Latest / From First Principles / The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary) (EP 52)

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The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary) (EP 52) · From First Principles

• 0:00
  And we're just like, let's just put some microphones and some cameras.
• 0:04
  And I was like, Lester, you handle that.
• 0:06
  Right.
• 0:07
  And you handle the science.
• 0:08
  How many people lived in the Amazon before 1492?
• 0:11
  And how would we even know?
• 0:16
  If the evidence is buried under the vast rainforest that so many of us see, that means that there's more than 20,000 additional earthworks.
• 0:27
  Just a few years ago, we used to think that there were 10,000 earthworks in the entire Amazon rainforest.
• 0:33
  And now we're talking about in this tiny area that we're going to get into.
• 0:36
  Hello, Internet.
• 0:37
  This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD,
• 0:43
  Krishna Chowdhury, we are celebrating our one-year anniversary of From First Principles.
• 0:51
  It's incredible that we've made it this far, and so many of you, 50 million.
• 0:57
  of you across the world have joined us in our first year on the show.
• 1:01
  13 million of you are now watching every month as we journey through discovery, curiosity, and science at the frontier.
• 1:13
  We're extremely, extremely grateful for all of you in FFP Nation who have been very vocal about what you like and what you don't like.
• 1:21
  And we've really taken that to heart as you've seen us evolve the show over our first year.
• 1:27
  Again, it is the two of us here, no production staff, no agency, no network, just two friends of almost, I think, 16 years now.
• 1:39
  Yep.
• 1:39
  Trying to just figure out the world around us as much as we can and as we can.
• 1:45
  A small token of our appreciation for so many of you following us, as well as an ability for us to better learn about who you all are and what you want from the show as we enter year two.
• 1:57
  We are going to have a merch giveaway for our year one merch giveaway.
• 2:03
  at ffppod.com backslash survey.
• 2:07
  There are a couple of questions that will help us understand a little bit more about our listeners, who you all are, where you're working, what you care about, what you want us to do on the show.
• 2:18
  As we go into our year two, now that we've figured out all of the sound issues,
• 2:24
  And the camera issues and other production problems.
• 2:28
  We really want to focus on community building and making sure that we are making the show collectively.
• 2:35
  Because at the end of the day, this would not be a show without all of you out here in FFP Nation.
• 2:42
  We do...
• 2:44
  Have a story that we will cover about the history of the Amazon.
• 2:49
  And as you notice just in front of us, we have some books that we will be adding to the inaugural from First Principles Library, which is three floating shelves.
• 3:01
  Yes.
• 3:03
  We're going to expand it, though.
• 3:04
  We're going to expand it.
• 3:05
  We'll expand it.
• 3:06
  We'll eventually get a building.
• 3:07
  And the first iteration, we've got some bangers.
• 3:10
  Yes.
• 3:10
  And we did ask the audience for some suggestions, and some of those suggestions did make it into the library.
• 3:17
  As always, we're going to talk about the science from the ground up today, because this is From First Principles.
• 3:39
  So today we're going to have a little bit of fun.
• 3:41
  We will give you the best science, but we've left out the banter for several months as we've tried to really focus on being as information dense as possible.
• 3:51
  But there's so many of you who are new to the show, and we thought it would be helpful to help you understand a little bit more about who we are.
• 3:59
  Note, I am not Lamorne Morris from New Girl, okay?
• 4:05
  We barely look alike.
• 4:08
  Although I did get approached in person.
• 4:11
  That was crazy.
• 4:12
  Here in the valley by a very nice older gentleman whose daughter apparently loves New Girl.
• 4:19
  So Lamorne, I just want you to know, as your apparent celebrity doppelganger, you really are loved out here in the streets.
• 4:28
  But for those of you who may be new to the pod and just for us to have the chance to talk about why we are doing this again, do you remember...
• 4:38
  It was June, July of last year that we finally decided to maybe do something.
• 4:46
  Yeah.
• 4:47
  Yeah.
• 4:47
  And we had flirted with doing something with other formats.
• 4:51
  Yeah.
• 4:52
  And this is finally the format that we came up with, which is just like the two of us bantering and talking about science like we've done for the past 10, 16 plus years.
• 5:03
  And what's so interesting about this is,
• 5:05
  And I don't think people understand.
• 5:08
  We literally will just do this.
• 5:10
  Yeah.
• 5:12
  Regardless.
• 5:12
  Yeah, yeah.
• 5:12
  We've been doing this since college, right?
• 5:15
  Among other friends, like at Princeton undergrad, we would just be hanging out, and we would be talking about the newest paper that came out in whatever field and whatever people are talking about.
• 5:26
  And there would be so many other people that were bantering with us.
• 5:28
  And now it's just the two of us.
• 5:31
  But, yeah, it was so natural to...
• 5:34
  And we're just like, let's just put some microphones and some cameras.
• 5:38
  And I was like, Lester, you handle that.
• 5:40
  Right.
• 5:41
  And you handle the science.
• 5:42
  And, you know, part of how we connected initially, or among other things, is, you know, we both have science families.
• 5:52
  Yeah.
• 5:53
  And so that was obviously a connection point.
• 5:56
  That's right.
• 5:56
  Indian, Zimbabwean.
• 5:58
  Yeah.
• 6:00
  And I think you got more of a physics lens.
• 6:03
  I got more of a biology lens.
• 6:06
  And it's immigrants to the U.S. in different ways.
• 6:10
  And, you know, L.A. for you growing up.
• 6:13
  Jersey, shout out Jersey for me.
• 6:16
  A little bit of North Carolina, but you guys were kind of at the tail end.
• 6:19
  You know, that wasn't formative.
• 6:20
  Yeah, for me, it was like India.
• 6:23
  And then L.A. was high school.
• 6:26
  So kind of at the tail end.
• 6:27
  But then it became formative because it was high school.
• 6:29
  Yeah.
• 6:30
  You know, when you come from a place like India to America, the first place you really put your roots down becomes a formative experience.
• 6:37
  Although, you know, I spent a year plus in Huntsville, Alabama.
• 6:42
  Yes, that's right.
• 6:43
  Where Marshall Space Flight Center and NASA.
• 6:45
  So my dad was a solar physicist there.
• 6:47
  And so, you know...
• 6:49
  Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama, still, I remember, Challenger Middle School.
• 6:54
  I don't know if there's anyone out there who went to Challenger Middle School.
• 6:59
  It's also where all the UAP labs are, allegedly.
• 7:01
  Yes, yes.
• 7:02
  Yeah.
• 7:03
  And I mean, I think it's like expanding a lot because Redstone Arsenal is there.
• 7:07
  It's one of the few military space places that is expanding rather than going down.
• 7:13
  Yeah.
• 7:14
  Which is a story for another day.
• 7:16
  But ultimately what we're trying to do with the show is build what I've always called an ESPN for science.
• 7:24
  You know, so many different aspects of culture have channels that really celebrate them, whether it's award shows like the Grammys and the Oscars and the Emmys.
• 7:34
  or things like SportsCenter, or all the different podcasts that are for comedy, and entertainment, and music, and sports.
• 7:42
  And there's obviously a huge ecosystem of, quote, science communication.
• 7:47
  Obviously, there's the journal and magazine culture.
• 7:51
  But with everyone consuming content in vertical video now, sometimes in horizontal,
• 7:58
  And I really feel like not a lot of people talking about the frontier in this way.
• 8:02
  Yeah.
• 8:02
  Where you have both a combination of the expert view that can get into the weeds technically, which is obviously our resident PhD Krishna.
• 8:12
  And the every person, which is me.
• 8:16
  trying to get a hold of what is going on because our view is that for a whole variety of reasons, progress in the sciences is accelerating.
• 8:27
  Yes.
• 8:27
  And it is really important for all of us in the general public to understand what is happening because it will be impacting our life directly in the way that the sciences always have –
• 8:39
  but at an increasingly fast and I think an increasingly more impactful way, whether you talk about biotechnology, medicine, material science, obviously the devil word of the day, AI.
• 8:55
  space exploration it's it is an incredible time to be alive and it's such a pleasure to be able to do this show for you all and we're hopeful that we can continue to make science a part of the zeitgeist with the best science show on the planet data suggests
• 9:20
  And we're all about data on the show.
• 9:22
  The data suggests that this is what the people want.
• 9:25
  But now enough of all of that self-aggrandizing nonsense.
• 9:31
  We're going to get back to why you all tune into the show, which is our story, our only story of the day.
• 9:37
  A little brief rundown of...
• 9:40
  This idea that the Amazon was never empty.
• 9:45
  And I'm going to open with this question.
• 9:47
  How many people lived in the Amazon before 1492?
• 9:52
  And how would we even know if the evidence is buried under the vast rainforest that so many of us see on our social feeds as planes fly over?
• 10:04
  Yeah, it's a very strange question.
• 10:07
  For the longest time, people thought there was no one in the Amazon before Christopher Columbus came to the New World.
• 10:14
  And surprise, surprise, of course that is not true.
• 10:19
  There's a new paper out in Nature that was submitted in April 2025, accepted in June.
• 10:28
  July.
• 10:29
  Sorry.
• 10:29
  Yeah.
• 10:29
  July.
• 10:30
  And it's actually showing that they're, the Amazon is way more populated than we could have ever imagined.
• 10:38
  Surprise, surprise.
• 10:39
  Yes.
• 10:40
  Right.
• 10:40
  I'm shocked.
• 10:41
  This is my shocked face.
• 10:42
  Yeah.
• 10:42
  It's, it's,
• 10:44
  And getting into sort of the historical tendency of why we think the Amazon was just desolate, and now we're sort of correcting our views, it's a very interesting story.
• 10:58
  So we'll start with Gaspar de Carvajal.
• 11:01
  He's a Spanish explorer, and he explored the Amazon in 1542.
• 11:08
  He went up the Amazon River, and when he went back to the King of Spain...
• 11:13
  He talked about crowded cities, advanced societies along the Amazon River.
• 11:18
  Later, explorers came to corroborate what he was talking about, and they found no one.
• 11:24
  Okay?
• 11:25
  This was in a span of about 100 years.
• 11:27
  So within 100 years, there was no one.
• 11:31
  Historians traditionally say, well, he's just BSing.
• 11:35
  Okay?
• 11:35
  He was just trying to impress the king of Spain.
• 11:38
  He's talking about these wide roads, busy marketplaces, large armies of local warriors.
• 11:45
  But, hey, maybe he was just trying to get in with the Spanish royalty, to get more money, to do more expeditions.
• 11:54
  There is a current story in geopolitics around the Spanish king right now.
• 11:59
  And so this idea of people trying to curry favor or not curry favor is very topical.
• 12:07
  Yeah.
• 12:08
  Well, this guy was trying to do it, apparently.
• 12:10
  That's what we all think.
• 12:11
  Okay.
• 12:11
  We all think that he was just lying because he wanted some credibility.
• 12:15
  He wanted more funding to do more expeditions, right?
• 12:17
  Right.
• 12:18
  Now it turns out, if we really go back, we're starting to find evidence for more and more civilizations in the Amazon with kind of the techniques that we're going to go over.
• 12:30
  And it turns out what probably happened was European diseases like smallpox wiped out 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population.
• 12:38
  And that can happen very, very quickly.
• 12:40
  I mean, we saw that with the COVID-19 pandemic.
• 12:42
  Now imagine smallpox, which is a much more deadly disease and a much more transmissible disease, exposed to a population that has never seen anything like it, right?
• 12:54
  European and Eurasian populations, there's this famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, that talks about why European populations and Eurasian populations, because of their proximity to domesticated animals, developed kind of a herd immunity.
• 13:12
  to pathogens like smallpox.
• 13:14
  But when you introduce that to a completely naive population in the Americas that has never been exposed to cows, domesticated cows and things like that,
• 13:24
  Now all of a sudden, something like 90% to 95% of the population can be decimated.
• 13:29
  And then when – I mean that kind of number is where societies collapse.
• 13:34
  Right.
• 13:34
  Right?
• 13:35
  Yeah.
• 13:36
  What are you going to do?
• 13:37
  Yeah, yeah.
• 13:37
  With only 10% of your population remaining?
• 13:40
  Not evenly distributed across the roles necessary to sustain a society.
• 13:45
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:46
  And so, I mean, whatever society you had –
• 13:50
  you're back to the stone ages type of thing, right?
• 13:53
  And so whatever society remained, the survivors went back deep into the jungle.
• 13:59
  And then perhaps that's why when you see all of the newer explorers come in 100 years after the 1500s, they don't see anyone.
• 14:07
  They also don't see any remnants
• 14:09
  Because the jungle is a beast, right?
• 14:13
  Most of these dwellings are made out of earth and mud and wood.
• 14:18
  These are things that are biodegradable, and these are things that trees can grow on, right?
• 14:24
  Now the jungle takes over.
• 14:26
  You don't see anyone.
• 14:27
  You call fraud, and you call them a liar.
• 14:31
  Right?
• 14:31
  A fair given the information at the time.
• 14:35
  I can think of...
• 14:36
  my backyard and how quickly it's been taken over by nature.
• 14:40
  We have a cement mall in the back that was there.
• 14:43
  And then within six to 12 months, you cannot see it.
• 14:46
  Yeah.
• 14:47
  And you know, I mean, life finds a way in life.
• 14:50
  Right.
