflation, we was recognized that the part of the universe we see is unlikely to be everything there is. We’re limited in what we can see because of what’s seeable, just like being on Earth. And it’s limited because of the speed of light and the age of the universe, and the way the universe was constituted in certain stages. And the way it’s expanded ever since. Let me throw in a wrinkle, if that was clear, now let me muddy it. Because it used to be, again, sensible, even in my early years as a scientist, that we’d assume the older the universe, the longer we live, the older the universe is, the more we’ll be able to see, right? And now, a little further, the universe is expanding, but we thought at the time that that expansion was slowing down, and therefore the longer we wait, the more we’ll see, because light from further and further objects can get to us. What’s really crazy now is because we recognize that apparently empty space is dominating the energy of the universe, that’s causing the universe to expand ever faster, faster and faster and faster, and what it means is, there are parts of the universe that are literally escaping from our sight, there are parts of the universe that we will never be able to see, and moreover, even more so, there are parts of our universe that we could see now that if we were a civilization that developed five billion years from now in real telescopes, that we couldn’t see then, because regions of the universe are eventually moving away from us faster than the speed of light and are now invisible, so the longer we wait, the less we’ll see because more and more galaxies will be literally disappearing behind the horizon the longer we wait. I wrote some papers about that and once a Scientific American article, and I think some of my books, that eventually, the far future of the universe, I know we said we’d start out of the past, but the far future is kind of poetic, because up till about 1925 the picture of the universe was quite natural based on observation, one galaxy, we saw one galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, and beyond that it was assumed to be eternal, empty, dark space that just was static and Edwin Hubble, who was famous for discovering the universe was expanding did something before that, in 1925, he first realized that in fact there were other galaxies, that these things called nebulae in our galaxy with the new 100 inch telescope of Mount Wilson could be discerned and be seen as other island universes, so already that was a revolution in our picture of the universe, suddenly our galaxy wasn’t all there was, there were other galaxies and then of course later on he discovered the expansion of the universe, the interesting thing is that observers who evolve, and there will still be stars and say even up to 10 trillion years from now, there will probably still be stars in existence, and you can imagine planets around those stars and intelligent life evolving on those planets, and astronomers would look out from our galaxy, at that time it will be a very different looking galaxy because the Andromeda galaxy will have collided with it and all sorts of things will happen but they’d look out, and the interesting thing is, all other galaxies would have disappeared behind the horizon by then, so observers 10 trillion years from now will think they live in the universe, we thought we lived in 1925 a universe with one galaxy, and there will be no evidence that the universe is expanding no direct evidence, because the galaxies that are now markers that we can measure their motion away from us, they’ll have disappeared, and even it turns out the causing microwave background will have become invisible by that time which is another bit of evidence for the Big Bang, and while some really smart scientists may come up with some pictures to say, well really I can understand what we’re seeing if we assume our universe began in the Big Bang, observationally, basically all the current observational markers of an expanding universe will have disappeared and poetically in the far future they’ll think we lived in the mistaken universe we thought we lived in in 1925, because again, it’s kind of interesting conventional wisdom in 1925, scientifically was that the universe was static and eternal, and you may know that it was actually a Jesuit priest who was also a physicist, who first really suggested the Big Bang and when it was later shown to be true, for a while the Catholic Church got quite excited, because they argued that here was observational evidence that there was a beginning to the universe as they’d been arguing, it doesn’t provide any such evidence for the universe they discussed but it was an interesting fact that science, the model was that the universe was more or less static and eternal on large scales, and it was completely wrong and you might say, and this is where people often write to me, they say well how do we know our current model isn’t completely wrong and the answer is, then there was no data, basically, and one of the biggest misconceptions about science and scientific revolutions, in particular revolutions in physics, is the misconception that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before them they’re more like Piagetian revolutions, right? yeah, well in fact I would argue that even political revolutions never do away with everything that went before them, but in this case, they certainly don’t and I can’t say that the fact that they survived the test of experiment before that revolution remains completely true, Newton’s laws of gravity and motion may have been subsumed in quantum mechanics of relativity, but if I hold a ball up now it’ll fall just as well as described, and I can describe a cannonball, I can even for the most part calculate how astronauts are going to go into orbit without needing anything beyond Newton. Yeah, the developmental psychologist Piaget studied Kuhn’s scientific revolutions, and his objection essentially to the restructuring, the new structure incorporates all of the knowledge of the old one plus some new knowledge, so it can be revolutionary, but it still subsumes it exactly, and that’s exactly what happens in science so we have a lot of data with which we can test ideas, and I’m certain that there’s much more we don’t know about the universe than we do what people don’t realize, or don’t give credit to, is that there’s a lot we do understand, and any new picture, a new understanding will not be able to disagree with the observational evidence that the universe is expanding, that there’s a hot cosmic microwave background, all the things we now have discovered that we didn’t know about in 1925, and so whatever our picture is of the beginning of time, or the end of time in a hundred years, may be very different, but we know, we’re not going to ever say that the age of the universe is no longer 13.7 billion years old, you know, that’s going to remain true. What happened at the beginning could be completely revolutionarily different, and what happened, if you want to think about before the beginning, if it even makes sense to describe it before, and it may not make sense, because time itself could have originated… Well, let me ask you about that for a second Okay? Sure, sure. Well, I thought a lot about time a long time ago, and it struck me that time is, we mark time by change and so then I thought, well, why not dispense with time as a concept, if we mark it by change time is average change. If nothing changes there’s no time. So if there’s nothing happening, there’s no time there’s no before that time, there’s an event, and then if there’s no event till the next event, there’s no duration between those two things, if there’s only that event and the next event. So, I mean, is there any reason to assume that there’s anything about time that is independent of change? Well, you know, that’s obviously a very deep question and a lot of people spend a lot of time on time, I think far too much time talking about time In physics, time and space are not different. They’re both, if you wish, parameters that simply describe when events happen and where they happen and that’s it. And it turns out that that’s the playing field on which the laws of nature play out the playing field happens to be in space-time. And time is no different than space in principle, except in fact, in practice, time seems very different than space. We can go backwards in space, but it’s not clear we can go backwards in time and that’s caused a lot of people, a lot of philosophers and then physicists, a lot of problems and a lot of mental gymnastics but even but you could argue that time is a parameter and I could replace that parameter by some other parameter that is equivalent to time and you could say that that parameter was change like the parameter you talk about. And then if there’s no change then you’d say, okay, well that’s you could say that that parameter isn’t changing and you call that time. There’s changes happening all the time at the microscopic level and that’s the time that’s different. I mean, there’s an indefinite number of changes and so statistically you can extract out an average from that and you can experience that as duration and you can define that as time but if there isn’t anything there except one event and then the next event well that’s it. There’s no time there. There’s an event and then there’s the next event. Well, that’s where I disagree with you, I guess. That’s why we refine it. Because if there’s no time happening then time isn’t a relevant concept but to some extent it’s space and to some extent it’s physics because really what we’re interested in is describing the process of events, in particular the prediction of events and that process of going from event to event is parameterized by a useful quantity called time but if nothing’s happening, you’re right, it’s completely arbitrary but then we wouldn’t be having this conversation because nothing would be happening. So in a universe in which nothing was happening there would be no time but there’d be no reason to talk about it either. Alright, so back to the beginning. Now, my understanding I don’t understand why there is something once something is created because as far as I could tell and I don’t think I was disabused of this notion I finished reading the greatest