Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Brian Keating on Theories of Everything, Free Will, and thoughts on Eric Weinstein's / Wolfram's TOE

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

As the show pivots away from strictly political matters, we revisit my background -- mathematics and physics.

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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories. All lowercase. That's shopify.com slash theories. For my next few videos, it's going to take somewhat of a divergent path from the political matters that you've become accustomed to from this channel into a foray back to my roots as a theoretical physicist. I'm still going to talk about philosophical issues such as the existence of God, consciousness, and free will. philosophical issues such as the existence of God, consciousness, and free will. My inaugural guest is the great Professor Brian Keating, someone who I admire to such a degree that I was timorous and forgot familiar terms, how to pronounce them, such as homogeneity and isotropy. You'll see what I mean. He has a YouTube channel that I think you should subscribe to. It's one

that I personally covet. He's had on such heavy hitter notables as Eric Weinstein, Jim Simons, Stephen Wolfram. Enjoy. No problem. All right. I'm here with Professor Brian Keating, the magnanimous and beatific Brian Keating. You should check out his youtube channel because he interviews plenty of physicists as well as people who are watching this may be familiar with like dave rubin some

other of guests which i'm not unsure why you're interviewing them or we're going to get to that which is for example the beyond meat people okay first of all let's get through the questions one by one what are your goals explain to the audience what you do with your channel, what your goals are as you as a professor for your life. Yeah. So my basic dictum in life is that it's incredibly short and you have to make the most of it and you have to do everything you can until we invent time travel. we have to do everything we can in order to make each moment as meaningful, as invested with meaning as possible. And so I do that in different ways, different habits, rituals, practices. But one thing I've always wanted to do is to write a book and leave a legacy as an author.

And I've learned so much from other authors that i wanted to start something especially during this time of covid to give back to people that have been my silent mentors or distant learning mentors namely folks like um as you mentioned michael schirmer has been on my podcast uh we've had people like David Kaiser, very famous and well-known physicist, all the way down to people that have influenced my life personally that haven't written books, such as Jim Simons, who we had on the podcast for Father's Day. And again, following Carl Sagan's dictum that books are magic, books are proof that human beings can work magic.

You have an author's voice, possibly a long dead author from communicating from hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago in the case of, you know, I read a lot of the Bible and things like that we can get into. And how it influences me is you get to create the sort of artificial, I call it artificial wisdom. We hear a lot. I'm sure you've had a lot of contact with people that study artificial intelligence. What I'm more interested in is artificial wisdom, namely how can you accrue wisdom without going through all the experiences that other brilliant people have gone through. So I love to read books. I love to write books. I'm thinking about my second book now as we speak and putting it together based on

a lot of the interviews and things that have emerged from the conversations with these luminaries that I'm really fortunate to talk to. How are you defining wisdom in artificial wisdom? So artificial wisdom is just kind of a playoff on artificial intelligence, namely that you have an awful lot of knowledge that's available to humanity through things, Wikipedia, the internet, et cetera. But in fact, I remind people that the word science in Latin means knowledge, doesn't mean wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to synthesize fat pieces of knowledge in a way that we don't know, but maybe uniquely human. And I think synthesizing it to avoid, I'm also a private pilot, I fly tiny little planes. And one of the things we say is,

you have to learn from the mistakes of others, because you won't live long enough to make them all yourself. So that's sort of the, you know, kind of the 10,000 hour rule applied to pilots, which I think is one of Malcolm Gladwell's examples of truly outstanding pilots are those that have obtained 10,000 hours. And you can only get that far if you've done things and benefited from others' wisdom, the situations that they've been in so that you don't have to go through it. So it's not just about knowledge. I mean, I think Derek Seavers once said, you know, if it was all about knowledge, we'd all be billionaires with six pack apps. There's an abundance of knowledge. Wisdom is synthesizing it, distilling it and catalyzing the many disparate pieces that you get into some coherent form of life message or vision, which is what I try to maintain.

Have you heard of John Vervaeke? No, I haven't. Who is that, Kurt? Cognitive scientist from U of T. Okay. Plug there. I also interviewed, there's two interviews with him on my channel.

Oh, cool. He extensively studies wisdom from a cognitive science perspective. Oh, wow. Yeah, I would definitely like to listen to him. Yeah, okay. Maybe we'll get in touch. He'll help me get in touch with him.

Now, you mentioned that the mind might not be, the human mind might be uniquely predisposed or capable of wisdom. That is, the distilling of so much knowledge down to something that's practical, which implies a goal. And then we can talk about where do you get those goals from later when we get to the biblical section. Do you happen to, do you think that the mind can be mechanized? That is, what I mean is that a machine can simulate the mind. Yeah, so I've had some conversations with people about this, and actually the most interesting people I've talked to are people in the realm of music and the arts. I interviewed a controversial but interesting,

very interesting person named Zuby. He's a musician in the UK. He does a lot of rap and improv-based rap music. He's also very knowledgeable about jazz, et cetera. And I also interviewed one of my best friends, Stefan Alexander, who's a professional jazz musician, but also professor of theoretical physics at Brown University, where I went to grad school. And these two gentlemen have the idea that music can be

synthesized and it can be made by computers, but there's something uniquely almost endemic to human beings that allows for sort of what Stefan calls this path integral approach, where the mind is exploring and seeking out ways to minimize a quantity we physicists call action. And he's doing it in a way that a computer can solve, you know, theoretically can reduce what's called the Lagrangian or solve this action principle, the integral of Lagrangian. But it may not be able to create that idea. You know, the notion of an artificial physicist that Max Tegmark, who is also a friend and colleague, has proposed, you know,

the ability to replicate the laws of physics merely based on computing power seems dubious to me. I'm not saying it's impossible, but these metrics that we have are often superimposed upon biases that the individuals who program the artificial intelligences, the machine learning algorithms, unconsciously or sometimes consciously bestow upon that. So the Turing test, you know, is the classic definition. It turns out, you know,