• 14:51
  Shout out Dr. Ian Malcolm.
• 14:52
  Exactly.
• 14:52
  So, so,
• 14:54
  More than about 20 years ago, there was a geographer, Alceur Ranzi.
• 14:58
  He's now at the University of Accra, and he was on the right side of an airplane going over the Amazon jungle, and he saw a ring-like structure.
• 15:11
  And he's like, that's not natural.
• 15:12
  Okay?
• 15:13
  It's really never natural.
• 15:15
  If you see a perfect ring somewhere, that's almost always man-made.
• 15:19
  Okay?
• 15:19
  Unless it's like a meteor impact.
• 15:22
  But if it's a meteor impact and you can still see it, that's very strange.
• 15:26
  Right?
• 15:27
  And so he's like, there's got to be something...
• 15:31
  that made that.
• 15:31
  It's got to be humans.
• 15:33
  Decades of subsequent research by Ronzi and his colleagues have slowly revealed that the Amazon was populated by millions of people, even in the most remote areas of the Amazon, right?
• 15:47
  And so now researchers suggest that ancient Amazonians were widespread in territories that previously we considered uninhabited.
• 15:56
  That's where this current story comes in.
• 15:59
  There's a new paper that we talked about out in Nature.
• 16:03
  Science covered it.
• 16:03
  A lot of press has covered it.
• 16:06
  It's showing that in even the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, away from rivers, away from the traditional places that we would have expected large-scale civilizations, we are finding structures that demand an economy that is worth millions of people.
• 16:25
  Right?
• 16:25
  It's one of the most favorite things I think about in archaeology when we look at structures that were built by civilizations of yore.
• 16:33
  The structures are a proxy.
• 16:35
  for how big the society was.
• 16:39
  We look at, I mean, a beautiful example is Egypt, 5,000 years ago.
• 16:44
  They built the pyramids, the three giant pyramids of Giza.
• 16:48
  The largest one, the pyramid of Khufu, is like one of the largest structures ever.
• 16:53
  It was the largest structure for something like 4,000 years before some random cathedral in Europe took over.
• 16:59
  Honestly, that's insane.
• 17:02
  That's actually insane that Egypt built a structure that was the largest structure, the largest man-made structure on the planet for 4,000 years, right?
• 17:13
  If you think about it, like, the people who built the Colosseum, like Julius Caesar and the Romans who built the Colosseum—
• 17:21
  They looked at the pyramids like we look at the Colosseum.
• 17:26
  It's just insane to think about.
• 17:28
  And more importantly, when I look at structures like that, I think about what was the size of their economy.
• 17:34
  Right.
• 17:34
  In order to be able to.
• 17:35
  In order to be able to support the workers.
• 17:37
  I mean, sure, there was a lot of slavery involved, right?
• 17:39
  Still.
• 17:40
  Still.
• 17:41
  With, like, getting the stone from, like, random places along the Nile, putting it up in a pyramid environment.
• 17:49
  Guys, there weren't any aliens.
• 17:50
  It was just an incredibly advanced technology, right?
• 17:56
  And an incredibly advanced civilization that could, like, muster together the amount of humans to create something like that.
• 18:03
  The idea of taking the work process...
• 18:09
  and breaking it down into its fundamental steps in order to be able to scale it, to be able to create infrastructure of that size when no one had ever done that before.
• 18:21
  So you have a blank slate and you're like, how do we, we have this imagination as humans, so I have a vision, I want this thing, I want it to look like this.
• 18:31
  And they just figured out how to do it without being able to reference how anyone else did it.
• 18:34
  Yes, exactly.
• 18:35
  No one came in and was like, oh, we have this thing called cement, whatever, right?
• 18:40
  And that's, I think, truly what's so – and this is what's so fascinating when we think about some of these –
• 18:48
  older generations and cultures in humanity.
• 18:52
  And we always come back to kind of the same things.
• 18:55
  Yeah.
• 18:56
  Right.
• 18:56
  And it manifests a little bit differently with little different flavor each time.
• 19:01
  But everywhere we look across the planet, we have these highly sophisticated, you know, you know,
• 19:10
  of civilizations in time periods where we did not expect there to be this level of collective accomplishment yeah particularly around infrastructure and and all the so i'm really interested because the amazon has always talked about so much it's talked about a lot in it's like egypt and the amazon yeah in terms of you know uh armchair archaeologists yeah uh and and
• 19:38
  The Amazon in particular, for a lot of scientists, has been the object of a lot of curiosity.
• 19:46
  Yeah.
• 19:47
  For some time.
• 19:47
  Especially from a standpoint of deforestation, a standpoint of climate change, a standpoint of being a carbon sink.
• 19:55
  And now it's gaining credibility from a standpoint of archaeology, which I think is very, very cool.
• 20:02
  So the latest paper, Ronzi is actually one of the authors on this paper.
• 20:07
  Okay.
• 20:08
  It details nearly 200 previously undocumented earthworks in a very small patch of a corner of the rainforest.
• 20:18
  I just want to make a quick note.
• 20:19
  I think it's 400, not 200.
• 20:21
  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:21
  You're right.
• 20:22
  It's double.
• 20:22
  It's double that.
• 20:23
  Which is crazy, yeah.
• 20:25
  And then what's crazy is if you extrapolate the results, right, then that means that there's more than 20,000
• 20:34
  additional earthworks because you can like do the math right you can be like i sampled this region and then i found this many i sampled the whole thing and this region was not any special compared to everything else so i can make like a blanket kind of guess 20 000 earthworks in that area and just a few years ago we used to think that there were 10 000 earthworks in the entire amazon rainforest and now we're talking about in this tiny area that we're going to get into
• 20:59
  This is like as an analogy, this would be like we found Brooklyn and there's 400 things in Brooklyn.
• 21:04
  Yeah.
• 21:05
  And then like New York.
• 21:07
  And then Jersey, Connecticut.
• 21:09
  Right.
• 21:09
  Yeah.
• 21:09
  So it's like, oh, like everything around here is pretty much the same.
• 21:13
  Yeah.
• 21:13
  There's 400 in Brooklyn.
• 21:14
  Yeah.
• 21:15
  So obviously we also have it in Manhattan.
• 21:17
  Exactly.
• 21:17
  The Bronx, et cetera.
• 21:18
  Yeah.
• 21:19
  Yeah.
• 21:19
  Yeah, it's really, really cool.
• 21:21
  So let's talk about how they actually did it.
• 21:23
  We always want to focus on the procedure and the methods on this podcast.
• 21:28
  They use LIDAR.
• 21:30
  It's effectively using a laser, an infrared laser.
• 21:33
  What you do is you have a drone or an airplane that has an infrared laser that's sending out laser pulses from...
• 21:40
  hundreds of thousands of laser beams per second downward.
• 21:43
  Okay?
• 21:44
  A laser beam.
• 21:45
  Yeah.
• 21:45
  It's going to go and scan everything.
• 21:48
  And then each laser pulse, it's going to get split when it hits something.
• 21:51
  There's going to hit a leaf.
• 21:53
  Part of it's going to go through the leaf, right?
• 21:55
  And then it's going to hit another leaf.
• 21:58
  Every time it hits something, it bounces back.
• 22:00
  And sometimes it's going to hit the ground and bounce back.
• 22:03
  Have you ever seen these landscape scanning drones in person before?
• 22:08
  No, I have not.
• 22:08
  It's really creepy.
• 22:09
  Really?
• 22:10
  Because if you don't know what's happening, you kind of just see this light happening.
• 22:15
  And it's clearly programmatic.
• 22:18
  Scanning, yeah.
• 22:19
  It's actually quite interesting.
• 22:21
  But I think the point you bring up there is important is we're sending something down.
• 22:24
  When it hits something, it comes back.
• 22:26
  Yeah, I mean, LIDAR sounds like radar because it's the same physics, right?
• 22:30
  Radar is radio.
• 22:31
  Here we're doing it with light.
• 22:33
  Not necessarily optical light, mostly infrared, right?
• 22:36
  And then what you do is the computers take all that data, and then they remove the top layer of where the leaves are.
• 22:42
  You can, like, tell that this bounced back from a leaf.
• 22:45
  This went all the way down to the ground.
• 22:46
  You can find, like, a sort of floor of where the bounce happened.
• 22:50
  Because it takes longer.
• 22:51
  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 22:52
  And you just do the timing.
• 22:53
  So you just remove everything that's really short in time.
• 22:56
  Yeah, and you look for the extremum in some given time bin, right?
• 23:00
  And then once you do that, now you've got a final ground-level data, and then you can look for undulations.
• 23:07
  You can be like, there's earthwork.
• 23:09
  What that means is there's a mound and then that mound is going to, is going to have a geometric structure and you can find this out through LIDAR, right?
• 23:17
  There's a certain characteristics of like human made structure that you can basically map to.
• 23:22
  Yeah.
• 23:22
  It's not a hill.
• 23:23
  Um,
• 23:24
  It's got some shape that's like very weird.
• 23:27
  Circle as an example.
• 23:27
  Circle, square.
• 23:28
  Square that you brought up earlier.
• 23:29
  Yeah, exactly.
• 23:30
  And so the area that they surveyed, the researchers went through the Acre and the Amazonas, which are two states of Brazil, effectively.
• 23:41
  The Acre is the one that is bordering Peru.
• 23:43
  Okay.
• 23:44
  Right next to Peru.
• 23:45
  And then Amazonas is the giant one that covers most of the Amazon rainforest.
• 23:51
  Right.
• 23:52
  Right in that border is where they were looking.
• 23:55
  Notice, this is far away from the Amazon River.
• 23:58
  The Amazon River is going up top.
• 24:00
  Yes, yes.
• 24:01
  Right?
• 24:01
  These are minor rivers that are tributaries into the Amazon.
• 24:06
  More so, they're tributaries very, very far away from the Amazon rainforest.
• 24:11
  I mean, sorry, from the central sort of Amazon River.
• 24:14
  I think the point you're trying to bring up is...
• 24:18
  ancient civilizations would have likely gathered or aggregated around major water.
• 24:23
  Yeah.
• 24:23
  That's the assumption.
• 24:24
  That's the assumption you want to make, especially given what that Spanish guy had seen, right?
• 24:29
  Cause he had just gone up the Amazon.
• 24:31
  The Amazon is like the easiest navigable river.
• 24:35
  It's like a mile wide the whole time.
• 24:37
  Right.
• 24:37
  So you just like go up, right?
• 24:38
  He's not going up these tiny tributaries.
• 24:40
  And so the point being this place that we're looking, which is sort of in the southwest.
• 24:47
  Yeah, it's like almost towards Peru.
• 24:48
  It's almost in Peru.
• 24:49
  There are no natural infrastructure that would suggest that –
• 24:57
  Human life would congregate in that area.
• 24:59
  Exactly.
• 24:59
  And that's why the scientists were so surprised at the density of what they found, right?
• 25:05
  This is a civilization that the researchers have previously named the Aquiri.
• 25:10
  It's named after two of the rivers that are in that region.
• 25:13
  They're tributaries into the Amazon, right?
• 25:15
  Now, the team identified most of these earthworks in the new study.
• 25:19
  They're geoglyphs.
• 25:20
  They're ditches that are made in the ground that form geometric shapes.
• 25:24
  Some are even more sophisticated with geometric shapes.
• 25:28
  They're like a square inside of a circle, or I think it's a circle inside of a square.
• 25:34
  If you look over here, clearly human-made, right?
• 25:37
  They're in a line.
• 25:39
  It reminds you of sort of Teotihuacan near Mexico City, where the Pyramid of the Sun and things like that.
• 25:46
  It reminds you of Angkor Wat.
• 25:48
  in Cambodia this is sophisticated society right for example if anyone goes to Italy and you know you go through any of the you see the roads you see the grid system in some format the Vatican right right there's permutations and slight differences but there's clearly a network because people are trying to go from point a to point b and you start to see these and and the density like you were saying proximity because I'm not trying to go two miles yeah
• 26:18
  To get to the pizza parlor.
• 26:19
  Yeah, exactly.
• 26:20
  And so, I mean, it's incredible that they're finding this with LiDAR, right?
• 26:24
  This is unbelievable.
• 26:24
  Now, based on the calculations of the workforce that was necessary to create and maintain these earthworks, and that's where we get into what is the size of the economy?
• 26:33
  What is the size of the population?
• 26:35
  The researchers estimate that it's up to something like 3 million people could have lived in that tiny region.
• 26:41
  There's no way.
• 26:42
  Yeah, and the little green dots, those are the images that we saw earlier, right?
• 26:48
  This is a massive swath of rainforest.
• 26:52
  All of that rainforest looks exactly the same as this swath.
• 26:55
  This is a random spot that they picked.
• 26:59
  So if we were to extrapolate, you can imagine just the many millions of people
• 27:06
  that are living in this part of the rainforest before Columbus showed up, before any of the Europeans showed up.
• 27:13
  And this is around 100 to 300 AD, right?
• 27:17
  So this is right after death of Christ, like the start of the common era, right?
• 27:24
  If we talk about like when the timeline of American civilizations, right?
• 27:29
  Right.
• 27:31
  this would be right around...
• 27:33
  So the Aztec and the Inca, those are very new.
• 27:36
  Those are around 1300, 1400 AD.
• 27:40
  So that's a thousand years after this stuff.