story I ever told so far this week why weren’t there equal amounts of matter and antimatter produced at the beginning so they just disappeared everything just disappeared. That’s a good question Does that have anything to do with uncertainty with the fact that there isn’t, I’m wondering if there wasn’t equal numbers produced Well, look, the point is that we don’t have an answer to that question and by the way I think that’s really important as a scientist and too few people journalists always want answers and people are always disappointed when they say we don’t know but I think it’s probably one of the most important things that we and parents and teachers should get more used to saying because it means there’s more to discover and that’s wonderful so the answer is we really don’t, it’s one of the biggest, it’s questions that’s really provoked much of the field of research that I’ve been involved in since I was a student I remember Steven Weinberg wrote about it when I was a graduate student and got me interested in the whole subject. We now know that we live in a universe that’s made of matter. We try and measure antimatter and there’s miniscule amounts of it and we think most of it’s caused by high energy collisions between particles and cosmic rays. As far as we can see, and there are real tests we can do for a while people thought maybe we lived in a universe that had equal amounts of matter and antimatter and they were separated, you know, there were matter regions and antimatter regions but it turns out there are tests you can do to test that and all of those tests demonstrate that as far as we can tell that there are no, that the universe is made of matter, not antimatter. Which again is arbitrary because of course if we lived in a universe made of antimatter we’d call it matter and you know and there’d be anti-lovers living in anti-cars, sitting in anti-cars, making anti-love and all the rest it wouldn’t be different for the most part. But the paradox here is at early times the universe is very very hot and when it’s so hot one of the central parts of relativity is that energy can turn into matter and matter can turn into energy. So particles of light with enough energy can collide together and produce particles of matter. But when they do that, if they have enough energy, since antimatter and matter have exactly the same mass, particles that collide will produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter. If two photons at very high energy, and they don’t collide very easily, but if they do they’ll produce particles and antiparticles in equal numbers partly because of the conservation of charge, right? The photon doesn’t have any charge and therefore whatever comes out of the collision has to have no charge, so if it produces an electron it’ll have to have a positron. All those interactions, elementary particle interactions don’t really distinguish between matter and antimatter and therefore at very early times, if you were a creator if you were creating a universe and it was very hot and dense the most reasonable thing would be for it to have equal parts of matter and antimatter. But somehow, so that’s the reasonable assumption for the beginning of time, that the universe had equal amounts of matter and antimatter and a very hot, dense plasma. How do we get to a universe that just has matter? Well, that is the interesting question. And it turns out by the way, and I know you’re interested in what you would call Soviet things, you like the art and everything else, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn… No, I collect it, I don’t know if I like it. Yeah, okay, you collect it. But I do collect it. But Andrei Sakharov was a very famous physicist who was actually probably the father of their hydrogen bomb but he was also, as you know, won the Nobel Peace Prize because he became a dissident. Interestingly enough, one of his major, well, in retrospect one of his major contributions to science was he actually asked in, I think it was 1967, well before any of the physics actually allowed any of the, he came up with three criteria by which a universe that started out with equal amounts of matter and antimatter could evolve into a universe which just had matter. They’re called the Sakharov conditions. And there are three of them. One is that you have to depart from thermal equilibrium. Because if you’re in thermal equilibrium, everything remains the same. So nothing’s going to happen, right? Thermal equilibrium like the air in this room. Okay, so there’s a place where uncertainty seems to be relevant because if the principle of uncertainty holds, you wouldn’t have thermal equilibrium. You’d have unavoidable variation. Well, no, but you have thermal, well, you do have local thermal, in thermal equilibrium in this room, there’s local variations. The thing about thermal equilibrium is and you’re right, in fact, what you just said there is right. Normally we talk about thermal equilibrium being a global thing. But we can also talk about microscopic equilibrium. And there are variations, but what happens is that in thermal equilibrium, one particle turns into another particle, you know, a collision, but an equal number of collisions happen in the opposite direction. So there’s lots of things happening, but they’re all happening in equal opposite ways so that no global properties are changing. Okay? And certainly the amount of matter in the universe is a global property. Okay? So thermal equilibrium, but you, okay. The second is that you have to have some physical process that tells the difference between particles of matter and antimatter. Okay? Because if the physical processes don’t tell the difference then nothing is going to start a situation that has equal numbers and change it to a situation that has unequal numbers. Okay? This property is called, it happens to be, the laws of physics that tell you matter and antimatter, the laws of physics are the same for matter and antimatter, are related to two symmetries of nature. Something called charge, conjugation, and variance, which tells you that positive and negative, there’s no difference between positive and negative, it’s just an arbitrary thing. And it turns out there’s no difference between left and right. Okay? If the laws of physics at a microscopic level obey both of those properties, then the laws of physics will not distinguish between matter and antimatter. Only if that’s violated, that’s called CP, charge and parity, only if CP is violated, can you, by some microscopic physical law, can you evolve from a system with an equal number of particles and antiparticles to one that has one. And the third is something called what we call it baryon numbered on conservation, but basically matter is made of protons, okay? And you know, electrons are obviously protons and electrons that wake up atoms, but electrons are very little mass, most of the mass in your body is protons and neutrons, they’re called baryons, okay? And clearly, if you want to end up with a universe full of protons and neutrons, and more protons and neutrons if you wish than antiprotons and antineutrons, then there has to be some process that makes protons when there weren’t protons to begin with. So that’s thermal equilibrium, CP, violation of thermal equilibrium, violation of CP invariance, and some process that violates what are called baryon number, that, okay? And he wrote those down, and what’s amazing is at the time he wrote them down, the laws of physics obeyed thermal equilibrium, the universe, obeyed CP and obeyed baryon number, so there is no evidence that you could ever do that. And what’s been remarkable is that over the last 50 years or so, is as we’ve studied the microscopic laws of physics, we’ve discovered both that CP is violated by microscopic laws, and we’ve discovered processes that could have happened in the early universe that would violate that thermal equilibrium, that nice general, what you call adiabatic expansion of the universe, there could have been abrupt processes during which the universe departed from thermal equilibrium by natural processes that we could describe, in fact we know there were some of them, we know, if you read my book, we know, for example, now that the two forces of nature, electromagnetism and the weak interaction that now appear very different, early on in the history of the universe actually represented two different sides of the same coin, they were really part of a single more unified force, okay? The point where the universe cooled down enough so that suddenly electromagnetism began to behave differently than the weak interaction, as the universe cooled down and things suddenly began to behave differently, that’s what we call a phase transition. And phase transitions are places where you can depart from thermal equilibrium, right? I think, I don’t know if I use the example in the book, and I grew up in Canada, so the example is beer, but if you have a party, a beer party, and you forget to put beer in the refrigerator, you put it in the freezer, and then you forget that you put it in the freezer, and the next day you take it out of the freezer, and it’s frozen solid, I mean, it’s not frozen solid, it’s still liquid, but you take off the top, and suddenly it freezes instantaneously and the bottle breaks, that’s a phase transition, because when the beer was being held under high pressure, it wasn’t at a low temperature, it wasn’t really in thermal equilibrium, when you opened it up, then it could suddenly go into thermal equilibrium, and the preferred state to be in in thermal equilibrium was ice, and suddenly boom, it’d break it, so phase transitions are points where you can violate, you can depart from thermal equilibrium momentarily, before the transition completes. So there’s a theoretical explanation for how the anti-matter matter… Well the point is there’s no one theoretical explanation, but we now know all the parts, the Sakuraba components, exist, but we don’t have any good model that puts them all together. We thought we did in the 1980s when I was at Harvard, we thought there were, even before that, when I was doing my PhD at MIT, we thought there was a model called Grand Unification, it all looked like it was falling together, and we thought we had the answer to everything, and it turned out the experiment told us that