Joe Rogan Experience #1233 - Brian Cox

That's great, three, two, one, yeah, a guy named was online. Twitter errors. Instagram runs the TGT studios and he makes these. I actually did one for Elon. Elon Musk loved it too, so we made one with him, he made one like this, very beautiful. Redwood and those are those things made of Jamie that some diodes or something Nixie Tubes Nixie Tubes yeah, yeah, you have to get them from Russia, that's right, you have them delivered from Russia so they can have like listening devices implanted in them like Well Yeah, Brian, it's good to see you, man, it's great to be back, yeah, it's great to have you back, so tell me what this tour you're doing, it's a volunteer tool, try to keep this sucker a handful, oh yeah, there you have it.

That's perfect, yeah, it's a world tour that starts next week in the UK and then we're going everywhere from the South Island in New Zealand to the Arctic Circle, to Svalbard, which is the furthest north we can go. you can go on a commercial plane in the We are in the United States for a month mainly in May and yes, it is about cosmology and the questions that cosmology raises, so if you are interested in the science of how the universe began, even questions about what could have been. Does the eternal universe exist? Does something like this exist before the Big Bang?

What is the future of the universe? How does complexity arise spontaneously in a universe? I mean, we kind of take it for granted that there's a big bang and everything is hot and there's just this kind of hot glow of things and I said that spontaneously in 13.8 billion years you get something like the Earth with civilization and life in it, so how do we know anything about it? I mean, I'm asking. the atomic question we know a lot about it, so it's really about showing the size and scale of the universe, but in addressing those questions I think everyone has about what it is, what it means to be human, this little finite life that we lead. in a possibly infinite universe sense, well, it's incredibly exciting to me that there's a giant audience for this and that what Neil deGrasse Tyson had been doing and what a lot of public touring intellectuals are doing now, they're doing these giant theaters and These people are coming to see these shows and we're realizing that I hate to use the term market for this, but there is a demand for this and there are a lot of people who are incredibly fascinated with this and yes, it is spreading. information that expresses knowledge, yes, I mean the United Kingdom, in particular, I mean Wembley Arena, for example, you are talking about 10,000 people, 12 times more, and you are right, everyone else comes, you know their big shows, screens Spectacular and all that.

They come to think that they come to hear what we know about the universe and nature and I think you already know that. I guess I'm not surprised that people are interested because these are questions that everyone asks. You already know. I mean, why? Here you know that everyone asks that question, but my point is that there is a framework, there is a framework of knowledge, there are things that we know about the universe, so it is true that scientists are not going to tell you why you are here. I'm not going to tell you what the meaning of life is, but there are actually things you need to know if you want to start exploring those questions for yourself, but you need to know that there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

I need to know that the Milky Way has 200 billion stars, most of those stars that we now know have planetary systems. We estimate that there are something like 20 billion Earth-like planets or potentially Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone, so if I'm asking questions about what my place in the universe is. You need to know those things first. It's a framework that you can think within when you get to those numbers when you're talking about trillions and billions and even though all those zeroes are mine. The brain just goes numb, there's a lack of understanding that I'm very aware of, like those numbers are being thrown around.

I go, oh, 200 billion, hmm, I think everyone does. I think I have all the scientists and no scientist can imagine that number, I mean, even the little number 200 billion starts in one galaxy and then when you say two trillion galaxies, you know, I challenge anyone to be able to imagine it, but it's the reality that we have observed, you know, we have not told them all. to billions, by the way, did you ever think about the whole Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which maps the positions of galaxies so you can know what part of the sky you've surveyed and you know how many galaxies you counted and then you can broadcast that? through the wider universe and you get this image of a vast and possibly infinite universe.

I mean, we know that the universe is very suspicious at the university and is much larger than the piece we can see, so we have good reason to think that is the case. Whether it is infinite or not is another question and then that goes to you know, can you imagine infinity? Well, no one can imagine infinity. You know, we say the universe started 13.8 billion years ago, so that's one measurement, because we can measure the speed that Basically all the galaxies are moving away from us and then you can go back in time if you want to know when They were all on top of each other and a pretty simple measurement and we've done it, so we say the universe.

It started 13.8 billion years ago, but really all we know is that the universe was very hot and very dense at that time and we have some theories that the universe existed before that and maybe some kind of circumstantial evidence and that means that actually the universe could have always been there forever and then when I talk to people they sometimes get a little upset because some people would prefer it to have a beginning, the idea that it could have existed forever is scarier in some ways. so the fact that it started now is interesting the way people's minds work what terrifies you the most an eternal universe or a finite universe yes both are incomprehensible although the eternal universe if there was an eternal universe is that it denies the Big Bang theory either means there is a constant cycle of big bangs and then expansion and then recompression or it could, those theories are back.

King vogue, some of those theories are back in fashion, so yes, some of them say that there is a cyclical universe. So the Big Bang is an event where space gets very hot and very dense and filled with particles and that can happen again. These are some of the other theories. There's a theory called eternal inflation, which is a theory there, and I actually think it's the most popular theory. right now, but what happened, but why the Big Bang is the way it has some very special characteristics, the Big Bang we could talk about, but inflation is the idea that space, spacetime existed before of the Big Bang and was expanding extremely quickly, in the most popular of these theories it doubled in size every 10 to minus 37 seconds, which is point no, no, no, 37 knots one of a second, so it is an unimaginably expansion fast and then the idea is that it is attracted to a closes quite naturally, so it dies in the expansion, it slows down and all the energy that was brought there was causing the expansions to be thrown into space and heat it up and form particles and that's what we call the Big Bang and those theories that The extension of those says that that slowdown only happens in small patches, so most of the universe, the overwhelming majority of the universe, is still inflating that incredible speed and that little irregular stop and there's Big Bang, so you get multiple universes, a multiverse, it's called inflation. multiverse and we are in one of those bubbles and that is what the most popular theories have, that is another one, I mean, but right now I am aware of what you are saying.

I can visualize it in some kind of graphical form. but it is incomprehensible as if my mind does not have the ability to expand this sense of distance and size so that understanding is due to the way we evolved, we evolved here on earth to deal with the space that is in front of us and now , over the course of industrial civilization and education, we are grasping these concepts that are so foreign to the tangible reality in which we exist every day. I'm sure that's right and it's the You know even very simple things like you go back to the Greeks, so Aristotle and it's great, you know very smart people, but they thought the Earth was the center of the universe, not why, because It feels like it is, at the same time, it feels like it is us. we're not moving and that's a pretty deep point in physics, it's like why are we flying relative to the Sun very fast at a speed of 80 miles per second or something like that and the whole solar system is rotating around the Sun?

The Milky Way, etc., why don't we feel it? And then the Greeks, naturally, said well, because we are at the center of the universe. They also said that everything falls towards the Earth, so the Earth is possibly at the center. It's his natural right and it's actually a pretty deep thought, so to understand why he didn't feel like we were moving, you have to go all the way to Einstein for someone to take that very seriously and he said, he actually said, well. There's a great little explanation in Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time about this: the idea that you can't tell if you're moving or not, demolishing is the notion of absolute space, so if we think of perspective as its face ti o I guess most people would think that Newton had a big box in which things happen and that it has to be a natural image of space and the universe.

Isn't it a thing in which all the planets and galaxies are placed? In the short history of time, Hawking says: "Imagine bouncing a ball, so you bounced a ball that stabilized, now it's a tennis ball, so I drop it and I catch you again, so let's say I drop it Secondly, the Earth has moved about 80 miles in space around the Sun, so you could ask whether that ball returned to the same place in space or not and the answer is that you can't answer it, it does it from our perspective, but from the perspective it is that of someone watching the Earth go around the Sun.

When I saw it again, it had moved 80 miles and then, from another perspective, it would have done another thing, so the point is that you can't say that this is a point. In space it went back to the same place because that depends on your perspective, it depends on whether you're looking at the Sun, the Earth rotates around the Sun whatever. , so Einstein said that means there is no absolute space that follows if you think about it, but that's hard, that's a cool but hard thought process, right, I mean, that's essentially what happens when you're in a plane, I mean, if you're throwing a ball in the air and catching it on the plane, it's happening on a much smaller scale, yeah, yeah, I mean, you're flying it at six hundred miles an hour relative to the ground, but when you're sitting there, yeah, and Einstein elevated that to a principle and said if you're moving.

