0:08

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast.

0:10

I'm your host, Lawrence Krauss. Richard

0:13

Dawkins and I go back a long way. We've

0:16

had great times together. We've

0:18

had many dialogues on stage. We've written

0:20

things together, and we've even appeared in

0:22

a movie together, The Unbelievers,

0:24

that followed us as we lectured around the

0:26

world. And you might think based on that,

0:28

there's nothing new for us to talk about.

0:31

And we often worry about that, but in fact,

0:33

we found that each time we have a dialogue

0:35

on stage or online, there

0:38

are new and

0:41

exciting things to talk about. We are surprised,

0:43

and perhaps you'll be surprised. This year, we

0:46

did two events on stage in England

0:49

for Changing Minds and Changing Times,

0:51

which was produced

0:54

in part by The Origins Project,

0:57

one in London, one in Birmingham. And

1:01

we found them fascinating. They were surprising.

1:03

In London, I got to

1:06

interview Richard about his

1:08

interests and his recent book and

1:10

other things. And in Birmingham,

1:12

for the very first time, Richard

1:14

interviewed me for

1:16

his podcast and this podcast. And we've recorded

1:19

them and combined

1:21

them together here for this Origins

1:23

Project podcast. And I

1:25

hope you find it as

1:27

fascinating and entertaining as we

1:29

found doing them. So please

1:33

enjoy these podcasts, these discussions,

1:35

these two discussions with

1:37

Richard Dawkins. You can watch them,

1:41

as always, without any

1:44

commercial interruption, if you

1:46

could be a paid subscriber to

1:48

our Substack site, Critical Mass. And

1:51

those subscription fees go to supporting

1:53

The Origins Project Foundation, the non-profit

1:55

foundation that produces the

1:57

podcast and our other public events. consider

2:00

supporting it. Otherwise, eventually

2:02

it'll be released on YouTube, making you watch

2:04

it on our YouTube channel as always, or

2:07

you can listen to it on any

2:09

podcast site. No matter how you watch

2:11

it or listen to it, I hope

2:13

you enjoy these dialogues as

2:15

much as I always enjoy my dialogues

2:17

with Richard. Well,

2:27

we've done a lot of double acts together, Lawrence.

2:29

This is the first time I've had the pleasure

2:31

of interviewing you. Yes, yes.

2:33

I'm going to treat it with

2:36

everybody's permission as a kind of tutorial

2:38

in physics. Okay. Because

2:41

I hardly understood a word of

2:43

what you said. Richard, please don't

2:46

leave my turnkey. For

2:50

example, I mean, when you said,

2:52

this is ridiculous, this is absurd,

2:54

and therefore everything's absurd in modern physics. In

2:59

the same sense, I mean... Yeah,

3:03

you're right in the sense that you're

3:05

absolutely right. Modern physics has taught almost

3:08

everything is absurd when it comes to

3:10

conventional wisdom and common sense. It's taught

3:12

us that common sense is not to

3:14

be trusted. You have to go

3:17

to the actual data. You have to go

3:19

to the data and ask if common sense is

3:21

consistent with the data. And you should be willing

3:24

to accept. And I think as

3:26

you probably said, it's not surprising

3:29

that common sense doesn't

3:31

work, because common sense is

3:33

evolutionarily based. And

3:35

it's based on the things that got us successfully

3:38

reproducing for a million years and

3:40

not an understanding universe.

3:42

And the biggest surprise is that

3:45

it somehow has led to a species

3:47

that can. It's hugely surprising that

3:49

it's led to a species that can. And

3:52

sometimes I can console myself with the thought

3:55

you just said

3:57

that after all we evolved to...

4:00

work out where the next meal is coming from, where the

4:02

next member of the office sits, and where the next water

4:04

hole, and where the next, so on. And

4:08

so it's not surprising that we cannot

4:10

grasp the idea that when

4:13

a particle moves from one orbit to another,

4:17

it doesn't pass through the intermediate stages

4:19

when a particle goes through two

4:22

slits at once, and so on. I

4:25

love, there's a cartoon in New York, you've probably seen

4:27

it, it's in a veterinary

4:30

waiting room, a vet's waiting room, and

4:33

the nurse is there, and she's breaking some

4:35

news to one of the people

4:37

who's sitting there, which was another

4:39

person who talked with one of those lampshades things

4:41

on, which he's saying to one man. About

4:45

your cat, Mr. Schrödinger, I

4:48

have some good news and

4:50

some bad news. Well, Schrödinger

4:53

made up the cat fable as

4:55

a demonstration of how ridiculous the

4:59

interpretation of quantum theory is, that

5:04

it, well, in his terms, the

5:07

cat is neither alive nor dead until

5:10

you open the box, and that's clearly

5:12

absurd, and yet it's

5:14

one of the accepted reputable

5:17

interpretations of quantum theory. Another

5:20

one is the many-worlds

5:23

interpretation, where there

5:26

are numerous billions of universes where the cat is

5:28

alive and billions of universes where the cat is

5:30

dead, which is, to my

5:32

mind, slightly less absurd, actually. It's

5:35

very uneconomical, but not totally

5:38

absurd. Where do you stand on,

5:40

or I suppose there's the third school of thought, which

5:42

is Feynman, who says, just shut up and calculate. Well,

5:44

I side with

5:46

Feynman to a great extent there. I

5:49

don't come on the side of either. I

5:51

think they're both misplaced. I do

5:53

think you're right. If

5:55

you had to pick one, the many-worlds interpretation is

5:58

more palatable. closer,

6:02

a little bit closer to what actually is the

6:04

case, but neither are the case.

6:06

And in fact, quantum theory does not

6:08

predict that the cat is both alive and

6:10

dead. It predicts that

6:13

an electron can be spinning

6:15

this way and that way, but properly

6:18

interpreted, quantum theory says

6:22

the world is quantum mechanical, yet the

6:25

world around us is classical. We

6:27

aren't, you're in that chair, you're not in that chair

6:29

and in the audience at the same time. Electron

6:32

could be, but you're not. So

6:34

there's somehow, there's some something happens when

6:37

the world becomes classical. And

6:39

if quantum mechanics is correct, then it

6:41

should explain how the world becomes classical.

6:45

And one

6:47

of my colleagues and professors first, and then

6:49

colleague and then friend, who's

6:51

now passed away in Sidney Coleman at Harvard, who

6:53

was, interestingly enough, the smartest person

6:55

in the department. At the same time, the department had

6:57

five Nobel laureates in it, but he was smarter than

7:00

any of them and also funnier. He

7:03

pointed out that the, that the, we get

7:05

it exactly wrong. There should be no

7:07

such discussion as the interpretation of quantum

7:09

mechanics, because the world

7:12

is quantum mechanical. So

7:14

anytime you describe the real world, in terms

7:16

of some clues, which is the classical world

7:18

we experience, you're going to prove something that

7:20

sounds nonsensical, like the many worlds interpretation. And

7:23

in fact, what

7:26

we should try and understand is the interpretation

7:28

of classical mechanics. How

7:31

is it that the world we see is

7:34

the way it is when the real world is different?

7:36

And he gave a great lecture, which I talk about

7:39

in the new book, and I really recommend you looking

7:41

at it. You can see it online called

7:43

Quantum Mechanics in Your Face. But

7:46

one of the things I didn't mention in the book, which

7:48

I think is lovely, is that the world is different. What

7:50

we see is, is the realization

7:53

so, quantum mechanics says many weird things should

7:55

happen, but when we measure them, we

7:57

measure something different. People often talk about the collapse of the

7:59

world. wave function. There's no collapse

8:01

of the wave function. It's just thinking

8:04

about quantum mechanics correctly and measurement you

8:06

realize how a classical observer will always

8:09

measure classical things and the example he

8:11

uses is from a Tom Stoppard play

8:14

where Ludwig Wittgenstein is

8:17

standing on a corner in Cambridge and

8:19

he's thinking and someone stops us what

8:22

are you thinking about? He said well you

8:24

know I'm thinking about the fact that people say

8:27

you know that the earth orbit doesn't orbit

8:30

the Sun it just I mean

8:32

the Sun doesn't orbit the earth the earth over

8:34

the Sun it just it just looks like

8:36

the and so it says yeah and

8:38

he says I'm thinking about what would it

8:41

look like if it was the other way

8:43

around and of course it would look exactly

8:45

the same and when you think about it

8:47

you and he carefully shows that this this

8:50

classical cluge can result from a careful

8:52

understanding of quantum mechanics but people who

8:54

get hung up about the many worlds

8:56

or interpretation of the quantum mechanics and

8:58

write books about it to make themselves

9:01

seem profound it's totally misplaced in

9:03

my idea in my view it's like saying

9:05

the interpretation of general

9:07

relativity in terms of Newton well

9:11

the results of general relativity in terms of Newton

9:13

are absurd light doesn't go in

9:15

in in in bend in Newtonian mechanics but

9:17

if you try to interpret general relativity in

9:19

terms of Newton you'd have to come up

9:21

with these weird cluges but no one does

9:23

it I don't know well

9:25

I know why they do it with quantum mechanics

9:27

quantum mechanics is so strange that that

9:30

people even at their heart

9:32

because in principle we

9:34

all have seen curved pieces of paper

9:36

and curved things so even if curved three-dimensional

9:38

spaces are beyond our kin

9:41

we're used to the ideas but

9:43

quantum mechanics is completely beyond our

9:45

perception our experience and therefore is

9:47

innately not understandable as Feynman

9:49

said if you think you understand it you don't

9:51

understand it so it's not the case that

9:54

you're perfectly safe playing Russian roulette

9:56

because even if you shoot yourself in

9:58

another world you go on discovering

12:00

the universe, which is not how it happens

12:02

at all. But in

12:04

fact, it was only, and

12:06

I, when I was an

12:08

undergraduate, I actually did experimental

12:10

physics, which is what convinced me

12:13

I didn't want to be in experimental physics.