those pictures are not quite right. There’s a host of possible ways of starting out with a universe that has equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and we’re beginning up with a universe that has unequal amounts, but we don’t know if any of the proposals that we’ve now made are correct. And if history is any guide, my feeling always is the most likely answer is one we don’t yet have. I mean I’ve written papers, lots of models that can make that happen, but nature probably isn’t smart enough to use any of the models that I’ve written down, and I suspect it. But so there are lots of ways, but what’s neat is that experiments have shown, and that’s what’s important, it’s not just theoretical mumblings of physicists who like to have nothing better to do, experiments have shown all the components of the Sakharov requirements for generating matter, a universe that had an asymmetry, are possible in nature and are suggested. I should be a little more careful. We know phase transitions happened in the early universe, we know CP is violated. Baryon number, we don’t know to be violated, but all of our models that extend what’s called the standard model of particle physics naturally produce at very early times models where baryon number is violated. So it’s not implausible. It’s certainly not implausible. And so all those things exist, and our current picture is really quite, having said all of that that’s complicated, the current picture is a little simple, and it’s really remarkable. It says that what happened is there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and a physical process happened sometime between the Big Bang and the time when the universe was about a millionth of a second old that caused a very slight excess, one part in a billion more particles of matter than antimatter. And that’s all you need. You might say, why is that the case? Because we now live in a universe that’s just matter. Well if I have one extra, let’s say there’s a billion and one particles of matter, and a billion particles of antimatter, what will happen as the universe evolves? The particles of matter will annihilate with the particles of antimatter producing radiation, but there’ll be one leftover particle that couldn’t find the particle of antimatter annihilate. So what you’d expect is roughly a billion particles of radiation in the universe for every particle of matter. And when we look out, that’s exactly what we see. The Cosmic Microwave Background contains roughly a billion to ten billion photons going throughout all of space for every proton in the universe. So in fact, while we think we really live in a universe of matter, what we really live is a universe that’s mostly radiation polluted by a little teeny teeny bit of matter, one part in a billion, but that teeny bit of matter is enough to make all of the stars and galaxies in you and I. So like, one of the things that I’d like to think of in physics is it makes us more and more insignificant as human beings in a cosmic sense. We realize, we used to think we’re the center of the universe, we’re the center of the sun, you know, the sun went around us. It’s been a series of these kind of Copernican revolutions where the earth isn’t the center of our solar system, but the sun isn’t the center of our galaxy, but our galaxy isn’t the center of a cluster of galaxies, and our cluster of galaxies isn’t the center of the universe, and now we find that most of the particles in the universe aren’t even made of the same stuff as we are. So it pushes us more and more to feeling marginal. And I find that, and a lot of people say, well that should make us feel sad, but to me, it makes me feel more precious, rather than less precious. It’s like obviously we’re getting into the realm of psychology, but my psychological response is, hey, the fact that the universe is accidental as far as I can see and was created without any supernatural shenanigans, the fact that we’re cosmically irrelevant, the fact that the universe is going to go on without us, all that doesn’t make me feel sad, it makes me feel I should enjoy my brief moment of the sun, I should enjoy my brief, you know, four score and ten or hopefully more years, and it makes this accident of life on earth remarkable, that evolution has endowed us with a consciousness so you and I can have these discussions. So I don’t find the pointlessness of the universe to be depressing, I find it rather the opposite. And I often, and this may be an area we disagree in, I don’t know, but one of the bits of semantics that I’ve tried to fight is this notion of loss of faith, like losing your faith is a loss, but to me, losing my faith in those fairy tales at least, or those incorrect explanations is not a loss, it’s a gain. And using that terminology makes it seem like, people always write to me, I now recognize that I don’t believe the Bible stories, but what am I to do? How can I deal with this loss? And I think they’re conditioned to feel like they have a loss. I think you can at least, you can psychologically create a picture where you don’t feel that’s a loss, you feel in fact you’ve gained something. And actually it’s the way I feel about many things in life when I’m being well adjusted, which is a small percentage of the time to be clear. When I have a loss, I often reflect on it afterwards and realize in fact how I’ve gained. That what seemed to be a traumatic experience in the end produced something which is much more valuable. And of course it’s a rationalization probably, but it allows me to deal with those things anyway. Anyway, that’s my little bit of psychology, my little bit of pop psychology for our discussion. I’m tempted to take it in the direction, I think I’m going to continue to torture you about the structure of the universe. I can do that because one of the things that I hope your listeners will know is that you and I are going to have a podcast on my podcast. I can’t wait to have you on my past. Maybe we’ll be together in the same room. And then I will do, I will torture you. Okay. That sounds like, I’m looking forward to that a lot. Okay, so matter pops into being essentially after things cool down to some degree. And there are different, there aren’t exactly different laws governing the universe before that, but what would you say, the allowances that the current laws make have a remarkably powerful effect before that? Yeah, absolutely. The form that the laws, I mean, the laws of physics do evolve at energy scales and which laws are important at different energy scales are different. So certain laws of physics, even if they don’t change at all, certain things are more important early on and then other laws become important more important later on. Like now, obviously electromagnetism on small scales is incredibly important. It governs all the biology, all the chemistry, all of the things that we see in the world around us. At earlier times it was nuclear physics and particle physics, the laws of the strong and weak interaction that were determining what was going on. But you’re right, eventually, and it took a while, it took a long time before the universe became dominated by matter. Even when the universe was one second old and a temperature of about 10 billion degrees, there weren’t even elements, all of the, that’s the other thing that’s remarkable, until the universe was, even protons didn’t exist until the universe was about a somewhere about a millionth of a millionth of a second old. But elements didn’t exist, all of the light elements, hydrogen, helium and lithium, were, if you wish, created by nuclear reactions in the first five minutes of the universe, which is why Steven Weinberg’s book called The First Three Minutes talks about that. And those were the only elements created at the beginning of time. Hydrogen And they’re created from the lightest upward. And that’s basically the way that things go across the entire periodic table. You start with protons and in fact, and it’s kind of, protons and neutrons, but neutrons are actually unstable so they decay into protons. It’s very fortunate. It turns out if you want to believe in coincidence, this is really quite amazing. It’s very fortunate that it works out that neutrons live about 10 minutes. I mean, if I had a neutron here and held it in my hand in 10 minutes on average, it would decay. Well, you and I have more neutrons in our body than protons. How can that be the case? We’ve been talking for a lot more than 10 minutes and I’m sure your listeners are quite aware of that. But the reason is if you put a neutron in a nucleus, it can become unstable. And it’s really quite fortunate that all the neutrons that are more or less, many of the neutrons that are now existing in the universe got trapped in this form of helium and lithium. Because protons hydrogen just has a proton and electron. There’s a heavy hydrogen which is deuterium which is a proton and a neutron electron and some of that was created in the universe too. But helium has two protons and two neutrons and so by those neutrons being, by helium forming by a series of remarkable nuclear reactions, the universe if you wish stored the neutrons that otherwise would have decayed away into protons and there would be no neutrons left in this universe. And so they’ve been stored ever since that time. For the most part, yeah, they have been, exactly. And so those neutrons, and of course other neutrons have been created in the fiery cores of stars. So what happens is, and I talked about it in the Universe or Nothing in a lecture I gave that sort of was the formation of that book. And I’m not the first person to say that. I know Carl Sagan talked in different ways but it is really true. What’s important for the psychology that you study is carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, iron all of those things. None of those elements were created in the Big Bang. All of those elements were created much later literally billions of years later or hundreds of millions of millions of years later in the fiery cores of stars where nuclear reactions happen. And that means something that is really truly the most poetic thing I do know about nature. Every atom in your body in the first approximation, all the carbon, all the oxygen was created inside of a star and that means forged inside of a star. And not just forged inside of a star but in order to get into your body that star had to explode. So all the atoms in your body, and in fact probably they’ve been in many stars because you probably need many generations they’ve experienced the most catastrophic explosion in nature, a supernova. Every atom in your body has experienced that at least once many times. You are a stardust. It’s so remarkable that it sounds cliched. Yeah exactly. It’s like a discussion of love it is the case. But you know what makes it less remarkable for me is that the atoms in your left hand could have come from a different star than the atoms in your right hand I just find that amazing. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Whatever turns young. So what do you think, okay so now we’re at the point in the story where atoms are beginning to form and they’re starting with their simple forms and that’s within the first three minutes. Yeah, first five minutes first five minutes. And so it’s hydrogen first and then it’s helium and then it’s… Let me even correct you again because I’ll correct me. The nuclei of atoms form but in fact there were no atoms until the universe was 300,000 years old because it was so hot that when atoms exist when protons and neutrons capture electrons, right? Then you get a whole atom. But in the early history of the universe it was so hot that when an electron got captured it got knocked out again. So there were only these nuclei which were charged, protons, and electrons and it was a plasma of these things. Only when the universe cooled down to about about a thousand degrees or so maybe ten thousand degrees, somewhere in that region, was the universe cool enough that protons could capture electrons and neutral hydrogen would form and those were the first atoms, literally atoms, neutral atoms that existed in the universe and that’s when if you wish the causing microwave background separated from matter because then once matter became neutral instead of being a bunch of charged objects then light and matter kind of decoupled. And that was a momentous period and that was the first moment that neutral atoms began when the universe was 300,000 years old. So that’s at about 300,000 years. Yeah. And then not much happened I mean and then from 300,000 years what happened is the universe cooled and cooled and cooled and really it was the dark ages if you wish because there were no stars, it was just matter and radiation but And it’s fairly uniformly distributed and it’s expanding and cooling. Unbelievably uniformly distributed. This was one of the big surprises. Einstein, in order to make a model of the universe, your models are simple. So you Einstein and others would make models in which the universe was uniform because only then could you do the calculations. But then when we look out we discovered empirically this remarkable fact which for a long time was quite surprising and now we have this idea of inflation that in principle explains it but it’s that the universe is uniform across regions that could never have been in causal contact before today. That’s really important. The region way over there could not have communicated that region over there before today but they have the same temperature to one part in 100,000 It’s remarkable. The universe is unbelievably And that’s the cosmic background microwave radiation that we’re talking about. It’s the same in every direction. It’s the same in every direction And since matter was a couple of the radiation the more or less distribution of matter is uniform around the universe. But now it’s not because you and I are in different places and the distribution of matter in our room. It sounds like it’s another one of those situations where small discontinuities at the beginning were enough to produce very large differences across time. Exactly because gravity is attractive. That’s the key point. So if you have small lumps anywhere a little small excess here will begin to grow. And then that snowballs so to speak And that’s exactly the case. There were small and this is another amazing fact which is not appreciated enough. The small fluctuations in the microwave background we think were due to quantum mechanics. Yeah that’s where I was thinking about the quantum uncertainty. Sorry it’s not the earlier. We are literally quantum lumps in any way you wish. In order to get those. Because there’s quantum discontinuity. Early on. On microscopic scales That causes clumping. Or allows clumping to occur. Yeah the point is that we don’t see quantum fluctuations on our scales. But remember the entire observable universe was once inside a region that’s the size of an atom. And those scales quantum fluctuations are very important. And what’s amazing is those quantum fluctuations got frozen in into the microwave background characteristics in ways that we can predict and describe. And those quantum fluctuations later formed all the stars and galaxies and everything else because they were lumps So we really are macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics if you want to think of it that way. Okay so let me ask you a question about that quantum fluctuations. There is uncertainty of location and position and speed. Yes I’ve got that right You can measure one but not the other. Yeah there’s uncertainty in the combination. Okay but that uncertainty is real enough so that in that relatively uniform background there were actual let’s say fluctuations. There were discontinuities of position that were sufficient to cause gravitational. There not only were but they’re inevitable. They’re required. But that’s a real that’s an actual phenomenon. Oh it’s even more real and more but it’s also more wild than you just said. What you just said may not surprise people. But what’s even weirder is when you go to the smallest scales for very there’s another uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. There’s a position and momentum uncertainty but there’s an energy and time uncertainty. And the certainty is if you can measure a system for only a short time then your ability to measure its energy is very uncertain. So if you can measure it for a longer time your uncertainty energy goes away. If you measure it for a small time your uncertainty in energy gets very large. And that means for very short times empty space can burp out particles and anti-particles. You say well that violates the conservation of energy because there was nothing there to begin with and you know when I burp out an electron and a postron suddenly there are particles. Is that how black holes evaporate? That is a mechanism which black holes can be thought of as evaporating if you want to get there. Right because particles pop up spontaneously some of them fall into the black hole That’s one way of describing Hawking radiation. It’s not a bad analogy. It’s got problems but it’s not a bad analogy. I’m glad I’m not completely off the wall here. Dabbling around. No so far you haven’t accept your questions about time. You’re right on track. So this says that particles can suddenly spontaneously burp out of nothing because as long as they disappear again in a time so short that we can’t measure their existence they don’t violate anything. They don’t violate energy conservation if we could measure them. Now that sounds crazy and it sounds like sounds something like potential. Well that’s right. They have potential to do things but to be less generous It doesn’t sound like talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin If you can’t see them then what the hell does it matter? The point is we can’t see them but they have indirect effects. That’s what’s remarkable. So we know that process is happening not just because physicists like me say it’s happening but because if you take say a hydrogen atom you got a proton and an electron. The laws of quantum mechanics that Dirac developed allow you to calculate the energy levels that that electron can have around a proton and that determines the colors of light that’s emitted by hydrogen We can compare those predictions with observations and that’s one of the basis of knowing that quantum mechanics works. This discreet set of light that’s emitted by hydrogen. Well it works but it doesn’t really work because it turns out at a gross level it works but when you try and measure things at the level of one part in a thousand or so it doesn’t work It turns out the energy levels aren’t exactly what you think they were Why is that? That is because the proton the hydrogen atom isn’t just a proton electron. It’s a proton electron but in the atom virtual particles are popping in and out of existence. And say an electron-positron pair pops into existence In the atom. Within the confines of the electron Yeah exactly. In that region, well it’s happening everywhere in space but it’s also happening in the atom. But in that region, during the time before that electron-positron pair disappears, the electron in that pair will want to hang around close to the proton because negative charges attract positive charges whereas the positron will be kind of repelled and that’ll change the charge distribution inside the atom in a way that we can calculate Does that make every atom somewhat unique? Well no, yes and no. Every atom is experiencing the same thing because what’s happening is the particles, I mean what’s happening statistically is that all those virtual particles and antiparticles are changing the spectrum of hydrogen, of all hydrogen atoms by the same amount because they’re happening so fast they’re changing that spectrum in a way that we can calculate. And it is one of the triumphs of theoretical physics that using a theory called quantum vector dynamics developed by Feynman and others and building on what Dirac did we can calculate to 14 decimal places 14 decimal places from first principles what the spectrum of hydrogen should be and how those virtual particles could change that spectrum. And when we compare with observation it’s bang on, there’s no other place in science that we can make a theoretical prediction from first principles and compare it to 14 decimal places with observation to get the right answer. So that tells us that those virtual particles that we can’t see are really there. And that means empty space is much more complicated than we had assumed before. Was that part of what led you