It's a beauty, you're not accelerating, you're just moving at a constant speed in an airplane or now I mean, that's essentially what we're doing now, we're moving around the Sun, effectively it's a constant speed, so you can't tell . There is no experiment you can do, we could observe the decay of a radioactive nucleus or some electricity and magnetism or bouncing a ball, have a pendulum, whatever it is, and there is no experiment you can do to tell you if you are moving or not, therefore, The concept has no meaning because it cannot be measured and that led Einstein to relativity, so that is the basis of general relativity, which is our best theory of the universe now, why Do we think that the known universe is bigger than we can?

Observe well, one point is that it is expanding and we always see the same radiation out there, hence the brightness of the Big Bang, but there are some deeper reasons and the inflation theory is the best way to explain the properties of the universe. What we see is that it is much larger than the piece we can see, so, for example, we measure the space so that it is what is called a plane. I don't want to say that what is called flat is flat, so if you imagine slices of space, let's imagine slices of them at different times, so you just slice the universe and say there are big sheets like this today.

You could break a sheet of space and there's another sheet, another sheet and it can have a flat geometry like a table or it could be curved like a sphere or it could be curved in the opposite direction, like a saddle or a bowl, and we can measure it and When we measure it we see that it is absolutely flat and that is something very unusual for it to be as required. because what Einstein's theory says is that the shape of space, the curvature of space is determined by the things that are in it, that's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity, it puts things in space and slows them down, folds them,it warps them, stretches them and so on and what we find is that there are precisely the right amount of things in the universe to have a completely flat universe and the most favored explanation is that the universe is much larger than the piece that we can see and therefore that's like looking at a piece of earth oh you look at a small square of a mile of the earth at that time it's flat I mean you have to look at great distances it's some kind of variation of the radius of the earth or not you know that is bigger than 1 kilometer anyway in 1 mile to see that you are actually on a curved surface and that is One of the ideas about the universe and white seems to be the way it is because it is much larger so we're just looking at a small piece and that's why it looks flat and that's one of the ideas now when Saying flat like that my brain doesn't understand this because from our perspective, when you look up at the Milky Way, you see all these stars everywhere. , so if you say flat like that, what height and what are you saying!

So terms like how to measure it, the best way to think about it is to not think about three dimensions of space because then we can't imagine it, but you can think about two like this table and it's okay, we just forget about it. the other one for now and so that you know what is flat on this table, I mean you could define it so that you can say, for example, that if I draw a triangle on the top of the table, then all the angles add up to 180 degrees, so so it actually defines plane, if you did that on the surface of the earth with a large triangle, then the angles wouldn't add up to 280 degrees or you could draw a circle and say what is pi, then pi is the ratio of the circular inference of a circle to its diameter is only true on a flat surface, it is different if the surface is curved, so you can define flatness, so when you say flatness, what is the height and what is the width if you are talking about that? like it's a table, there must be some kind of dimension, right, oh yes, there is a third dimension of space, but the same thing applies, it's just a generalization of geometry, so let's say you can pick the fires, we can imagine it in two dimensions. but you can, you can draw, literally, you can imagine sending out similar rays, then we make this measurement, we can actually look at the disk, the most distant light that we can see, which is something called cosmic microwave background radiation, which is if you Imagine looking out, if you look at the Andromeda galaxy, which we can see with the naked eye here in Los Angeles, you can see that it is the most distant object that you can see with the naked eye and it is about 2.2 million light years away .

It means that it took 2 million years for the light to reach us, so it's very far away, but it's very big, so when you look further out into the universe, 2 more and more distant galaxies, you're looking further back in time because You look at something that is a billion light years away, it took light a billion years to reach us, so we see what it was like a billion years ago in the past, and in fact we can look as far away as we can. see almost up to 13.8 billion years ago, which is very close to the Big Bang for us to observe light that began its journey before galaxies existed and that is the oldest light in the universe which, by the way, It is one of the tests when people say: "I don't believe in it." of the Big Bang, the answer is where can you see it, so actually, right there you can see it, we have photographs of it and of that light, it turns out that there are structures or waves in that light that we can use as a ruler, literally. as a ruler in the sky and then, because light has been traveling through the universe, we can see how that ruler has been distorted as light travels through space and so we can infer whether space is flat or curved or how it is deformed, if you prefer. just because of that measurement it's a beautiful measurement, is it possible that in the future we will be able to see beyond 13.8 billion years, not with light, no, because what is the image that before it was released, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, it is You could say a precise number: how do you know that long before that time the universe was so hot that atoms could not form, so you had a soup of electrically charged particles?

It was just too hot for the electrons to go into orbit around the nuclei, so the universe was opaque to light, so you couldn't, it's almost like a big bright star, if you will, and then when you was expanding, it cooled beyond the point where atoms could form and at that point it became transparent almost instantaneously on a cosmic time scale, so light could travel in straight lines through the universe and we can see that light , so we see the light from that moment, but further back than there it is opaque, so you cannot see beyond that with light, but potentially you can with gravitational waves, which is this measurement that won the Nobel Prize A couple of years ago, the LIGO experiment here in the United States and that looks for waves in the fabric of space and time and, in principle, if we had a big enough detector, we could see the waves from the Big Bang, so we don't You could, you could image the Big Bang in gravitational waves, which it would be, but you need a huge amount of space-based data, so we're not going to build that anytime soon.

No, obviously. This is all due to equipment and technology that has been invented and perfected over the past hundreds of years. Is it possible that things will improve and some ability to detect things even in a much more distant way can be gained? Yeah, I mean gravitational waves are amazing, I mean, Einstein predicted them in 1915, he never thought they would be detected because you need to look for your hyper, you need lasers, he didn't have lasers, but they think like, oh, this experiment that happened performs half near Seattle in Washington state and half. in Louisiana, so they have two detectors and they're basically like that and they don't have three mile long laser beams and they just sit there and measure this stretching and king of space school like rifles into the fabric of the universe and they go through and and what they've been observing black hole collisions, so you can imagine how extreme, like the black hole collision, she said an incredibly extreme event that shakes the fabric of the universe and the rifles go through the universe and these laser beams, but she Basically, The rulers can detect it, they sound like you already know, they simply vibrate as the waves pass in space and time.

They keep Thorne, he got the Nobel Prize last year for this, he's one of the greatest living physicists, so I was assigned to describe him. like a storm in time, so you have this is a moment to storm, it's a beautiful image, so the technology is amazing because the change in length is kind of an exact number, but it's much smaller than the diameter of an atom . core, so the change in the length of the beams is a small measure, but we can do it, this time a collision of black holes, the idea that you can detect that yes, yes, they were, I said the article, the first article they published about black holes. and they were about 30 times the mass of the Sun each and they were orbiting each other and spiraling toward each other and they accelerated at one point they were approaching each other at one-third the speed of light and they accelerated at two-thirds the speed of light. speed of light in a tenth of a second and they will hit each other and the explosion was the release of energy.

I think I'm right, it was something like 50 times the energy release that powered all the stars in the observable. The universe was shining and it was something like 50 times that amount of energy for a small fraction of a second, but it is an unimaginably violent event and that is why our detectors can see the ripples that it generates in space and time and we detected at least two or three. of them now and also two neutron stars colliding, we saw it too, so it's an incredible machine, that's why it got the Nobel Prize. Now there is a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy, yes, there are also other black holes that are not.

Not necessarily in the center of galaxies, yes, so these little ones have a few times the mass of the Sun and they come from collapsed mosaics, so they are stars at the end of their life, much larger than the Sun, more massive than the Sol. but they run out of fuel and they start to collapse because gravity crushes them and if they are massive enough then there is nothing that can stop the collapse and as far as we know they collapse to a point, essentially an infinitely dense point that we know. We don't really know what happens, we don't know what happens right in the middle, but they crashed a search and discovered that there's a region around it where light can't escape and that's so nothing can escape and that's a black hole and what happens to them they travel, they move through space yes, they are still stars you know, so they are still there, they are surrounded, this region where you have fallen is called the event horizon and if you cross that horizon and then you will go to the center .

There is a way to think about it that is quite interesting, which is that the change of time and space is one way to think about it, in the same way that we are entering the future now so let's go to tomorrow there is nothing we can do about it let's do it tomorrow the same way if you fall through the event horizon of a black hole you go to the middle the singularity is called so that's that your future, every line of your future points to the center of the black hole, like this which is kind of the latest.

