Latest / Drawn of History / Joe Rogan Experience _1233 - Brian Cox(M4A_128K)

Transcript

Joe Rogan Experience _1233 - Brian Cox(M4A_128K) · Drawn of History

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: That's very cool.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Three, two, one. Yeah, a guy named, well, his online Twitter,
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: or his Instagram handle is TGT Studios, and he makes these.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: I actually had one made for Elon. Elon Musk loved
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: it too, so we made him one. He made one
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: with this very beautiful red wood. What are those things
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: made out of, Jamie? Some diodes or something?
• 0:26
  Speaker 3: Nixie tubes.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Nixie tubes. They're old. Yes. Valve technology. Yeah, he has
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: to get them from Russia. He has them delivered over
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: from Russia. So they might have, like, listening devices implanted
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: in them as well.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: So, Brian, good to see you, man.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Great to be back.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, great to have you back. So tell me about
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: this tour that you're doing.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: It's a world tour.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Try to keep this sucker, like, off this from my face.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: There you go.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: How's that?
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: Perfect.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a world tour. It starts next week in
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the U.K., And then we go everywhere from the South
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Island of New Zealand all the way to the Arctic Circle,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: to Svalbard, which is the furthest north that you can
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: go on a commercial aircraft. In the middle, we're in
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the States for a month, mainly in May. And yeah,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: it's about cosmology and about the questions that cosmology raises.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: So if you're interested in the science of how did
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: the universe begin, even questions of what may have been there,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: is the universe eternal? Is there such a thing as
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: before the Big Bang? What is the future of the universe?
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: How does complexity emerge spontaneously in the universe? I mean,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: we sort of take it for granted that there's a
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Big Bang and it's all hot and there's just this
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: kind of hot glow of stuff. And out of that spontaneously,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: in 13.8 billion years, you get something like the Earth
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: with the civilization and life on it. So how does that,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: do we know anything about that? I mean, we do.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: I'm asking the question rhetorically. We know quite a lot
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: about it. So it's really about showing the size and
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: scale of the universe, but addressing those questions that I
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: think everybody has about what does it mean to be human,
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: this tiny little finite life that we lead in a
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: possibly infinite universe. How do you make sense of that?
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Well, it's incredibly exciting to me that there's a giant
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: audience for this and that what Neil deGrasse Tyson had
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: been doing and what a lot of public touring intellectuals
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: are doing now, they're doing these giant theaters now. And
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: these people are coming out to see these shows, and
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: we're realizing that there's, I hate to use the term
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: market for this, but there's a demand for this. And
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of people who are incredibly fascinated by this.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: And it's spreading information. It's spreading knowledge. Yeah.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: In the UK particularly. Wembley Arena, for example.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: You're talking about 10,000 people, 12,000 people in these shows.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: And you're right.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: They are coming. Although they're big shows, spectacular screens and
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: all that, they're coming for... To think that they're coming
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: to hear about what we know about the universe and nature.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: And I think, you know, I think I'm not surprised
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: people are interested because these are questions that everybody asks.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: You know, I mean, just why am I here? You know,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: everybody's asking that question. But my point is that there
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: is a framework. There's a framework of knowledge. There are
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: things we know about the universe. So it is true
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that science scientists are not going to tell you why
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: you're here. They're not going to tell you what the
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: meaning of life is. But there is actually, there are
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: things you need to know if you want to start
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: to explore those questions for yourself. You need to know
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: that there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: You need to know that the Milky Way galaxy has
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: got 200 billion stars. Most of those stars now we
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: know have planetary systems. We estimate there are something like
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: 20 billion Earth-like planets or potentially Earth-like planets in the
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Milky Way galaxy alone. So if you're asking questions about
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: what is my place in the universe, you need to
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: know those things, first of all. It's a framework within
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: which you can think.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: When you get to those numbers, when you're talking about
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: trillions and billions and all those zeros, my brain just
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: goes numb. There's this lack of comprehension that I'm well
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: aware of. Like those numbers get thrown about, I go, oh,
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: 200 billion. And it just.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: I think everybody does. I think every scientist that... No