12:15

Not only that it was easy for me

12:17

to destroy things, I nearly blinded myself with

12:19

the laser once, but what really

12:21

convinced me, and

12:27

this is one of the reasons I hold them with such admiration,

12:30

is that I

12:32

worked for six months on a little

12:34

thing to try and

12:36

get one little part of an experiment to work.

12:39

Six months on that one little thing, and

12:41

yeah, I finally got that one little thing

12:43

to work, but I'm a very impatient person,

12:46

and the idea of spending 10 or 20 years

12:48

on an experiment which might reveal absolutely nothing

12:52

was something that didn't appeal to me, but now, I certainly,

12:56

as I became a physicist, my

12:58

appreciation of experiment dramatically

13:01

increased, actually, when I was a

13:03

graduate student. I used to

13:05

do mathematical physics when I started, very mathematical physics,

13:08

and it was a friend

13:10

of, now a friend of mine, named Sheldon Glashow, who

13:12

was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, who one

13:15

day looked at me and said, there's

13:17

formalism and there's physics, and

13:20

you have to know how to tell the difference. And

13:22

what he convinced me was, you always should

13:24

ground yourself in observation. You should never be

13:26

far away from what we can measure, or

13:29

you're at risk of intellectual

13:31

masturbation, of wandering off

13:34

into a domain that has nothing to

13:36

do with the real world. And

13:39

that caused me to, almost all of

13:41

my work, therefore, has in some ways been related to

13:43

things we can measure, not all of it, but

13:46

much of it. And the other thing about

13:48

experiment that I envy now is

13:51

that when you build

13:53

something, it's real.

13:55

You have something there. You have something

13:57

to show for your work afterwards. Where's

13:59

I... ideas are so much more ephemeral. And

14:03

you can never really, I mean, ideas are often

14:07

in the background anyway. You know, Einstein

14:09

developed general relativity, it was a triumph,

14:11

but David Hilbert, the mathematician, was that

14:13

close to developing it. You know, I

14:16

profiled what we wrote in 1995. There

14:19

were other people thinking similar things. So

14:22

you never kind of feel like, with

14:25

an experiment, you've done something, you've demonstrated

14:27

something, you've really tapped into nature. It's

14:30

terrifying if you're an experimental, if you're a

14:33

theorist. It really is terrifying to think that

14:35

some weird idea that you're writing down might

14:37

actually describe the universe. Let

14:39

me raise another of the things that came up

14:41

in your presentation. Okay. When you said, even

14:44

when the prediction is

14:47

fulfilled to the umpteenth decimal

14:49

place, it's still not actually true, and

14:52

I get that. But on the other hand, when

14:54

you say in all science, I mean, well,

14:58

Darwin's theory of natural selection is

15:01

true. That's not just provisional. Well,

15:04

that's an interesting question. Well, okay, maybe

15:06

not quite that, but the fact that

15:09

we are cousins to chimpanzees is simply

15:11

true. Yeah, okay, there are

15:13

scientific facts that

15:15

what we've measured, what

15:18

we've measured is true. Okay,

15:21

what we measured, you know, I mean, unless the

15:23

measurement is wrong, and you can always test it

15:25

and retest it. But when you measure something, you're

15:27

dropping a ball, it's gonna fall down, not up.

15:30

No matter what we learn about quantum gravity, you let the ball go a

15:33

million years from now, it's not gonna go up. It's

15:35

always gonna be described by any of these laws, because

15:37

our measurements have shown that in general. But, but

15:41

the question is, is it true over all times

15:44

and spaces? And you could say with

15:46

evolution, that

15:48

evolution is true, but

15:51

it's manifested in the long term,

15:53

over long times. It's

15:56

not, it doesn't necessarily

15:58

describe accurately what's happening. at

16:00

every instant when a biological system is working. No, that's

16:02

true. So that's what I mean by universally true. And

16:07

you know, it's a challenge evolution, the reason people

16:09

don't buy it is that you

16:12

need to understand long times, and it's something hard

16:15

for people to accept that something as complex as

16:17

the eye or DNA or

16:19

RNA could actually develop. Well,

16:22

let me persist in my role as the unintelligent

16:24

layman, try not to hear him. When

16:28

you, excuse me, we hear about Hubble

16:31

showing that the universe is expanding

16:33

and then the metric extrapolating

16:36

backwards. I get that

16:38

extrapolating backwards makes sense, but why to a

16:40

point, why not to a sphere,

16:44

you know, the size of the Earth or

16:46

the size of the solar system or something?

16:48

Why a single point? Well, because if you

16:50

take the theory seriously, then that

16:54

theory and many theories of physics are time

16:56

reversal invariant. So if

16:59

you can extrapolate forward, then you can

17:01

always run the movie backwards. And

17:03

if you take the theory to its logical

17:06

conclusion with gravity being

17:08

attractive, if the

17:10

universe is always expanding, then

17:13

at some point, if you work backwards,

17:15

it's always contracting. And the extrapolation

17:17

of that is to a single point, but you're

17:19

absolutely right that we

17:21

have no right to extrapolate

17:23

the theory back to a single

17:25

point because of what I

17:27

said earlier. We know general

17:30

relativity breaks down as a theory. We

17:32

know it describes the universe beautifully

17:34

and galaxies beautifully, but we know,

17:37

and this is a great gift, we

17:40

know explicitly the scale at which general

17:42

relativity stops making sense. It's

17:44

called the Planck scale. We know if quantum

17:46

mechanics is true, that general relativity

17:50

stops making sense at a very small scale.

17:52

So you can't extrapolate back and do it

17:54

with any competence. It doesn't stop physicists from

17:56

doing it. And many physicists do

17:59

it. And we

18:01

generally, when you should take

18:03

all of those things with a grain of salt, whether

18:05

it's Roger Penrose or anyone else. If

18:08

I sound naive, it's because I reckon

18:12

I'm probably not alone. Yeah,

18:14

no, it's great. And I know we've had

18:16

these discussions, but I also know that, well,

18:19

anyway. I

18:22

don't understand what's the difference between

18:24

inflation and expansion? Oh, that's a

18:26

great question. And again, you're probably

18:28

right that I threw out the term.

18:32

So what

18:35

LeMeter showed really, LeMeter and since then, is

18:38

that general relativity doesn't allow for a static

18:40

configuration of matter. And the answer is the

18:42

same as Newton. Newton doesn't

18:44

allow a static configuration of matter, because

18:46

gravity is universally attractive. So

18:48

if you put a bunch of mass points down

18:50

in Newtonian gravity, they're always going to collapse together,

18:53

because they're always going to be attracted by gravity,

18:55

okay? And more or less, what

18:57

LeMeter showed is the same thing is true in

18:59

general relativity. If you have normal matter and radiation,

19:01

it's more or less universally attractive. And

19:04

therefore, the only way you could have a

19:06

universe that's as old as ours, you

19:08

know, if you started out with a static universe,

19:10

it would have already collapsed by now. So

19:13

the only possibility is to start it out

19:16

expanding. And then

19:18

it'll slow down and maybe return

19:20

back. If you throw a rock, it'll go. I'm

19:24

familiar with the idea that when

19:26

the solar system condensed out of a

19:29

ball, out of a lot of gas,

19:31

gravity was attracted to

19:34

little nuggets of matter

19:36

that were forming, and they gradually grew and grew and

19:38

grew by gravity, and they became planets.

19:41

And so that gravity pulling things

19:43

together and making, in

19:45

this case, planets or rocks. That's

19:50

easy to understand. But

19:53

contraction to a single point

19:56

of infinitesimal size is utterly different

19:58

from that. is,

20:01

except why don't

20:03

we collapse right now? Why are we sitting

20:05

in these chairs? Thankfully,

20:08

that's a rhetorical question. I'm not going to make the answer. But

20:12

the answer is because of electricity

20:14

and magnetism. Happily,

20:17

gravity is the weakest force in nature, which is why

20:19

we can ignore it for every experiment

20:21

we do on Earth. It's the electric and

20:23

magnetic forces that are holding this cable off

20:26

it, stopping it from going down. I get

20:28

that. So that stops the

20:30

Earth from collapsing to a point. But if

20:32

they weren't there, if gravity is universally

20:34

attractive, there should be nothing that would stop it

20:36

from keep on collapsing. And the great. But

20:39

the sheer volume of matter

20:41

that's there couldn't collapse to a point.