I have no escape from definitive prison. They will crush you until you are infinitely dense, so anoint that not every star turns into a black hole. not at the end of its life, because if something like the Sun and we have a small star, it is quite small, yes, and when it collapses there is a kind of pressure, a force, if you will, that is caused by the fact that Electrons don't like to be very close to each other, so it's called the Pauli exclusion principle, but essentially what happens is that as they get closer and closer, they move faster and faster to get out of the way. of the other, if you wish, and that creates a force. which holds them up and creates what's called a white dwarf star, so you can have a mass of mate, so they're about the size of the Earth but they're about the mass of the Sun and that's for smaller stars.

They end up like these white dwarfs, which are very dense objects. There is another version called a neutron star, which is the same thing but for neutrons and they move faster and faster, so if it is massive enough to overwhelm the electron, then the electrons are crushed into protons and become neutrons and it all starts over, so a neutron star can be, you know, elite, one and a half times the mass of the Sun, say, but it can be about 10 miles in diameter. So it's an incredibly dense ball of matter held up by moving neutrons. It has a fancy name, it's called neutron degeneracy pressure, but someone made it, but if you go even bigger, even that can't sustain it and that far. as we know so there's no known force that we know of that can hold the thing up if it's too massive and that's when we almost disappear from existence if you want oh collapse and collapse and collapse and that's when get a black hole we try to put that In perspective the earth the sun is a million times bigger than the earth yes and this neutron star is, would you say one and a half times the mass of this?

Yes, it's miles wide, yes, yes. and he allowed those around to call them pulsars, so we see them everywhere, although the first one that was discovered was called lgm1 because it spins very fast and then it was called lgm1 because it is a very regular pulse and they thought it was little green men like that they jokingly called it little green men one and then yes, we have seen that there is one called the crab pulsar that is in the Crab Nebula, where we saw the supernova explosion, so that was when one of these stars exploded at the end of its life and then collapses to form a neutron star and we saw that in 1054 AD there was some speculation that our gal or our solar system at some point was a binary star system and that one of those stars had become a dwarf, not I know and someone had read something about that in relation to the dense object that they think is outside the Kuiper belt, yeah, I mean, there's some evidence, there's a little bit of evidence that there's something out there, yeah, yeah, well because of periodic extinctions and things on Earth you get periodic bombardments from the Kuiper belt so yeah I think one of the theories is reassigning extinctions well yeah so I feel like you know they've been there ha There have been mass extinctions on Earth where a lot of life died and then we don't know what caused all of that, but sometimes their impacts from space seem clear and yes, there are theories that there is something orbiting there that can disrupt all of these objects in the future.

Kuiper belt that sends charges. of comets and asteroids into the inner solar system can wreak havoc, so there are some people who look at thoseIt would be surprising if we found microbes on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn where there is liquid water like Europa, yes, and the reason is, if you think about the reason, I think it is an assumption, it is because if you look at the history of life on Earth, then the Earth formed and there was no life, it was a ball. of rock and almost as soon as it cooled we see evidence of life, so certainly 3.8 billion years ago, possibly even further back, we see evidence of life on Earth, so at some point geochemistry, active geochemistry, became biochemistry on Earth, and we have some The idea is that if you get temperature gradients, acidic and alkaline and conditions that are naturally present at the surface of the oceans, then complex carbon chemistry occurs spontaneously, so we know that life almost certainly we know that life began on Earth.

I mean I had the other option: it came from space or something, but it probably didn't start on Earth and that means that at least here that happened and that we know the conditions that led to the origin of life. on Earth they were present on Mars 3.8 billion years ago before and we know that they are present on their own today, so I don't see that there is anything special. Life is just chemistry and the idea of ​​geochemistry becoming biochemistry is not. Fantastic because it happened here so I think that given the same conditions I would be surprised if the same thing didn't happen at that beginning of life so III that is one of the two tests that is one of the greatThe frontiers of science are now one of the big challenges, and that's why another reason we're interested in Mars is because we know those conditions existed, we know there were what are called hydrothermal vent systems on the ocean floors of Mars 3.8 years ago. or 4 billion years.

It would be good to know. What I have said is correct and the way we will find out is by finding life or evidence of past lives. Are you aware of the speculation that was circulating out there about how they got hold of the octopus eggs that were there? There was a group of scientists who were speculating that it's pop, you know, panspermia, the idea of ​​panspermia, that octopuses may have come from somewhere else, some frozen eggs actually came from somewhere else and landed on earth, and these are as if legitimate scientists are contemplated. No idiots, I don't think I've seen this now, but I'm serious, I think all of a sudden, so panspermia doesn't have to be unlikely, right?

I mean, for example, you may have seen the other day that we found a terrestrial rock. on the moon, yeah, well, the Earth now because you probably know it's probably back, weren't four billion years lost or something? One of the oldest rocks ever found. Yeah, so we know that material is transferred between planets, so it's not inconceivable that microbes could survive that trip, we know that microbes can survive in space for example, so that's not crazy, it's probably unlikely, but he's not angry, but with the octopus I didn't hear that, but the thing is that the octopus is still extremely similar biologically. for us I mean the differences are negligible, yes, so you still have the same energy system with a single ATP in the DNA.

You know, everything is very similar. It was something about RNA and DNA. Did you find that article? I'm looking at a different article. one for certain websites about the same thing I did with the Cam

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explosion and there were 33 authors in an article that was published in Progress and Biophysics and Molele Biology that talked about this possibility, there are other people who do not agree with it, although I mean, I guess I haven't seen it, so I think it's unlikely because the octopus is extremely similar to us, which suggests a common origin to me. I suppose the counterargument you could make would be that there is only one way to live life.

You could say that they actually happen because the laws of physics and chemistry are the same everywhere, so maybe DNA is the only way to do it, that's how it's done, that's why they are so similar to us , Yes to everyone. Those are so alien too, yeah, they're not, although you know that's what it's about, that's why it surprises me, because they're not that alien, they're very similar, well, there's in their abilities, I mean their ability to transform. Their exterior texture and color are instant, almost instant, oh yeah, I mean, they have amazing camouflage capabilities that don't really exist in the mammal world, yeah, but I'll sell you a level where you look at an octopus cell under a microscope and I wouldn't be able to tell the dish apart so you know it's for sale and humans, so the only way that would make sense is that all life comes from basically the same kind of building blocks and it just varies depending of the conditions and where it is taken. place, I guess, but yeah, that must be the only way to sustain that, given that they're so similar, because they really are biochemically, that's the only way it can be done, given the building block, the toolkit. the laws of nature and the elements and so on that we have in our universe, we have so many different forms of life on our planet, but if we found something that was even remotely similar to what we have here on Earth on another planet, it would be a great discovery incredible like the one we sent if we found a frog on the moon.

I mean, the world would stop. I would be very surprised if we found anything anywhere that is similar to an insect on Mars. Well, this is what I mean. He said it was micro, it wasn't single-celled things, remember, I mean, you mentioned the Cam

brian

explosion, so what we do know is that the Earth, although life began, let's say 3.9 billion years ago, it wasn't until around 600 million. years ago or so, or maybe most of the seven hundred that you see, complex multicellular organisms, that's all so first, something like 3 billion years, it was single celled only and that's one of the reasons why I guess which if I had to guess, I would say that microbes would be common because life started very quickly on Earth and I would be surprised to find them on Mars, but complex life, multicellular life, insects, plants, intelligence, I guess it will be very weird because it took so long on Earth to get there, who doesn't? t slime about 3 billion years of slime that's what happened how it went from slime to giraffes it's very fast once it started yes and it's one of the great unsolved mysteries in biology the only thing that's true is that it seems like We're all complex creatures, it seems like we call eukaryotes, right, Russian cells with a cell nucleus and all that kind of stuff, and they seem to be a fusion between two simpler life forms, bacteria and a thing called archaea and our So it seems like Two billion years ago, whatever it was in some ocean, the bacterial cell entered the archein and survived essentially as a symbiotic organism and then, somehow incredibly, managed to reproduce and replicate in that configuration and that seems to be the origin of all the complex multicellular life on Earth, so it's called the fateful encounter hypothesis and then if that's true, then it's just a small glimpse, anything happened once and that's why we're here now when the Striped look considers how many billions of Earth-like beings.