to the hypothesis that empty space was? It was, it was. So that’s all part of the background for that. So empty space is a seething pool of virtual particles popping in and out of existence constantly. So that does sound a lot like a potential. Yeah, and that means not only is a potential but it can have but that effect can cause empty space to have energy. In fact generically you would expect empty space to have energy. So you might say what’s so surprising? So it’s not surprising that empty space has energy what’s surprising in a sense is that empty space has so little energy Why does it have energy if the particles sum to zero over a short time? Well that’s a really good point. And the answer is a little more complicated. And it is that, let me give you an example from quantum mechanics. So if I have a the famous quantum mechanical example of a potential well. I have a little u-shaped well. And if I have a ball on that well, you know it will roll down the ball but friction will eventually cause it to rest at the bottom at the lowest energy state. It will lose energy by friction. It turns out in quantum mechanics because energy states are quantized in such a potential well, the lowest energy state is not at the bottom of the potential well. It’s a little bit above the bottom. And so the ground state the lowest energy state that an electron can have trapped in a well is not at the bottom of the well. It actually has a little bit more energy in the bottom because the energy states are quantized. Classically the So that means it can’t get to zero? It can’t get to zero. That’s a generic property of an electron in a potential well. It’s an amazing fact. So that’s called the ground state energy in quantum mechanics. Is there a a why to that? I mean you said it’s because it’s quantized I presume that’s an explanation but it’s not an explanation I understand. Okay let me give you a heuristic explanation that you might like better. Okay. You might not like it as much but it’s one that I use in my own mind so maybe it’ll help. Remember we tell us in quantum mechanics particles are also waves. So the electron has a wavelength. I don’t know if you play music. Do you play music at all? Badly. Me too. Very badly but I like to play. Okay so when I when I hit a piano key I hear a note. Why? Because that string has a certain length and the only and there are vibrations that can be on that string but the only vibrations that persist are ones that have a very specific relationship with their wavelength to the length of that string. That’s called resonance. And that’s why because the wave goes along the string it comes back then it bounces back and comes along and reinforces but only when the wavelength in that case is exactly equal to the length of the string will you have resonance. Will the string be able to persist? Okay now electron has a wavelength and the way to think about a stationary state of an electron is it’s like a resonant note in a musical instrument. So I have a potential well and the electron can only exist at those distances where its wavelength is an exact relationship to the width of the potential well. So is it reasonable to say that an electron can’t exist and have zero energy. That’s not possible. Let me think if that’s a good a good if it were the only way it could is if its wavelength were infinitely big because it turns out the wavelength of an electron is related to its total energy inversely related. So if you want to think about this an electron that’s at rest if you want to think about it would have a wavelength of what’s called the broily wavelength which is infinitely big in size. So only in an infinitely big universe can an electron really have a ground state energy that’s exactly zero. Alright now I’m going to ask one more question about this then I’m going to shut up about this. Is that also an uncertainty issue? Because if it’s at zero you can specify it exactly so then it has to have an infinitely large wavelength That’s the reason. That’s basically the answer more or less. Its position if you more or less if it’s at rest its momentum is exactly zero. Right and you can exactly specify that. And therefore its position is equally likely anywhere in the universe. Okay. It’s crazy. Yeah well these are more like concurrent incomprehensible descriptions rather than explanations. Well yeah except the theory that’s what you can predict obviously. And it works but there’s something you’ve hit on which is really important. A lot of people get hung up on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Many people write books about it in many worlds and they lately there’s somebody who wrote a book and tried to sell books. But the point is it’s nice to talk about all that but it’s really irrelevant because actually I first realized it due to a colleague of mine at Harvard who was really the most famous person there in the physics department he’s now dead. Sidney Coleman he said the proper thing to talk about is not the interpretation of quantum mechanics it’s the interpretation of classical mechanics because the real world is quantum mechanical and any classical picture we impose on it is going to be crazy and but you don’t have to think of it as real they’re all just different approximations to a reality an underlying reality which can’t be described by any classical picture. So that’s why all these classical pictures seem crazy because none of them is complete. Well you know if you look at this psychologically I’m going to refer to Piaget again Piaget pointed out that we derive our concepts from our practical manipulations of things. So for example you might ask why is this one thing? I could say it’s five things. Well the question is what’s a thing? Look it moves as a unit therefore it’s a thing so that’s one. Well it could be five if I broke it apart now it’s two but the concept itself is predicated on our interactions at this scale and so we’re going to derive our sense of reality from our practical interactions at this scale and your claim the claim of the quantum mechanics in general is that that doesn’t apply at the micro scale so our intuitions are gone because our intuitions are predicated on our embodiment at this level of analysis. Absolutely in fact the purpose of the greatest story we’ve told so far that particular book is to say something remarkable. The world of our experience is an illusion I know I hate to say it because it breeds all sorts of mumbo jumbo and people start doing but at a fundamental scale at the small scales everything that defines our universe including matter and mass really the things that make the universe the universe we experience are really accidents of our circumstances rather than fundamental properties of the universe so our universe. Yeah well that’s something I would like and we can do this again when we talk again because I’m always curious about that leap into purposelessness and one of the things I would like to ask you just briefly on that subject is as the universe cools we do see a gradual increase in at least one sort of constant complexity right and that’s the building of that let’s say the building of the periodic table and so atoms become more and more complex and sophisticated as the universe cools that seems like a kind of directionality that’s built into the structure itself and it isn’t I mean do you think that’s is that necessarily discontinuous with the radical increase in complexity that you start to see 3.5 billion years ago when life emerges or the same process of complexification? Well you know okay it’s a good question and the answer is it’s all momentary it’s a momentary accident it is true that the stars as individual stars evolve they build up heavier and heavier elements they do it at the expense of their surroundings by increasing the disorder in their surroundings right they’re emitting energy. Right so there’s localized increase in complexity like us. Yeah but it’s all momentary if you follow it long enough the heavy elements are going to disappear matter is going to disappear and the long term the universe will look will just be pure radiation again so we are so this build up of complexity which you’re absolutely true is not a direction of the universe it’s a momentary but fortunate imbalance that will exist for a while until the universe catches up with it. Yeah well that’s now that’s a real problem in discussing concepts isn’t it because you can take a time scale and change the time scale and all of a sudden the phenomenon changes completely and that’s what people do to themselves often when they think about the meaninglessness of their life it’s like well wait a second I could make the case I’ve made this with my clients approximately is if you’re thinking on a time scale that makes your life irrelevant that’s the wrong time scale for the problem that’s the the hopelessness is an indication that you’re using the wrong frame and you’d say well what’s the proof of that and I would say well the hopelessness is the proof of that now you might not regard that as proof but it’s a point that’s at least worth considering you know because you could say well what good is a Beethoven symphony across the span of a trillion years it’s like well none but why what good is posing that question exactly I couldn’t agree with you more the fact that there’s no obvious purpose to the universe the fact that we and everything we’ve created will long be gone that can depress you but the opposite is so into the coin it seems to me if I were a clinician that I would try to argue to my clients is that it makes every moment of that accident of your own existence special and every instant is more special because it’s finite because it’s so unique and therefore you’re right there may be cosmic purpose to your existence but you create your own purpose I know you write about meaning your whole book about meaning but I would argue there’s no objective meaning to the universe we make our own meaning and to the extent we make our own meaning our lives are more or less valuable to us and to others around us and so I would say see I would I would quibble with that and maybe it’s not just a quibble because I don’t think meaning is something we create I think it’s something that manifests itself to us now look I know I know it’s not that simple because we do make decisions but