• 27:43
  It just tells you how rich the human history in South America and the Americas in general is.
• 27:50
  We've got the Olmecs, which might even be preceding this in Mexico.
• 27:55
  The Maya is like this giant civilization.
• 27:59
  It goes anywhere from like...
• 28:00
  3000 BC to 900 AD.
• 28:03
  So the Maya is like whenever archaeologists like see stuff that looks kind of like Maya.
• 28:10
  But it's like there's no way there's a same civilization that went on for 3000 years, right?
• 28:14
  Maybe.
• 28:15
  Maybe.
• 28:15
  Maybe.
• 28:15
  But it could also just be our lack of granularity in seeing the differences, right?
• 28:22
  Can I make a small side note?
• 28:24
  Yeah.
• 28:24
  For all my Nickelodeon heads who are listeners, you mentioned Olmec's.
• 28:29
  Yeah.
• 28:29
  Have you ever seen the game show in the 90s on Nickelodeon Legends of the Hidden Temple?
• 28:34
  Yeah.
• 28:36
  No.
• 28:36
  So there, there is the, the, the, the whole, the kind of the shtick was that the Olmecs had this hidden temple and these kids would come on the show similar to global guts and they would have to like traverse this, like, you know, mystery pad, like these little mazes in the hidden temple.
• 28:54
  And they had different, they had like the silver snakes and they had like the purple iguanas and you would be on a team and you would traverse this hidden temple of the Olmecs.
• 29:04
  That's pretty cool.
• 29:04
  And,
• 29:05
  for the connection there is like, I actually never knew that it was a related to a real thing.
• 29:12
  Yeah.
• 29:12
  I thought it was the kind of just, you know, took something that was real and, you know, did their movie mad, their TV magic to it.
• 29:19
  Um,
• 29:20
  But Olmec, real thing.
• 29:23
  Olmecs are a real thing.
• 29:24
  They're kind of like, you know, in Halo, we have, we've been talking about Halo a lot on this podcast.
• 29:29
  But, you know, in Halo, there's like the race called the Forerunners.
• 29:32
  Yes.
• 29:33
  That came before humans and the Covenant.
• 29:35
  Yes.
• 29:36
  The Olmecs are kind of like that for Mezzo America.
• 29:39
  They came before, they might have been the same time as the Maya, but they definitely came before the Aztecs and the people of Teotihuacan.
• 29:48
  And the people of Teotihuacan and the Aztecs regarded the Olmecs as kind of like the forerunners of their civilization.
• 29:57
  And if you look at the Olmecs, what we have remaining from the Olmecs is a crude writing system because we don't have a lot that's survived.
• 30:06
  And we also have faces, Olmec faces, where a lot of the Aztec art, you know, the characteristic Aztec art with the 2D sort of...
• 30:16
  That's derivative of Olmec art because they were descendants of the Olmecs, or at least they tried to say they were.
• 30:23
  I mean, the Aztecs were kind of a messed up people, right, with all the human sacrifices and the subjugation of all the other tribes.
• 30:31
  But they thought of themselves as like,
• 30:33
  descendants of the Olmecs kind of the same way it reminds me of halo yeah where it's like the humans and the covenant they we both thought yeah that we were descendants of the forerunners right and it turns out we're just like fighting each other i just want to say literally on the show they had Olmec was a face carved yeah stone yeah so so those are the famous faces of the it was literally that was the main like person giving you the hints on the show
• 30:56
  Someone please in the comments let me know that you have seen this show so I don't feel like a crazy person.
• 31:01
  It was such a classic.
• 31:02
  I wanted to be on all the game shows on Nickelodeon.
• 31:04
  But it's the connection to real history here and understanding.
• 31:08
  I think the Halo reference is actually helpful to kind of contextualize how these different Mesoamerican –
• 31:16
  ancient civilizations relate to each other.
• 31:17
  Yeah, yeah.
• 31:18
  I mean, it's really cool.
• 31:19
  Like in humanity, we always seek continuity, right?
• 31:23
  We always seek a story that we're a part of in the past.
• 31:27
  And that's invariant of whether you're from Europe or Asia or even the ancient civilizations of the Americas.
• 31:35
  I think it's really cool.
• 31:37
  So in the past 40 years,
• 31:40
  This is, we're kind of going to transition from this is really cool archaeology to the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed.
• 31:51
  Okay?
• 31:51
  Yeah.
• 31:52
  And this is kind of a problem.
• 31:53
  Yeah.
• 31:53
  We talk about the real things on this podcast.
• 31:55
  It's very cool that we're discovering new archaeology.
• 32:00
  new earthworks and new civilizations in the Amazon and new evidence for it.
• 32:04
  But the reality of the situation is that the Amazon has lost more than 13% of its vegetation cover in the last 40 years.
• 32:12
  And some scientists say that the region might not be able to sustain itself any longer.
• 32:17
  If the figure passes 20%, we're already at 13%.
• 32:21
  So they, it becomes kind of a conundrum about, you know,
• 32:25
  how agriculture is taking over their Amazon rainforest because Brazil is an economy that is hungry, is a developing nation.
• 32:34
  It's one where they realize they've got this vast resource of fertile land.
• 32:40
  They want to,
• 32:42
  exploit it for their agriculture, right, and for their society.
• 32:46
  Now, I want to be a bit nuanced here because I think a lot of takes about Amazon deforestation just blames Brazil and blames the farmers in Brazil and these developing countries.
• 32:58
  Let's take a look at Europe and let's take a look at America.
• 33:01
  Okay?
• 33:03
  The American prairie, for example, was a vast ecosystem that rivaled the African Serengeti.
• 33:10
  And what did we do to it when we came here?
• 33:13
  We turned it into farmland.
• 33:16
  Europe has no old growth forests left.
• 33:19
  Which is so crazy to me still.
• 33:21
  There's like one pocket in the Black Forest in Germany, in the southwest corner of Germany, near Freiburg.
• 33:28
  But that's about it.
• 33:29
  All of the old growth forest in Europe is done because the Industrial Revolution happened.
• 33:35
  The Agricultural Revolution happened.
• 33:37
  And they...
• 33:38
  They went at it, right?
• 33:40
  And so now we're coming upon developing nations that are trying to get that bag, right?
• 33:46
  It cannot be only on them to figure out a solution to make preservation of their forest sustainable, okay?
• 33:55
  You can't just be like, hey, stop cutting down trees.
• 33:59
  It's...
• 34:00
  I don't know what to do.
• 34:01
  I'm just saying it's not on them.
• 34:04
  I think this is – Does that make sense?
• 34:06
  It's true about a variety of different issues, which is like you have a generation of what we now call first world countries.
• 34:12
  Yeah.
• 34:13
  That were able to burn coal, tear down their natural environments in order to accrue a level of wealth –
• 34:21
  And socioeconomic status for some, not all of their people.
• 34:27
  And it's not evenly distributed.
• 34:29
  There's complexities about all of that.
• 34:31
  Yes.
• 34:32
  But comparatively to the majority of nations on the planet, there's this cohort of first world, quote unquote, first world countries.
• 34:40
  Right.
• 34:40
  That were the first across the finish line.
• 34:42
  So now you're having another batch.
• 34:45
  And these happen in batches.
• 34:46
  Now you're having the third, fourth, or fifth cohort.
• 34:49
  Try to do the same thing.
• 34:50
  This is where you see things like BRICS, Brazil, South Africa, China.
• 34:55
  China's already there, obviously.
• 34:57
  India.
• 34:57
  India in there.
• 34:58
  Who are now trying to effectively say, we're just doing what you did.
• 35:03
  And so, but now there's this almost holier than thou.
• 35:08
  Yeah, because they're the ones that have it left.
• 35:10
  Right.
• 35:11
  Right.
• 35:11
  Right.
• 35:11
  Because we have nothing.
• 35:12
  And now we're more of a globalized society with communications, with supply chain.
• 35:20
  And so the things happening over there impact what's happening over here much more than they did years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago.
• 35:28
  And so I think your point is –
• 35:32
  We need to have a broader discussion.
• 35:34
  Yeah, it's got to be a global solution.
• 35:36
  Right.
• 35:36
  Because we can't just, again, ignore that what's driving so much of the climate problem and all these other things is because of the things that the first groups that went through did –
• 35:50
  Not the ones we're trying to go through now.
• 35:53
  Oh, sorry.
• 35:55
  I destroyed all the road behind me.
• 35:56
  But like, no, you can't use natural resources to repave it.
• 36:00
  Yeah.
• 36:00
  It's like, no, I want a good economy.
• 36:03
  I want air conditioning all the time.
• 36:05
  Right.
• 36:05
  Right.
• 36:06
  I want to use plastics all the time like you guys are.
• 36:09
  So it's a weird take.
• 36:11
  I'm probably going to get some hate, but that's what I think.
• 36:14
  I think like with everything, unfortunately, have you heard this like bean soup theory?
• 36:21
  Let me not go there.
• 36:22
  But we just everything there's there.
• 36:26
  We need to just there's a lot of we live in a complex adaptive system.
• 36:30
  Yeah.
• 36:31
  And there are a lot of variables that go into that.
• 36:33
  And there's a rush to say it's either this or it's that.
• 36:38
  Yeah.
• 36:39
  And 99.9% of the time, it's like a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
• 36:46
  We need to be able to have complex, nuanced conversations.
• 36:49
  And it is in all of our benefit to prevent catastrophic ecosystem collapse.
• 36:59
  And it is not going to be solved by any one nation.
• 37:03
  Yeah, I agree.
• 37:04
  At the end of the day.
• 37:06
  But this is a sensitive issue.
• 37:08
  Obviously, people have very strong opinions about it.
• 37:12
  This is a record-level El Nino year.
• 37:14
  Yeah.
• 37:15
  If you're in Europe, y'all have been having fires going on right now that you do not have the infrastructure to deal with.
• 37:22
  Canada has been having fires that are taking over everywhere.
• 37:25
  I think it was Seattle, Washington?
• 37:27
  Yes, I heard.
• 37:28
  Burning.
• 37:29
  And look, when I was growing up,
• 37:32
  That wasn't what it was like.
• 37:34
  Yeah.
• 37:34
  So it's progressing fast.
• 37:38
  We cannot ignore the reality that's in front of our face.
• 37:43
  And it's okay to just talk about it.
• 37:45
  We're not prescribing an answer.
• 37:46
  We're not saying you can't have plastic straws.
• 37:49
  But maybe these large industrial companies need to be a little bit more responsible.
• 37:55
  Yeah.
• 37:56
  And perhaps we make...
• 37:58
  them responsible we make them you know we don't we don't be like please hey can you can you save the can you not like mess up our only home our only home in this vast emptiness can you maybe like try to try to try to not mess up the only home that we have yeah
• 38:20
  This was a tangent, as you can see.
• 38:23
  We try to keep it tight, but these are complex issues, and sometimes we just need to get it off our chest.
• 38:29
  So I think we've earned the right to have a little social-political commentary.
• 38:34
  And actually, wait, one more thing before you move on.
• 38:36
  I wanted to do a mental exercise, because we're talking about...
• 38:42
  We're talking about modern civilization now, us with LiDAR and things like that, coming in and seeing old, old infrastructure and old civilizations, and we're trying to judge the capabilities of the civilizations based on what they've left behind.
• 38:58
  For example, with Egypt, we can guess that their economy was insane.
• 39:03
  With something like Rome building the Colosseum, we can guess that the economy was insane.
• 39:09
  So suppose like...
• 39:12
  something crazy happened, right?
• 39:14
  And like humans died.
• 39:15
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  And aliens came back in like a million years, right?
• 39:20
  In some insane amount of time.
• 39:22
  Like what would they see and what would they judge from us?
• 39:25
  I was thinking about this.
• 39:26
  Like, for example, even if Earth looks very, very different –
• 39:31
  There's quite a possibility that, like, the moon is not going to look that different.
• 39:35
  And so if they saw, like, the remnants of Apollo 11 and all of our Apollo missions, they'd be like, this is crazy.
• 39:42
  Yeah, they got from there.
• 39:44
  They got off that planet with a pretty strong gravitational field.
• 39:47
  Yeah.
• 39:48
  And, like, it seems they walked around.
• 39:50
  There's, like, footprints and stuff.
• 39:52
  Because the footprints aren't going to go away.
• 39:53
  Right.
• 39:54
  Like, there's not enough meteor impacts for the footprints to grow.
• 39:58
  They got a car with, like, wheels.
• 40:00
  I think they'll know what wheels are, right?
• 40:02
  And they might be like, damn.
• 40:04
  They were so close.
• 40:05
  They were pretty good.
• 40:06
  Yeah.
• 40:07
  They almost escaped a single point of failure.
• 40:09
  Yeah.
• 40:09
  Or, like, if they came on Earth, right, and they went and they saw CERN, which is underground.
• 40:14
  So it might be, it might be like...
• 40:18
  shielded from vegetation loss, right?
• 40:21
  And atmospheric loss.
• 40:22
  Like I can imagine like Manhattan.
• 40:26
  All of the buildings might crumble and fall.
• 40:28
  Maybe the steel will still be there.
• 40:30
  And the fact that we have pure steel in these sort of columns, they might be like, this is pretty cool.
• 40:38
  It'll be just a bunch of pointies coming out of the ground.