Planets, did you say they exist? Only our solar system in the galaxy. 20 billion and something like that. Towers so intense that the odds of complex life coming out of our incredibly lucky situation, but the odds of that happening on any of these billions of other planets that exist. We don't know, but let's say the Earth is on the lucky side, so we're talking about four billion years or so from the origin of life to now and we have a civilization now and we would have if our species had existed for a million years or something, it's basically now, so let's say four billion is the lucky side, let's say it was double or triple that on average, suddenly that's the age of the universe.

Right, that's a third of the age of the universe, so how many of those worlds have remained stable for three or four billion years? It is quite a difficult task. In fact, it looks like our solar system could be quite unusual in that sense because it could have planets. they have to stay stable in a stable orbit the stars have to stay stable the grand average stabilizes yes, Jupiter plays a big role, puts down some roots, yes, it sucks a moon, so you know there's one thing, there's a theory called theory of big technology, which is why it is very difficult to explain the evolution of our solar system, so when computer models of solar systems are made they tend not to look for rocky planets too close to the Sun and large gas giants further away, one of the best current.

Theories and I say this because it shows you how you could be Jupiter, that they tend to form these big gas giants and they migrated inward towards the star, so you know, I owe all the computer simulations just because you have this. A big gas giant that orbits all the dust around the star tends to fall inward and it looks like Jupiter did that, so it looks like it formed and came in and got almost as far as where Mars orbits today and cleaned up the region around Mars actually. , which This is maybe the reason why Mars is so small compared to the other, so it's Venus and Earth, oh, but then Saturn was also coming in and in the computer models the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn It stopped Jupiter from getting in before it got to Earth and they both get pulled back in and so they get to where they are today and that and that seems to be one of the best theories for the evolution of our solar system, so what are the odds?

You know the chances of that happening are so small. the school may be small, so that's what I think about these rocky planets, in order to have a civilization on them, I think you need quite unusual solar systems and that would be an assumption and you need quite unusual stability on the planet for thousands of millions of years and that's why I think we can be very lucky mmm and how Bodes' law works. Bodes' law is a detection method. If you look at the mass of a planet, you can precisely detect how much mass and size of a neighboring planet.

I think it wasn't just the positions of the orbits, I think just where they are, yeah, and one thing that's true about our solar system is that if you get the computer simulations, you can't put any more planets in if you try. and fill in, put more planets, they become unstable very quickly, so the mass of Mars, if you measure, can accurately represent where the next planet close to it would be, I mean that's what was done, was the 17? Century or so, yeah, it was just one of those things where you know it's a pattern, they were just trying to fit into a pattern, which is a, you don't know, there's nothing to it really other than to say that most From solar system simulations if there are any, if you put other planets in they tend to get kicked out by gravitational interactions, so in a sense our solar system has as many things as it could have, so the planets are well spaced and you're right. their mass depends on how close another planet can be before the interaction goes wrong and it is flung into intergalactic space.

Partly because mannix does that, you know, we know that planets are ejected from solar systems by gravitational interactions, so Yeah, again it points to the fact that solar systems are not stable over long periods of time, they are not like a clockwork, they are not like Newtonian clockworks and they just go on forever, they are not like that and they evolve. and planets can change orbits and change and we know that if you look at the surface of the Moon, for example, it's covered in craters and that's because they all seem to collide at about the same time and it was about 3.8 billion years ago and that's called the late intense bombardment, so we know that if you look at the rate of cratering on Mars and the Moon, everything seems to happen except for a big spike around that time and that seems to be correlated with Neptune moving outward. in the solar system and towards Kuiper.

The belt is basically towards the Kuiper belt and it wreaks all kinds of havoc and everything goes into the inner solar system, so those things happen, but it didn't happen when life was established on Earth, so this is all something extremely old that is changing. textbook, but how long has the solar system been in this particularly stable situation it is in now? It's from about 3.8 billion years ago, so if it had been unstable at any point since then we probably wouldn't be here, right? that it is possible, do you ever consider the idea that it is possible that we are the only intelligent life in the known universe?

III, as I said Teresa,I tend to restrict myself to galaxies so I think it's possible that right now there is a civilization in the Milky Way and that's us and I think that's important actually and it goes back to our starting saying about astronomy and cosmology are part of the framework within which you have to think if you're looking for meaning, you're looking for how we should behave even politically, you know, that relates to me, I mean, imagine that we are the only place where there is intelligence in this galaxy and how we should behave, despite the fact that we are small and fragile and physically insignificant things we should consider ourselves extremely valuable in that sense because there is no other place where you know I would go so far as to say that there would be no other place where meaning There is meaning in the Milky Way because meaning is one of those things that scientists don't.

I don't talk about it much, although Richard Fineman, one of my great heroes, did talk about it. There is a quote where he says what is the meaning of all this. It's a big essay called The Value of Science, so what's evidently true is that Meaning exists here because it means something to us, so it's an obvious statement: Your life means something to you and me, so that the meaning exists, but I think it is a local and temporary phenomenon. I think it comes up. Meaning arises from the configurations of atoms. which is what we are, we're just very, very strange configurations of atoms, I think, and that means that, if you follow that line of logic to the end, we are the only island that means The galaxy I mean only ourselves , yes, it means something to us because we are the only ones who can grasp the concept and we are finite, we are finite organisms, we have this temporary existence while we are here and for us there is I mean, yes, and I don't know any other way to define it correctly, like this I will define it like this.

Yeah, I don't think there's a globe, yeah, otherwise you have to believe there's some kind of global meaning and that's some kind of god. mingun I don't think that's it, I think it's more wonderful and more challenging for us because we have to take responsibility to say that we must operate in such a way that we are in this galaxy mmm there is nothing else, I'm sure I'm I'm just sure that there are other civilizations in the universe because there are two billion galaxies. I just can't believe this hasn't happened elsewhere. The question is how often it happens and how far apart our civilizations are and I think they are very far apart and I think there may be one or two per galaxy. on average it could, but like you said, basically, what else can we think of well, so what more do you want?

I mean, I think what it says is that you have to take responsibility for all those things as spiritual. the things you think about and the emotional things you think about, you are responsible for it, you are like that, whatever it is, it exists in you and it will only exist for a short period of time, so what you know makes it happen. Best of all, it is incredibly compelling to entertain the idea that somewhere there is another civilization that is perhaps even more advanced than us, and this thought is so appealing that it is incredible that there should be.

If civilizations are common or even slightly common, then there should be civilizations ahead of us, yes, because it's been a long time, but wouldn't you like to see what that's like? Yeah, I mean, we're so compelling that you can imagine the time scales we've been on. a civilization, let's say forty thousand years, I don't know how long our civilization has existed, let's say the galaxy is almost as old as the universe, it has a time of thirteen billion years, so the idea that there are no Zeros of civilization, you know, 100 million years ago, 200 million years ago, a billion years ago and imagine what they would be like if they had survived.

I mean, we've been here, we've had science, let's say since Newton. or Copernicus 500 years at most we have had the Sun look what we have done we have gone beyond the solar system with Voyager we have walked on the moon and we are about to go to Mars, I think yes we are we are about to start colonizing our own solar system and we've done it in 500 years, so imagine a million years in the future. I would say that it is one of the arguments often used to say that there are no civilizations in the galaxy.

It's called the Fermi paradox because if you imagine a civilization that is a million years ahead of us, they should have already written their presence in the sky, they should have seen it. I mean, you'll see us leave. We survived a million years into the future. In fact, even a few thousand years into the future we will be exploring the galaxy. We will have spaceships that will go to the stars. We will do this so that our signature becomes visible. I'm sure if we lasted in the middle, he said, would we do it? I choose not to do that, here is my opinion on uncontacted tribes, like do you know the gentleman who was the missionary that visited North Sentinel Island?

Yeah, he was killed by the natives of North Sentinel Island, which is a really unusual place because they got separated. from Africa 60,000 years ago and they've been living on this little ion the size of Manhattan and plus we know there's only about 39 of them left somewhere out there and we can't, we're not supposed to contact them like we're supposed to. people don't like to leave them alone and there is a strange tribe when they find them in the Amazon, the isolated tribes, our initial instinct is to back away, leave them alone, leave them alone, do you think maybe a universe like there is a civilization? that's a million times more advanced than incredible, it's been here because you know, millions of years of life instead of a quarter of a million, why would they let us know if they'd watch us throwing bombs at each other and polluting the ocean, sucking everything? the fish out there and putting clouds in the skies of dirt and particles and why would they look at these crude monkeys, look at their data, they are way beyond where they need to be before they can join the Galactic Civilizations, it's true, it's an argument that There is also the argument that such advanced technology would be difficult for us to detect.