Turing almost inadvertently came up with it, or he wasn't necessarily thinking about it the way that we think about it now, but he was so prescient that he really presaged the fact that, yeah, this question of whether or not a computer and artificial and general artificial intelligence could mimic a human being is certainly a very, very interesting topic to me. And I've actually talked about it recently with, who did I talk about this week? I think it was James Altucher, who's like a pundit, blogger, prolific podcaster, author. And he was saying that, yeah, like the Turing test, you could think about it being passed right now. Like sometimes I give my iPad to my young kids, I'll give an iPad to them, and they'll play with it. And then they'll come back to me,

and later on, they'll like swipe my face like they're trying to change the page of my face. You know, unfortunately for them, it doesn't change the way I look. But it made me think like, could the Turing test be kind of age dependent? Could the Turing test be passed already for very highly intelligent animals like bonobos or what have you? In other words words that you could actually pass it already or young children uh so a young child wouldn't know if it's their dad

talking to them or an artificial intelligence so i i those are very fascinating questions i don't know however um again what is the impact because i don't i'm not an expert in this field, but what is the uniquely human aspect of intelligence that proves so resistant to perfect mimicry, i.e. the Turing test? It's not something I personally investigated very deeply, but I think it is a very important question. I was reading recently Mind Machines and Girdle by Lucas. Have you heard of that paper i've heard of it yes i haven't read it he says that a mind that a machine can simulate any aspect of the mind but not every aspect and that seems like a contradiction but you can also think of it like a machine can simulate any natural number but not every natural number right and it can do things better than

human beings right i mean you know one of the you know what one of the best uses of a quantum computer is, that a classical computer can't model, right? That's a quantum computer. In other words, a quantum computer is the ideal device, if you will, technology to model quantum processes, Lagrangians, Hamiltonians. The question is, as you say, because it surpasses any human being or any conventional silicon computer or whatever, classical computer, does that mean it could do so in every field? It's hard to say yes.

I guess that paper you're saying argues no. Yeah. And it says that we need to make a delineation between superiority and equivalence. So a computer can be much better than us, and it is in various aspects, but it doesn't mean it's equivalent and he gives an in principle argument for why it can't be used in girdle or if it's a formal system that's consistent and sound then it can there are statements that it can't prove to be true but we can see when we stand outside the system that it's true and just based on that alone there's a difference between our minds and machines. Have you studied much of Gödel's incompleteness theorem? I wouldn't say I've studied it. I've familiarized myself with it in the following sense that

I believe that physicists have a deep envy of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for the following reason. It's very hard to find statements about physics itself that come from within physics itself. In other words, it's very hard to say what constitutes physics, what constitutes scientific methods. Uh, some as, as in your fellow Torontonian, or I guess he's in Waterloo, but Lee Smolin, who's a very good friend of mine, he'll be on the podcast soon. He and I have chatted about this. He actually doesn't even believe that the scientific method is resilient, you know, is a truly definable conjecture. In other words, he argues, you know, with the kind of Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, simple statement of

what the scientific method is. He argues based on a book that I can provide for you guys later. But there's arguments against the existence of even the scientific method. So now once you have this and you try to equate it, and you try to ask, am I wasting my life? I'm building this huge observatory with 300 of my most brilliant colleagues in the world. Is it just a waste? Because ultimately, it's tantamount to astrology? Now, I think I could make very strong arguments that it's not. However, as we will get to, certainly there are aspects of this pursuit of studying the early universe that some claim are tantamount to astrology or tantamount to phrenology or something like this that we are doing. What's that? How so? So we can get into that one with regard to string theory, the multiverse.

I saw you wanted to talk about that. We should definitely get into that. But just finishing up on, because you asked me about Gödel. So what's important about Gödel is that it shows you the limitations of the mathematical construct that human beings have invented and discovered. Now I say that because Jim Simons and I had a wonderful conversation. I asked him, is mathematics invented or discovered? And he said it's both because the only way to find out what is new

is to discover something. And when you discover something new, like the Chern-Simons relations and differential forms, et cetera, when you do that, you learn new things and you, in some sense, invent new technology. Literally, I mean, there are people that say that effectively Chern-Simons can be used to derive the Einstein field equation. So, you know, did Einstein, you know, discover that or, you know, did he invent it? He used tools of mathematics that had never been used in physics. So getting back to Gödel, I think that physicists would love to have a similar statement, even though some mathematicians, my friend, Jan Eleven, who was on my podcast,

I haven't released her episode, but she wrote a great book called The Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. And it's about Gödel and Turing and this fictitious relationship between the two of them in Vienna. It's a fictional book. Yeah. So she's an amazing writer. She's written bestselling nonfiction books about LIGO and about... Is she a physicist as well? Yeah. She's a named chair professor at Barnard College at Columbia University. Wow. Cool. Yeah. She's amazing. I would love to connect you with her, but she writes fiction. And this book is this fictional kind of character of how they both were led to basically take their own lives and what happened, how they did so.

One did so via ingesting a poisoned apple, and one did so by starving himself to death. And just the amazing connections that she draws. It's been called like Maria Popova. It's one of her favorite books of all time, and she's one of the most brilliant people anyway getting back to Gödel so I would say I wish that there was and I think

many physicists wish that there was something besides Popper you know Popper we can get into his demarcation conjectures effectively we don't have a hard and fast mathematically consistent rule at least within the realm of self consistency that Gödel

delineates. We don't have something that tells me cosmology or, you know, a condensed matter physics is a waste of time because it's, it's, it's logically as equivalent to, or not, to some other branch of, of, you know, what we consider metaphysics or non-physics like astrology. So is cosmology like astrology uh we don't have as cleanly divided demarcations between those despite what most people think coming from popper now as you're an experimentalist the audience might not know that well we'll know from the introduction yeah which is different than most of the people that i talk to i talk to theoretical physicists yeah and and and that puts you in a unique