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: scientist can picture that number. I mean, even the small number,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: 200 billion, which is the number of stars in one galaxy.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: And then when you say two trillion galaxies, I challenge
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: anyone to be able to picture that. But it is
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the reality that we've observed. We haven't counted all two trillion,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: by the way. We have a thing called the Sloan
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Digital Sky Survey, which maps the positions of galaxies. So
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: you know how much of the sky you've surveyed and
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: you know how many galaxies you've counted. And then you
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: can spread that across the wider universe. And you get
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: this picture of a vast and possibly infinite universe. We
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: know that the universe, or very strongly suspect, that the
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: universe is much bigger than the piece we can see.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: So we have good reason to think that's the case.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Whether it's infinite or not is another question. And then
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: that goes to your, can you picture infinity? Well, no
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: one can picture infinity. There's a weird thing as well about,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: you know, we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: So that's a measurement. So because we can measure the
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: speed that all the galaxies are flying away from us, essentially.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: And then you can run time backwards, if you like,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: to find out when they were all on top of
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: each other. And so it's quite a simple measurement. And
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: we've done that. So we say the universe began 13.8
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: billion years ago. But actually, all we know really was
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: the universe was very hot and very dense at that time.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: And we have some theories that the universe was in
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: existence before that and perhaps some sort of circumstantial evidence.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: And that means that actually the universe could have always
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: been there, eternal. And when I talk to people sometimes,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: they get a bit, some people get upset about that.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Some people would rather it had a beginning. And the
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: idea that it might have been around forever is more
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: frightening somehow than the fact that it began. And it's
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: interesting the way that people's minds work. What terrifies you
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: the most, an eternal universe or a finite universe?
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're both incomprehensible. The eternal universe, if there was
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: an eternal universe, does that negate the theory of the
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: Big Bang? Or does it mean that there's a constant
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: cycle of Big Bangs and then expansion and then recompression? Yeah,
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: it could do.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: So those theories are back in vogue. Some of those
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: theories are back in vogue again. So yes, some of
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: them say that there's a cycling universe. So the Big
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Bang is an event when space gets very hot and
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: very dense and filled with particles. And that may happen again.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Or some of the other theories, there's a theory called
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: eternal inflation, which is a theory that, and it's actually
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: the most popular theory, I think, at the moment, but
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: what happened, but why the Big Bang is the way
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: that it is. Because it's got some very special features,
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang, which we could talk about, but Inflation
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: is the idea that space, space-time, was around before the
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Big Bang, and it was expanding extremely fast. And it
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: was doubling in size, in the most popular of these theories,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: every 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.00000
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: with 37 knots, one of a second. So it's an
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: unimaginably fast expansion. And then the idea is that draws
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: to a close, so it quite naturally sort of dies
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: away and the expansion slows down, and all the energy
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: that was taken... that was causing that expansion sort of
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: gets dumped into space and heats it up and makes particles,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: and that's what we call the Big Bang. And those theories,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: the slight extension to those, say that that slowing down
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: just happens in little patches. So most of the universe,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: the overwhelming majority of the universe, is still inflating at
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: that insane speed. And just little patches stop, and they're
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Big Bangs. So you get multiple... universe. It's a multiverse.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: It's called the inflationary multiverse. And we are in one
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: of those bubbles. And that's one of the more popular theories.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: That's another one. I mean, right now, I'm aware of
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: what you're saying. I can sort of visualize it in
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: some sort of a graphic form, but it's incomprehensible. Like
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: my mind doesn't, it doesn't have the capacity to expand
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: the this sense of distance and size to that grasp?
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: Is this because of just the way we evolved? We
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: evolved here on Earth to deal with the space that's
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: in front of us, and now over the course of
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: industrial civilization and education, we're now grasping these concepts that
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: are so alien to the reality, the tangible reality that
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: we exist in every day?
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that's right. You know, even very simple things
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: like you go back to the Greeks. So Aristotle and
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: there's great, you know, very clever people. But they thought
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the Earth was at the center of the universe. Why?