• 40:41
  Yeah.
• 40:42
  But CERN, for example, it's underground and it's a giant thing.
• 40:45
  And there's massive magnets, right?
• 40:48
  There's going to be wires of pure copper, right?
• 40:50
  and silicon and all of this other stuff they're gonna look at that and be like this is nice i like this yeah right yeah like that those are the things that i think would be our pyramids yeah right if the aliens came down and searched for our pyramids or our coliseum yeah they would they would find cern and ligo and the moon landing you know i think that's kind of cool to think about
• 41:14
  As a last note on that, it's sort of like for civilizations that came before us, large-scale infrastructure was the thing that was signature of it.
• 41:24
  For our generation, it's almost like large-scale – I don't want to use scientific loosely, but like this instrumentation.
• 41:32
  Yeah.
• 41:33
  um that's like pure and like yeah you know what i mean it's like single focus single function it's not to honor some dead pharaoh it's not to facilitate the transfer of goods and services it's purely it kind of speaks to oh we they became a curiosity based yeah civilization where they had some level of abundance or sustainability
• 41:57
  not evenly distributed, that allowed them to spend money on things that didn't have a direct functional outcome to their own survival.
• 42:04
  Exactly, yeah.
• 42:05
  That's really interesting.
• 42:06
  It is, right?
• 42:06
  That's really interesting.
• 42:07
  Because they would look at CERN and they would see the electromagnets.
• 42:11
  They would see the solenoids of the copper becoming electromagnets.
• 42:15
  And they could probably discern, because they know the laws of electromagnetism, that these were giant magnets that were curving the thing, you know?
• 42:23
  And there's these giant centers where the two beams sort of meet.
• 42:28
  So you see the two beams meeting up.
• 42:30
  And then right where those two beams meet up, coincidentally, there's a giant detector, right?
• 42:35
  That's the size of, like, a building underground.
• 42:38
  So maybe that's a particle collider.
• 42:41
  Like, you know?
• 42:42
  That's really good.
• 42:43
  I know.
• 42:43
  That's a good one.
• 42:44
  I like that.
• 42:45
  I was just thinking, whenever I think about, like...
• 42:48
  Old stuff.
• 42:49
  Yeah.
• 42:49
  I think what would a civilization 10,000 years, a million years from now look at us and say, damn, that was sick.
• 42:55
  Yeah.
• 42:56
  Right?
• 42:56
  If the International Space Station is still floating around.
• 42:59
  It's still floating around.
• 43:00
  Probably not because it's going to – Yeah, it's going to – But like if it was –
• 43:04
  Actually, James Webb Space Telescope.
• 43:06
  Yeah, that will be.
• 43:06
  That thing is at Lagrange 2 or something, right?
• 43:08
  That's like way off of Earth orbit.
• 43:10
  So that thing is just going to be following us around the sun.
• 43:13
  Like if they saw that.
• 43:15
  It's a techno signature, you know?
• 43:16
  Yeah.
• 43:17
  If they saw that, they'd be like, this is insane.
• 43:19
  Yeah.
• 43:19
  Right?
• 43:20
  They were looking for us.
• 43:21
  Yeah.
• 43:22
  We just came a little late.
• 43:23
  We missed the train to the train.
• 43:24
  That's really interesting because when you – a lot of times people in sports and entertainment and media or whatever, even in life, think about legacy.
• 43:33
  Yeah.
• 43:34
  But I always talk about things at like three scales.
• 43:36
  You have the individual or four scales.
• 43:39
  You have the individual unit, the family unit, your like community unit, which could be neighborhood, city, state, nation state.
• 43:47
  And then you have the civilizational unit.
• 43:49
  And a lot of times the legacy conversation is talked about in the individual, family, or neighborhood like context.
• 43:58
  Yeah.
• 43:58
  Yeah.
• 43:58
  What is our civilizational legacy to an outside observer?
• 44:02
  Yes.
• 44:02
  If we were to just disappear.
• 44:04
  Right now.
• 44:05
  Like for our generation, not for the past.
• 44:07
  Yeah.
• 44:07
  That's a...
• 44:09
  I'm going to think about that more.
• 44:11
  Yeah.
• 44:11
  I really do like that quite a bit.
• 44:13
  I really do like that quite a bit.
• 44:14
  And...
• 44:16
  you might all know what's coming next because this kind of just fascinating, incredible, deep, and fun conversation is brought to you by From First Principles.
• 44:32
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• 44:36
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• 45:21
  This was out of the Ibero-American Institute of Finland and the University of Helsinki.
• 45:28
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• 46:33
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  We have a great field notebook.
• 47:00
  There's a ton of stuff in there.
• 47:02
  If you can complete our survey to help us better understand what you want us to do in our second year, that's over at ffppod.com backslash survey.
• 47:11
  To all of those who say, what does Lester do on the show?
• 47:14
  I shill the website.
• 47:20
  And so we are now going to transition into the christening
• 47:26
  of our brand new library, which just a bunch of shelves behind us.
• 47:31
  So you can see some of the books that Krishna has put together for our inaugural christening of the FFP library.
• 47:38
  So for those of you who are watching, as you can see, there's an empty set of three floating shelves behind us.
• 47:43
  And we're going to christen our new library with some of the books here.
• 47:47
  And we're going to do it one shelf at a time.
• 47:49
  So Krishna, what are we going to put into the library?
• 47:54
  with our first shelf here in the collection.
• 47:57
  We have two piles, different contexts.
• 48:00
  So what is our first set of books?
• 48:02
  Yeah, so I thought a lot about what we were trying to put in the shelves.
• 48:08
  The first shelf I want to christen with the textbooks that made me the, you know, physicist, thinker, whatever you want to call it, that I am.
• 48:18
  I'm going to start with mathematics, and then we're going to go into physics and biology, okay?
• 48:23
  So, the first mathematics book, Baby Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis,
• 48:32
  This is called Baby Rudin because I cried like a baby while I was reading this thing.
• 48:39
  This was my first semester at Princeton University.
• 48:42
  There was a course called Math 215.
• 48:46
  It was called analysis in a single variable.
• 48:50
  That was the tagline.
• 48:51
  And then the description in the syllabus was analysis in a single variable.
• 48:56
  I get to the first lecture, and it's Peter Sarnak, who is a legend in mathematics.
• 49:01
  He's got this thick South African accent.
• 49:04
  And he goes, what is a number?
• 49:07
  And I'm like, what are we talking about?
• 49:10
  And right?
• 49:11
  What's going on?
• 49:14
  And this is the book.
• 49:15
  This is the textbook for it.
• 49:17
  It was an insane course.
• 49:19
  It was one of the most formative courses in my life.
• 49:23
  The first lecture we get into what it means to be a number, what it means to be a real number.
• 49:28
  That's stuff that I was talking to you about, countability, and the fact that real numbers are uncountable, but rational numbers are countable.
• 49:36
  And there's functions that are continuous everywhere, but you can't differentiate anywhere.
• 49:43
  It's like really, really strange things.
• 49:45
  Basically, it's the foundations of calculus.
• 49:48
  Because when Newton invented it, like every good physicist, he was very hand-wavy.
• 49:54
  He was like, limits approach.
• 49:57
  And it's obvious.
• 49:58
  And for most smooth functions that we deal with on a day-to-day basis as physicists...
• 50:04
  it's totally fine, right?
• 50:06
  And as a physicist, I can totally understand why he would choose to present calculus that way.
• 50:11
  But pretty soon, like within about 50 years of him saying all that and 100 years of him saying all that, mathematicians start saying, well, what about this?
• 50:18
  And what about that?
• 50:20
  And it turns out there's like functions that are completely non-intuitive,
• 50:24
  There's functions that are continuous everywhere, meaning I can take a pen and I can draw it out theoretically, but I could never find a slope anywhere on that function.
• 50:35
  That's a really weird thing to do.
• 50:39
  Baby Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis.
• 50:43
  Honestly, a great time.
• 50:45
  Once you get over the trauma and everything, it's an amazing, amazing book.
• 50:50
  I'll take it here, actually.
• 50:51
  Oh, okay, yeah.
• 50:52
  Yes, yes.
• 50:53
  All right.
• 50:54
  Next one is actually, it's my favorite course that I ever took at Princeton University.
• 51:02
  My favorite course that I ever took at Princeton University was a mathematics course.
• 51:06
  It was not a physics course, even though I was a physics major.
• 51:09
  It was complex analysis.
• 51:12
  The author, Elias Stein, was actually my professor at the time.
• 51:16
  He's also the PhD advisor of Terence Tao.
• 51:20
  Ah.
• 51:20
  So we've got a lot of Terence Tao in the comments lately.
• 51:23
  Yeah.
• 51:24
  This book is absolutely amazing.
• 51:27
  It is not like Baby Rudin because this is gentle.
• 51:32
  This brings you in.
• 51:33
  And it treats you fairly.
• 51:36
  And it treats you like you're a human being.
• 51:37
  Yeah.
• 51:38
  And it goes on to show some of the most beautiful things in mathematics.
• 51:44
  It starts with the invention of i, the imaginary number, and it goes on to talk about the Cauchy-Riemann equations, how to take integrals in the complex plane.
• 51:57
  It talks about the Riemann zeta function.
• 52:02
  It talks about the prime number function, which is how many prime numbers there are as you get higher and higher.
• 52:08
  It turns out it's related to the log of how high you get.
• 52:14
  And have you ever heard that weird math thing that's like all of the numbers added up, like 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4, all of them added up to infinity is negative 1 twelfth?
• 52:25
  No.
• 52:26
  Okay, that's something that we can get into.
• 52:29
  But it turns out the sum of all the natural numbers is negative 112.
• 52:33
  And this is the key to understanding that.
• 52:35
  Complex analysis.
• 52:37
  It has to do with holomorphic functions and the fact that everything is okay in complex analysis.
• 52:44
  Stuff that is not allowed in real analysis becomes allowed in complex analysis.
• 52:48
  It's absolutely beautiful.
• 52:50
  It's my favorite thing.
• 52:51
  If you would like us to cover it, let us know in the comments.
• 52:56
  Finally, the next one, I lost the cover to this, but this is also Elias Stein.
• 53:01
  This is part of his analysis series.
• 53:03
  This is Fourier analysis.
• 53:05
  This was instrumental for physics in general, right?
• 53:09
  Understanding Fourier analysis.
• 53:11
  There's a lot of really non-intuitive things about Fourier analysis.
• 53:16
  Like the fact that I can add up a bunch of sines and cosines...
• 53:19
  And I can get a convergent function, but then the derivative of that function can be divergent, which is really weird.
• 53:25
  Like, the derivative will blow up, but the function itself will approach, like, a really nice steady value.
• 53:30
  Again, really weird things.
• 53:33
  This was a great course, but this was actually the last course in higher mathematics that I took at Princeton University.
• 53:40
  I also took, at the same time, algebra with Galois theory.
• 53:44
  The textbook is not here because I don't want to talk about that experience.
• 53:48
  It is not getting added to the collection.
• 53:50
  That's not getting added because I don't want to talk about that experience.
• 53:53
  That's a class that I PDFed.
• 53:55
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 53:56
  Remember when we could do pass, defail?
• 53:58
  I passed.
• 53:59
  I passed.
• 53:59
  I did not get a D or a fail.
• 54:01
  No D, no F. But I don't want to think about what the letter would have been had I not done that.
• 54:06
  This is not a file that you can open in Adobe having a class that's PDFed.
• 54:11
  Yeah.
• 54:12
  Is not maybe a Princeton-specific thing, but... Usually it's just pass-fail, but Princeton's one of those like, I'll give you a D. So you got to work a little bit.
• 54:23
  Remember that selection process.
• 54:24
  Yeah, yeah.
• 54:26
  All right.
• 54:26
  So that was the mathematics.
• 54:27
  Now let's get into the physics.
• 54:29
  The first physics textbook I'd like to talk about...
• 54:33
  is again, the Bible.
• 54:35
  This is Landau Lifshitz Mechanics.
• 54:37
  A lot of the viewers and a lot of the grad students in the audience will know this book by a different way.
• 54:44
  cover okay they're gonna know the the newer version with like there's like circles and like yellow circles everywhere this is the original um version that my dad actually gave me um and it's one that he wants back dad you're not gonna get this back okay this this was a formative experience because this was classical mechanics um my second year first semester um this is a crazy textbook this is by lev landau who's the
• 55:11
  legendary Russian physicist.
• 55:14
  In the first two pages, he proves that mass cannot be negative.
• 55:20
  Okay?
• 55:20
  In the first two pages.
• 55:22
  And I remember reading this going, this is insane.
• 55:25
  That, like, we just take for granted as an axiom the axiom of least action.
• 55:32
  That, like, everything goes by least action.
• 55:34
  You have, like, a Lagrangian and stuff like that.
• 55:36
  And from that, you can prove that mass is negative.
• 55:38
  Yeah.
• 55:38
  And then a lot of the problems in here are just like insanely hard.
• 55:43
  And he has problems and solutions.
• 55:45
  There's a colloquial saying about Landau-Lifschitz, which is not a thought of Lifschitz, not a word from Landau.
• 55:54
  Because Landau was kind of...