perspective. Many theoretical physicists, including Penrose and Feynman, I mean, Dyson, believe that that Gerdes incompleteness theorem has something to say about our ability to come up with a theory of everything if they're, and the existence of one as well. So whether or not we can find it and whether or not existence are two different topics. Well, what do you see as an experimentalist, Gödel's incompleteness theorems implications for physics itself? Yeah. So, you know, I've had on Penrose, I had on Dyson many times, and Penrose many times, and Martin Rees and I have had wonderful conversations as well, I would say that exactly as you know, and you know,

you're the first person to ever notice this. I don't know if you use metrics with your podcast, Kurt. If I ask somebody a question, they say, I've never thought of that before, or I've never been asked that before, or they sit there like this. That's a sign of a good podcast. I want to give you that

little metric, that little metric that little uh what do they call that kpi key performance so good job there so so almost no one has ever asked me uh about the unique perspective that an experimentalist has on this and i think it's it's a it's a little unfortunate because most many people see the theoretical physicists the brian greens the jan 11s like I said, the Stefan Alexanders, Jim Gates, Lee Smolin, they see the, those are physicists, Michio Kaku, they see those are the physicists. And the, you know, and the Brian Keatings don't get the attention, I'm clamoring for attention of Brian Green. But the bottom line is they can work. And I had this conversation with

Eric Weinstein yesterday, just the two of us, you know, hanging out and chatting on the phone. And I was like, look, you know, an experimentalist, I can point to the key performance indicators that I achieved every day, I keep a journal, I have, I have, you know, metrics for what I want to succeed in each day. Today's list, I could show it to you in my diary across the room, I talked to Kurt, today's list, I could show it to you in my diary across the room. I talk to Kurt and, you know, communicate new ideas. So I keep that. Now, a theorist might have one or two papers in his or her career, and that's their entire career. Now, some experimentalists might not even have, you know, more than that in terms of one experiment. Some of my experiments last 10, 15, 20 years. The LIGO experiment lasts 40 years from beginning to

success. And we can talk about what that means later. But basically an experimentalist has a certain clock that's ticking within his or her brain. And that clock is saying, what can I accomplish that will provide crisp new evidence that will reveal something new about the universe that no one's ever known before so that my student can get a PhD or a postdoc or I can get a little, you know, continue the program of endeavor that I'm trying to achieve. And sometimes they're very big and sometimes they're very small. But on a daily basis, there's a clock ticking, tick, tick, tick. What did I get done?

What aspect? Even if it's a simple thing. And that's where I think we have an advantage because as Richard Feynman once said, teaching is good for physicists because most of the time we're not productive coming up with QED or some new theory of physics. So at least we feel like we accomplished something

when we taught. I feel like that I get to teach and I get to learn by experimentation every day, thinking about not exactly how to test whether or not the universe had a singular origin in the Big Bang, which is a very important part of my overall mission. That's what I call the big picture strategic thinking of an experimentalist. What big questions do I want the answer to? Do neutrinos have mass?

What are the masses of neutrinos? Is there a CP violation in the early universe? Do neutrinos have mass? What are the masses of neutrinos? Is there a CP violation in the early universe? Those are huge questions. The tactical day-to-day activities that an experimentalist does are probably very different from what a theorist does. And I've written works with theorists. A lot of what I do is guided by theorists. But on the other hand, I can point to specific tactics every day that are metrics towards the ultimate strategic victory that I hope to achieve. And so I think it's a different perspective. It's more practical. It's more, it's sort of more, it's more quotidian. But on the same token, I think it's just as important

as the theoretical guidance that we get. And furthermore, you can produce, I feel like theorists are, and I love theorists, but you know, my father was a theoretical physicist. So I'm going to say this, no insult to all you theorists, but theoretical physicists are kind of like bosons, not bozos, but you can create like a lot of them doing the same kind of cool stuff. And, but they won't be able to see if it's right or wrong until a fermionic experimentalist comes along and says, that doesn't, you know, we don't, we don't play nicely, right? We're not going to just accept some theory because it's beautiful. In some ways, well, ultimately, the experimentalists are the ground of physics

because you can come up with ideas as much as you want. And I think that one of the reasons why theoretical physicists get much more play in the public's eyes is because, I'd like to know your thoughts. I don't know if this is true, but this is what I think, is that they can be expansive and they can be mystical, but the experimentalist's job

is to be careful and say no. Yeah, that's right. Theoretically, this is maybe, and that's more intriguing to the public because the experimentalist is to be fastidious and meticulous and exact and precise. Obviously, a mathematician needs to be that same way. You can make an analogy between theoretical physics and mathematics, but that's not.

My father used to say the same thing. He used to say, actually, you need to know – you need to be better than a theorist because you don't have to create new theories. But if you don't understand how the theories work, you're – in his words, he said, you're just like a plumber and I'm not disparaging plumbers. I love plumbers. My cousin's a plumber, you know, so don't take this the wrong way, but you're just like doing a technical task. You're not actually doing it for the right reason, which is to understand using the principle of right reason, what is the importance of this undertaking that you're pursuing? So, you know, I always make sure my students, my students spend almost as much time reading theoretical papers. And in fact, as you

just said, I will make sure that they are inundated, deluged by dead theories, by theories that didn't work out, because I think that causes them to acquire the very most difficult trait, which is good taste. How do you know a problem is worth working on? If it's going to require, you know, a technology like I had on James Beecham on Monday this week, he's a great scientist. He's in particle fever. He's helped produce particle fever. He was in chasing Einstein, brilliant physicist. He's arguing for this future circular collider in Europe. He's an experimentalist. And he's saying, like, my ultimate dream is like a particle accelerator at the diameter of the solar system.