it’s very frequently the case and you know this you know this as a scientist for example you may have a moment of insight into some phenomena so that’s deeply meaningful but it isn’t so much that that is something you create although you can seek it out it’s more like that’s something that bursts on you yeah okay well I it’ll be an interesting question to see if we’re debating semantics here or not yeah yeah right right right and well I guess I guess I guess at a fundamental scale and maybe we can follow this up in our in in when we talk in my podcast but I I tend not to think that there’s an objective meaning to the universe there’s existence well it may be that objective and meaning aren’t well suited for one another right because you could also make the case that the objective viewpoint precludes meaning as part of its operation yeah and I think I mean you make a strong case that the scientific method is designed to exclude subjective meaning that’s actually and that’s actually one of its remarkable strengths but it has a cost the cost is well what do you do with the phenomena of meaning well it doesn’t exist scientifically well that is something we could talk about for a long time because that’ll pull us into it the question of whether what’s constituted conceptualized as objective reality is a sufficiently sophisticated conception of reality itself and it isn’t obvious to me that it is because it does have this tendency to include to exclude the subjective bias by its method okay that’s good because I would say it’s for me it’s perfectly fine the fact that excludes reactive is its strength not its weakness in my point is it is one of its strengths there’s no doubt about that because the subject because by excluding the subjective you can discover what’s transpersonally universal but but that also may mean that there are things you exclude that are real that that are necessary you know you well teach it to you know I used to read well there’s a I like Oliver Sacks so I used to read a lot and one of his last books before he died was a on hallucinations and one of the things that really at the beginning of his book that really hit me and it was relevant to something I was working on at the time and I honestly forget it but is his point that to people who are experiencing hallucinations they’re real and yeah well that’s the thing about real real is real there is objectively real let’s make a mistake about that and objectively real is powerful but it isn’t obvious to me that objective and real are synonymous when it comes to our own our own psyche I couldn’t agree with you more which is why I tell people by the way when I was a kid I wanted to be what I would have if my neither my parents were at the university so I didn’t know the term neuroscience so I wanted to be a brain surgeon my mother wanted me to be a doctor a nice Jewish boy and and I wanted to be and what interested me most was the brain and I thought well neurosurgery must be the way to do it I didn’t realize it wasn’t but the reason I one of the reasons I do physics is it’s so much damn easier it’s just so much easier than psychology or neuroscience it’s because of these complexities of psyche and so I do go back to this reason as a slave of passion I mean the fact that we that are that are our whole understanding of our own existence is not really based on reason I try as a scientist certainly not based on our capacity to to what would you say to conceptualize objective reality that isn’t how people think Christ or we’ve only thought like that for 500 years yeah that you know it’s really powerful but yeah but it’s not the way we natural and that’s also something that’s mysterious to me well you know but it’s that’s what’s so wonderful about science to me is it is the recognition that scientists are people which is a secret that most people don’t realize and and therefore they’re subjective they’re they’re subject to all of the the whims and slings and arrows of fortune and and so the scientific method is developed to realize that scientists are bound to make mistakes and be human and the scientific method is to catch those mistakes I argued recently in fact at Oxford Union and they didn’t get the point because they’re all woke but um the students but but there were you know there was a debate on terrible that’s a terrible thing I know that’s the case it’s so terrible you’ll be surprised there was a debate on the question was we are all religious and I asked to speak on the pro side my colleagues my atheist colleagues who people you know were on the anti side and they were shocked that I wanted to pick on the pro side and my argument was quite simple if we were all religious we wouldn’t need science if we didn’t all want to believe right that’s exactly right man that’s exactly right so we agree they didn’t get the point and I will argue that was part of what I was trying to point out to Sam Harris is that and this is something I learned at least in part from reading Jung and his claim was that alchemy the ideas of alchemy grew out of a religious foundation and then science emerged out of alchemy it’s like it’s nested science is nested inside a radical fantasy that’s nested inside a religious fantasy well I wouldn’t say nested I would say it grew out of it like I I was born from my mother and father who you know and I like to think that I grew that a lot of what I who I am is that but I grew out of it here’s why I think it has to be nested still now and this is something we could talk about a lot the objects that draw a scientist’s attention aren’t by scientific processes the phantasm you see what I mean is that like you get interested in some things and you pursue those now that’s informed by your scientific knowledge but it’s it’s so Jung’s point for example was that science was a materialist redemptive myth that grew up as a counter position to the spiritualist redemptive myth right so you imagine there was an idea which was that we could redeem our inadequacy through spiritual discipline okay we tried that for a long time it wasn’t enough people were still suffering from leprosy okay so there’s a fantasy emerges over thousands of years maybe we should investigate the transformations of matter there’s redemptive information residing in the transformations of matter we could investigate that and that would make life better and so the motivational goal behind science is the expansion of human competence and that’s not a scientific goal that’s a motivational goal yeah I agree with you but where I guess that we disagree and we could have this discussion is that I think you’re right and that’s what I said before scientists are people so they’re motivated by all they’re motivated by greed by fame by jealousy as well as by facts by awe by awe on wonder I mean I would you know I want to point out I mean we’re all you know that’s why I’m a scientist I’m demonstrated by awe on wonder and fascination but I’m also the questions I ask are detartedly determined by the time in which I live but I don’t want to be postmodern because the point is that what’s great so that’s all true from a psychological perspective so you may say that the motivations of science are kind of a personal fantasy but what’s great is that science overcomes that so that you’re right there are in fact if you in my book in the book you read the greatest server told so far I make a big point of saying scientists were all moving in this direction and it was the wrong direction wait but the science doesn’t overcome the motivation it doesn’t overcome the motivation it overcomes the contamination of the theory by the motivational impulse but the motivation changes because the results force it upon you scientists are forced kicking and screaming to change their minds they don’t want to but that motivation of the kind of questions you ask come and that’s the greatness of science because it’s empirical because it’s not based on just what I want but what nature tells me is the case and so eventually all the scientists who want this and are and no doubt were driven in that direction because they wanted that find out that that one is wrong and they have to go over here and that’s the beauty of science it’s that nature determines what’s beautiful ultimately you know I you know I there was a while when string theorists talked about the elegant universe and all that elegant and beauty don’t matter nature determines it not scientists and eventually we get drawn until we eventually come to a picture where we think it’s beautiful but it was nature you know something that was incredibly ugly in the beginning that we thought was ugly ends up being beautiful because we force our picture to understand that that’s the way it really is and then we we develop an understanding of it but so that’s the beauty it’s that I guess I I don’t think of it as a fantasy in that sense maybe the motivation is fantastic and even the process of some level there’s a proposition right which which I think maybe look let me let me give you another example of this and you tell me what you think okay okay so I’ll try to formulate this properly although I may not be able to do it we have a hypothesis that that’s a fantasy I would say that the increase of knowledge through technical means will be of benefit to us as individuals and as a species that is a fantasy now it may be accurate it’s the fantasy that we’ve staked ourselves on but there’s it’s not provable and we’re actually ambivalent about it because we generate apocalyptic nightmares all the time and we know that our technological prowess has a frankenstein element so it’s not like we’re a hundred percent convinced that this non-stop onslaught of knowledge generation is necessarily in our best interest and you could also make a case an evolutionary case that most species are stunningly conservative if something works man they do not deviate from it whereas we’re just transforming like mad and so we do have this fantasy which is we can escape our static destiny by the acquisition of knowledge by going out into the unknown that’s star trek right you wrote books on the physics of star trek to go boldly where no one has gone beyond before and that that will be of net benefit to us that’s the fantasy which within which this is nested I don’t think that does change I mean I understand your point within