• 55:56
  narrating and lift shits is the guy who typed this this sounds like the show yeah you're the guy narrating and i'm the guy who types but this this absolutely an amazing textbook um formative for classical mechanics and it's a textbook that that i definitely used um this also reminds me of all the rugrats fans out there dr lip shits uh the doctor and rugrats slightly different pronunciation
• 56:23
  equally impactful.
• 56:25
  Definitely.
• 56:27
  Next one on our list of textbooks.
• 56:30
  We've alluded to this before.
• 56:32
  Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi.
• 56:36
  This is one of those where he treats you like a human being.
• 56:41
  He treats you like a human being.
• 56:43
  Enrico Fermi, Thermodynamics.
• 56:44
  This is a great textbook for intro thermodynamics.
• 56:47
  You don't want to get into statistical mechanics and the theory of atoms and things like that.
• 56:51
  You just want to talk about heat, temperature, entropy.
• 56:55
  This is an amazing, amazing read.
• 56:57
  Really short, you can tell.
• 56:59
  But just really informative.
• 57:01
  PV equals NRT, equations of state of gases.
• 57:06
  Absolutely amazing.
• 57:07
  And also on our ranking in our Oppenheimer Scientist ranking episode, which if you have not watched, is a fantastic deep dive in the concentration of brilliance and genius that was applied to, unfortunately, the nuclear program.
• 57:24
  Yeah, and I think Enrico Fermi was top five in that, right?
• 57:27
  Yes, yes.
• 57:28
  And totally deserved.
• 57:29
  Totally deserved.
• 57:30
  Okay, next one.
• 57:31
  So I gave you the first textbook on classical mechanics, which was Landau-Lifschutz.
• 57:35
  Yes.
• 57:36
  This next one is the bane of my existence.
• 57:40
  Goldstein, classical mechanics.
• 57:42
  Look at how thick this is.
• 57:45
  And then it's just the worst.
• 57:47
  It's just the absolute worst.
• 57:49
  It's so dense, and it covers literally everything that has to do with classical mechanics.
• 57:54
  But the problems are insane.
• 57:56
  Like, no reasonable person would assign more than two in a homework problem.
• 58:03
  And guess how many we got?
• 58:05
  A lot more than two.
• 58:06
  A lot more than two.
• 58:06
  Okay?
• 58:07
  So, Goldstein.
• 58:08
  Classic.
• 58:08
  Classic.
• 58:10
  You know, a lot of trauma with this textbook, but I do know classical mechanics really well now because of this, right?
• 58:19
  And this is a really good precursor to learning quantum mechanics because this goes over kind of the subtleties.
• 58:26
  It goes over Poisson brackets really well, which is something that...
• 58:30
  becomes commutators in quantum mechanics.
• 58:33
  So it's like a kind of really nice bridge between classical and quantum mechanics.
• 58:38
  It's still a terrible textbook, I have to say.
• 58:40
  It doesn't explain stuff, but the problems are pretty insane.
• 58:45
  If you want some light summer reading as you get ready for year two of FFP, pick up the second edition of classical mechanics.
• 58:55
  All right, here's another bane of my existence.
• 58:57
  Okay.
• 58:58
  Jackson, classical electrodynamics.
• 59:01
  I think every physicist would agree that this is the bane of their existence.
• 59:06
  Okay?
• 59:07
  Most physicists learn electrodynamics first using the Griffiths textbook.
• 59:12
  It's a great textbook.
• 59:13
  I don't have it here.
• 59:15
  But...
• 59:16
  That's the one that I first learned electromagnetism with.
• 59:20
  This is the second version of that, where it's like, okay, now let's talk about the real stuff.
• 59:27
  This is where, like, if you want to know how antennas work, this is it.
• 59:31
  If you want to know how light propagates through random medium, even if the medium is not homogenous, it's like a really weird medium, this is where it happens.
• 59:39
  Yeah.
• 59:41
  What's kind of cool about this is there are problems in this textbook that require a lot of thought, but there are also things that now I encounter in my research and in my job.
• 59:53
  Like I work at a quantum computing company where we're doing spin qubits, right?
• 59:57
  And part of confining individual electrons to create spin qubits is to create a kind of...
• 1:00:05
  egg carton-like landscape of potentials where it's like positive 5 volts, negative 5 volts, and so on and so forth, that geometry is a homework problem in Jackson.
• 1:00:15
  Why he would think that's a reasonable homework problem, I'm not sure.
• 1:00:20
  Okay?
• 1:00:21
  He was a maniac.
• 1:00:23
  But Jackson is another one of these trauma-inducing physics textbooks that now, given the years –
• 1:00:32
  past that i look back on i'm like okay this was pretty legit uh two notes on this one uh if we go back to our episode where we covered the ice cube neutrino detector yeah we talked about how light moves through ice yeah that's in there
• 1:00:50
  which was a very viral and popular clip that we had.
• 1:00:53
  Yeah, Cherenkov radiation.
• 1:00:54
  The fact that if a charged particle moves faster than light in a medium, it's going to create a shockwave.
• 1:00:59
  Yep, that's in there.
• 1:01:00
  Literally everything that you could ever want from an electrodynamics textbook about any electrical phenomenon is in here.
• 1:01:08
  And for all of my UAP fans, one of the things people talk about is that how these UAP allegedly move around is a part of extended electrodynamics.
• 1:01:18
  Yeah.
• 1:01:19
  And so you have to start here first.
• 1:01:20
  Yeah.
• 1:01:20
  You got to do the homework problems before you get there.
• 1:01:23
  Yep.
• 1:01:23
  Yep.
• 1:01:25
  This is one of my favorite textbooks, thermal physics.
• 1:01:27
  This was my introduction to my favorite subject in physics, which is statistical mechanics.
• 1:01:34
  I took thermodynamics with Enrico Fermi, but that was in my first year.
• 1:01:39
  It was part of the intro physics curriculum.
• 1:01:42
  Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi is very gentle.
• 1:01:44
  This one is also actually very gentle.
• 1:01:46
  Kittel and Cromer, thermal physics.
• 1:01:49
  In the first chapter, or maybe the second chapter, he proves...
• 1:01:53
  the second law of thermodynamics using two state systems, like a magnetic spin system.
• 1:01:59
  And that's a proof that I still have internalized and memorized.
• 1:02:04
  And it was a very deep thing for me to realize that the second law of thermodynamics is like something you can just like realize from math and combinatorics.
• 1:02:15
  This goes into all the way from phase transitions, like the Stefan Boltzmann law that we talked about in the last episode, the T to the fourth dependence, ideal gas law, how you can get the ideal gas law from just talking about quantum particles.
• 1:02:29
  It's an amazing textbook as the first textbook for deep statistical mechanics.
• 1:02:34
  I would highly recommend.
• 1:02:36
  It's honestly one of my favorite physics textbooks of all time.
• 1:02:42
  Yep.
• 1:02:44
  We've dealt with classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics, the last of the four pillars of modern physics.
• 1:02:55
  is quantum mechanics.
• 1:02:57
  Here we have Sakurai and Napolitano.
• 1:03:01
  This is in line sort of similar to Landau-Lifschitz in that Sakurai is the brains behind the textbook.
• 1:03:07
  Napolitano is the editor.
• 1:03:10
  Modern quantum mechanics, this is an amazing textbook for the first half because the first half was written by Sakurai during his lifetime.
• 1:03:17
  The second half, Napolitano and a bunch of his colleagues took over, and you can see the...
• 1:03:25
  You can see the decrease in quality.
• 1:03:27
  It's still very good, but J.J. Sakurai's way of introducing quantum mechanics first using the Stern-Gerlach experiment, where the first lesson in this book is just about why you need imaginary numbers to describe quantum mechanics.
• 1:03:46
  It's a very simple description of an experiment, and he says...
• 1:03:50
  The only way that you can describe this experiment is if the internal dynamics involve complex numbers, if they involve the imaginary unit i.
• 1:03:59
  It's absolutely amazing.
• 1:04:00
  And then he goes into the Heisenberg picture, the Schrodinger picture.
• 1:04:03
  He builds angular momentum, the theory of everything that we know and love in quantum mechanics.
• 1:04:10
  Absolutely phenomenal textbook.
• 1:04:12
  This is what I used in my graduate studies.
• 1:04:15
  In undergrad, I used Griffiths.
• 1:04:18
  But in graduate studies, you use Sakurai.
• 1:04:21
  And every physics nerd knows J.J. Sakurai, modern quantum mechanics.
• 1:04:29
  I'll just make a note for those who may be new.
• 1:04:32
  We've covered so many of the concepts that you just talked about on several of our previous podcasts in a variety of ways.
• 1:04:41
  frontier research that we build from first principles the history of the understanding that enabled those uh frontier projects um and it's one of the topics that i personally find super fascinating and clearly the audience does as well because so many people react in a positive way anytime yeah
• 1:05:03
  we do those discussions.
• 1:05:04
  It looks like we have two final textbooks left for our first section of the library.
• 1:05:12
  This one is experiments in modern physics.
• 1:05:15
  There was a course at Princeton University, again, a great course at Princeton University called experiments in modern physics.
• 1:05:24
  It was training you in how to do experiments, how to figure out what the noise level is, how to figure out what your error bars is.
• 1:05:30
  And what they would have you do is basically spend two weeks doing specific experiments that are legendary.
• 1:05:39
  So, for example, you could do the Cavendish experiment that measured Big G.
• 1:05:46
  way back in like i think the 1800s i think maybe late 1700s you can do the millican oil drop experiment where you measure the charge of a single electron you can do the lamb shift experiment which is what we see on the cover over here you the one of the ones that i did was measuring the 21 centimeter line the 1420 hertz
• 1:06:08
  in the galaxy and charting the gas in the galaxy and showing that the galaxy is rotating, calculating how fast the galaxy is rotating by taking a little dish and putting it at different spots in the galaxy and measuring the Doppler shift.
• 1:06:21
  So a lot of these seminal experiments are described in great, great detail in this book.
• 1:06:28
  It's absolutely phenomenal for someone who is interested in experimental physics and especially interested in the history of,
• 1:06:36
  of how way back when they were still able to get their error bars so small.
• 1:06:42
  Michelson-Morley, another one that is described in this book.
• 1:06:47
  It's a great book.
• 1:06:49
  And I will yet again note that if you are a longtime listener of this podcast and you just heard that description...
• 1:06:57
  of what you get in experiments in modern physics, you'll notice an overlap with the topics that we cover because every single thing that you just mentioned, Michael, some morally the lamb shift, uh, the 1420 hydrogen line.
• 1:07:10
  I think I remember back to, there was a story we talked about, uh, the formation of, um, it was, uh,
• 1:07:18
  Oh, it's escaping me now.
• 1:07:19
  But we talked about an astrophysics story where it was the accretion disk.
• 1:07:25
  Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:25
  No, the galactic rotation.
• 1:07:27
  Yes.
• 1:07:28
  And measuring that like, oh, dark matter.
• 1:07:30
  Yeah, it was a dark matter halo.
• 1:07:32
  Yeah, it was the fact that like the galactic rotation curve is flat after some time.
• 1:07:37
  That's something that is here.
• 1:07:39
  So as you can see, as we continue to build the narrative and the story and the history of
• 1:07:45
  who we are.
• 1:07:46
  You can see how that bleeds into the content we cover.
• 1:07:49
  Now, the last, but not the least, is the one and only biology book to start the collection.
• 1:07:55
  That's right.
• 1:07:55
  This is the one and only biology textbook that's going to be on the shelf.
• 1:07:59
  This was formative for my interest in biology.
• 1:08:03
  And you can tell from this podcast, I'm very interested in biology from a physics perspective.
• 1:08:08
  This is Fundamentals of Molecular Biology by Elizabeth Allison.
• 1:08:13
  great, great textbook that really goes into depth about kind of the processes, like the Lego block.
• 1:08:19
  You know, I always talk about like Lego blocks in biology and how everything is just trying to be Lego blocks.
• 1:08:25
  This is kind of where I get that from.
• 1:08:29
  Part of this course was also doing a molecular biology lab where we grew bacteria with GFP, green fluorescent protein, and then we –
• 1:08:41
  We expressed recombinant DNA, so we had a plasmid with the green flesh and protein, and that also had a little antibiotic attached to it, or a way to circumnavigate the antibiotic so that you could only select for bacteria that had the plasmid, and then you could isolate the plasmid, and you could isolate the GFP protein from...
• 1:08:59
  That was one of my favorite courses at Princeton was like just doing this lab and like manipulating life.
• 1:09:05
  Like live, you know, you'd come back the next week and the bacteria were grown and like you could like do things with it.
• 1:09:13
  Absolutely cool.
• 1:09:14
  This book is also amazing.
• 1:09:16
  Also, cool thing.
• 1:09:18
  One of the guest lectures during that course was Shirley Tillman, who was the president at the time of Princeton University.
• 1:09:24
  Yes.
• 1:09:24
  I think I've told you the story, but I'll briefly share it.
• 1:09:27
  So as you mentioned, guest lecturer Shirley Tillman, my first day on campus,
• 1:09:34
  I was with a teammate of mine walking north on the campus.
• 1:09:39
  We were there for preseason.
• 1:09:41
  And so no one else was yet there.
• 1:09:43
  And we're walking.
• 1:09:44
  We're just trying to figure out where our classes are going to be and stuff.
• 1:09:47
  And this nice person walked up to us and asked us where we're from.
• 1:09:51
  And are we acclimatizing well?