I mean, we tend to think of, you know, when you say written in the sky. I guess it's true. I'm thinking of spaceships like Star Wars, very big. energy stuff that you can see the signature of, but in reality maybe civilization will just become a nanocivilization, a tiny nanocivilization, but because that's more inefficient, it's a better way of doing things, so it's possible . I guess then there are space probes everywhere. They're so small and they're so efficient and they use so little energy that we just don't see them. I guess it's possible. My other thought is that where we're headed seems to me to be some kind of strange symbiosis going on.

There is a strange connection that we have with electronics and ultimately with an artificial creation or official intelligence, whatever you want to call artificial light life, something created by carbon-based beings, cellular beings that are not cellular but that are also They act like life, yes, that. This may be the future of life that we are so connected to the idea of ​​flesh, blood and bone, but perhaps this is just a temporary situation until we transition or, if not, our transition until it overtakes us and This stage does not need all the human and biological reward systems to be in place that ensured we survive, whether it is ego, fear or emotions, it does not need to simply exist and keep your balance as this new form of life and This is the future of life in the universe and you will get there, we may only be a hundred and two hundred years away, but that is what exists in the entire cosmos, so there is no need to strut, there is no need to show our sin. the sky and it just exists in this form yeah I agree I wouldn't be surprised yeah that's the counterargument to this Fermi Paradox argument I'm talking about exactly like you just said you basically evolved to a point very quickly where you just don't create a signature, yeah, and you don't really get involved, like you said, maybe just yeah, well, there's no motivation, right, it's not like that, our motivations are strange too, right, we have these biological motivations to survive and you know there are motivations to conquer and innovate and spread our genes and move to New Territories, but if you didn't have biology, if you did, you would exist entirely from man-made materials or from materials found on earth and that this A new way of life was created from that.

I wouldn't have them unless you programmed them and why would you do that? It's interesting, isn't it? Because we don't know which consciousness is correct, so something called a hard problem in We don't know the science, so it's a good question if you can build, let's say you want to build a self-replicating machine, which is what you're talking about, or something that can go and maybe go to the moon on Mars and replicate. and then he continues, that it is a living being, I suppose so, it has to have a sufficient level of intelligence, it is actually conscious and all these things that we talk about, this word that means that we used before and that we all understand, it is not can.

Define is an emergent property that has to arise if you have something that is smart enough to replicate and live and function, you said it was there. I don't know the answer, but it's worth considering that this thing is what emotion means. Love and fear and all that stuff are just the things that happen when you're smart, right? I don't know the answer to that, but it possibly could be and consciousness has to have a local origin like it has to come from a place. something like if you think about cellular communication, if you send me, if you're in England, can you send me a video from your phone and it reaches my phone, it reaches me through space, it goes through the sky, it's like literally from a device not connected by no wire or anything, it comes to me if there is a possibility of creating some kind of global intelligence through electronic components that are not local, if a piece falls off, it's the same, it just repairs itself or discovers itself but It is the same consciousness that exists on a global scale through some type of electronic network that instead of the idea that you and I have that Brian and Joe are, you have your mind, I have my mind and we exist as intelligent beings. separated from each other, but instead, everything is connected and everything is something that we can't even conceive because our brains are too crude like trying to explain to Australia Pittacus what a satellite is, yeah, yeah, I mean.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about our brains, ultimately, what are they? They're just a distributed network of cells connected by neurons and I mean they're very complicated, but they're a colony of things that are autonomous in a sense and we're communicating with each other, so yeah, I don't know. I don't see why that can't be expanded in principle. I mean, I should be wrong. The caveat is that we always don't know that no, yes, it's easy. It's just not well understood. I think there's something weird about physics, even though I'm pretty sure it's physics. I am very sure that nothing is going on in my head other than what is permitted by the laws of nature as we understand them.

I'm sure you're referring to the idea that a soul is some kind of divine thing that's inside the casing of the body. Yeah, I mean, I know I would say we can rule that out. In fact, I have discovered it in the past. How is it discarded? I've argued that we can rule that out like this, so it's my arm that's right, it's made of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and if I have a soul in there, something we don't understand, but it's a different kind of energy. or whatever first thing that we don't have in physics right now interacts with matter because I'm moving my hand, so whatever it is is something that interacts very strongly with matter, but if you look at the history of particle physics in In particular, what is the study of matter that we go through, we spend decades making high precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts and we look for it, for example, for a fifth force of nature, so we know four forces of gravity , the two nuclear forces called weak. and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism and that's what we know exists and we look for another one with ultra high precision and we don't see any evidence of it, so I would say we know how matter interacts at these energies, it's a room temperature.

Now, these Angeles we know how matter interacts very precisely, so if you want to suggest that there is something else that interacts strongly with matter, then I'd say that's out. I would dare say that it is ruled out by experiments or at least that way. It is extremely subtle and you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to come up with a theory of some things that we would not have seen when we have observed how the matter that is present in our bodies interacts and we presumably believe in the soul, you want it to exist outside when you die, still you want the thing to be there and you canbelieve in ghosts and stuff like a ghost, I mean, it's something that bears your imprint, presumably it looks like you, right? that means it interacts strongly with the matter that is you because it carries a patent if it carries a pattern it carries information if it carries information there has to be a source of energy that allows that information to persist in the pattern to persist and so again, you end up with a theory that postulates that something interacts with light because if you believe that a ghost is the soul, then it is something that people see sometimes, that means it interacts with light, but we know how light interacts and we rule it out. anything but the most subtle additional interaction that we haven't seen, so I would say and I started as a joke, this I actually wrote in an infinite monkey cage book, this radio show that I do, but it ended when I wrote it, in I actually thought it makes sense and I read that some are similar.

Actually, I think I'm Sean Carroll II. I don't have, you've had Sean, yeah, shareable dumps. He said something himself, I think in the book. he wrote the big picture. I think he actually has a similar argument, so it also occurred to him that it's pretty much the same argument, so if you use this energy that interacts with matter, even if you're not moving at all, if you're just thinking , it is interacting with the matter that encompasses your mind, your brain, your nerves or your neurons, yes, there is something there that interacts with matter, whether you like it or not, so even a simple thought process or a dream is still something who interacts with Matt, yes.

Well, obviously, because you know that your will is not presumably correct, even if you're not moving the idea like you say, you're like your body is interacting with the matter while you're moving your arm, but even if you're not moving, if you're just thinking and you are completely still, which is not totally possible because your hearts are beating, your breathing and all that, but if somehow or other you were able to isolate just the thought, the thoughts themselves are. they still interact with matter because they are interacting with the brain itself, yes, so there is something there, there is something that interacts with the physical structure of your body and I would say that there is not, so that's the whoo-whoo version is that The brain itself and the physical body, so this spiritual self you are simply an antenna. that is tuning into the great consciousness of the universe, but why, but then you have to answer what do we know what we are made of, yes, oh we know how those particles behave and interact, so why don't the particles interact in any way? those things because we interact, we don't, if that's true, we not only interact with it, we interact extremely strongly with it, we are interacting with it now, yes, every move I make is the interaction between those, every matter, yes, yes , so everything if I move my fingers, everything I'm doing right is an interaction between those things and me, so it's a very strong interaction with matter, but we don't see it in all of our precision measurements, well, the The answer for that dancer is because he is not. there the answer is Jesus and you can't measure God, that may be an answer, but the point is you, as we talked before with absolute space, yes, if you can't measure it, yes, it's not there, hmm, right, but for some reason.