20:43

Well, in fact, well, that's not necessarily

20:45

true. Because in fact, as far as

20:47

we know, electrons have no volume. No,

20:49

but protons and neutrons do. But

20:52

they're made of elementary particles called

20:54

quarks, which in the canonical picture

20:56

have no volume. And protons.

20:58

So they would break up into their constituent

21:00

particles if you crushed them small enough. OK,

21:02

so you answered my question in a way

21:04

that I find very surprising. But I'm

21:06

rather glad of it. Because

21:08

what you're saying is that all

21:11

the matter in the universe,

21:13

all the protons and neutrons, electrons you

21:15

can said, could

21:18

be collapsed into a point. And all you're

21:20

doing is you're crushing them and

21:22

removing the space between them. Yeah,

21:25

and I'm saying, but even, but you don't

21:27

have to go to that level of potential

21:30

absurdity. We

21:33

can go to a scale where we think we

21:35

understand the laws of physics. And in fact,

21:38

I wrote a book called Adam, where we

21:40

can, in our conventional picture, everything that

21:42

is now in all 100 billion galaxies

21:44

that are in our universe and all

21:46

the matter and radiation, at some

21:48

time that we can define where the laws of physics

21:50

still work, was contained in a region smaller

21:53

than the size of an atom. I

21:55

mean, that's unfathomable, but nothing stops

21:57

it from happening. There's

22:00

no force that can ultimately

22:04

stop that. For

22:06

certain objects, there are. Gravity is weak enough. And

22:08

that was, if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, one

22:11

of the things Oppenheimer was famous for,

22:13

well, among physicists, was the first realization

22:15

that if you had a star that

22:17

was big enough, that

22:20

even the nuclear forces would not stop

22:22

it collapsing into what later now we

22:25

call a black hole. And that was,

22:27

you know, and so, but there are

22:29

only special circumstances. The

22:31

sun, when it stops having fuel, won't

22:33

be a black hole because the nuclear

22:35

forces are strong enough to

22:37

hold the star together and electromagnetism is hard.

22:39

But if you have a big enough mass,

22:42

nothing can be gravity, big enough

22:44

mass. And so. Yes, so it's

22:46

just the sheer amount

22:49

of matter crushing

22:52

it into. And

22:55

if that didn't make you upset or confused, let

22:57

me try this. It's

23:01

even worse because as the matter

23:03

gets crushed, it gets hotter and

23:05

hotter. And actually, in

23:08

that primordial atom of the metric

23:10

or the one I talked about

23:12

in that book, the

23:14

actual total amount of stuff is

23:17

far more than the sum of everything

23:19

we now see by

23:22

factors of a million, million, million, million.

23:25

Namely, almost all of the energy and

23:27

stuff in that primordial atom

23:30

has been later dissipated by the expansion because

23:33

the universe has done work as it's

23:35

expanding and it's lost energy. And

23:37

so the universe now with its mere hundred billion

23:40

galaxies, if you want to add up

23:42

the total energy of the observed universe in matter, it's

23:44

a small fraction of the total energy that

23:47

was contained in that primordial atom. It

23:49

was so much bigger than you could get rid of all the matter

23:51

we now see in the universe and the amount of energy in that

23:53

region would be almost the same. It's

23:56

really, the fact that we can even think

23:59

of those things. with a straight face

24:02

is remarkable to me. And until the 1980s, no

24:04

one did. I mean, the

24:07

great change, and I got

24:11

involved in that, was to

24:13

think that with some seriousness, we

24:15

could apply the physics we understand on

24:17

fundamental scales to explain the universe on

24:19

larger scales. It's the ultimate chutzpah and

24:22

arrogance, but physicists are very arrogant,

24:24

so it's OK. OK,

24:26

well, I had thought, and I think I'm now wrong,

24:29

I had thought that something changed in the

24:31

laws of physics itself that made it possible. But

24:33

you're now telling me you literally can't crash all

24:35

the matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And but when you

24:37

get to a single point, we know the laws

24:39

of physics must change. And people

24:42

like me, I think most scientists would

24:44

say it doesn't collapse to

24:46

a single point, that some new law of understanding

24:49

gravity will intervene. It could collapse to the size

24:51

of a soccer ball. Or even a soccer ball

24:53

is amazing, or a baseball, or

24:55

even a solar system. The densities are

24:59

unimaginably great, unimaginable. Yes.

25:02

But let me point out that

25:05

even that if that may

25:07

seem so ridiculous that we wouldn't talk about it,

25:09

or it's not worth thinking about, even the time

25:11

when the universe was one second old, and

25:15

the universe was somewhat bigger than

25:17

our solar system, we

25:19

can actually predict what that

25:21

weird, incredibly hot, dense system that

25:24

was 10 billion degrees would be

25:26

doing. With

25:28

physics, we can measure in the laboratory.

25:31

And we predict the abundance of light elements precisely.

25:35

One of the things that people's won

25:37

the Nobel Prize for is that we

25:39

can extrapolate, we can measure in the laboratory and

25:41

extrapolate back to the universe of one second old

25:44

and make predictions that over 10 orders

25:46

of magnitude agree with observation. So

25:48

we know that even that incredibly hot,

25:51

dense state, which is almost unimaginable, we

25:54

can test that our ideas are correct, and they're

25:56

correct. It

25:58

is remarkable. It is. In

26:01

order to change the subject now, you've

26:05

written in your

26:07

podcast and things about

26:09

the politicization of science

26:12

and the subversion of

26:14

journals like Nature and Scientific American.

26:18

And well, talk

26:20

a bit about that. Well,

26:23

look, part

26:25

of what's driven you and I

26:27

from much of our careers is

26:29

the need to have

26:32

people understand the process of science. It

26:35

involves two important things. Nothing

26:37

is sacred. There's nothing

26:39

that can't be questioned. There's

26:42

no such idea that's—and heresy

26:44

is not heresy. Those

26:47

are the two characteristics that both you

26:49

and I find so reprehensible about organized religion

26:52

that has led us to try and

26:54

help people open their minds beyond that. And

26:57

so it's tragic to me

26:59

that those two characteristics are

27:02

infiltrating too

27:04

much the academia

27:06

and the scientific community. The

27:09

idea that there's some things you cannot say,

27:12

that Richard Dawkins cannot say

27:14

that there are two sexes, that

27:17

that's heresy. And he should not be—he

27:19

should be banned or he should lose

27:21

awards for saying something, when

27:23

in fact the whole point of science and the

27:25

whole point of education is to make you uncomfortable

27:31

first. And

27:33

science only proceeds—I was having this conversation

27:36

with a friend of mine who drove

27:38

me up here—only proceeds by a dialectic.

27:42

Whenever I get a letter from people, from

27:44

not scientists, I get letters every day. They

27:46

used to be letters. Now it's e-mail.

27:48

They're telling me that they've been working for 20

27:50

years and they have a theory of everything. You

27:54

know right away it's suspect. Because

27:57

it—I mean, unfortunately people have this

27:59

picture of Einstein working alone, and he

28:01

wasn't really working alone, in a room developing

28:03

general relativity is not the norm. Science

28:06

proceeds by dialectic. I

28:08

say something, you challenge it. You

28:11

criticize me and try and cut

28:13

to the quick what I'm saying,

28:16

because that's the way the scientific community works.

28:18

Because only if I can convince you, only

28:20

if I can survive the test of experiment

28:22

and rational debate will my ideas survive

28:25

and be worth talking about. So

28:28

it's essential that there be

28:30

debate, discussion, and that

28:32

no idea should

28:35

be above attack or

28:37

accepted without evidence. And

28:40

what we see happening in academia

28:43

and in the scientific journals is

28:45

certain things that are

28:48

not allowed to be said because they may offend

28:50

some people. And

28:53

we've always, I know from our discussions, you and

28:55

I strongly believe that, and

28:57

our good friends, Stephen Fry and Christopher

28:59

Hitchens said

29:02

it more beautifully than I can certainly say

29:04

it, that being offended, who cares?

29:09

That science and education should make

29:11

you uncomfortable. And the idea that

29:13

people need safe safety,

29:15

that scientific environments should be

29:17

safe. That is

29:20

the most contemptible word. Exactly. Very

29:22

utterly contemptible. Exactly. Yeah, what

29:24

does safe mean? You should, you should. You're

29:26

just science, but university is generally. Yeah, you

29:28

should never feel comfortable. In university, if you

29:31

are, you're not working and you're not learning.