And I think it's fun to hear a talk like that because it's science fiction and it goes with my podcast theme at the Arthur C. Clarke Center. But ultimately, what I'm concerned with is I've got, you know, hopefully 50, 60 years left. I don't know how much, you know, I'll be cognizant and be able to understand it. I want to know what I can accomplish that's practical, that's decisive. And as you said, in my book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I talk about how experimentalists are kind of like exterminators. in theories and destroy theories that don't comport with evidence. We're not required to create new theories, although I've worked to try to understand maybe phenomenology is the best way to describe it. And also look, what are the limitations of experiments? Don't forget, most of my career, I'm looking at noise. I'm looking at thermal radiation, which is basically

like noise, which can be mimicked is the most highly entropic form of radiation that exists. How do you distinguish that, disentangle that from other sources of contamination, from the ground, which is 100 times brighter, the sun, which is 1000 times hotter? How do you go about doing that? And so most of our time is looking for ways to prove ourselves wrong, which is Feynman said is the job to not be fooled. I think I did myself a great disservice when I was in university in that I disregarded experimental physics. I despised my, there was a second year requirement for experimental physics. And I just, it was never explained to me why you add the error bars in the way that you

do. And I understand now it has something to do with Taylor expansion, but I never rocked it. I didn't understand it. I didn't want to spend the time to, and I regret that because I think that as part of my mission is to come up with a theory of everything or integrate the other theories of everything or find the best candidate. I see that as a large area that I'm lacking that would have significantly helped me.

Yeah, you know what scientists don't do? Simple data analysis. Right. So what scientists, and it's not, you know, I don't want to like take the blame off you entirely because, you know, this is the first time we're talking. But I do want to say that we don't teach experimental physics properly, in my opinion. We teach it, typically we have a canned package experiment that we know works. How do we know it works? Does somebody want to know about you know the davis and germer experiment michelson morley you know so you can go through all these different nobel prize winning experiments and then you get

this uh assumption that everything is uh is essentially these neat little packages and as i said before what i spend most of my time looking for is noise and a lot of experimentalists do this but there's two different types of noise There's the statistical noise that more and more experiments and more and more observations can reduce to almost negligible values. And then there's a much more important class called systematic uncertainties. And those are the most challenging because they require, as this is a huge theme of the book, Losing the Nobel Prize, which I thought was a unique contribution because I'm not Brian Greene. I'm not Michio Kaku. I'm not Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I'm not a theorist. I'm going to tell you why is it that certain people lost Nobel Prizes? Why did certain people win Nobel Prizes? And it comes down to understanding the fundamental difference of being an experimental physicist, which is you're always looking to prove yourself wrong. And furthermore, you're always trying to nail down these systematic errors. And to do so- Does that generalize outside of physics? It probably does. You know, it probably does because I think there's bias and there's systemic features

of other features of inquiry, not just in the physical sciences. But people notice it every day. Like I said in my book, I talk about if you have dirt on your windshield, how do you know you have dirt? Well, you see a diminution of intensity of light or whatever. I go through an example of that. And what do you do to see if you can make a difference and get rid of it? Well, you remove it by water, and then you do an A-B comparison.

So you're actually doing an experiment. You're seeing what was the difference between before and after. And in this case, we looked at, we were looking at this light. Now, is it brighter? Yeah, now the light's brighter. Okay, so it had a difference. If it made it worse, if you wash it with concrete,

then it wouldn't get better. So thinking about things in terms of a systematic error is something that will require you to do another experiment. And in my case, with the bicep experiment and my colleagues, we failed to do a separate experiment by ourselves. We tried to do it in different ways that I describe in the book. I won't get into here, but we failed to do an experiment which would have ruled out the ultimate source of the signal we claim were inflationary gravitational waves, which is cosmic dust in our Milky Way galaxy. That required a separate

experiment to get rid of. And now we all know that. And so now in the Simons Observatory pictured behind me here in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in the Bicep Array Experiment my colleagues are running at the South Pole, we now have the capability to measure not just the Nobel gold winning dust, gold winning gravitational wave signature, if it exists, which we don't know, but also dust simultaneously. And you measure the cosmic signal plus the dust signal. And then you measure the dust signal by itself. You subtract it from the cosmic plus dust. And what you're left with is cosmic. Fascinating. Man. Yeah. Is that okay. So in math and in physics, in theoretical physics, there are seminal books like calculus on on manifolds that's feedback that's mathematics

then there's whatever there's some books for like the de facto text on quantum mechanics or quantum field yeah of course is there you know i i i i shouldn't have done this but when i was younger and i was arrogant and i ridiculed experimental physics like like a theoretical physicist would they view it i'm sure you know this and you must have boiled with hatred that they view it much like engineering yeah and engineering is this is as i said the plumber you know no offense to plumbers but yeah that's that way a lot of theorists view it in fact one of my friends uh i won't say his name because he's a brilliant uh he's a brilliant physicist and there aren't too many in the in his department uh you know he's like okay so what what you know did you change a valve today

like did you do a carburetor tune up and again he didn't you know we're friends but he come into the lab and i'd be like well did you write the same paper again you know about uh about membranes and d-brain and so yeah go ahead he's correct. It's partly some physical manipulation. But what I envy the most about your position is the understanding, the comprehension from various angles. You have to know these theories inside and out to be able to predict, to make an experiment and to know what could be wrong. You have to be passionate. I agree with you, Kurt, 100%. But you have to have the passion that that's curious and that's meaningful to you. I have a lot of students, Kurt, that are preternaturally gifted at building things, tinkering things.

I actually worked on an old 1970s Volkswagen Rabbit when I was in high school. My first car cost me less than my laptop cost me today. And I love that thing. And I love working on it and having a sense of satisfaction. Every day I could say, oh, I tuned up the brakes, or I lifted a suspension. I lifted it by a micron or whatever I was doing back then.

And the point is that you – but that was because I had passion for it. Some of my students don't have passion. They don't think about the big-picture questions. Most of them do. Some of them are just really good. They can build in the clean room. They can build new types of detectors. They love the pure technology. They are doing engineering. Look behind me in this picture, you see these telescopes and it's hard to see over my shoulder, but there are diesel generators. I have students that are fascinated with the way diesel generators work. And if they

didn't, and they're physicists and they're doing logistics and what's called project management. It's so crucial, Kurt. But for me, that's not what really turns me on about physics. It's understanding the theory that I could understand the way a four dimensional scalar field would operate over cosmic time.