There is incredible motivation to find something divine or another. There is something greater than this physical being. There's something you think it is. What is that compulsion? We've already talked a little about that. I think it says. to the heart of this question of what it means to be human mmm, then I would say that being human the answer to is not the answer to meaning, but one answer would be that we are small finite beings, right?, which are just groups of atoms, As we said before, they are very rare, but we roughly understand how they came about and we have a limited amount of time, not actually unfortunately, but because of the laws of nature that prohibit us from being immortal. -them-them immortality is ruled out by the laws of physics, but also what's interesting is that if you look at the basic physics of the universe from the Big Bang to where we are today, the physics is driven by the fact that the universe began. in an extremely ordered state, so it was a very ordered system and it's trending towards a more disordered system right now and that's called the second law of thermodynamics and it's that basic common sense thing that things basically go to the second law of thermodynamics what we strongly suspect and I would say we know is that in that process of going from order to disorder complexity emerges naturally for a short period of time, so it is a natural part of the evolution of the universe that appears in the time when there is complexity in the universe, then stars, planets, galaxies, life and civilizations, but they exist because the universe is decaying, not despite the fact that the universe is decaying, so our Existence in that kind of picture is necessarily finite and necessarily limited in time and it's kind of remarkable that that complexity has gone so far that there are things in the universe that can think and feel and explore it and I think that's the answer, if you want a answer to the meaning of everything, that is what you are. part of the universe because of the way the laws of nature work, you are allowed to exist, but you are allowed to exist for a temporary time or a small amount of time in a possibly infinite universe, one of the most mind-blowing moments I remember .

My limited understanding of what it means to be a living being was when I discovered that carbon and everything that makes us up has to come from a dying star, yes, just that, there is a very strange cycle of these huge fireballs that Forge the stuff that makes Brian Cox, yeah, he likes that, except there's this weird loop of biological life that comes from the stars, which is like the most elemental thing we can observe. We see these things in this. Can we see the Sun? the sky is this almighty ball of fire, yes, and that's where the basic components of a person come from and then it's like that and it will be from the carbon atoms in our body that you're right, they all became styles because there was nothing that in the Big Bang, there is only hydrogen and helium, a small amount of lithium to be precise, but nothing else, so everything was formed in stars and is probably of different styles, you know the atoms in your body, they are not all from a star who cooks it and then dies, there will be a mixture of things from many stars in your body now and I agree with you on what more do you want?

You know when I see people who have I want more than that. I want you to know there must be something more to this, what do you mean we have, we have, we were the ingredients now? The bodies were assembled in their hearts of long-dead stars over billions of years and have spontaneously assembled into temporary structures that we can think, feel and explore and then those structures will disintegrate again at some point in the very distant future. there will be no structures left, so there we are, we exist in this small window when we can observe this magnificent universe, why?

I want more insults, I think for people, I think a lot of people are not aware of all the right information and then I think also, for some people it's so overwhelming, you know, this concept of 13.8 billion years. of everything to get to this point where we are now is so overwhelming that they want to simplify it, you want to put it in a kind of fable structure, something where it is something very common, similar and familiar, yes, I agree and and but I think that that It is the journey that we undertake that is the true treasure.

I think it is in that journey of trying to face the incomprehensible. Yes, it is in that understanding that it is almost, it is almost impossible to believe that we exist. Which I think you're missing. I think if you decide to simplify it because you don't want to face that, you haven't faced the infinity that is in front of us and you don't want to face those stories like you said that you look at your finger and its ingredients were cooked in multiple stars for billions of years, that for To me it's something happy and powerful to think about, yes, and I think you're missing out if you don't want to face it well.

I think the distribution of information has changed so radically in the last two hundred years and particularly in the last twenty that you're now seeing these trends where more people are inclined to abandon a Many people, even if they remain religious or maintain a search or a belief in a higher power, they are more inclined to consider these concepts of science and to understand what has been observed, documented and written among scholars and academics and there are more, there are more people who accept that if you look at the number of agnostic people now compared to twenty thirty years ago, it's increasing, it's changing and I think it's also because of you and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Sean.

Carroll and all these other people who are public intellectuals who are discussing this kind of stuff, people like me have a much greater understanding of this than I think people did 30 or 40 years ago, yeah, and that trend continues, I think. It's going in a very good direction, yes. I mean, I don't know, what we should say is that in science we don't know all the answers, so we don't know where the laws of nature come from, we don't know why the universe started the way it did, if in fact it had a beginning, so I don't know why the Big Bang was very, very orderly, which is ultimately as Sean Carroll often mentioned and points out that it means right, but the whole difference is the only difference between the past and the future.

The so-called arrow of time is that in the past the universe was really ordered and it is becoming more disordered and that is that state of order necessary at the beginning of the universe, which is really the reason why we exist, that is the reason why that the universe started in a particular way, we don't know why it was that way, we'll probably find out at some point and it will have something to do with the laws of nature, but I'm always careful, I don't want science to sometimes sound ar

rogan

t, right, sometimes it can sound like it's the discipline of telling people you're not right, yeah, and it's not the discipline of saying you're not right, I mean, this is what we found out, yeah, so I like it. to say that it provides a framework within which if you want to philosophize or you want to do theology or you want to ask these deep questions about why we are here you have to operate within that framework because it's just a framework of observation, yeah, everything.

We have said that these are things that we have discovered, they are not things that someone invented. We, we, you know, understand nuclear physics. We can build nuclear reactors, for example, so that we understand the physics of stars, so that we understand that stars built carbon and oxygen. and we know how they did it and we can see it because like I said before we can if you look out into the universe you're looking back in time and as you look back in time you see less carbon and less oxygen so we have an observation direct that in the early universe there was none because we can see it and now we see that there is something and we know how it was made, so I think it's important to be humble when you speak. about science and you're not saying that's how it is, I mean your own sense, but you know it's not, it's not able to answer fundamental questions right now, it's not able to answer even if the universe had a start or not.

We don't even know and I gave him a talk. I was asked to give a talk to some bishops in the UK about cosmology and I said yes, it would be a lot of fun, so when I gave this talk and at the end I said I have some questions, so if the universe is eternal and It could be, perhaps it has not had a beginning if it is eternal, what place is there for a creator? You know, that's a good question, Brian, I didn't, they didn't. I don't have an answer, of course, it's true, an eternal creator, but yes, but I think these could be eternal and we could find out, so we don't know at this time, but it may be so.

I guess my point is that these other human desires are very natural for religions and it's a natural thing for people to see around the world and in all different cultures, but I think in the 21st century religion needs to operate within that framework, if it's going to work, there are still great mysteries and It's appropriate to think about what it means to be human and I'm giving you my view of what that means, but I don't think the problem arises when your theology or your philosophy forces it to to deny some facts, some measure, now these. things in measurements we are not saying it is not my opinion the universe is 13.8 billion years old we measure it it is like having an opinion between the distance from Los Angeles to New York no, you can't have an opinion about that, right?

Know what it is? and it's the same thing, you know, you get excited about these things that people say the Earth is flat or whatever, so it's not and we've measured it, so it's enough to just say it, but that doesn't mean it's not You can be spiritual and you can't really be, I would just say that doesn't mean you can't believe in God or God. That is not ruled out by science, butSome things are ruled out. I love the way you communicate this because it takes human nature into consideration. and I love Dawkins, he's fantastic, I think he's very, very, very valuable, but he likes to call people idiots and the problem with that is that people say you're an idiot, it's a natural inclination when you insult people. people to respond and respond.

They put their foot down, yeah, and you don't do that, and I think that's very important, and I think a guy like Doc is frustrated by all these years of debates with educated people who say ridiculous things and he's a bit of a Grumpy, you know, and he seems to soften as he gets older, well, he's evolutionary biology, yeah, and that's the first line in a sense, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, the thing about particle physics is that you don't understand much because people don't understand what you're talking about, so I understand their frustration. Oh, me too.

Having said that, you know, I've softened a little bit over the years, actually because I think about this point now. both in the US. In fact, in Britain and in some of the countries we are at a point that you have alluded to where everyone is angry, there is not a lot of anger and a lot of that is justified by the way in which I could talk about income inequality and all that. those things is justified anger, but it seems to me that there are people of good will who need to come together to dissipate the anger in our societies, otherwise we will not have countries like the United States, yes, the United States, because they are united and all of you I have the American flag there, you know, he said there's a sense of belonging and identity and togetherness in a country that you have to preserve, so I stopped choosing.

Isis, for example, I quite enjoy fighting with Deepak Chopra on Twitter it's just for laughs, she says some crazy things in her hand, but I saw Thomas. I stopped doing well, but in relation to some of the other people, right, he is someone who means well, yeah, I disagree virtually. Whatever he says, though, he is a well-intentioned person, yes, and that's why I started trying to find common ground. That's why, for example, I gave a talk to the bishops, they asked me to go. I don't agree with them about the framework, their theological framework, but most of them have good intentions, yes, so I think seeking consensus and spreading anger, as you said, is up to all of us, especially people like We, you have a public voice, we need to calm some of this anger because otherwise it will consume everyone.