29:34

And so to me, I've been attacking, I've

29:37

been attacking that idea, but what scares me, and

29:39

it's more in the United States, but not completely,

29:41

it's in England too, because I know I was

29:43

in an Oxford debate on, is

29:47

everyone religious? Is everyone

29:49

religious? I took the side of yes, by the way. So

29:51

my atheist colleagues took the other side. And

29:54

my example was

29:56

what you might call woke, what I call

29:58

fundamentalist wokeism. you get

30:00

rid of religion and still people still

30:03

believe in certain ideas in

30:05

the absence of evidence and in spite

30:07

of evidence and also defend them almost

30:09

to the death that

30:12

you cannot question them. And this

30:14

notion of safety, in fact this young woman

30:17

was on my side at Oxford and

30:19

she talked about safetyism and what you're

30:21

seeing everywhere is the idea that people

30:23

should have safe spaces in university is

30:28

where they won't have to hear ideas that offend

30:30

them or upset them and

30:32

yet, and I don't know if you have colleagues

30:34

but I have many colleagues in the United States

30:36

who change their curriculum for

30:38

fear that something they're going to say is going to offend

30:41

or upset a student because they

30:43

know their job is on the line and

30:45

that's what's scary that people can lose their

30:47

jobs for saying something. In a high school

30:49

in Canada, I now live in Canada, a

30:52

woman got fired for

30:55

talking about using the word Indian

30:59

for indigenous people. She was a history

31:01

teacher referring to the Indian Act of

31:03

1918 but referring to the act

31:06

by its name got her fired because

31:09

that using that word is so

31:11

harmful that people will be traumatized

31:13

by hearing it. I

31:16

mean I know what upsets you as much as it

31:19

does me and it scares me when journals

31:24

claim it

31:28

as a fact that science

31:30

is systemically racist or sexist.

31:33

I say show me the evidence, let

31:35

me question whether that's the case and

31:38

if you question it that's where you're

31:40

attacked by these journals. You cannot discuss,

31:42

if you try to discuss something like

31:44

that, the mere act of discussing it

31:48

is taken as your partisan

31:50

in one side or the other. It's

31:53

just like Miriam was talking about, it's

31:55

being a non-believer in Islam. The very

31:57

fact of asking a question, if you

31:59

ask a question about the Mohammed you

32:03

could be killed right and and

32:05

we're not at that stage but you can

32:07

be killed academically or a scholastically

32:10

or or shamed and

32:13

and so it scares me when

32:15

we have the institutions of science

32:17

defending that non-scientific notion and also

32:20

claiming to have an

32:23

end without asking the question it is true that

32:25

in the physical sciences at least there

32:27

are more men than women that's just true it's

32:29

also true by the way in the biological sciences

32:32

there are more women than men that

32:34

isn't discussed okay and the presumption

32:37

that that the physical sciences it

32:39

doesn't represent the demographics of the society

32:42

the presumption is that that's due to

32:44

sexism or if they're not equal number

32:46

minorities the presumption is that's due to racism and you've

32:48

got to be able to say hold on how

32:51

do you know that and demonstrate that

32:53

and of course and in all my

32:55

experience and I if

32:58

I would argue that of all the

33:00

places in in society academia is probably

33:02

the place with the least sexism and

33:05

least racism and and and so

33:07

I'm offended when I hear the head of

33:09

the National Institute of the Health who's a

33:12

you may know I'm Francis Collins who yeah

33:14

nice guy yeah and I know him and

33:16

he's a nice guy friend I think some

33:18

of the stuff he says is nonsense especially

33:20

with regards to religion but when he got

33:23

up and said the NIH is systemically racist

33:26

what he should do if he believed that is resign

33:29

stop if you're saying you headed an

33:31

institution for 20 years that's systemically racist

33:33

how can you really believe that and

33:36

still be the head of that institution

33:38

but they say it because it plays

33:40

to the crowd and I don't

33:42

understand it seems to me to be cowardice

33:45

on the part of the heads

33:48

of institutions to count how to I mean

33:51

I don't see what they have to lose and

33:53

they're not going to lose oh well I think

33:55

now that's interesting question why are they coward and

33:57

I absolutely agree with you the real The

34:00

real offenders here are the

34:02

heads of institutions, university presidents, heads

34:04

of scientific societies. But you

34:06

do see what they have to lose, right? Because

34:10

universities now require,

34:14

university presidents used to be intellectual leaders. Now

34:17

they're fundraisers, okay? And what

34:19

they're trying to do, and

34:21

the way you fundraise is

34:24

like anything. You advertise, you

34:26

present yourself as everything people

34:28

want you to be. And

34:30

so if you stand, it's just the same as the

34:33

communist scare in the 1950s and the 60s. If

34:36

you virtue signal, if

34:39

you say not only, we're at the

34:41

vanguard of

34:43

anti-racism and anti-sexism, you

34:46

gain a lot. You gain, it

34:49

sounds good. And if you violate

34:51

people's rights in the process, what

34:54

happens? Oh, a professor gets fired, okay. But

34:57

so if your interest is trying to present

34:59

a face, because you

35:01

know you're going to be attacked. If

35:03

you're the university president and you say,

35:10

say that not only is your institution

35:12

not racist, but you think that people should,

35:14

it's okay to be offended. You're

35:16

gonna be viscerally attacked by

35:18

the media and by huge numbers of

35:20

people online, and

35:23

what you'll find is there are boycotts. There'll

35:26

be efforts to get people to stop donating

35:28

to your university, for students to stop going

35:30

to your university. But the people you want

35:32

to get donations from, billionaires. I

35:36

just thought rather unlikely to go along with

35:38

that. Why would you say that? Well,

35:42

I've made them wrong. I

35:44

will say, I don't know if I should say this in public.

35:48

No, I've been in communication.

35:52

In an effort to try and think, what can we do to

35:54

change the situation? One

35:56

of the possibilities would be to communicate with groups

35:58

of billionaires who are donating. donating money to

36:00

universities and say we won't donate to university

36:02

unless there's free speech and open

36:05

inquiry. And I've actually been in

36:07

communication with a philanthropic group that represents a lot

36:09

of these people and that may be one way

36:11

to tell you. I would have thought so and

36:13

that's certainly my intuition. I don't have evidence for

36:15

it but... Well, you know, I think what happens

36:17

is, and I had this discussion with my friend

36:19

who's here who's a very intelligent person but watches

36:22

this from afar and the language

36:25

sounds good so people say, oh, of course

36:27

it's good to, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion

36:29

are good things. Why are you...

36:31

Well, of course that's good but firing people for... But

36:33

they don't, they're not aware of that. What they're

36:35

aware of is the verbiage that makes it sound

36:37

like they're defending. That's why I changed,

36:39

you know, I realized, it was a friend of mine,

36:41

I forget who it was who convinced me when I

36:44

was using the word woke as a pejorative. They convinced

36:46

me I was really not being fair because being

36:48

woke is good

36:50

intention. Social justice is well intentioned.

36:54

Actually wants society to be just. So the

36:56

motivation behind social justice is a good one.

36:59

And so I call it fundamentalist

37:01

wokeism in the same

37:03

way that I guess I say fundamentalist Islam. I

37:06

mean, I assume there are Islamic people who are just like

37:08

there are Christians who are kind and gentle and don't believe

37:10

in stoning and don't believe in this and that. And

37:12

they're like any religious people. They pick and choose what

37:14

they like and they don't consider the stuff they don't

37:16

like. And so

37:19

you might say that version, those Islams

37:21

are not, there's nothing inherently evil in

37:23

that picture, just like there may not

37:26

be anything inherently evil in many people

37:28

who call the Sims Christian. But fundamentalism

37:30

is always evil and fundamentalist wokeism, which

37:33

is this notion that people need

37:35

to be removed for heresy is just

37:37

as bad whether it's Islam or academia,

37:40

except in Islam it's people's lives at stake,

37:43

physical lives at stake, in academia

37:45

it's people's careers at stake, but

37:47

it's also science. And if you

37:50

love science like you and I do, science

37:52

can only proceed if there

37:55

are unfettered inquiry and if

37:57

we fatter people, then you know science is going

37:59

to stop. it happened in the Soviet Union with

38:02

genetics. You saw it with

38:04

Lusenko. There's a terrible book, which

38:06

is called, a Russian

38:08

book, which is called The Situation in

38:11

Biological Science Today, a nice catchy title.

38:14

And it's a

38:16

testimony of one geneticist

38:18

after another confessing to their

38:21

sins, to their heresies. They

38:24

stand up one after another and they say, I

38:28

have offended against the

38:31

Lusenkoists and

38:34

against Comrade Stalin. And I denounced

38:38

Mendel and I denounced Morgan.

38:41

And then they're led off to jail.