that there’s transformations constantly I think but I think it wouldn’t well look I agree with you to the most part and in fact regarding the apocalyptic things you must one of the things you didn’t mention is that I was chairman of the board of sponsors of the bolt and the atomic scientist for a dozen years that sets the doomsday clock so every year I’d have to stare apocalypses right in the face but I think the reason that fantasy has persisted I would argue like many fantasies is that it has an evolutionary success and the reason I agree and the reason that it persists is that we have found that yeah when we developed antibiotics we can live longer I mean so there’s a hope and you’re right and it comes back to what I said before reason is a slave of passion I recognize that when I think I’m being driven by pure rationality I have to recognize that there’s that there’s passion behind it you can’t be and well that’s it this is so okay and I think part of that again this is something I tried to draw out my conversations with Harris is well we are evolved biological creatures we’re motivationally driven and we have a pattern we are not rational that’s wrong now we can learn to be rational with great difficulty but fundamentally and maybe that’s a tool but there is underneath this you said it was an instinct so we can take that apart a little bit so the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex so the motor cortex enables you to engage in voluntary activity the prefrontal cortex enables you to abstractly represent motor activity play it out in an avatar like universe and kill off stupid ideas before they kill you so we’ve evolved to produce hypotheses test them through dialectic often and dispense with those that don’t work and so we’ve we’ve staked ourselves on that attempt and we’ve evolved to be able to do that and science I believe is the extension of that the practical extension of that the most successful extension I would argue yes it’s well so successful so far right so far we have the time frame problem yeah on the apocalyptic end let me ask you what you think of this so we have a particular view of a hydrogen atom now it’s very reductionistic right and you can see the power of that because we understand hydrogen atoms well enough to make them to turn them into bombs yeah but you I you could also argue that it’s because of that it’s because of the limitations of that form of knowledge that we were inclined to turn them into bombs that we separated the hydrogen atom from its context its broad broad broad context it enabled us to manipulate a tiny fragment of reality to exclude the rest of reality from that consideration that bestowed upon us a tremendous power but look what it produced it produced the hydrogen bomb and you know that could be evidence that the theory however practically useful for producing deadly machinery was not useful at all at a larger scale of analysis and that’s the that’s the paradox I guess of the reductionistic approach yeah I think it well you know it’s kind of like reminds me of the of the sorcerer’s apprentice a movie with Mickey Mouse or whatever it was or yeah Mickey Mouse yeah and is the sense that it’s it is a remarkable well maybe maybe I should do Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility but but um which may be a summary of your book but anyway um uh the we have this weird I can’t agree with you more we have this weird dichotomy we’ve discovered the science the scientific method was a discovery it took a while to discover it when the Greeks didn’t have it they did a lot but if they’d been able to know about empirical evidence they would have done a lot more um and so it was a discovery and it’s a discovery that was incredibly powerful that it works but we humans you know um didn’t evolve it didn’t evolve to discover the scientific method I mean we had the capability and therefore we have all sorts of evolutionary baggage that makes us human and so we’re on the one hand have this incredible power by using the scientific method but on the other hand have the fact that we are human and we have all the slings and arrows that came with being human all of the evolutionary evolutionary positive and negative features of having developed a psyche as you described it one with you know I had a podcast with uh Joseph Ledoux I don’t know if you know him we talked a great deal about fear and the amygdala and how those things play out but so we have we have this we have the people that are manipulating the scientific method who are who are subject to all of the concerns that may you know the jealousies the insecurities and the wonder all combined and somehow we have to combine those to keep us safe and secure and to make in principle a better again just saying we want a better future for our children you’re right that’s a fantasy too that’s a that’s a that’s a claim it doesn’t have to be why do we want to do that well for some reason we think it’s a good idea maybe for some reason we believe that there’s such thing as better yeah and we and we quantify it and we and again I would argue see to me I’m a solid empiricist if there’s not an empirical way of defining why it’s better than it’s an irrelevant concept and that’s why I have I’m just I’m a very pedestrian kind of guy if you can’t measure it don’t talk about it to some extent and so you can’t measure you can’t define it and then it’s hard to tell what the hell you’re talking about then it just ends up being semantics then it ends up being pure intellectual masturbation you know which is a lot of yeah and you can shift the concept around at your convenience which is not helpful which is yeah and that’s what sort of I would argue much of postmodernism is all about is that is that it’s lost track of what is real and and it just sort of intellectual circles with all right so I I mean I there’s other questions about physics I would like to ask you but I’m not going to because we’re running out of time unfortunately but I will ask you something I’ll ask you something instead that comes out of what we’ve just been discussing so you just went on this panel at Oxford you said was it was Oxford it was the Oxford Union debate yeah yeah okay so and I know you’re also interested in social transformations and and what’s happening in the universities and you described the crowd at Oxford as woke so I’m going to ask you I’m going to tell you something I’ve been thinking about I’d like you to tell me what you think about it sure so you know I was thinking for a long time about the advantages of a of a democratic monarchy like Great Britain okay so imagine imagine instead of executive legislative and judicial there’s four branches of government okay legislative judicial executive and symbolic okay and so you need it’s helpful to have the Queen because then the president isn’t the Queen yeah or the president isn’t the king about a constitutional monarchy you and I both have lived in Canada and the United States and that’s okay so you can part so you might say that in a place where there is no fourth branch of government the president the executive tends to take on the symbolic weight of the king yeah okay we agree on that that’s possible anyways absolutely I think it’s one of the problems of American politics yeah okay now I would say that’s also related to the problem of the separation of church and state and one of the things the West seems to have got right is the idea that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s well it’s an analogous idea that’s okay I’ll just continue where I’m going I need that to be described more but okay yeah yeah yeah well imagine there’s a practical necessity for the separation of the religious impulse from the political impulse but imagine that there’s a psychological necessity for that too and then if there aren’t domains specified out for the different domains of practical thought political economic religious then they contaminate each other and what happens is you don’t get rid of the religion you contaminate the politics with it and so I’ve been watching what’s been happening to Richard Dawkins for example yeah yeah right now Richard’s idea and I’m an admirer of Dawkins he can think you know I mean he’s brilliant and I’ve read his books I understand what he’s doing and why and I get his argument I think it’s incomplete for reasons we could get into and probably will but I think there’s something missing there and that is playing out is that when you remove the religious sphere and you confuse it with superstition or you fail to discriminate between the valid elements of it and the superstitious elements you don’t get rid of the religious impulse it goes somewhere else and I think we’re going to go if you’re saying it’s going into secular religiosity now I well what do you think I agree I mean what does it look like to you I said that I’ve written on it and that was my argument is that we’re seeing many of the aspects of religion being manifest in secular arguments as someone pointed out the only difference being unlike at least the Christian religion there’s no belief in the idea of absolution which is yeah yeah but that’s not funny right that’s seriously not funny I agree with you I know it’s seriously not funny believe me I know it very well I know you do I know but that also points out what a remarkable achievement the idea of absolution is because it’s like the presumption of innocence those two things those are miraculous yeah well I agree it’s constructive thought constructs of thought I agree when you talked about the symbolic one of the problems I sometimes have with you from having read you in the past and we’ll talk about this is as you say things and I don’t really understand what they mean I mean I find them vague enough that I really want them to know how you’re defining things and I’ve really enjoyed the fact that you’ve been defining things and I think the so I would agree with you completely we have to realize and I’ve had this discussion as you probably know Richard and I have had discussions on a lot there’s a movie about us called the unbelievers and we spent a lot of time together and I think our views have come together in different ways I would argue that religion on the whole has not been a good thing for people okay that’s the first argument but in order to but we