Yeah, I've tried really hard to evolve in that way and get better at communicating ideas and understanding how people receive those ideas and I think it's easy to get lazy and insulting, and especially. I mean, I'm a comedian, what I do, yes, for humor, I want to entertain people, that's the idea behind it, but I think in terms of discussing ideas, especially ones that are so personal to people, like the religion. I reexamined the way I interpret these ideas and the way I talk about these things. Yes, there is an interesting one. I did a BBC program about my age and they asked me to do it about the baby talks the BBC has done. from 1952 I think it was and Robert Oppenheimer did them in '53 and it was fascinating, you can get the transcriptions online, they're free and you can get a recording of the five that they recorded over the other four and if you believe it, they raised them. they wanted to record something but one of them existed often Jaime giving these lectures oh my God, but you can read better and Russell didn't make the Reaver, they recorded them on them Bertrand Russell because the tape was very expensive but he talks about raising money, yes, but it's brilliant, it's because science is in the common understanding and they weren't very well received because he thought he was going to talk about his Manhattan projects, so they thought he was going to talk about the atomic bomb, which means he was the one who basically he was directing it, but he didn't talk about how thinking like a scientist, which means thinking the way nature forces you to think, can be valuable in other areas and is an idea in itself?

The great thing, the only thing about science is that nature forces you. to think like this you can't have an opinion can I have an opinion about gravity? just be gentle like a building you can fall to the ground that doesn't matter what your opinion is and he said that if you think about for example Quantum Mechanics so sometimes you think of a particle as an electron sometimes it has to be a point object , it can behave like a little bouncing billiard ball, but sometimes it behaves like an extended thing, like a wavy thing, and nature forces you. to keep both ideas in your head at the same time, you know there's a complete picture of the objects, they're a description of an electron and he said that's the valuable thing about quantum mechanics that you know, unless you're doing electronics or inventing. lasers, you don't need to know these things, but if you want to learn to think, it's valuable to be forced to have different ideas in your head at the same time mmm, it's really teaching you not to be an absolutist, directly teaching you the The example he uses is because I think he had problems with McCarthy and all those things he didn't have, so you think he's writing in the '50s, so he said you can be a communist, which in his definition would be that. you think the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few so societies are all that matters oh i might be a libertarian on the conservative end where you think the individual is the only thing that matters and that's all but in reality Of course, to have a function in society you need a combination of the two and we can hope in one way or another, but you need to have both ideas in your head at the same time and that is one of the most valuable things. about science because it forces you into ways that you think are valuable and that's what we're talking about here, it's so absolute that doctors are always kind of a subset of what's really going on, you can't understand the world being an extremist.

Yes, you have to have all these points of view in your head, I find that very often on this podcast because I talk to people that I agree with and that I disagree with and I always try to put myself in their head. the person I disagree with. I always try to figure out how they come to those conclusions or where they come from, yes, and I think it's very important not to be married to ideas. I had a conversation with someone about this and they told me that sometimes you change your opinions a lot I go yes I flip-flop I'm not a politician like I'm not flip-flopping I'm thinking yeah I'm not sure I'm not sure how I'll have an opinion on a thing, whether it's something controversial like universal basic income.

I'll change my mind one hundred percent in two weeks, yeah, now I think it's probably a good idea, yeah, and then I'll come and go no, no, no, no, people need it, but it's as cruel as it sounds, they need the motivation they need and I don't know, I bounce off these things, yeah, but I've tried really hard as I've gotten older to have less absolute opinions, yeah, yeah, wrote Richard Fineman, another great physicist. a similar essay from a similar time to Oppenheimer and he also works on the Manhattan Project, it's called the value of science and I think it was in 1955 and they both shared a surprise.

I think they were still alive because they thought the power they had. He had told the politicians that the atomic bomb would destroy everything. They didn't think a political system would control it and it did. It is a remarkable emotion. Yes, we're still here, but in that essay he said it was the most valuable thing. The thing about science is realizing that we don't know and he said in that statement he calls science the satisfactory philosophy of ignorance because of the way he said in that statement it's the open door, the open channel, he called it if we want.

To make progress we have to understand that we don't know everything and we have to leave things to future generations and we can be unsure and we can change our minds and he said that's a great last line. I come exactly what he says. but he said it's kind of our duty as scientists to communicate the value of uncertainty and the value of freedom of thought to all future generations. That is the point. That's what freedom of thought means. Freedom of thought means the freedom to change your mind. In fact, he said. That's what democracy is, if you think about it, democracy is a system of trial and error, so it's admitting that we don't know how to do it, therefore, we will change every four years, we will change the president or every eight years.

We will change the president why because the president does not know how to do it so that someone better makes someone better who arrives and then someone worse and someone better but it is a system of trial and error and he is right and he is right that is the open door that it is the path to progress it is certainly better than humility yes, one of the things I like most about Bertrand Russell and Fineman is how human they were, they were very human, I mean, finally I like playing bongos and who chases girls and Bertrand Russell was addicted to tobacco, he talked about how he wouldn't fly unless he could smoke like he had to catch us in those days when they had smoking sections on airplanes and he had his pipe and he just refused. fly without tobacco and I couldn't imagine being without tobacco, well, yes, it is very strange that such a brilliant guy is addicted to something so disgusting, yes, you are right, because I think these are faithful who found happy existence, yes, they wanted do it.

I know they just wanted to know things, yeah, they didn't want to know everything because you can't know everything well, yeah. I guess that's what happens if you think about what the scientist's job is, to be on the edge of the known. because you're a research scientist, so if there's nothing to know then you don't have a job, so you have to be naturally comfortable not knowing and if there's something that I really believe was, how do we start to fix our countries? Again, one of the reasons I think in education is to teach people the value of certainty, but not knowing is not a weak right to not know, it is actually natural not to know and that is one of the freedoms that religion has is to say that you know when it's not difficult to say that you have the absolute truth and absolute knowledge of something, yes, when it really can't exist, yes, I mean, history tells us, doesn't it?

Yes, anyone who thinks they have absolute knowledge is a cause. he's a problem, yes, you saw Ex Machina, yes, did you enjoy it?, yes, I know him, Alex Garland because he wrote Sunshine, oh right, 28 days later, yes, yes, the new movie, the weird one, the alien movie, he wrote it too, right, yeah, great soundtrack. Yes, yes, are you afraid of artificial life, artificial intelligence and do you know that it could scare me? Yeah, when he talked about it like he talked about it like it was in the opening scene of a sci-fi movie where he's trying to warn people. and then they don't listen to the genie and everything goes south, so it depends.

I chaired a debate about this for the RPG sites in London a few weeks ago and this is what people seem to be afraid of in a general right now. a is not I AG I they call it artificial general intelligence, which is like what we talked about before, a human-like capacity, yes, and we are miles away from that, we don't have to do it, we don't have them and we are miles away , so right now artificial intelligence is expert systems and very focused systems that do particular things, you can be afraid of them in a limited economic sense because they are going to displace people's jobs and, in fact, interestingly in this panel of discussion we had, is happening.

It's like why Mike has middle class jobs in the UK and white collar jobs. Actually, that's not why people are interested in universal basic income to replace the money that's lost because otherwise there won't be jobs for all these people. we just have a massive catastrophe, yes they are very good, someone said these systems are special intelligence systems right now, they are very good at doing things like a lot of lawyers work on, so they are very good at reading contracts and things interesting. A revolution is not like the Industrial Revolution where it is manual labor that is necessarily affected.