38:44

Yeah, and you've seen that there. And

38:46

in fact, in my subtext, I published

38:48

a letter. You often see the scientists,

38:50

and a number of them are my

38:52

colleagues, Anna Krylov is a chemist at

38:54

Southern California, this

38:56

fellow who just wrote this letter. You see

38:59

the scientists that are objecting most are

39:01

often scientists from the former Soviet Union

39:03

because they've seen it exactly. When they were young,

39:05

they had to adhere to the party line in

39:07

order to be part of the university. Right now,

39:09

you, and you're aware of this, in university, maybe

39:12

some of you aren't, in universities in the United

39:14

States and in Canada, you

39:16

have to write a statement

39:18

about diversity, equity, and inclusion

39:22

in order to get a job, in order to

39:24

be considered for a faculty position. In

39:27

most universities, or even a post-doc position. And

39:30

the statement can't just be, I'm colorblind, I

39:32

believe in supporting all people, that's not good

39:34

enough. You have to show

39:36

how you are specifically, and have

39:38

been your entire life, anti-racist. And

39:42

if you don't, you won't get

39:44

a job. In Berkeley, where you spent time, the

39:47

biology department at Berkeley, 2020, the

39:53

76% of the applicants were

39:55

rejected by the way,

39:57

their applications for faculty positions are not read first

39:59

by... I'm

42:00

sure we've experienced that, where we really want

42:02

to believe something to be right, and

42:05

probably well beyond the stage at which we

42:07

should have given up our idea, we

42:09

kept it. Because we're human. And

42:12

being a scientist trains you. By being

42:14

wrong enough times, it trains you to

42:17

be suspicious of yourself. And that's really

42:19

an important part. That's what

42:21

we should be teaching about science, is to

42:23

question yourself as much as anyone else. One

42:26

of the great virtues of science, methods of science,

42:29

especially in medical science, is the double

42:31

blind trial, which is specifically aimed

42:33

at avoiding

42:37

self-delusion by this desire

42:40

to prove your own hypothesis. And that's

42:42

why I'm so happy I do physics

42:45

and not biology, right? I don't

42:47

have to do bubble blind experiments. Well, you do. In turn

42:49

now, when looking for the... Because we realized you can

42:51

put in here in biases, I was going to say

42:53

you don't have to probe

42:56

electrons and ask if they're... You don't have to worry,

42:58

all electrons are the same. But the

43:00

way it's done now, the Higgs was

43:02

discovered, is a kind of double blind

43:04

experiment. You put in false signals

43:09

and real signals to

43:11

see if the experiment can detect between them, because

43:13

it's so complicated, you don't know. And the people

43:15

who are doing it don't even know which are

43:17

the... As they shouldn't. Yes,

43:20

they shouldn't, exactly. And so that's become

43:22

the norm in experimental particle physics. But

43:24

in general, we don't have to worry

43:26

about the biases of electrons as much as we do about the biases of

43:28

people. How long are we supposed to go on for? I haven't been told.

43:30

I don't know. Why am

43:32

I supposed to stop? What

43:35

was that? Is that my cue? Is that my cue?

43:38

Ladies and gentlemen, what about that?

43:40

Hey? I guess that's all true.

43:42

Thank you, Richard. Can I

43:44

just say, this

43:47

was a... I've been waiting for this

43:49

moment for many years with you, and it was

43:51

a pleasure. And I thank you for taking the

43:53

time to ask the questions and be willing to

43:55

present them. It's always an honor to be on

43:57

stage with you, but it was a particular pleasure.

46:00

it I think it's well worth watching. It's

46:02

black and white and

46:04

this wonderful intellect, this

46:07

man reflecting on things,

46:10

he doesn't use much

46:12

in the way of his Creonic visual aids.

46:15

It's amazing, there's not all this

46:17

animation, it's just this compelling man

46:19

looking at the TV and talking

46:22

in his flashing glasses. Yeah, it's

46:24

really amazing. So

46:26

it was really appropriate that you wrote the foreword

46:28

for that. And of course, while

46:30

the selfless gene was vitally important,

46:38

as a demonstration of many people,

46:41

how scientists could properly discuss science

46:45

in a way that would change people's

46:47

minds about the world, the

46:50

God delusion has had a

46:54

shockingly significant impact. I remember

46:56

when it first came out, I did

46:59

not expect it to literally

47:02

change so many people's minds. And I've

47:04

been with you, but also around the

47:08

world. That book has changed everything. And so another

47:10

triumph. And I thought I'd start

47:17

by talking about what triumph are you working on now?

47:20

Oh, well, I'm working on a

47:22

book called The Genetic Book of

47:25

the Dead. Having written a couple

47:29

of books aimed mainly at young people,

47:31

this one is aimed at grownups, it's aimed at

47:33

the same audience as the selfish gene. And

47:37

it's sort of, I suppose I

47:39

could briefly say what the thesis is. If

47:43

you look at the external

47:45

appearance of animals, especially those

47:48

that, insects that mimic leaves

47:51

and sticks and things

47:53

like that, the perfection of

47:57

minicry that you've seen in the book, and the fact that

47:59

it's not a human being, natural selection has managed

48:01

to achieve is astonishing. And

48:05

what I'm trying to say in the book

48:07

is that that perfection is not

48:10

skin deep. It must pervade

48:12

the entire body of the animal down

48:14

to every single detail in every single

48:16

cell, every biochemical reaction

48:19

that's going on in there.

48:21

Must be honed to

48:24

the same degree of detailed intricate,

48:28

meticulous perfection as

48:31

the stick insect or

48:33

the butterfly that mimics another species of

48:36

butterfly is just

48:38

not obvious to us. We can

48:40

use our eyes, the naked eye is good enough to

48:42

see the perfection of the external

48:45

appearance. And it

48:47

will take the biology of the future

48:50

to discern the same degree of

48:52

perfection as you look inside. Speaking

48:57

of the biology of the future, we were

49:00

talking backstage a second ago about

49:03

the bet, which you forgot we had. And

49:06

I thought it might be worth talking a

49:08

little bit about my clearly

49:12

incorrect claim, according to you,

49:14

that life will always be

49:16

identical to the life we

49:18

see. So why don't you

49:21

explain why that's ridiculous? Well,

49:27

because the details

49:30

of the genetic code are

49:32

so arbitrary, the

49:37

genetic code I

49:40

think cannot really have been put together by the

49:42

same sort of process of natural

49:44

selection as the rest

49:47

of, well, I think I'm right in saying

49:49

that. It's

49:51

not a very elegant

49:53

code, really. Francis

49:56

Crick actually devised a much better code.

49:58

I think he's probably rather annoyed. when it turned out not

50:00

to be the one that nature

50:03

actually adopted. It's

50:05

what they call a degenerate code. And

50:11

that means that any one

50:14

amino acid is coded for by more

50:16

than one codon in no particular systematic

50:18

way. I

50:21

think it would be quite

50:23

astounding if, say, I think we had a

50:25

different bet, which you thought that

50:28

it was highly likely you

50:30

predict that there will be life found

50:32

in the solar system. I'm

50:34

happy to bet there'll be life elsewhere in the

50:36

universe. But the solar system is just

50:38

too much. And so

50:40

I would bet against that. And

50:43

the only criterion that

50:45

most exobiologists would accept

50:49

for life being

50:52

not just across infection,

50:54

because that's another possibility. We know that there

50:57

are some meteorites that have landed on Earth

50:59

that have come from Mars. There's no doubt

51:01

about that. And

51:04

the only completely

51:07

watertight demonstration that it is not

51:10

cross-contamination would be if it has

51:12

a different genetic code. It has

51:14

the same genetic code. Then

51:17

all exobiologists would accept that this is

51:19

due to cross-contamination. But you wouldn't. Well,

51:22

it's interesting. Yeah, I'll give you my arguments

51:24

now. It's

51:27

absolutely important to realize that there's contamination.

51:29

So finding extent or extinct life on

51:31

Mars, if it

51:34

were identical, would just

51:36

indicate that there was a common origin.

51:38

Maybe the origin was Mars. No,

51:41

no, because according to you, they

51:43

could have independently developed the same. They could

51:45

have. But it's more like we know. But

51:48

I'm a physicist. So

51:50

we know there's a physical mechanism

51:52

for contamination. So I'd

51:54

say that's the more if we saw identical life,

51:57

I'd say it's most likely contamination. And it

51:59

would be. It would be fascinating to see

52:01

whether it originated Mars or Earth first. Yes. If

52:04

when looked in the ocean, under the oceans

52:07

of Enceladus or

52:09

any of the other icy moons, it's

52:12

hard to imagine a physical mechanism

52:15

for contamination because they're kilometers of layer of

52:17

ice and there always have been. And it's

52:19

hard to imagine how

52:22

anything would

52:25

penetrate that or contaminate it. So

52:27

if we saw, so

52:31

it would be a fascinating question, if we, and it's going

52:33

to be right, there was just a big

52:35

water plume seen on,

52:38

and if we were able to penetrate that

52:40

plume and find evidence of microbial

52:43

life of some sort and it had

52:45

identical DNA, etc., we'd

52:50

have to, it'd be an interesting question. You

52:53

and you say all exobiologists would assume

52:55

it was contamination. And I

52:57

would say, let's ask as a physicist

52:59

which is more likely. And

53:03

you'd have to come up with a mechanism

53:05

of contamination. And unless you could come up

53:07

with a mechanism of contamination that was more

53:09

likely than the likelihood that it was an independent thing. So

53:11

I think it would be a matter of debate. Yes,

53:14

I agree. And

53:16

as far as why, I mean, I mostly do it

53:18

to be heretical why I think it'll be the same

53:21

mechanism. But somehow chemistry

53:23

and physics, a

53:25

combination of enthalpy and entropy, produce

53:28

the first forms of life. And

53:30

I talk about it in the new book. Somehow,

53:33

what is amazing is under certain conditions,

53:37

systems are driven energetically and

53:39

entropically to create large, you

53:41

know, maybe RNA molecules.