• 1:09:54
  And we were like, yes.
• 1:09:55
  And we asked who it was.
• 1:09:56
  Yeah.
• 1:09:58
  I think I don't want to get the story wrong.
• 1:10:00
  So I'll just say they had asked, you know, who we were and then we asked who they were.
• 1:10:06
  And then she said, Shirley Tillman.
• 1:10:09
  And we were like, Oh, so what do you do?
• 1:10:12
  She's like, oh, I'm the president of the university.
• 1:10:14
  So that gives you an idea of where my lack of context was at the time as an 18-year-old who was just obsessed about being able to be there but also play soccer at the same time.
• 1:10:27
  I will also note that one of the best bands –
• 1:10:30
  at the university at the time was Shirley and the Tillmans.
• 1:10:34
  That was a good band.
• 1:10:35
  Great band.
• 1:10:36
  Great band name.
• 1:10:37
  Yeah.
• 1:10:38
  And so for all of those, if any of you who are band members are listening, we all remember.
• 1:10:43
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:44
  You are not forgotten.
• 1:10:45
  You are not forgotten.
• 1:10:46
  Formative for all of us.
• 1:10:48
  And that completes our first shelf.
• 1:10:51
  In the library, we're going to come back with the second, which will be a little bit smaller, but we'll expand.
• 1:10:59
  Yes.
• 1:10:59
  So now we are moving on to shelf number two after placing our first shelf of textbooks with an esoteric collection in this selection.
• 1:11:09
  Yep, we're going to start off our esoteric collection with Relativity by the one and only Albert Einstein.
• 1:11:18
  This is a pretty short book.
• 1:11:20
  It's quite fancy.
• 1:11:20
  If you look at the pages, it's like ruffled pages.
• 1:11:24
  You know what I mean?
• 1:11:25
  It's like a Harry Potter book.
• 1:11:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:27
  It's kind of cool.
• 1:11:29
  2007 is the date that I have here.
• 1:11:33
  Krishnachadur, December 19th, 2007.
• 1:11:36
  I didn't understand anything about relativity.
• 1:11:38
  2007, I was in sophomore year of high school.
• 1:11:41
  Okay.
• 1:11:43
  But the magic of relativity is you can like try and read it even in high school and kind of get it.
• 1:11:49
  Okay.
• 1:11:49
  It's not like quantum mechanics where I have – I still have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
• 1:11:55
  Relativity is like one of these nice things about physics that just kind of makes sense the more and more you think about it.
• 1:12:01
  And Einstein, fair play to him –
• 1:12:04
  He's a really good explainer of relativity.
• 1:12:07
  Okay?
• 1:12:08
  It's not like Heisenberg, where he wrote the 1925 Umdeutung paper, and then people still read it today, and it's like, how did you come up with that?
• 1:12:15
  Relativity, especially special relativity, kind of makes sense.
• 1:12:19
  And then when you graduate to general relativity, it still kind of makes sense.
• 1:12:22
  It's a beautiful textbook, in his own words, the man himself, Albert Einstein.
• 1:12:28
  First in our esoteric collection.
• 1:12:31
  Next one, Arnold Sommerfeld.
• 1:12:33
  Yes.
• 1:12:34
  We've talked about Arnold Sommerfeld.
• 1:12:36
  He's the mentor to so many of the greats, including Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg.
• 1:12:44
  He was Heisenberg's PhD advisor and kind of saved his PhD thesis because Heisenberg nearly failed and Arnold Sommerfeld had to go to bat for him and make sure that he passed.
• 1:12:57
  and go on to greatness.
• 1:12:59
  Arnold Summerfield never won the Nobel Prize, but he mentored something like 10 Nobel Prize winners, including Hans Bethe, Wolfgang Pauli, just some of the greats of all time.
• 1:13:11
  He had the first...
• 1:13:14
  collection of lectures on theoretical physics.
• 1:13:17
  Nowadays, a lot of times people use Landau-Lifschitz, which we covered with the mechanics textbook that I had earlier.
• 1:13:25
  Landau-Lifschitz also has a textbook on fluid mechanics, statistical physics, field theory, and all the works, right?
• 1:13:33
  And it's kind of become a gold standard for graduate textbooks.
• 1:13:37
  But before Landau-Lifschitz, there was Arnold Sommerfeld.
• 1:13:41
  This is volume six, partial differential equations in physics.
• 1:13:45
  You can imagine he had a mechanics, he has an optics, he has statistical mechanics.
• 1:13:51
  One of the greats of all time.
• 1:13:53
  And one of our earliest episodes we covered...
• 1:13:57
  that relationship in depth, which again, Mr. Schill here, some of our library of previous episodes is just phenomenal around the history, particularly in physics.
• 1:14:09
  And so if you're interested in the relationship between these people and how that relates to the growth of the field in our understanding, it's like our episode 2345,
• 1:14:19
  We're very heavy in that arena in some of these early developmental protests.
• 1:14:24
  Yeah, it's how we first got viral on Instagram.
• 1:14:26
  Yeah.
• 1:14:27
  Is with the Sommerfeld-Heisenberg episode.
• 1:14:30
  Yes.
• 1:14:30
  Where we covered the 1925 paper and the 100-year anniversary of it.
• 1:14:34
  Yes.
• 1:14:34
  Back in 2025, last year.
• 1:14:36
  Yes.
• 1:14:36
  A year later.
• 1:14:37
  A year later.
• 1:14:38
  Look at us.
• 1:14:40
  Who to thunk?
• 1:14:41
  Not me.
• 1:14:42
  Yeah, not me.
• 1:14:44
  Another one from our previous episodes.
• 1:14:46
  Another one.
• 1:14:48
  Schrodinger's What is Life?
• 1:14:50
  We covered this in detail in our DNA episode where we covered James Watson and his work with DNA.
• 1:14:57
  What is Life is a seminal textbook in biological physics.
• 1:15:02
  This is where a physicist tried to tackle the question, what is life, with biology.
• 1:15:07
  This is where he predicted that DNA would be an aperiodic crystal.
• 1:15:14
  Why?
• 1:15:15
  Because...
• 1:15:16
  It has to store information, which means that it can't just be the same thing over and over again.
• 1:15:23
  It can't be something like starch or cellulose, which is just glucose, glucose, glucose, glucose everywhere, because there's no information.
• 1:15:29
  It's just all glucose.
• 1:15:31
  But if you have something like an aperiodic crystal, like something with bits, where it's a 0-1-1-0-0-1-1-0,
• 1:15:38
  Then you can all of a sudden store all of the information that is needed for life.
• 1:15:42
  And he reasoned from first principles that if we wanted a molecular basis for information storage, we needed something like a crystal that had regular parts, but different sequences to store all of the diversity.
• 1:15:58
  He predicted the structure of DNA before we even knew that it was DNA that we were looking for.
• 1:16:03
  It's absolutely incredible.
• 1:16:06
  Erwin Schrödinger, what is life?
• 1:16:08
  The double helix episode is a great way to dig into that concept that you just covered, which is fascinating to me.
• 1:16:18
  And also the history of the discovery of the double helix and kind of some of the non-scientific social drama.
• 1:16:23
  Yeah.
• 1:16:25
  of the real world humanity that relates to these early discoveries is also quite interesting.
• 1:16:29
  Yeah.
• 1:16:30
  Yeah.
• 1:16:30
  It's, it's absolutely amazing.
• 1:16:32
  Okay.
• 1:16:33
  This one S Subramanyam Chandrasekhar.
• 1:16:36
  The Thundershaker.
• 1:16:37
  Yeah.
• 1:16:38
  Yeah.
• 1:16:39
  Chandrasekhar's Radiative Transfer.
• 1:16:41
  This is a seminal textbook in astrophysics.
• 1:16:44
  It's talking about how radiative phenomenon goes through ionized atmospheres, stellar atmospheres, and,
• 1:16:52
  This thing is like an end-all, be-all for that subject.
• 1:16:56
  It's absolutely incredible.
• 1:16:57
  He uses principles of symmetry to talk about radiative transfer in astrophysics, which is very different from how normal astrophysicists used to do it at the time.
• 1:17:09
  Normal astrophysicists used to make a phenomenological model.
• 1:17:12
  They'd make some kind of model that would be like, oh, okay, so this is happening and this is happening.
• 1:17:16
  Here, he went through...
• 1:17:19
  like symmetry principles to be like, this needs to happen because of the symmetry of the stellar atmosphere, because of the symmetry of the geometry and things like that.
• 1:17:28
  It's a very physics-y approach.
• 1:17:30
  Now, I'm going to be honest.
• 1:17:31
  I've only read very small parts of this, but I asked my father, who's an astrophysicist and a big fan of Chandrasekhar, and he has like five or six textbooks.
• 1:17:42
  And this is on loan, by the way, from the Chowdhury family exhibition.
• 1:17:48
  So he wants it back maybe in like a year.
• 1:17:50
  It's on permanent loan.
• 1:17:52
  Yeah, it's on permanent loan.
• 1:17:53
  Yeah.
• 1:17:55
  So I asked him, you know, of all of the Chandrasekhar textbooks, which would you say is his most seminal work?
• 1:18:02
  And he said, radio transfer.
• 1:18:03
  And I'm like, okay, thank you.
• 1:18:07
  That's going in the FFP pod library.
• 1:18:09
  Absolutely legendary astrophysicist and physicist in general.
• 1:18:14
  So I'm glad that we have this thing here.
• 1:18:19
  All right.
• 1:18:21
  Next one.
• 1:18:22
  Gibbs.
• 1:18:24
  Yes.
• 1:18:24
  Elementary principles in statistical mechanics.
• 1:18:27
  This is the graduation of statistical mechanics into a formal field where we go from Boltzmann, Maxwell Boltzmann distribution, Raleigh-Jean's Law, all the way up to now Gibbs talking about
• 1:18:43
  Chemical Potential, talking about the Gibbs ensemble.
• 1:18:46
  This is the book that put American theoretical physics on the map.
• 1:18:50
  Okay?
• 1:18:51
  Now, he is from Yale University, but we'll forgive him for that.
• 1:18:56
  He still deserves to be in our library.
• 1:18:58
  And I had to do a lot of soul searching.
• 1:19:00
  Yeah, I plead the fifth.
• 1:19:01
  To really convince myself.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah.
• 1:19:04
  But Willard Gibbs, we covered him in the 250-year America anniversary.
• 1:19:10
  This guy was definitely a legend, and he put American science, American theoretical physics on the map.
• 1:19:16
  He completed the Gibbs ensemble to create all of the statistical mechanics that we know and love today.
• 1:19:24
  This is why chemists love statistical mechanics is because of Willard Gibbs.
• 1:19:28
  Or maybe they hate him.
• 1:19:29
  I don't know.
• 1:19:30
  But in any case, you can't deny that it's hella useful.
• 1:19:34
  I mean, it describes chemistry, right?
• 1:19:37
  We've remained number one in theoretical sense, and that may not continue to be the case unless we continue to invest in the hard and fundamental sciences.
• 1:19:50
  That's right.
• 1:19:51
  All right, the next esoteric edition, Albert Einstein, philosopher-scientist.
• 1:19:57
  This is actually a collection of essays about Albert Einstein
• 1:20:02
  by the preeminent physicists and mathematicians of his time.
• 1:20:08
  There are several biographies of Albert Einstein.
• 1:20:11
  I didn't want to include the biographies of Albert Einstein because they're written today based on stuff that people said.
• 1:20:18
  This is what people actually said.
• 1:20:20
  Okay?
• 1:20:21
  There's an essay from Niels Bohr talking about how much of a legend Albert Einstein is.
• 1:20:28
  There's an essay from Kurt Godel talking about how ridiculous Albert Einstein is.
• 1:20:32
  Wolfgang Pauli
• 1:20:34
  Arnold Sommerfeld, like all of the who's who of people who could say stuff about the GOAT and this is it, right?
• 1:20:45
  It's like imagine interviewing the star NBA players in Jordan's time and they're all talking about how ridiculous Jordan is.
• 1:20:53
  And how like Jordan is here and like we're a step below, right?
• 1:20:59
  That's this book.
• 1:21:00
  The football reference would be if you had today all the star footballers talking about Messi.
• 1:21:08
  You listen to Beckham, you listen to Neymar, you listen to Thierry Henry, Vinny, all these legends who in their own right have earned the right to be at their plateau.
• 1:21:17
  Yeah.
• 1:21:19
  Not quite the same.
• 1:21:23
  Kind of the same.
• 1:21:23
  Kind of the same.
• 1:21:24
  But Einstein, to me, feels like Messi is an alien.
• 1:21:29
  Yeah.
• 1:21:29
  He's absolutely an alien.
• 1:21:31
  Yeah.
• 1:21:32
  But he's still, he's still like, you know, in the same...
• 1:21:39
  region yeah yeah there's distance yeah there's distance but like cristiano ronaldo's like people say people argue yeah i think with einstein no one argues yeah no one he's the one he's the one in the 1900s he's the one he's the one yeah and so you know yeah um it's so word for word bar for bar what people actually say yeah yeah yeah it's like hear it from niels bohr himself
• 1:22:03
  About how ridiculous Einstein was.
• 1:22:05
  No rose-colored glasses.
• 1:22:06
  No postmodern interpretation.