And then say, Hmm, to measure that, not only do I want to measure that, of course, any, you know, red blooded physicists would, to measure that, not only do I want to measure that, of course any red-blooded physicist would want to measure it,

but I want to understand what are the impediments to measuring it first. That's what makes – so my friend Sabine Hossenfelder was on my podcast. She has this book, Lost in Math. I'm speaking to her tomorrow. Oh, great. So she has her book, Lost in Math. You'll talk about it. She'll go on her whole litany.

I've heard it before, and I respect her. But I said one of the first things I said in my interview with her is I said, no experiment is not beautiful. Like there's no such thing as, even if you look at, have you ever seen a picture, Kurt, of the very first transistor that, you know, Shockley and Bardi invented? It's like a, you know, it's like some, some silicone. It's like a s'more. It looks like a s'more. It's got like a coat hanger and, and some, and some marshmallow. It literally looks like that. That is beautiful nonetheless, because they took materials that they had and they made it work and they tested for these contaminations, impurities, systematic effects,

and it is beautiful. All experiments do what are called null tests. You've probably heard of these jackknife tests, where you take a set of data. Look, I do the cosmic microwave background. The cosmic microwave background doesn't know that the data that I'm analyzing was taken on a Tuesday. It doesn't care about that. So therefore, if I take data on a Tuesday, compare it to data on a Wednesday, and subtract the two, what should I get? Zero.

Zero. Similarly, if I scan back and forth, I take all the data, and I bin it when I was moving the telescope to the left versus moving it to the right, and subtract them what should i get well that depends on what depends on the spatial homogenity and it can never pronounce that and then i saw i saw isotropy well but we know that the cosmic signals themselves are homogeneous and isotropic so any you're right there could be deviations from the ground, from the telescope mirrors, whatever. I'm just being ridiculous. Yeah, exactly.

I understand what you're saying, yeah. So there's symmetries, and the symmetries are beautiful. What Sabine rails against is the reliance on symmetry to create new theories or to have guidance towards what we're doing in math. So I take issue with the fact that categorically saying beauty and symmetry and naturalness are anathema to new physics. So I'm sure you'll hear that. I'm sure you'll get into it. But the basic philosophy that I have is that all experiments are beautiful. And that her thing is that you should not be guided by beauty and theory.

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old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free just make sure to add them to the cart plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything are there books that are experimentalist books much Much like I was mentioning, there's the Sankars, quantum mechanics. Well, you know, I didn't think that there were. And so my book describes a lot about how a cosmic microwave background

polarimeter works, how you measure what polarization is. In the Losing the Nobel Prize book? Yeah. So it's about how a polarimeter works what is polarization it's the least well understood of all the three properties of light I describe how that works I describe how you can make your own polarimeter etc and so I give a lot of analogies I talk about classic experiments and I talk about in particular there was a man named Edward Ohm no relation to the Ohm resistance fame, but he was working on the exact same telescope at Bell Labs that

Penzias and Wilson were working on. And he did error analysis incorrectly. And because of that, he found that he had this persistent three degree background that he could not get rid of. And he assumed that that error was due to this conspiracy of error bars co-additing together constructively, literally doing a mistake that my freshman in physics would get failure marks for. And because of that, he had the data that Penzias and Wilson would later get four years earlier. And so he is one of the Nobel Prize losers in the book. So I described that what does

that mean to do a systematic error how how do experimentalists build these things now there are good there are some books that talk about it um there's a book by john mather called the very first light that describes kobe um george smoot wrote a book called wrinkles in time also about kobe and they won the nobel prize in 2006 um but uh you know uh they're they're that was one of the lacuna that i felt i could repair and make a contribution to with losing the nobel prize how about for these physicists who are second year they're smart upper they're going into the upper year and they want to understand and they're theoretical physicists and they want a textbook textbook that takes you from knowing virtually nothing

to how do you, what are some experiments, and how do you perform the requisite analysis? So Jim Peebles, who won the Nobel Prize last year at Princeton, who's hopefully coming on my show pretty soon, and he's written a book called Cosmology Century. And it goes through, he was part of the original Penzias and Wilson competitor team at Princeton

that lost the Nobel Prize back in 1968 when Penzias and Wilson did win it. But they were famously scooped by, and this was my graduate student's advisor's graduate, his advisor, David Wilkinson, and team and P's lost the nobel prize for the discovery missed out on discovering the cmb uh by only a little bit to this other team led by pennsies and wilson anyway jim people's has written a book called cosmology century and

he goes through a lot of the classic experiments and how we came not just to know what we know about the cmb which is very important, obviously, but also galaxy surveys. How did we start from 1900 knowing almost nothing if the universe was static, eternal, infinite, finite, whatever, to knowing so much about cosmology, the age down to the tens of millions of years, the density down to fractions of a percent, the expansion rate, depending on who you talk to, to either sub-percent or 9%, et cetera. So it's a fascinating book.

It's brand new. And there's another book by a colleague of mine in the Simons Observatory, also at Princeton, named Jo Dunkley. She wrote a book called Our Universe. And then another Princeton professor, you see what's happening here. Jo Dunkley, Joanne Dunkley. Joanne, okay, okay. A book called Our Universe.

And then Lyman Page, also at Princeton, wrote a book just out now called The Little Book of Cosmology. And they're very accessible, especially to not – the first one, Jim Peeble's book, is more technical. You'll see Einstein equations. You'll see correlation functions, but... Sounds like my book. Yeah, I think you'll appreciate that book.

So as an experimental physicist, what do you think is missing, is needed for progress to be made on a new theory of everything or current theories of everything? Is it, like I was asking you in the notes, is it something as simple as a larger collider is it to build the collider in space is it not even the collider at all is it's just analyze the cosmic background radiation with more resolution what is yes so obviously you know i have a bias towards uh two things one things that i can contribute to uh because that's where i'm putting my limited amount of of attention you know, you have a limited amount of time, but you even have less attention that you can dedicate, right, to different things.