53:43

And the question is, is

53:46

there, so it's something about energy

53:48

and entropy, enthalpy. There

53:50

are degrees of similarity which we could talk

53:52

about. I would agree with

53:54

you that extraterrestrial life is going to

53:56

be carbon-based. Yeah, OK. I

53:58

go that far. And it

54:01

will be protein based and what do you

54:03

think energy ATP? Do you think there'll be

54:05

any other? I'm not sure about that only

54:07

only protein molecules. I think have the necessary

54:10

versatility to serve as Enzymes

54:13

that that life needs and protein molecules are

54:15

marvelous at that. I mean they have this

54:18

extraordinary capacity to coil

54:21

themselves into three-dimensional forms The

54:24

three-dimensional shape of a protein is what

54:27

gives it its Enzymatic properties and

54:29

the three-dimensional shape comes from its two dimensions

54:31

or its one dimensional Sequence of

54:33

amino acids and that in turn comes

54:36

from the DNA. Well My

54:38

bet would be that Extraterrestrial

54:40

life is carbon based. It's organic

54:42

in other words and

54:45

protein based There must be

54:47

some kind of genetics. It's going to be Darwinian must

54:50

be some kind of genetics The

54:52

genetics itself will not be protein the genetics

54:54

will be something else But beyond

54:56

that I wouldn't bet on

54:59

it being a nucleic acid necessarily That's a little

55:01

well, I mean even it was DNA. I certainly

55:03

wouldn't bet on it being the same genetic code

55:05

Yeah, no, I I know

55:07

people have tried to make it codes with different nucleic

55:10

acids Certainly the thing about RNA is

55:12

that makes it so special is that

55:14

it contains genetic information

55:16

But it's also an enzyme it also

55:19

has an it does both jobs and

55:21

so you'd have to find some precursor

55:23

Because you know, it's chicken and egg. Yes

55:26

You know, yes, what was the first

55:29

protein protein was created? Well, yeah, I mean

55:31

you can't the proteins are enzymes, but you

55:33

have to have an enzyme to make it

55:35

Yeah So RNA would be a

55:37

very very good bridge So the question is

55:39

is there another kind of chemistry that would

55:41

fulfill both things and I don't know but

55:43

I'm willing to say every Time I meet

55:45

a biochemist. I try to get them to

55:48

devise an alternative biochemistry. They don't really

55:50

see the interest of that They don't want to do it for

55:52

some reason. Yeah Well, I've been that we ran an origins

55:54

meeting once where people were trying

55:56

to do that And that's where I became convinced since they

55:58

weren't doing a very good job job that

56:01

maybe nature did do a

56:03

good job and it did it once and

56:05

it worse. And so anyway, I figured it's

56:08

a bet I'd love to lose. So because

56:10

finding other kind of life would

56:12

be remarkable. But speaking

56:14

of other

56:16

kinds of life and and

56:19

losing, we were talking about the

56:21

Black Cloud and you. Oh, yes. As

56:25

you said, I think Fred Holmes, the Black Cloud

56:27

is one of the greatest science fiction books ever

56:29

written, despite the fact that

56:31

its hero is utterly obnoxious. Yes,

56:34

maybe realistic. Well, I

56:36

almost certainly based on Fred Hall himself.

56:38

Yes, because all his other science fiction

56:40

books have the same obnoxious hero. They

56:42

have a different name in each case.

56:46

But apart from that, it is

56:48

brilliant. It does. It

56:50

does, as you said, have

56:54

lessons about the way scientists work. I mean,

56:56

there's a lovely beginning bit where the

56:58

Black Cloud is discovered in two

57:01

completely different ways, partly astronomically, just

57:03

seeing seeing it appear. Yeah. And

57:05

partly mathematically, the

57:08

same method as the planet Neptune

57:10

was discovered by by noticing that

57:12

other planets were in a

57:14

different place from where they should be.

57:16

And therefore there must be gravitational influence

57:18

from some strange foreign body. And

57:21

there's a lovely passage where simultaneously

57:24

in America, the astronomical

57:26

observations are made. And

57:28

at the same moment in Cambridge, the

57:31

mathematician hero deduces that there must be

57:34

an object. And he sends a telegram

57:36

to America saying, kindly advise if unidentified

57:38

object is in so and so as

57:40

it moves this left ascension

57:43

so and so. And it says the

57:45

words of the telegram seem to swell

57:47

to a gigantic height. It's

57:49

not a wonderful piece of drama. So

57:53

that that's one point. Another point

57:55

is the way in which they

57:58

work out that the Black. cloud

58:00

must be a living thing. And

58:04

two characters, the obnoxious hero and

58:07

the Russian comic relief character, independently

58:10

think that it must be living.

58:14

And everybody else poo-poo's the idea and

58:16

they do it by predicting and predicting

58:18

and predicting. It's undone by predicting. If

58:21

we are right, then we must make

58:23

such and such an observation. Prediction is

58:25

everything in science. That's another point. And

58:29

then I learned a lot

58:31

of information theory. The idea that you

58:34

can, that

58:36

information is just information and it doesn't matter

58:39

what medium it goes in. There's a pianist,

58:42

this is the rather male

58:44

chauvinist thing. The only woman in the story

58:47

is there because she's a good pianist.

58:49

And she plays a Beethoven sonata to

58:52

the black cloud and the black cloud loves it.

58:55

And people say, how on earth has

58:57

it got ears? How can it like

58:59

this Beethoven sonata? It doesn't matter. The

59:02

information is still there even though it's

59:04

transmitted in the form of mathematical symbols.

59:07

And the black cloud says, too

59:09

slow, can you play that ten times

59:11

faster? And then finally there's the deep

59:16

problems which

59:19

really leads on to your book, Lawrence. The things

59:21

we don't know. Things that perhaps

59:23

we cannot know. Are there

59:26

problems, scientific problems,

59:28

which the human brain is simply

59:30

incapable of grasping because the

59:32

human brain was never built by natural selection

59:34

to have the

59:38

necessary profundity. And

59:42

finally the black cloud offers to teach some

59:44

physics to these scientists.

59:46

And one by one they volunteer.

59:48

And one by one

59:51

they die of an overheated brain because they

59:55

can't cope. And these are all things which to

59:57

me show how science fiction can teach

59:59

you real science. Although

1:00:02

there's one bit of science that

1:00:04

you think you got wrong because he

1:00:06

was... Oh, that's right. Yeah. At

1:00:09

one point they asked the Black Cloud, what

1:00:11

was the first member

1:00:14

of your kind? And the

1:00:16

Black Cloud says, I would

1:00:18

not accept that ever was the first member. And

1:00:21

the astronomers then exchanged knowing glances because

1:00:23

this was an in joke for astronomers

1:00:26

because at that time Fred Heil was

1:00:28

the leading proponent of the

1:00:30

steady state theory as opposed to the Big

1:00:32

Bang. I want to draw

1:00:34

attention to the fact that a great

1:00:47

friend of both of yours is

1:00:50

being auctioned. Oh,

1:00:53

okay. The painting? Oh,

1:00:55

yes. Original? Oh, right. Unique

1:00:58

of Christopher Hitchens

1:01:00

to go on your wall tonight

1:01:04

if you wish for it

1:01:07

on eBay. Okay, while

1:01:09

we're talking you bid.

1:01:12

Yeah. So we won't mind

1:01:14

if you use your phones while we're talking.

1:01:16

We'll go on for another few minutes. Is

1:01:18

it bidding by phone or not? It's bidding

1:01:21

on eBay. And will the auction

1:01:23

end when we end? Oh, okay.

1:01:26

So the longer we talk the more,

1:01:28

the higher the value will become. Okay,

1:01:35

there we go. And you can hold it. I

1:01:37

like that. Anyway, so...

1:01:41

Okay, I was just saying about

1:01:43

the steady

1:01:46

state. It's one thing to believe as

1:01:48

Fred Heil did that the universe had

1:01:50

always existed and galaxies rather

1:01:53

are being spontaneously created. And there's nothing

1:01:55

wrong with that except it's not

1:01:57

factually correct. But there's nothing... principle

1:02:00

wrong with that. What's in principle wrong is the

1:02:02

idea that life could have been

1:02:04

there all along because life is too complicated.