This is kind of interesting because it hits that kind of middle ground that usually escapes, so you're right. One of the answers is to tax. There was an example. robot tank, so in a car factory you say to the manufacturer, well, you can have a robot, you pay the robot the same as you pay a person and then that money goes to fund universal basic income or something like that, mhm, so I think there has to be an economic shift because these systems will be there, but I guess all the experts who agreed that the idea of ​​a Terminator-style general intelligence taking over the world are miles away. , so, although we could start thinking about regulation, it is not going to be like that. it happening soon is the general point I think, so I wouldn't agree with him on that, I think it's too far in the future at this point I thought I might be one of those people, it's okay everything will be fine and then I know that my iPhone takes me along the way, sois expanding now so it must have been closer in the past and therefore there could be a time when everything was expanding. together and he was a priest, well, so he's a Belgian priest, so I think I wrote about this now, it's a kind of mental socialization, but I think he was more predisposed to accept what the equations were telling him because a beginning and an origin . for a priest it's actually a good thing because it tells you the creation event and Einstein tried to get around it and put this allowed term in his equation, which is almost the elastic term, so say well, if it's all, if it's all kinds of contraction or something I can put something in so it stretches a little bit to balance it all out so it can be eternal so you can't you can't make it eternal that way but he tried it and then he took it out and called it his biggest mistake in taking it out was : you know, you can't put any on his biggest mistake or at least some people think that what he had done was miss the Big Bang prediction, so by trying to tinker to have a static. universe that is stable he missed what the equations were screaming his own theory was screaming at him that no, the universe expands or contracts and he didn't realize it, so I think that's probably what he meant most wrongly, but In any case he removed it. and then in the 1990s it turns out that no, it is there, but it is very small, it is a tiny effect, but it still dominates the universe now and will dominate it even more in the future, so we think that we are in the universe that It will continue to expand by essentially doubling its size on a fixed time scale which is about twenty billion years, so every twenty billion years in the future forever, unless something happens, the universe will continue to expand and double its size. size two years and that is dark energy. that's driving it, but no one knows what it is, it's one of the massive cutting-edge problems in theoretical physics and what's being done to try to better understand what it is, I mean, it's theoretical to them, I mean, we're making observations very precise, but it seems like a constant, so it seems like it's basically a number, if you will, in Einstein's equations and it's very simple, so it seems like something that maybe is a property of space itself, I don't know , but it seems.

It's a very simple thing that doesn't change over time and just stays there, so it also requires theoretical advances, which is why people are trying very hard to achieve it. It is crazy to go from Galileo to modern theoretical physics. still in the myths of this understanding, yeah, what is this all about, yeah, I mean, these are, you know, these are fundamental, difficult problems and we're talking about the origin and the evolution of the universe, right, that's what It is cosmology and also its particles. physics, I mean the way these things, these things, we keep talking about these things in the universe, that's what the LHC studies, it studies how things behave, um right now.

These are very theoretical, right, They are trying to understand what this is and what its properties are. Can you imagine a time when you can actually measure this physically and then have a really clear understanding of what it is and what its properties are, dark energy and I, I don't know, I mean, for example, there are theories that probably don't are right, but they are not necessarily wrong either, there are theories that try to link it with the Higgs particle, so the Higgs particle that we have discovered and that we can measure has some properties that we think dark energy would need and also this inflation that I mentioned a long time ago at the beginning of the universe like some of the prophecies that can also do that, for example, there are trying to link them with fear so that we have an observation of the Higgs, we can study that they are also linked, I don't know, for which could be that we can study it even though it is a very small weak effect and it could be web. direct access to food, so it's cool, I mean, they're great mysteries that there's something really deep that we don't understand about the way that things in particular, the Higgs, really interact with space and time, in very very Naive, the Higgs should blow up the universe.

Very naively, it's a lot of energy in a very small amount of space, huge amounts of energy in the Higgs field, but it does nothing more than give mass to things that don't seem to directly affect space, but everything. the rest. what you put in the space affects it directly so you know there are problems that we don't and it just says we don't understand it, we don't know, we don't understand it yet, it's just that I can. eat another one of those, they probably would have been late. If I stayed, I guess I would say there's some link there, you know there's something going on and solving one of them could solve the other with inflation, Higgs dark energy, something, how many people in the world would do it? you estimate that you are trying to understand this and working on this, the good question, I don't know, I mean, it's probably tens of thousands, tens of thousands, if you can, all the people who work at CERN and the particle physicists and the theoretical physicists there.

It would be tens of thousands because it's so important that we understand what's going on, but it's still out of reach for most people, including me, like I was listening to you talk about this and I said, thank you. God, it's people like you thinking whatever, thanks to think quarks, there are people like you out there doing this, but it's almost like you're speaking another language. It's very strange to me. It was something very new. Yes, you know. I mean, even when I was. at school and when I was at university we hadn't discovered the top quark and we knew it was there, we thought the Higgs might be there but we had no idea if it was so we moved on.

In my career we are moving pretty fast and yet, you are right, these are the most fundamental questions about what Weiser eats, ultimately why the universe is the way it is and even possibly why there is a right universe, we are far from that. yet, but if we are ever going to answer that it will be by doing things like this and all of this is addressed in this live show that you are doing in this world, yes, live show and it will certainly also be the consequences of what is not coming. words of knowledge, but cosmology is terrifying, as we begin, I think, as we said, it raises questions, it asks quite vivid questions that we all have about, you know, what are we doing here in this breath.

Try, I think it goes back to me, I've actually been around Cal Sega and he always used to try this. You try to link it to things that people think about naturally, so that's why people are fascinated by these things, because they really think. In this regard, you may not have the right names, the right words or the right facts, but you are thinking about how I got here, how I came to exist, what is the future, do we have a future, what was our past, yes. These are universal questions, I think there certainly are and the way you do it with your live show you were saying you have a huge visual aspect, well we have the biggest screen we can have in every venue. and it's targeted, it's when there's a state-of-the-art modern LED screen, so they're like Lego, then you can build them to fill the place with them and get to know Wembley Arena, then it's 30 meters wide by 8 meters high.

It's huge, you have to have a huge crew, yeah, 16 or 18 people and to show rock'n'roll, some of the venues they were doing in North America, they're in Canada, they're a little bit smaller venues, but we just filled it with screen as much as we can get and then the graphics, a lot of the graphics that I have, were made by a Dean egg that was made ex machina actually by Aunt Estella and the reason why I say, I say, I chose them, I drank them and I said, Please please. Would you do this? And they said how much money you have and you know why it's a lot lower than Chris Nolan's.

Yes they did it. They were bad, they just liked the idea of ​​these messages and these ideas, so they use the software they use. to interstellar create images of black holes Wow and they use general relativity, they coded it into their graphics software so they can classify the lights around the black holes and you can move the camera around the black hole and it tracks the path of all the light. it moves around it, so if you remember those incredible ones, get the gigantic black hole in the interstellar, that's a simulation, it's not an artistic impression, it's a simulation of what Einstein's theory will look like what a black hole will look like , so I can use that to talk about What happens when you fall into a black hole?

What would you see when you saw someone fall? And you can explain all that using Einstein's theory. You know the idea that it's a well known idea. It's a strange idea to fall into. a black hole and you were watching, you would never see me fall, you would see time slow down, my time slow down as you watch me, so in the end I would just slow down, slow down and slow down and then I would freeze. at the event horizon and it just fades away as an image a reddened image at the event horizon so time passes at different speeds as you get closer and further away from the black hole because space and time have been distorted by the mass of the black hole and so on.

I could talk about all that, but I talk about all that with this incredible image that we had, it's such a high resolution, by the way, it was a higher resolution than what is used for interstellar because my screen is so big that we need a special machine to play it, you can buy the most expensive Mac Pro in the world and it won't play this stuff, so I loved the fact that from a geek perspective you have a special video player to play the buffers such as a series of CPUs connected together. and kind of super, yeah, yeah, it's one of those, this is a great display graphical kind of thing, but these files are like you know there are 20 gigabyte video files.

Wow, because there are so many pixels, Pixar's resolution is really geeky. It fakes the resolution 6400 by 1536, so it impresses my screen. It is very similar. Yeah, are you coming to Los Angeles with this? Yes, wait a month. Taliban Theater in May. The end of me. I'm there, yes I'm here. Oh yes, no. I have to come on May 24. Oh, you're in San Diego too. Hey, I have to see one of these. Yes, it will be very fun. As many things as we can stuff into those handsome devils, look at that nice jacket someone gave you. I want to look for that, but it's okay because you look like a cool guy, a cool guy with space behind you, that's awesome, man, well, listen, thank you so much for doing this.

I really appreciate, you appreciate everything you're doing, it's amazing, no, thank you. I always enjoy crying. I loved it last time and people still talk about it when I was in less time. More people ask me about making you, but should someone else say get ready because it's a hundred times more popular than it was back then? It's going to be very strange now, but thanks again. I really appreciate it. I can't wait to see your show. Thank you so much.