shouldn’t realize we have to realize that in order that it does serve an evolutionary purpose if you want to call it purpose it’s there because it has survived all of societies because it does it meets some human needs in one way or another and therefore we have to ask what needs does it satisfy and realize what they are and how can we provide them without the fairy tales so I guess we definitely do have to ask that question in an extraordinarily serious you know one of the things that we might want to do if we can figure out how to do it is also to have a discussion with Roland Griffith do you know Roland Griffith’s work? he’s been investigating psychedelics with psilocybin and he’s a very solid scientist yeah well there’s a mystery there that’s virtually unfathomable and Griffiths is a very very solid scientist and that’s another place that would make an interesting but it’s relevant to this point because there are I think the reason that there has to be a religious domain is because religious questions will never go away and so even if you get rid of the answers you can’t get rid of the questions I would argue that is what sent that’s my big argument about everything is that we have to encourage questioning in fact that’s what education should be based on it should be based on answers it should be based on questions so I don’t think I have no desire to get rid of those questions like if you want to call it why are we here I would argue the why questions ultimately the difference may be and I know Richard has gotten involved in this too because he wrote the forward for one of my books but the why questions are really all how questions they only remain why questions if you believe there’s some fundamental purpose and since there’s no evidence of that when you ask why are we here really means how are we here when you ask why does your heart pump blood it doesn’t mean that there’s someone made up it means how does it what are the biochemical processes by which your heart allows your body to do this so alright so let me respond to that a bit I understand your point and take it very seriously but what I’ve been looking at because I do look at this biologically to begin with because I try to look at things scientifically insofar as the science allows those things to be viewed to the degree that I can look at religious matters from a biological perspective I do that because it’s simpler so I believe that the religious instinct manifests itself in a variety of fundamental motivations but they’re abstract motivations to some degree so the experience of awe that’s a major one the experience of beauty that’s another one the experience of admiration and the desire to imitate those are crucial and so one of the things that I would point out you can tell me what you think about this and I’ve been trying to formalize this idea and I don’t know its extent so I look at Christianity in particular although not uniquely Christianity but Christianity in particular as a thousands of years investigation into the structure of the abstracted ideal to imitate so imagine we imitate those we admire but we’re abstract creatures so we want to know what’s the essence of what should be imitated itself now we investigate that it’s not all explicit we have to represent it in music we have to represent it in art we have to represent it in architecture because we’re looking at it from multiple different domains and that is a reductionistic argument right it says nothing to do about divinity itself it’s purely psychological or biological argument well where I would disagree with you and I like the way you’ve described it in many ways but where I disagree with you I guess would be the word investigation my problem with Christianity and I’ve said this I’ve debated once at Yale many years ago theology and I’ve argued that I’ve argued with theologians I’ve said give me an example in the last 400 years of a contribution of theology to knowledge and you know what they all say what do you mean by knowledge now if you ask me what do you mean by theology maybe but I would argue because I would point to Nietzsche and Jung yeah okay but I would say if you asked a psychologist or a chemist or a biologist what contributions and all they list these things but the point is that my problem with Christianity is it stopped asking questions it stopped the investigation and it was a dictum here’s the answer don’t ask any more questions and that is the antithesis of what I exist for so I think that’s probably look factor analytic studies of religion reveal something like two factors there’s a dogmatic element and there’s a spiritual element and if you do large scale surveys of people now you see that their faith in the dogmatic element has declined substantially but their spiritual claims have not but again I’d ask you I don’t know whenever someone uses the word spiritual for me my mind kind of glazes over because I have no idea what they’re talking about no I think it’s on the investigative side that’s why I brought that up because I think what you’re objecting to correct me again if I’m wrong but it’s the same thing that you object to as a scientist you object to dogma as a de facto dogma absolutely everything is subject question nothing is sacred right right right so that’s the continued investigation of the creative mind so now but you know that’s not that can’t be quite right either though because when you move forward you always move forward on the basis of dogma but you question it like you do both at the same time which is what you said people should be doing at the beginning because you do assume the validity of your knowledge to move forward until you hit an impediment and then you question it you have to be sure you have to look you have to make assumptions to move forward you just the difference between science and religion is you can recognize later those assumptions are wrong and that’s the beauty that’s why to me the distinction between science and religion we all make assumptions and in fact I’d love to determine I’ve often quoted from the X-Files where Fox Maldar I want to believe we all want to believe as a scientist I want to believe that’s why we’re all religious I argued in it in that sense we all want to believe the difference is science eventually has a technique allows us to say yeah but that belief was wrong and and and and that’s the beauty that’s what that’s why I like science it works in that sense but we all have to make some hypothesis but the willingness to dispense with it even if it’s central to our being and that’s what I say to everyone an education for everyone should exist should be if it’s at at its best should comprise one thing that at some point you find that something that’s central to your being something you feel that’s central to your existence you find out to be wrong because that is the liberation that education should provide and that’s part of my problem with the humility isn’t it yeah and that’s part of my problem with the getting back to the darkness is that people aren’t allowed to ask questions because right and that’s that’s the antithesis of knowledge anyway so is that the antithesis as well of the true religious impulse is to question and search because you don’t look israel israel means those who struggle with god right yeah it doesn’t mean those who have got god right well yeah no I mean one of the reasons I you know but it’s again I recognize that part of the reason I feel this way is because I was brought up I wasn’t brought up in a religious family but I was still brought up in a Jewish family so it’s natural to say hey there’s nice things about the Jewish religion and one of the things that I like about the Jewish religion is yeah you can question you can question god and all of that but that doesn’t make me think that but at the same time it’s all still based on a ridiculous fallacy that doesn’t make it any more legitimate the culturally I like the cultural it’s like genes I like the expression the cultural expression the underlying basis of Judaism is just as ridiculous in fact just as ridiculous as evil as vicious as Christianity and Islam and most other religions so I guess I like the cultural manifestation so yeah there are lots of cultural Jews but I don’t even say that I don’t find myself as people say why don’t you define yourself as Jewish now and it’s because well you know it doesn’t mean anything to me I mean maybe from a perspective I don’t know the fact that I was brought up in a certain way but I try not to identify myself by you know whether I’m Canadian or American those things aren’t as important to me as what I’m thinking and so yeah I don’t think it does strike me that you are someone who’s part of Israel in terms of the struggle yeah yeah I mean it blew me away when I knew when I found out that that was what that word meant it really shocked me to my depths it’s associated with the struggle with sometimes I think you tend to it’s a nice it’s a nice discovery but don’t read into it more than it is I mean you know after all the Yahuwah was a word that you weren’t allowed to say I mean it’s based at the same time as being based on questioning it’s also based on absolutes that you’re not allowed to disobey and therefore it is evil in the sense that every other religion is evil because there shouldn’t be there shouldn’t be questions you can’t ask there shouldn’t be words you can’t use whether it’s Yahuwah or ginger if am I in well look we should probably leave the rest of this I would say because we had a good discussion and it’s a really good place to end it is a good place to end and we began and I look forward to following this it’s really been a true pleasure really and I think I hope for me as well will have found something in our two hours of discussion if it’s a science or otherwise to see that there’s a lot more left to discuss and I look forward not just to my podcast but you know having more chance maybe discuss publicly too it’s been it’s been a real pleasure and I great great I really enjoyed it and thank you very much thank you very much I have many more questions for you but they’ll wait yeah all right great I’m looking forward to when we meet again good well thanks a lot it would be bad if in two hours we we got through everything yes yes yes that would be so good okay all right all right okay