And so what I feel is worthy of my attention and that of my, you know, six graduate students and six undergraduates and three postdocs revolves around the CMB, but not only for studying the cosmic microwave background, for looking for this potential signature of inflation, which would be this twisting, curling pattern of microwaves that we claimed also as part of the BICEP2 experiment back in 2014. We declared we detected it.

It turned out we had to recant that claim. Not that we made a blunder or made a mistake, but we attributed the source of the signal to an incorrect piece of evidence. The biggest picture things to me are to understand whether or not time had a beginning. And I think that has just tremendous implications for not just me, but everybody in terms of philosophy, metaphysics, religion, if you believe. Smolin has a great book on that.

I don't know if you read it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm in the middle of it. I was invited to a conference at Perimeter Institute near you three or four years ago where I started to have conversations about him that could use the CMB to determine if there is a clock, a certain universal clock,

and that universal clock might be connected to what we talk about in terms of CPT violation, CP violation, and that's using the properties of polarization as a sort of detector of mirror symmetry. So we know that something called CPT violation is respected, and we know that CP violation takes place, but the distances of billions of light years of travel time, you might see the evidence for the rotation of polarization of both photons and some say even of gravitational waves. So there's a huge area of physics that's left to be explored. And that I believe will tell us a lot about the fundamental aspects of electromagnetism.

And then if you do believe that there is a grand unified theory plus gravity, so a theory of everything, then you would have to argue that if the weak force disobeys parity symmetry, then gravity must at very high energies. And so where's the best place to look for gravity's behavior at very high energies? The Big Bang or a bounce? And that's something proposed by my colleague Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, that the universe is actually cyclical, that there was no Big Bang,

that there is no single origin of time, that the universe undergoes perfectly classical physics bounces and expansions over trillions of years, not just, you know, billions of years. And this is also related, there's related work by Roger Penrose, and you may know this conformal cyclic cosmology. So that's the biggest question you could possibly answer. Is time unique? Is it, did it have a beginning? Is it a singular origin as people claim? Or are there other aspects of the universe that we can only study using the universe as our biggest possible accessible particle accelerator? Do you think there are in principle limitations to experimental physics?

For example, Lee Smolin said that you can't make theories about the universe from within the universe. I believe that's in Time Reborn. I don't know if you understand if I'm reiterating it correctly. Yeah, so I've heard him speak about that, and I think that's related to this book, which I don't want to break our conversation up to go look up this book, but he has his doubts about the existence even of the scientific method. So if the scientific method, which relies on hypothesis, some kind of conjecture, some crisp test, some ability to be proven wrong in the case of Popper, et cetera,

then, yeah, you might think that if that isn't maintained, in other words, if you don't believe that that's the sine qua non of physics, of science itself, then trying to rely on experiment to reveal something new is plagued and fraught with the very bias that you're trying to solipsistically eliminate, which is that you can learn something about the universe from within the universe. And, and, you know, I think it's a fascinating question. And Lee is one of the most original thinkers I know. So it's not possible for me to ignore what he says. On a day to day basis, do I think that it's not possible to learn about the universe? Of course not. No,

I do. I believe we can learn tremendously about the composition, the structure of the universe on a practical level. And so to be honest, I don't really concern myself so much of like these questions, the ultimate question, like, do I exist? You know, do I have free will? I actually don't personally find those interesting. I know you're interested in it. Yeah.

Do you forget about if you find it interesting? Do you happen to believe that you have free will? I do. Yeah. In general, I do. And how does that comport with your experimentalist reductionism? I don't know if you believe in reductionism,

but it's, I don't, I don't necessarily believe in reductionism. I find all these things kind of again. So I participated with Stuart Hoffman, who is a good friend, not Stuart Hoffman, Stuart Hammeroff at University of Arizona, who runs

a science of consciousness seminar every other year alongside Roger Penrose and others. And actually Noam Chomsky spoke with me a few years ago here in San Diego when I was here. And, you know, I became very frustrated and disillusioned a little bit because they couldn't even like say for sure what consciousness was. And yet they said they have a science of consciousness or they're working towards the science of con. I know Sam Harris is the hard problem until you understand. So it's not so much that I feel if I can prove it, or I feel like I'm a hypocrite because I believe in free will, even though I am an experimentalist. No, it's more that I think the burden is on other people who believe that there isn't free will and there isn't, you know, there is super determinism. And I know people will just throw it around like

the block universe and it's just, but there's no evidence for it. So I guess the question is, I'll give you, yeah, go ahead. I'll play devil's advocate. Sure. Let's say you have free will. Okay, well, so that means you made a decision of your own choosing. Well, what caused you to choose in that particular direction? And then if you say, well, I had some play in that. Well, then I ask what caused that? It's just what caused. Until you get to something that is outside of you.

So for example, the initial conditions of the Big Bang maybe, or your mother giving birth to you, which you didn't choose, how is it that you have free will? I guess I would ask kind of like the Turing quote, like, how would you tell the difference? Like, if I did have free will, you know, as they say, like, I have to believe in free will, I have no choice. But the question of, you know, I would say, isn't that, is that the super, you know, the superset of all events that have taken place since the Big Bang? If you want to say that that's deterministic, when we know that there's certain quantum decoherent effects that cannot be modeled as intrinsically being deterministic or could

possibly allow for violations of certain Bell's inequalities. If you look at it that way, I guess it just, then it becomes very, very too all-encompassing. So like I recount to somebody a couple of days ago, like when I was dating my wife, we went to an astrologer and she knew I didn't believe in astrology and she wanted to have fun. So she said, go tell her about yourself and she'll predict your horoscope. And so I said, yeah,ces i do this this and this she said oh it's going to be good you guys are going to do this and and blah blah and i said is it is it really true that pisces are born in september i forgot oh no you're born september yeah i'm born in september oh you're a virgo but don't worry this everything i said is still going to happen anyway so it's like what was the what is the difference like if everything is