• 1:22:08
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:09
  It's just, the guy's like, no, this is insane.
• 1:22:12
  How is this a single human being?
• 1:22:16
  All right, speaking of ridiculous single human beings.
• 1:22:18
  Yes.
• 1:22:19
  The greatest work in scientific literature.
• 1:22:23
  is Newton's Principia.
• 1:22:25
  And our library would not be complete without a copy of Newton's Principia.
• 1:22:30
  This is the beginning of the scientific revolution as we see it today, where we think of the universe as understandable.
• 1:22:41
  We think of the universe as something that mathematics can tackle and describe in a way that is unprecedented
• 1:22:51
  before him.
• 1:22:52
  Okay?
• 1:22:52
  He said that the same laws that apply on earth are the ones that apply in the cosmos, right?
• 1:22:58
  He said the same way that the apple falls from the tree is,
• 1:23:01
  is the same way that the moon falls towards the earth.
• 1:23:04
  It's not that he noticed the apple.
• 1:23:06
  He was like sitting under the apple tree and he's like, oh, I got hit by an apple.
• 1:23:09
  Apples fall.
• 1:23:10
  Everyone knows apples fall, right?
• 1:23:13
  Galileo described how all apples and like, you know, balls of lead will fall at the same rate.
• 1:23:20
  That wasn't the key thing.
• 1:23:21
  The key thing was the way that the apple falls is also the same way that the moon is falling.
• 1:23:27
  And if I were to include the three laws here,
• 1:23:30
  that he came up with, the fact that the moon is moving and it's just falling in the direction of the force.
• 1:23:36
  There's a force that is centripetal, that is 1 over r squared.
• 1:23:41
  All of those things.
• 1:23:42
  He also invented calculus, by the way, on the way to describe everything about the world.
• 1:23:49
  The calculus was a side hustle.
• 1:23:50
  It's like, I need something to explain it.
• 1:23:51
  Let me just invent.
• 1:23:53
  Yeah.
• 1:23:55
  And what I really love about this is, like, when he was describing, for example, Kepler's laws and...
• 1:24:03
  describing how the moon falls and how a comet goes around the sun he didn't actually use any calculus he just used geometric constructions like the stuff like the compass and needle stuff from way back in the greek days that's what he used to describe all of the mathematics because he knew the calculus was going to be this new thing and he didn't want to over index on this new thing that he invented right
• 1:24:27
  Lest people say, oh, you just made up some stuff.
• 1:24:32
  But here it's like, no, it's just geometry and the few rules that I made.
• 1:24:36
  It's absolutely beautiful.
• 1:24:37
  And the work that he did, he described Kepler's laws, which were established 50 years earlier.
• 1:24:43
  with just pure geometry.
• 1:24:44
  He's like, there's a triangle, and the triangle has this much, and that's why it's going to fall this much, and the areas are going to be equal to when it's closer and when it's farther away.
• 1:24:53
  Absolutely incredible.
• 1:24:54
  The genius of this guy.
• 1:24:55
  And he's another one of these Einsteins where all of his peers were like, what is going on?
• 1:25:01
  How is this a real person?
• 1:25:03
  Alien.
• 1:25:03
  Yeah.
• 1:25:04
  Joseph Bernoulli, the guy behind Bernoulli's principle, he was like, what is this guy?
• 1:25:11
  Which is, again, crazy to even say.
• 1:25:13
  There's a guy who has a thing named after him, and he's talking about Newton like, I don't know.
• 1:25:17
  I don't know.
• 1:25:19
  I don't know.
• 1:25:19
  I don't know.
• 1:25:20
  I just came up with one thing.
• 1:25:21
  He came up with everything.
• 1:25:22
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:23
  Out of whole cloth.
• 1:25:23
  Absolutely amazing.
• 1:25:24
  Yeah.
• 1:25:25
  Newton's Principia.
• 1:25:27
  The greatest work in scientific literature.
• 1:25:29
  And I will stand by that.
• 1:25:31
  Some of the most legendary additions to the esoteric collection.
• 1:25:35
  Yeah.
• 1:25:36
  in the library, our second shelf of three.
• 1:25:39
  Again, the library is a living document, and so we have three remaining books that we will go through as we place our esoteric collection onto the shelf.
• 1:25:51
  And if you wanted an excuse to migrate from being an audio listener to watching the podcast on video, coming soon to Apple Podcasts, but already available on YouTube and Spotify,
• 1:26:04
  we're having a great time today.
• 1:26:05
  You're missing how amazing these look and Krishna holding the book up so he makes sure it gets in the clip on Instagram.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:14
  No, I only did that for the second one.
• 1:26:17
  For longtime listeners of the podcast, you may have noticed the platonic solids as our sort of emblem, as our logo.
• 1:26:26
  You're going to see it in the top right corner of our videos.
• 1:26:31
  The platonic solids are something that we chose early on at the very beginning when we started this podcast.
• 1:26:38
  We were thinking about what is the symbolism that encapsulates what we're trying to do.
• 1:26:47
  The Platonic solids are introduced in Plato's Dialogues, which I have a copy of here.
• 1:26:53
  This next shelf, the third and final shelf, is going to consist of philosophy in a broad sense.
• 1:27:00
  And again, it's a living document, or it's a living library, so if you guys have other books that you want to include there, please let us know.
• 1:27:10
  But for now, we've got three.
• 1:27:11
  We're going to start with Plato's Dialogues.
• 1:27:14
  This is a copy from way back...
• 1:27:16
  that includes both Timaeus and the Republic.
• 1:27:21
  Okay?
• 1:27:22
  So, in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, he introduces these platonic solids, and he says that these are the shapes that are his answer for the question, what is the universe made out of?
• 1:27:35
  Now...
• 1:27:36
  I like that for the reason that he's even asking that question, right?
• 1:27:41
  It's kind of cool that someone's asking, what is the material, like, what's the stuff made out of?
• 1:27:48
  And he says, everything is made out of platonic solids.
• 1:27:50
  There's some hidden geometric building blocks that make up the world.
• 1:27:55
  And Timaeus is kind of like a first attempt at, you know, what we as physicists do.
• 1:28:01
  try to chase all the time, which is a unified field theory.
• 1:28:06
  Theory of everything.
• 1:28:06
  Right, a theory of everything.
• 1:28:08
  Well, Plato had his version of a theory of everything.
• 1:28:10
  I mean, it's wrong.
• 1:28:11
  It's not made out of shapes.
• 1:28:12
  But, I mean, if you ask string theorists, they'll say, yes, it's made out of shapes.
• 1:28:17
  It's just that the shape is in 11 dimensions.
• 1:28:19
  Okay.
• 1:28:21
  But the philosophy is there, right?
• 1:28:25
  Where, like, as physicists, we want to find unification.
• 1:28:29
  And I think Plato was...
• 1:28:31
  one of these philosophers that really suggested that very early on.
• 1:28:38
  What I also love about Plato is the fact that, you know, in his Republic there's the very famous allegory of the cave, which talks about how human perceptual senses have a limitation.
• 1:28:55
  Okay?
• 1:28:56
  The fact that, I mean, let's go over the allegory of the cave.
• 1:28:59
  The idea is that there's these philosopher kings or whatever that are creating real shapes, and the shapes are getting projected as shadows on a wall.
• 1:29:10
  And all we humans are doing...
• 1:29:12
  are looking at the shadows and thinking that they're real.
• 1:29:15
  This is how the matrix comes out to be, right?
• 1:29:18
  Where it's like all of our senses are actually fooling us into thinking that there's a hidden reality underneath.
• 1:29:23
  I mean, the deeper and deeper we go into physics, it turns out there's a lot of truth to that idea, right?
• 1:29:30
  The other reason why I love platonic shapes is just the geometry of it is so cool.
• 1:29:34
  The fact that there are only five of them.
• 1:29:36
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:29:37
  and no more, right?
• 1:29:38
  There are only five three-dimensional objects where every single face is exactly the same.
• 1:29:44
  You've got the tetrahedron, which is the triangle with a bunch of four equilateral triangles.
• 1:29:49
  You've got the cube, obviously, with square, square, square, square.
• 1:29:53
  You've got the octahedron, the dodecahedron.
• 1:29:56
  And Plato, in Timaeus, he...
• 1:29:59
  Constructed this mathematical cosmology where the physical world was consisting of these shapes, and each of the shapes had to do with an element that the universe is made out of.
• 1:30:12
  Like the tetrahedron was fire, the cube is earth.
• 1:30:16
  The icosahedron is water.
• 1:30:17
  The dodecahedron is the cosmos itself.
• 1:30:20
  And then there's like an ether, which is crazy that he thought of an ether.
• 1:30:23
  And then we borrowed it in the 1900s to describe how electromagnetism worked.
• 1:30:27
  Turns out that's not exactly true.
• 1:30:29
  But again, it's like, it's very cool to see like, you know, from 2000 years ago, 2500 years ago, this trail of intellectual thought still coming down.
• 1:30:39
  The idea that the universe is understandable, right?
• 1:30:42
  At a first principles level from building blocks.
• 1:30:46
  I think that's very cool.
• 1:30:47
  And so that's why Plato gets on our philosophy shelf.
• 1:30:53
  The inaugural selection.
• 1:30:55
  The inventor of the concept of Legos.
• 1:30:57
  Yes!
• 1:30:58
  And then one day the Fire Nation attacked.
• 1:31:01
  Yeah.
• 1:31:03
  For those Avatar fans, the last airbender Avatar in the audience.
• 1:31:08
  Yes, that's exactly right.
• 1:31:09
  So, you know, we're going from Plato, which is this idea that realism, a true reality exists in the realm of forms.
• 1:31:19
  There's this idea like the theory of forms.
• 1:31:22
  If you've seen that very famous painting, I think it's by Raphael, it's in the Vatican,
• 1:31:27
  where Plato, it's all of the Greek philosophers in a single painting.
• 1:31:33
  Actually, my favorite philosopher, Diogenes, who's just a troll, is like in a corner there.
• 1:31:38
  The funniest, my favorite, even though Plato's awesome, just from a personal perspective, my favorite philosopher is Diogenes, because he invented trolling.
• 1:31:49
  Um, there's a famous story where Plato said, I, I, I'm paraphrasing, but Plato said, um, how do you define a human being?
• 1:31:57
  It's a featherless biped.
• 1:32:00
  And then Diogenes got a chicken and plucked all of his feathers.
• 1:32:06
  And then came into Plato's lecture, and he was like, Behold, a human.
• 1:32:12
  Diogenes the degenerate.
• 1:32:14
  Dude, he's so degenerate.
• 1:32:16
  We love it.
• 1:32:17
  I mean, he trolled Alexander the Great.
• 1:32:19
  When Alexander the Great was like, what can I do for you?
• 1:32:21
  He's like, step out of the sun for me.
• 1:32:24
  You're in the way of the light.
• 1:32:25
  Like, to Alexander the Great.
• 1:32:27
  Like, this guy did not...
• 1:32:28
  care.
• 1:32:29
  So I love that about him.
• 1:32:31
  It's not someone that I, let's say, aspire to be.
• 1:32:34
  Sure.
• 1:32:34
  But he's still funny.
• 1:32:37
  Well, sometimes you gotta be the original contrarian.
• 1:32:40
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:41
  And he was the original.
• 1:32:43
  Anyway, so Plato, in this giant painting by Raphael about
• 1:32:49
  It's about all of the philosophers in the school of Athens.
• 1:32:55
  There's Plato and Aristotle, and Plato is pointing at the sky because he's saying that the true reality is in this world of forms, right?
• 1:33:03
  And we're just peons looking at, through our senses, some random nonsense.
• 1:33:09
  Yes.
• 1:33:09
  Okay?
• 1:33:11
  Some representation.
• 1:33:12
  Yeah, some representation based on our senses.
• 1:33:14
  But not the true form itself.
• 1:33:15
  Yeah.
• 1:33:16
  Well, he was kind of late to the party.
• 1:33:18
  Oh, okay.
• 1:33:19
  Because a thousand years ago, the Hindus... Of course.
• 1:33:24
  In the Upanishads wrote exactly this down, okay?
• 1:33:27
  The Upanishads are something that I grew up learning about.
• 1:33:32
  It's a school of...
• 1:33:34
  Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta, which is this non-dual representation of the world.
• 1:33:40
  The fact that consciousness and the material world are one and the same.
• 1:33:43
  They're not actually separate.
• 1:33:45
  This is very different from, I think, Western philosophy that talks about a creator having created creation.
• 1:33:50
  Yes.
• 1:33:51
  Right?
• 1:33:53
  You know, God said, let there be light, and there was light, and then it was all good.
• 1:33:58
  In Hindu philosophy, especially in Advaita philosophy, Advaita means non-dual.
• 1:34:04
  Advaita means two, and then A is like a non.
• 1:34:08
  There, it's one and the same.
• 1:34:10
  Like, the creation and the creator cannot be separated.
• 1:34:15
  Right?
• 1:34:15
  Right.
• 1:34:17
  I really like that, but that's from a more philosophical point of view.
• 1:34:22
  In the line of Plato and his idea of forms and the idea that the senses are limited, the Upanishads definitely talk about that a thousand years earlier.
• 1:34:33
  There's the Shvetashvatara Upanishad that talks about the origin of Maya.
• 1:34:39
  Maya is this idea that when we talk about the world as an illusion, it's...