1:02:07

Life has to have come about by

1:02:09

an incremental process such

1:02:13

as Darwin suggested and so

1:02:15

that that was a I think the

1:02:17

only scientific flaw

1:02:19

in the book. Yeah

1:02:21

no I the fact that had

1:02:23

to have come about although I always

1:02:26

like the fact that at the same

1:02:28

time which and I agree

1:02:30

with you with that you you've also said when

1:02:32

we've been together in fact it's I think it's

1:02:34

in the unbelievers a very important point that

1:02:36

there ever was a first fish there

1:02:39

never was a first oh yeah and

1:02:41

so it's so why don't you talk about

1:02:43

that because I think it's a really important

1:02:45

point. Well it's a completely different point but

1:02:47

yeah it sounds the same. Yeah okay it

1:02:52

sounds vaguely paradoxical although it isn't

1:02:54

that we

1:02:57

are all descended from a fish

1:03:00

but every

1:03:02

one of the ancestors

1:03:04

that link us to that fish belong to

1:03:07

the same species as its parents and

1:03:10

his children and so as you

1:03:12

go back you couldn't possibly if you if

1:03:14

you'd lined up all the intermediates between a

1:03:16

human and a fish and had them all

1:03:18

standing in a gigantic long parade and you

1:03:20

walked along this huge long parade you would

1:03:23

not you would not detect the change as

1:03:25

you walked along because the change would be

1:03:27

too slight in each generation and

1:03:29

yet by the time you got back

1:03:31

to the Devonian you would you would find that

1:03:34

that this had become a fish so

1:03:36

that it's like a cinema film that's

1:03:38

the yeah and that's of course a

1:03:40

great challenge that's

1:03:43

why evolution appears so non intuitive

1:03:45

because we just can't picture those

1:03:47

that kind of a line

1:03:49

that long even if even if you

1:03:52

wrote a tale and called it the ancestors tale it

1:03:54

would be hard yeah it would be

1:03:57

hard. Let

1:03:59

me ask you one question about Hoyle and then I'm

1:04:01

going to let you ask me a question. Because

1:04:05

given what I said about you and

1:04:08

the importance of not

1:04:11

just the significance of

1:04:14

the self-esteem but the

1:04:16

legitimizing science writing which

1:04:19

has served

1:04:21

for many people including myself to motivate

1:04:23

people like myself to write because

1:04:26

of the example of how

1:04:28

useful the self-esteem was. Hoyle

1:04:31

was a science fiction writer

1:04:33

and a popularizer and

1:04:35

even though he didn't buy

1:04:38

the Big Bang he actually did

1:04:40

the work, some of the

1:04:42

key scientific work that helped demonstrate the Big Bang

1:04:44

was true and didn't share

1:04:46

the Nobel Prize for that. And

1:04:48

do you think it was because he was a popularizer

1:04:51

or maybe because he was just not likeable or what?

1:04:54

I've always wondered that.

1:04:56

He did this

1:04:58

seminal work on the formation of

1:05:00

the elements. Oh, the light elements, yeah. And

1:05:03

the colleagues that he

1:05:06

worked with or was associated with got

1:05:08

the Nobel Prize and he didn't. He

1:05:12

was an abrasive character but that shouldn't have mattered.

1:05:16

He ventured into other

1:05:18

fields such as, well evolution, he

1:05:20

taught nonsense when he went into

1:05:22

evolution. But

1:05:25

I wouldn't like to speculate as to what went

1:05:27

on in the prize giver's mind.

1:05:29

Yeah, it's hard to know. There's another

1:05:32

one, George Gamow was another one who

1:05:34

also did seminal work literally

1:05:36

predicting many things including the cosmometric

1:05:38

background but again was a

1:05:41

popularizer and a joker

1:05:44

and it's hard to know. It's nice but that's one of

1:05:48

the reasons why

1:05:50

this Selfish Gene is so important because you're

1:05:53

a serious person and

1:05:57

the Selfish Gene is a book of scholarship

1:05:59

as well as something for the public that has an impact.

1:06:01

And I think that makes, we've

1:06:04

talked in the last summer there that science

1:06:06

writing is a form of literature that is

1:06:08

too rarely appreciated as a form of literature

1:06:10

and it should be. And yes, I think

1:06:12

it's kind of what I'm getting at. I'm

1:06:15

starting a new podcast, which is

1:06:17

called the poetry of reality, meaning

1:06:19

science is the poetry of reality.

1:06:23

And it's kind of, I'm saying

1:06:25

the same thing that you just said, that

1:06:27

science ought to be a

1:06:29

vehicle for great literature. Yes,

1:06:31

it'll be great. We'll be competing podcasters, but I

1:06:33

promise to come on. Well,

1:06:36

I want to ask your advisor how to do it. Oh yeah,

1:06:39

well, we'll talk a bit. Good.

1:06:42

That would be an honor. You said backstage that

1:06:44

when I was talking, there were one or two

1:06:46

things that came to your mind. Oh

1:06:48

yes. Let

1:06:51

me think, what was it? Oh, one of

1:06:53

the things was a thing about time being

1:06:55

an illusion. Fred

1:06:57

Hoyle wrote a book called Man

1:07:00

in the Universe. And

1:07:02

one of the, it's a collection of essays,

1:07:04

and one of the essays is about time,

1:07:07

the subjective present, he calls

1:07:09

it, as an illusion.

1:07:11

And he said that to a physicist, there's no

1:07:14

sense in which time moves from the

1:07:16

past to the future step by step

1:07:18

by step by step. It's just all

1:07:21

there. It's all just all laid out. The

1:07:25

whole stretch is there at the

1:07:28

time. And he actually puzzles

1:07:30

himself about what it is that gives

1:07:33

this strong illusion of time

1:07:37

moving time like an ever rolling stream, as

1:07:39

the hymn says. And

1:07:42

I want to ask you about that. Well,

1:07:44

you know, it's interesting because when he thought

1:07:46

that I think he was ahead of his

1:07:48

time as he often was in

1:07:51

a variety of ways, because there is this dichotomy. Physics

1:07:53

generally is done by creating

1:07:56

what's called a time slice, time

1:07:58

A, and defining variables

1:08:01

there and then using the laws of

1:08:03

physics to propagate them forward. That's how

1:08:05

quantum mechanics is done and quantum mechanics

1:08:07

is a deterministic theory although those people

1:08:09

don't realize the same. It's always some

1:08:12

time slice and but the problem is

1:08:15

that when you think about gravity the

1:08:18

variables of gravity are space and time and

1:08:22

therefore if you wanted

1:08:24

to define a quantum mechanical

1:08:26

wave function of whose

1:08:29

variables are space and time it

1:08:31

would be it would have a value at every

1:08:33

point in space but also every point in time

1:08:35

and therefore it would be

1:08:37

defined from that

1:08:40

wave function of the universe would have all of time

1:08:42

from the beginning of the universe to the end embedded

1:08:44

in it in which case the

1:08:46

past and future would not have to be

1:08:48

any different than the present. You just said

1:08:51

that quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory. It

1:08:53

is yeah. So people

1:08:55

who say something like Heisenberg's

1:08:57

indeterminate principle cannot be used

1:08:59

to sanctify free will.

1:09:02

That follows from what you said.

1:09:04

Oh absolutely. Yeah the physics is

1:09:06

determined. Schrodinger's

1:09:08

equation is a second order differential

1:09:10

equation. What it defines exactly the

1:09:13

wave function. Now our measurements of

1:09:15

the wave function are probabilistic but

1:09:17

the underlying physical quantity is determined

1:09:19

with a hundred percent accuracy by

1:09:21

the again completely

1:09:23

and but that's what makes the

1:09:26

wave function of the universe so weird and people thought

1:09:28

about it. We don't have an answer. I mean it's

1:09:30

an open question but it's one of the reasons people

1:09:32

some people would say time is an illusion because of

1:09:35

this fact that if the world is quantum

1:09:37

mechanical and if gravity is

1:09:39

quantum mechanical and there's a wave function

1:09:41

that finds describes the universe in some

1:09:44

sense all of time would already be

1:09:46

determined by within the context that wave

1:09:48

function how can you propagate it forward

1:09:51

in time if time is

1:09:53

already determined. All of these questions are problems

1:09:55

and it's one of the many many

1:09:58

problems having to do with trying out understand a quantum

1:10:00

theory of gravity that we don't have the answer to. But

1:10:04

what is clear, and I guess the point

1:10:07

I tried to make, is that even if

1:10:09

this abstract, deep question leads

1:10:11

us to some new insights into a

1:10:14

theory of gravity and a theory of

1:10:16

space and time, what

1:10:19

really matters is how the

1:10:21

world we see arises,

1:10:24

a world in which time really does appear

1:10:26

to have meaning, and

1:10:30

the past is different from the future. But you

1:10:32

seem to be suggesting that time travel

1:10:34

was not absolutely ruled out. And it made me

1:10:36

immediately think of the famous killing

1:10:38

your grandmother paradox. You only just have to

1:10:40

kill your grandmother. I mean, anything you do

1:10:42

in the past. I've

1:10:45

illustrated it by the hypothetical example

1:10:47

of if a particular dinosaur

1:10:50

had sneezed at a particular moment, none

1:10:52

of us would be here. Yeah, absolutely.