so all-encompassing then i guess i'm a vir is. I'm a Virgo too, by the way. Oh, you are? Okay. Well, Virgos are the ones in their right minds or something. I don't know. I think, you know. I think you're right. I think you're right. Well, I also happen, I wouldn't say I believe in free will,

but I don't find the arguments against free will as particularly convincing. I just want to know what your opinion was. So is it your counterargument is that it is the Turing test? How would you tell one way or the other? It's an experimentalist question. Exactly. And isn't it? I'm a pragmatist, Kurt, you know, at the end of the day, you know, what I'm concerned about are things that I can get a crisp answer to. So I don't believe I'll ever get a crisp answer to that, nor do I. And you could ask me about God. And I don't think I'm going to have like some answer about God or the existence of God, but I think, you know, I think a place for a physicist, especially an experimentalist,

is to be agnostic, but actually agnostic, which means like if you just don't go to church or you don't go to synagogue, in my case, you go to the same, you know, you have the same religious performance as Richard Dawkins. There's no functional delineation between you and Richard Dawkins. I actually had this conversation with Freeman Dyson before he passed away because he said he's an agnostic. I said, what church do you go to? He goes, I don't really go to

church. I said, so you go to the same church as Richard Dawkins. He's like, cognitive dissonance a little bit. What I look at is behaviorism. So how do I behave? And if I knew that everything was controlled by, you know, the initial condition state, if there was a big bang, which we don't know.

So I guess I think about it in terms of what is the pragmatic day-to-day implication of this? Does it have any bearing on me individually? So in the case of free will, I don't think it does. I don't think I'll behave differently and treat my kids, you know, like one kid hits another one. I say, oh, well, you didn't really have free will. So I'm not going to be, no, of course I'm going to punish them or make them understand and apologize. I'm not going to lay it off. As some people like Michael Shermer, I've had this conversation, you know, he basically

is much more libertine about this. On the other hand, if God exists, that's a much bigger question, right? And I'm not saying if I believe or I don't. As I said, I'm a fully practicing devout agnostic, meaning I go to services. I read and I learn. I've taught myself Aramaic so I could understand the arguments of the second holiest book in Judaism called the Talmud. I learned that age 30. It wasn't easy. And I study it on a regular basis because I want to take it seriously. Because if God exists, that would have a, if you knew, I don't know your religious beliefs and it almost doesn't matter to me, but if you knew, like I asked Sean Carroll this question, I said, you want, you know, what is the probability the

multiverse is true? He said 50%. And I said, what's the probability that God exists? He said, less than, less than 5%. He didn't say zero. So imagine now that means he's open. He is a brilliant man. So I could tell him I could, let's say I provide evidence, whatever, some miracle that he can't dismiss. And then he believes it. So he would change his life. I know that he would, even though I don't, I don't think he thinks the probability is even that high, by the way. But, but it was a good soundbite. We had a good conversation about it. But do you know what I'm saying, Kurt? The bottom line is I am concerned with things that will impact my life as a behaviorist. How will it change my behavior? How will I change my treatment of the poor, the sick, behavior how will i change my treatment of the poor the sick my wife my kids you how will i change my behavior is much more influenced to the good i would say by wrestling with the question

of whether or not god exists whether or not it does exist is an important question for that reason because if the answer is yes it would have huge implications and even dawkins has said like he doesn't rule it out so um so but free, if you told me that everything is super deterministic, it wouldn't change how I operate on a daily basis. I think it was Jim Peebles' book that goes over how we even know about an instantaneous amount of time after the infinitesimal amount of time after the Big Bang. Okay, well, but that's after the Big Bang. That's presupposing the Big Bang. Not necessarily. Yeah, so I would just say if I could ask God if God exists, you know, what happened?

One question, I'd say what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang? In other words, you know, Hawking used to say it doesn't make sense to ask what predated the Big Bang. I don't think that's actually correct, because you can have many, many legitimate scenarios in which time is cyclical. It's just, there's possibility for that. And if that happens, there's a perfectly great explanation for what happened on the Tuesday before the big bang. It was a fiery hellscape of collapsing, you know, all the material energy and properties of the universe that pre-existed. Again, I collaborators are working? And in part, the mission of the Simons Observatory is to falsify his hypothesis. So you cannot falsify the Big Bang hypothesis as such. universe scenario called the cyclic universe. There'd be the equivalent of a hot dense. And again, another shout out to Sean Carroll. He says a good thing, which is that when you say the Big Bang, you're really talking about a period about a minute or two from time backwards to a minute before this event when our extrapolations of classical physics would imply a singularity. It's basically the end

of our knowledge or the beginning of our ignorance, he calls it. So the Big Bang is really a shibboleth. It's a shortcut. It's a code word for where does our ignorance stop? And our ignorance stops about a minute afterwards when we start synthesizing the very first elements. You know, I happen to think that our ignorance is so far greater. And I do this thought experiment where it's like, imagine a few billion years from now, maybe 90 billion or whatever, whatever order of magnitude,

and we're on Earth and we have our sun. But we look out and the galaxies are moving so far away that we see almost nothing. But we wouldn't know that anything else existed. Okay, so that's just a few billion years from now, presuming our current theories of general relativity and cosmological expansion are correct. Okay, well, what about now?

Why do we think that we're in such a privileged position that we have so much knowledge to even think we're 1% of the way there to a theory of everything, for example. By the way, what do you think of Eric Weinstein's theory of everything? So he and I are very close collaborators, friends, and we talk about this a lot. I've encouraged him to really start thinking about ways that we could revive both the kind of excitement and the sociological milieu that happened before 1974 in physics and that's the period of time that sabine and eric and others have claimed it was like basically the end of physics like there haven't been new discoveries or predictions which i argue with both of them on my podcast um but, but, but essentially they want,

he wants to recreate the urgency of the Manhattan project of the MIT radar laboratory of the world war two generation of the shelter Island generation post world war two, when physicists were chauffeured around by secret service agents because they, they contain within them national secrets and national treasures. He wants to recreate that. And I'm hoping to engage with him as an experimentalist. I'm not a mathematician.