• 1:34:47
  Maya is the illusion.
• 1:34:48
  That's the Hindu sort of word for it, the Sanskrit word for it.
• 1:34:52
  It's defining this as like a cosmic mechanism that turns some singular reality, right?
• 1:35:00
  A singular reality...
• 1:35:01
  into all of the manifestations that we see here today.
• 1:35:05
  And, you know, a lot of times, now this is where I'm going off on a personal limb, a lot of times people think of Hinduism as a polytheistic religion because we've got millions of gods and all this other kind of stuff.
• 1:35:16
  But, you know, if you go down to this level,
• 1:35:19
  It's this.
• 1:35:20
  Right.
• 1:35:21
  There's a singular reality that is getting manifested in all these sorts of forms, right?
• 1:35:26
  There's all these forms of the divine that you can worship and things like that.
• 1:35:30
  You don't have to worship.
• 1:35:31
  I don't know if I worship.
• 1:35:32
  But this idea that all of the manifestation and all of the richness that we see in the world is from a singular reality.
• 1:35:41
  I really like that concept.
• 1:35:43
  Not all of the gods have admin privileges.
• 1:35:45
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:47
  There is only one super admin.
• 1:35:49
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:50
  And he's like, he's...
• 1:35:53
  He's distributing.
• 1:35:54
  Right.
• 1:35:54
  Right?
• 1:35:55
  But all of the other ones are really just them.
• 1:35:57
  An extension.
• 1:35:59
  He or she or them.
• 1:36:00
  Yes.
• 1:36:00
  Like being, like, just like trolling.
• 1:36:03
  Yes.
• 1:36:04
  Yes.
• 1:36:04
  In the world.
• 1:36:05
  Yes.
• 1:36:05
  Right?
• 1:36:06
  There's another Upanishad that I really like, which is the Keno Upanishad, which maybe we'll talk about in some sense.
• 1:36:12
  That deals with the question of consciousness.
• 1:36:14
  The Keno Upanishad is really the who Upanishad.
• 1:36:17
  Like, who am I?
• 1:36:19
  Who are you?
• 1:36:19
  And what is all this?
• 1:36:20
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:36:21
  Right?
• 1:36:22
  It's talking about who is the seer behind the eye.
• 1:36:25
  The eye is like this instrument that is taking in photons and then creating an image.
• 1:36:31
  Yeah.
• 1:36:31
  But who is the thingy?
• 1:36:33
  And then interpreting it.
• 1:36:34
  Yeah.
• 1:36:34
  And then who defines how it's interpreted?
• 1:36:36
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:36:37
  Because the way you interpret and the way I interpret.
• 1:36:39
  Yeah.
• 1:36:39
  And what is the consciousness?
• 1:36:40
  Is it the same?
• 1:36:41
  Right.
• 1:36:41
  Right?
• 1:36:41
  Is it the same entity that is...
• 1:36:43
  I mean, I'm not going to say that I'm an expert in it.
• 1:36:46
  I'm still reading a lot, and I'm still trying to understand the whole thing.
• 1:36:50
  But it's crazy cool that, like, as humans, we've been thinking about this from different points of view, right?
• 1:36:56
  Plato's been thinking about the forms.
• 1:36:58
  The Upanishads have been thinking about the illusion.
• 1:37:01
  And now we get to modern quantum mechanics, right?
• 1:37:05
  What is real?
• 1:37:06
  With what is real.
• 1:37:07
  This is an amazing book.
• 1:37:08
  This was actually in one of the comments where people talked about what's a book that we should have.
• 1:37:13
  This is something that I already read, and I'm a huge fan of this book.
• 1:37:16
  Adam Becker, PhD in...
• 1:37:19
  astrophysics, I believe, absolutely wonderful exposition of the state of reality and that question of what is real in quantum mechanics.
• 1:37:29
  Is it the wave function?
• 1:37:31
  Is the wave function a real thing?
• 1:37:32
  If the wave function is a real thing, what the hell is a collapse of a wave function?
• 1:37:37
  How come it collapses for me?
• 1:37:39
  And then does it also collapse for you?
• 1:37:42
  But then you're collapsing at a different time.
• 1:37:45
  So how does your collapse know that mine collapsed?
• 1:37:47
  It goes over the Copenhagen interpretation.
• 1:37:52
  It then goes over Einstein's qualms with the Copenhagen interpretation in a way that is a lot more subtle than people give Einstein credit for.
• 1:38:01
  They say, oh, Einstein just didn't like quantum mechanics.
• 1:38:03
  Well, there's really good reasons why he didn't like quantum mechanics.
• 1:38:07
  And this goes into that.
• 1:38:08
  And then he goes into the bomb interpretation with the pilot waves.
• 1:38:12
  And he goes into the Bell's inequality that we covered in the America 250 episode.
• 1:38:18
  And he goes into some of the real implications.
• 1:38:22
  Also Everett's multi-worlds interpretation and the many-worlds interpretation where there's just one giant wave function.
• 1:38:29
  The reason why I like...
• 1:38:31
  Everett's many worlds interpretation is because, kind of selfishly, it aligns with my pre-existing philosophical theories that I've learned from the Upanishads, which is there is one reality, and we are all seeing manifestations of that one reality.
• 1:38:47
  Well, according to Everett, there is one universal wave function that we are all entangled with,
• 1:38:53
  And I am entangled with the observation.
• 1:38:56
  Like when I observe a photon here versus here, it's because I am entangled with the photon.
• 1:39:02
  And so I observed it here because the part of my wave function is entangled with observing the photon here.
• 1:39:07
  There's another part of my wave function that is entangled with the photon being observed over there.
• 1:39:12
  And that went over there.
• 1:39:14
  And I can never get access to it.
• 1:39:15
  And in that universe, Spider-Man is Tobey Maguire.
• 1:39:18
  And in this universe, Spider-Man is Tom Holland.
• 1:39:20
  Exactly, yeah.
• 1:39:22
  This is where Marvel and everything comes in.
• 1:39:24
  But yeah, the reason why I'm an Everettian and a many worlds person is because, you know, I come from the Eastern philosophy of like a one wave function universe, a one reality universe.
• 1:39:36
  And that comes from my reading of the Upanishads since I was a child.
• 1:39:40
  So these are the three that are going into the philosophy of...
• 1:39:44
  shelf.
• 1:39:45
  And there's only three.
• 1:39:46
  So if there's more, if there's some Buddhist stuff that aligns with that philosophy, I know there's some Mahayana Buddhism that goes into the world being an illusion.
• 1:39:55
  I'm not fully aware of Buddhist philosophy, but if you guys have some ideas, please let us know.
• 1:40:02
  If there's any other philosophical books that
• 1:40:06
  that you'd like us to put on the shelf, please let us know.
• 1:40:09
  But now I think you guys kind of have an understanding of what we're going for.
• 1:40:13
  And it's not that we're only going for this interpretation.
• 1:40:17
  If there are other interpretations that are compelling, I would love to read it.
• 1:40:21
  I'm not sold because I don't know what's going on.
• 1:40:23
  And that's being okay saying, I don't know.
• 1:40:27
  Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:40:28
  I don't know.
• 1:40:29
  This is a weird question.
• 1:40:31
  And it might be beyond science because the scientific method –
• 1:40:34
  relies on observation right and if what how do you rely on something that's unobservable yeah yeah and it's like i'm i'm i'm trying to question what the active observation is exactly so yes this is the last note i'll make on this what is real um for those who are uh
• 1:40:54
  interested in a visual a visual example of this idea of the everettian interpretation uh is the movie cloverfield paradox which got really bad reviews it's in the cloverfield yeah no i didn't watch it because it got i i loved cloverfield it got really bad reviews but it it dealt with this concept in a way that was intriguing and it had
• 1:41:21
  You know, it was sort of Marvellian a little bit, but it did it, you know, Earth was basically having a fuel crisis, an energy crisis.
• 1:41:32
  They built this giant energy producing apparatus in space and this universe and this universe bumped up against each other.
• 1:41:44
  Oh, interesting.
• 1:41:44
  Okay.
• 1:41:45
  And then...
• 1:41:47
  Hijinks ensues.
• 1:41:50
  And it really was an interesting way to visualize what would be the human experience.
• 1:41:58
  Because obviously we don't have it on a regular basis unless UAP are interdimensional.
• 1:42:04
  They may be interdimensional.
• 1:42:06
  Come on.
• 1:42:06
  It's the one-year anniversary episode.
• 1:42:07
  We're not going to not talk about it.
• 1:42:09
  I got it in here I think three or four times legitimately in this episode.
• 1:42:13
  Last thing I'll just note is when you're talking about the Maya as this concept, it's almost – it's convenient.
• 1:42:19
  The illusion.
• 1:42:20
  The illusion.
• 1:42:20
  The grand illusion.
• 1:42:21
  It's funny that we talked about the Mayans earlier in the Amazon story and kind of that word root came back.
• 1:42:27
  Yeah.
• 1:42:27
  At the end here, we are again at the two hour mark for those who are still listening, which apparently is many of you because the stats are telling us, especially on Apple Podcasts, that many of you are listening all the way through, which we are super grateful for.
• 1:42:43
  Thank you for making it through.
• 1:42:45
  We had a little bit more of a relaxed episode today, just kind of meandering through.
• 1:42:49
  Hey, we deserve it.
• 1:42:50
  It's been a year, okay?
• 1:42:52
  We wanted to sort of just enjoy for a second and not be totally over-analytical about the substance, but it really is a blessing.
• 1:43:02
  to be able to have so many of you all want to listen to these concepts, these ideas.
• 1:43:06
  Again, we really focus on frontier research and try to give the story arc, experimental design and an understanding of what are we actually talking about when we say we have a high temperature memorister or that we've discovered a dark matter halo or,
• 1:43:20
  or we model MOFs, organic frameworks.
• 1:43:27
  Yeah, MOFs.
• 1:43:28
  MOFs.
• 1:43:29
  Metal organic frameworks.
• 1:43:30
  Metal organic frameworks from the Nobel Prizes last year.
• 1:43:33
  We're going to cover the Nobel Prizes this year again.
• 1:43:35
  We have a great episode that I'm excited about.
• 1:43:38
  about the summer transfer window for American scientists.
• 1:43:41
  I mean, these are things that I think we find interesting and entertaining to know about, and it's great to share them with you all all the time.
• 1:43:50
  I will end with one last reminder.
• 1:43:53
  We're trying to build community this year, so please go ahead and head over to ffppod.com backslash survey, especially if you're still listening now.
• 1:44:01
  You are a part of the core audience.
• 1:44:03
  Want to know about who you are, what you want to hear about.
• 1:44:06
  We don't know what to do for a community.
• 1:44:07
  Should we do an Instagram group?
• 1:44:09
  Should we do a Discord, a TikTok group, a YouTube thing?
• 1:44:15
  Do we do something on our own?
• 1:44:17
  You know, where do you all live?
• 1:44:18
  Apparently, none of you are on X because we have no – none of you engage with us on X, which is fine.
• 1:44:24
  One less thing for us to manage.
• 1:44:25
  Yeah.
• 1:44:26
  But, you know –
• 1:44:27
  You guys always ask us questions, and we've been really focused on just making sure the show is produced.
• 1:44:33
  And I think now we're ready to try to figure out how do we make this a community of the curious and help kind of all of us connect and share in a way where we can build something powerful.
• 1:44:44
  Then it's individual parts.
• 1:44:47
  And with that, I think for the comment to leave in the comments if you've made it this far.
• 1:44:51
  is which book in the collection is your favorite?
• 1:44:54
  If you've already read it or you're most interested by it, let us know in the comments.
• 1:44:59
  I will leave the final word to our resident PhD before we wrap up this incredible episode 52, our one-year anniversary.
• 1:45:08
  How many weeks in a year?
• 1:45:09
  52.
• 1:45:10
  Yeah, we did it.
• 1:45:11
  We did it.
• 1:45:12
  I just have to say thank you so much to all of our listeners, to all of the community that is FFP.
• 1:45:20
  I really, you know, when we started Me and Lester a year ago, I don't think either of us had any idea of what this podcast would become for, like, us.
• 1:45:33
  It's really, like, kind of become a big part of our lives today.
• 1:45:37
  a welcome part of our lives.
• 1:45:39
  And the whole reason is because we've got a community of you guys trying to consume our content, share our contact.
• 1:45:48
  We really appreciate it.
• 1:45:50
  There's, there's no words to say, you know, just how transformative this whole experience has been.
• 1:45:55
  And we hope to continue this for many years to come.
• 1:45:58
  So please continue supporting us, giving us all of the shares, you know, talk, talk about us in your labs,
• 1:46:07
  Talk about us in your classes, in your workplace.
• 1:46:11
  I know there's a lot of you that just do random things.
• 1:46:14
  There's always room to talk about stuff that we cover in FFP pod.
• 1:46:19
  You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain, and we will be dying as heroes in the quest to continue to cover frontier and the history of science in a way that is accessible to everybody.
• 1:46:35
  I am Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD and my biffles,
• 1:46:43
  Krishna Chowdhury, we love you all.
• 1:46:46
  Thank you again so much.
• 1:46:48
  Oh, we didn't yet put these books on the third shelf, but you'll see them on the third shelf in the next episode.
• 1:46:54
  And we will see you all next week.