1:10:55

The butterfly effect, that kind of thing. There

1:10:58

is one way around this in physics, and

1:11:00

it involves what's

1:11:04

called a closed time-like curve. In Star Trek, I think

1:11:06

it's called a causality loop. But

1:11:09

it would get around that,

1:11:12

which is that basically, if you go back in time, you're doomed to

1:11:14

do exactly the same thing

1:11:16

you did before. So that systems can travel in

1:11:18

time and do a circle. But

1:11:21

basically, somehow, so you want to shoot

1:11:24

Hitler, but the

1:11:26

laws of physics will ensure you trip, and

1:11:28

you cannot change things. And so it's a

1:11:30

mathematical way around doing it. Too contrived, it

1:11:32

seems to me. It is very contrived. And

1:11:34

that's one of the reasons why time travel

1:11:37

appears so difficult

1:11:40

to accept. And we

1:11:42

even have, we can

1:11:46

come close to proving it's impossible. If you wanted

1:11:48

to have time travel, you'd have to have a

1:11:50

very, very special kind of energy. I

1:11:53

have a time machine right here. It's

1:11:56

a wormhole. You can't see it, but

1:11:58

it's a wormhole. shortcut through space,

1:12:00

the kind that Jodie Foster took in

1:12:03

contact, in Carl's negative move contact. If

1:12:06

a stable wormhole existed, it's

1:12:08

a time machine. And it's really simple

1:12:11

to understand. So a wormhole is a shortcut

1:12:13

through a curved space. So instead

1:12:15

of going all the way around space, it's like going through

1:12:17

a mountain. Instead of going all the way up, you get

1:12:19

a tunnel and it's much shorter to go through. So that's

1:12:21

what a wormhole is. But you see,

1:12:23

if a wormhole is connecting two points in space

1:12:26

and one of the ends of the wormhole is

1:12:28

moving very fast, then clocks

1:12:30

at that end of the wormhole are doing slowly.

1:12:32

So in five

1:12:34

years, as observed by an observer at this end

1:12:36

of the wormhole, if that end of

1:12:38

the wormhole is moving very fast, it may just

1:12:41

be a week for an observer moving at that

1:12:43

end of the wormhole. But then you see, if

1:12:45

you went through the wormhole, you'd come out five

1:12:47

years earlier, except for a week. And then you

1:12:49

take a spaceship back to where you began and

1:12:51

you come back before you left. So

1:12:54

stable wormholes are time

1:12:56

machines. An interesting kipthorn and

1:12:58

others showed that the

1:13:01

problem is, if normal matter and energy is

1:13:04

all you have, we can show that the

1:13:06

mouth of wormholes will collapse to form black

1:13:08

holes before you could ever go through

1:13:10

them. There's no such thing as a traversal wormhole. So

1:13:13

you might say time machines are impossible. But if

1:13:15

you filled the wormhole up with negative energy, then

1:13:19

the wormhole would be stable. So the question

1:13:21

is, can you create negative energy? And that's

1:13:23

the current unknown. There's no

1:13:26

negative energy things we've ever been able to create

1:13:28

in the laboratory. And people have even written papers

1:13:30

showing up to a certain point you

1:13:33

can't create negative energy in the laboratory. But there's

1:13:35

always a loophole. And so until we get those

1:13:37

loopholes, until we have a theory of quantum gravity,

1:13:40

time travel will remain at least possible. But

1:13:42

I'm more willing to bet that

1:13:45

time travel is impossible than I am that

1:13:47

all life is always made of DNA. I

1:13:50

think ultimately we'll find out

1:13:52

the laws of physics preclude creating configuration

1:13:54

that could do that. But I

1:13:56

don't know. You had a

1:13:58

question backstage about particles

1:14:00

and... Yes, I

1:14:03

don't really understand the general

1:14:06

theory of relativity but I kind of partly

1:14:08

do. What I don't understand is

1:14:11

what on earth gravity has to do with particles.

1:14:13

Why do you have to... gravity

1:14:15

we're talking about something

1:14:18

in which huge bodies

1:14:20

are... particles

1:14:22

are tiny things, what are they going to do with gravity? Gravitons.

1:14:26

Well, what they have

1:14:28

to do with gravity is the same thing that

1:14:30

the tiny particles have to do with

1:14:33

an electric field. I mean you've

1:14:35

always... you've always... you probably

1:14:38

rubbed a balloon on a wall or felt

1:14:40

your hair go up. That's

1:14:43

because of static electric field produces

1:14:45

a force. Yes. But we know

1:14:48

that that force is produced

1:14:50

by ultimately a coherent

1:14:52

configuration of many particles. The

1:14:55

electric field is a coherent configuration of

1:14:57

many photons, of many individual quanta and

1:15:01

we can describe that. You need many... in order for

1:15:03

it to be classical so you and I can see

1:15:05

it, you have to have huge numbers of photons

1:15:08

in the same state and

1:15:10

that creates a selective field. The

1:15:12

photons are also responsible for... So

1:15:14

when Jupiter exerts a gravitational

1:15:17

influence on the little particles,

1:15:23

the only thing between...

1:15:26

If gravity is a quantum theory then

1:15:29

in fact you can show it's due

1:15:31

to the exchange of particles just like

1:15:33

electromagnetism is due to the exchange of

1:15:35

photons. Those particles are called gravitons and

1:15:37

it's really kind of interesting because

1:15:41

it's one of the... Richard Feynman was the first person

1:15:43

that I think to show this, I'm not sure, but

1:15:46

photons have a very particular characteristic.

1:15:49

They happen to have spin 1, doesn't really matter what it is.

1:15:51

But if you exchange a spin 1 particle

1:15:54

then like charges will repel. So

1:15:57

we know that gravity can't be the same as

1:15:59

electromagnetism. because light charges attract matter

1:16:02

attracts matter. There's only two possibilities

1:16:04

exchange of a spin two particle or exchange

1:16:07

of a spin zero particle. But

1:16:10

if you can show that if you exchange

1:16:12

a spin two particle then you

1:16:14

can write down a theory that makes

1:16:16

it look like that exchange is the

1:16:19

curvature of space. And

1:16:21

so we've never detected

1:16:23

a graviton but if gravity if

1:16:25

classical gravity if Jupiter is interacting

1:16:27

with us, it's exchanging a huge

1:16:29

number of gravitons

1:16:32

with us. Exchanging, you mean that passing

1:16:34

between them? Yeah, and that's why gravity

1:16:36

occurs at the speed of light. If

1:16:38

the Sun disappeared literally

1:16:41

disappeared, I mean all the mass in the

1:16:43

Sun disappeared now for eight minutes we continue

1:16:45

to go around the Sun. I understand that.

1:16:47

And so it's because of it's because exchange

1:16:49

of particle. But we have

1:16:51

never detected a graviton and some

1:16:54

people would say gravity is ultimately not a

1:16:56

quantum mechanical theory because we haven't been able

1:16:58

to invent one. A

1:17:00

colleague, Yarod Tuf, to won the Nobel Prize would

1:17:02

might say that. And I'm very pleased

1:17:04

to say that we, a colleague of mine who

1:17:07

did win the Nobel Prize for Frank Wilczek and I

1:17:09

actually wrote down showed that if we could detect gravitational

1:17:12

waves which are the

1:17:15

classical version, just like

1:17:18

radio waves, are the classical version

1:17:21

of photons that you put enough of

1:17:23

them and you can detect a radio signal. If

1:17:25

they're all in the same state it's

1:17:27

enough for you to detect the radio signal. Gravitational

1:17:29

waves are the classical version. Well, they have been

1:17:31

detected. But they're the classical

1:17:33

version. Yeah. The question is is there a

1:17:35

quantum version? And what we showed is if

1:17:38

you could detect them from the beginning of

1:17:40

time, from inflation, we could prove that that

1:17:42

gravitons exist. So I don't, it's still an

1:17:44

open question. And so if you don't like

1:17:46

it, you might be right. I

1:17:49

wouldn't presume to like it or not like it. Well,

1:17:51

that's, that's good. That's the right answer because whether you

1:17:53

like it or not doesn't matter. How's

1:17:57

the bidding going? Are we allowed to bid? Oh, yes. Okay,

1:18:00

and yes, can Richard bid on this?

1:18:02

Well... It's on

1:18:04

the consolation. Yeah, so, so,

1:18:07

um, so why

1:18:09

don't you write down a number and I'll give it to,

1:18:11

uh, I don't know where John is. This

1:18:15

is a secret auction, we don't know how... Yeah, yeah, I mean,

1:18:17

Richard would like to bid on it. And

1:18:19

I'd like to bid on it too, I'd like to

1:18:22

bid one dollar less than Richard bids. Just

1:18:28

to show support. John,

1:18:32

can Richard bid on

1:18:34

the painting? And

1:18:37

I assume he wants to, do you want to

1:18:39

do it privately? What's the bid at, do you

1:18:41

know? We're not told, are

1:18:43

we? What

1:18:46

was that? Four

1:18:48

hundred and ten dollars? Pounds. Pounds,

1:18:51

well, same thing. For

1:18:54

a cosmologist, it's really the same thing. Um,

1:18:57

uh, so, anyway, it's four hundred and ten

1:18:59

pounds. Do you want to do a private bid or do

1:19:01

you want to announce what you're willing to bid? Richard,

1:19:04

it's up to you. The

1:19:08

auction's finished. Oh, the auction is finished? You

1:19:11

didn't give Richard a chance to bid. Okay,

1:19:14

well it's eight o'clock, which means I think

1:19:16

that we are finished too. So thank

1:19:18

you very much, Richard, and thank you all. I

1:19:25

hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast

1:19:27

is produced by the Origins Project Foundation,

1:19:31

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1:19:33

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1:19:37

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1:19:45

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learn more, please visit originsprojectfoundation.org.