I do understand some of the math that goes into it. You must know that he is universally looked upon in the physics community with both skepticism because he hasn't published anything. Although if you go to my YouTube interviews with him, I've done two now. And in the second one, I have actually downloaded his slides from his Oxford talk in 2013.

One of my undergraduates digitized them. And so if you sign up for my mailing list at briankeating.com, I'll send you a copy of his lecture notes from that lecture in 2013. That's about as close as we get right now because he's in that making hay phase, Kurt, which I'm sure you've been in a state of flow

where you're actually, you're just producing great content for your film, for your research, for the other projects, for this YouTube channel. And you're just singularly focused on this thing and it obsesses you. And you want to learn more about it before you then take these tentative, furtive steps to publication. So I would say, I said, he's looked upon simultaneously with skepticism, but also dismay because he's a great

communicator of science. And he believes, as he said in my podcast interview, that physicists are the worst at PR that have ever existed because we have the greatest material. And instead, we just keep regurgitating the same double slit experiment, the wormholes, multiver, you know, where we have the hop vibration. I'm not saying if I... I 100% agree with Eric Weinstein on that. It's incredibly, incredibly incredibly boring yeah oh yeah it can be up and down at the same time

exactly so there's a limit to that so i but but then he'll go on joe rogan and i'm referring to superposition to that yeah and uh he'll go on joe rogan show and six million people will watch it and you know that's six million people that will be potentially there's some kid out there who like me at age 12, they didn't have podcasts back then. But, but we'll think, well, that's really cool. I want to learn about some, I used to read Isaac Asimov, not as science fiction books. He wrote a tremendous amount of nonfiction in science, chemistry, the history of chemistry. I devoured it at age 12. Flatland, the book Flatland have you ever read that book kurt no oh you got it i heard of it i heard of it you will love it it has it's uh

it's by ed uh edward abby in the late 1800s victorian england and it's it's actually like a commentary on racism which is really fascinating but but it also talks about what it's like for a two-dimensional creature to visualize the third dimensions and in so doing it helps you visualize what the fourth dimension might look like to a three-dimensional creature um you have to read that so that was an that was a foundational book in my education you asked me about books earlier but that is one of them because i started thinking geometrically and there's always the siren song of thinking geometrically that leads you to beauty and symmetry and everything else but in my case it actually led me to like well let me think about things that i can't access with experiments so the most important experiments are called

gedanken experiments thought experiments einstein was the greatest experimentalist of all time in that sense because that's what led him to create theories of relativity, in both theory, general and special. So I hope that kids out there will take what Eric's doing seriously. I am trying to encourage him. I've actually invited him. I'm on record multiple times. I'm the only physicist in the world, apparently, which is sad to me. That's invited him to be a scholar in residence here in San Diego

and work on actual experimental predictions and tests for geometric unity, which is what he calls his theory of everything. I've also had on Stephen Wolfram on my podcast. I've also encouraged him to look for ways that we can collaborate together to think of ways we could test it as an experimentalist. Because again, I am obsessed with time, tick tock, tick tock. And I'm obsessed with the brevity of life and how short a period of attention span we have to make discoveries. And so I don't want to waste my time. But if there are potential avenues, like Eric could be correct, could be wrong.

Paul Steinhardt could be correct, could be wrong with regard to the bouncing models that he's proposed. Stephen Wolfram could be right, could be wrong. So I'm actually talking later today about ways we can get the whole physics community together and kind of like a shelter island or revival of the theory of everything studies, maybe through Zoom, maybe through a webinar, something like that.

And thinking really big to attract the greatest minds to attack this problem and rejuvenate, as Eric says, this rockstar status that physicists used to have in the 20th century. Okay. Is there much movement on that, this Manhattan physics project? Or is it right now, it's just conversations between you and Eric and maybe two other people? Yeah, I'm sort of inspired by, in part, by David Kaiser, my friend at MIT, who wrote a book recently called Quantum Legacies about the aftershocks of the World War II projects and when physicists were chauffeured around with bodyguards,

and also by Eric. So, no, we're thinking about it. We have kicked around some ideas for an hour or two yesterday. I'll let you know if we can actually put together. That would be the dream, like the Solvay conference. You ever seen that picture of like Marie Curie and Niels Bohr? I would be taking the picture and putting it on Instagram. I wouldn't be actually in the picture. But the point is, let's get the most creative people together. But we can't ignore funding. We cannot ignore

basic research funding. And that's what's so exciting about partnering with the Simons Foundation. They really primarily support non-application driven science, mainly math, computer science, computational biology, astrophysics, and now the Simons Observatory pictured behind me to look at potential resolutions and answers to the greatest questions of the human mind. Tell the audience where they can find out more about you and what you're up to. So I'm doing a lot. You asked me in the notes, we didn't, you know, fully are in the beginning. My mission is really to communicate, you know, what I want to be. And maybe I have a kindred spirit with you.

It's kind of like the Joe Rogan of science. Like I want to do stuff. And it doesn't have to be restricted to science. There are people like we mentioned, Dave Rubin, Zuby's is going to appear soon. Michael Shermer, they're not scientists per se, but basically they have an affinity either for science fiction, which I claim allows you to do thought experiments. And so we talk about things that revolve around academic freedom. And in the case of my podcast which you can find on youtube at dr brian keating dr brian keating and uh you can find me on twitter and my goal is to really have incredible conversations that stimulate me uh to think about

the future legacy that i want to leave on earth which is is to have this impact on gleaning wisdom and communicating a vision for curiosity, for wonder, for imagination. And that's part of this tripartite vision that I have for my life. So yes, long story short, find my podcast on Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. Hopefully you can link to it and I'll link back. And then I'm my podcast on Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. Hopefully you can link to it, and I'll link back. And then I'm on Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating, Instagram, same thing. And I have a mailing list where I send out things like personal notes and book recommendations from people like Jim Simons to Eric Weinstein, etc.