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Because it feels like it's at the center of the universe.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: It feels like we're not moving. And that's quite a
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: deep point, actually, in physics. It's like, why is it
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: that we're flying around relative to the sun very fast
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: at whatever speed it is, 18 miles a second or
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: something like that? And the whole solar system is going
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: around the Milky Way galaxy and so on. Why is
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: it that we don't feel it? And the Greeks quite
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: naturally said, well, because we're at the center of the universe.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: They also said everything falls towards the earth. So therefore,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: the earth must be at the center. It's natural.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: And actually, it's quite a deep thought to understand why
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: it doesn't feel that we're moving. You have to go
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: all the way to Einstein, really, for someone to take
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: that very seriously. And what he said, actually, he said, well,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: there's a great little explanation in Stephen Hawking's brief history
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: of time about this. that the idea that you can't
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: tell whether you're moving or not demolishes the notion of
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: absolute space. So if we think about space, if I
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: said space to you or most people, I suppose, you'd
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: think the way that Newton did of a big box
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: within which things happen. And that's a natural picture of
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: space and the universe, isn't it? It's a thing in
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: which all the planets and galaxies are placed. But in
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: the brief history of time, Hawking says, well, imagine bouncing
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: a ball. So we bounce a ball on the table now,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a tennis ball. So I drop it and I catch
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: it again. So let's say I drop it and it
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: takes a second to bounce up. So in that second,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: the Earth has moved about 18 miles or so in
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: space around the sun. So you could ask the question,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: did that ball return to the same place in space
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: or not? And the answer is you can't answer it.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: It does from our perspective. But from the perspective of
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: someone watching the Earth go all the way around the sun,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: when I caught it again, it had moved 18 miles.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: And then from some other perspective, it would have done
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: something else. So the point is you can't say this
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: is a point in space. It came back to the
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: same place because that just depends on your perspective. It
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: depends on whether you're watching the Earth go around the
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: sun or whatever it is. So Einstein said that means
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: there's no such thing as absolute space, which kind of
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: follows if you think about it. But that's a difficult,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: it's a cool but difficult thought process.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: Right. I mean, that's essentially what's happening when you're on
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: a plane. I mean, if you're throwing a ball up
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: in the air and catching it on the plane, it's
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: happening on a much smaller scale, right?
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, you're flying at whatever, 600 miles an hour relative.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: To the ground. But it doesn't seem like it when
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: you're sitting there. Yeah.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And Einstein elevated that to a principle and said, if
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: you're moving at, if you're not accelerating, you're just moving
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: at a constant speed in a plane or now. I mean,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: that's essentially what we're doing now. We're moving around the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: sun at effectively constant speed, then you can't tell. So
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: there's no experiment you can do. We could look at
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: the decay of a radioactive nucleus or some electricity and
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: magnetism or bounce a ball, have a pendulum, whatever it is.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: And there's no experiment you can do to tell you
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: whether you're moving or not. Therefore, that concept has no
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: meaning because you can't measure it. And that's led Einstein
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: to relativity. So that's the basis of... general relativity, which
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: is our best theory of the universe.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: Now, why is it that we think that the known
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: universe is larger than we can observe?
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Well, one point is that it's expanding, and we always
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: see the same radiation out there, so the glow of
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang. But there are some deeper reasons. One,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: from the theory of inflation... the best way to explain
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: the universe, the properties that we see, is that it's
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: very much bigger than the piece we can see. So,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: for example, we measure space to be what's called flat.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: I don't even have to say what's called flat.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: It is flat.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: So if you imagine slices of space, let's imagine slices
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: of them at different times. So you just slice the
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: universe and say there's a big sheet like this table.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: There's a sheet of space and there's another sheet and
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: another sheet. And it can have a geometry, right? It
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: can be flat like a tabletop, or it could be
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: curved like a sphere, or it could be curved in
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: the opposite direction, sort of like a saddle or a bowl.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: And we can measure that. And when we measure it,
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: we see it's absolutely flat. And that's a very unusual
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: thing for it to be like. It requires, because what
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Einstein's theory says is that the shape of space, that
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: the curvature of space is determined by the stuff that's
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: in it. That's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity. Put
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: stuff in space and it curves it and bends it
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: and warps it and stretches it and so on. And
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: what we find is that there's precisely the right amount
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: of stuff in the universe to have a completely flat universe.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: And the explanation, the most favoured explanation for that is
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: the universe is way bigger than the piece we can see.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: And so it's like looking at a piece of the earth.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: If you look at a little one mile square of
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: the earth, right, then it's flat, right? You have to
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: look at big distances to kind of avoid the radius
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: of the Earth, bigger than one kilometer anyway, or one mile,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: to see that actually you're on a curved surface. And
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: that's one of the ideas about the universe and why
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: it appears to be the way that it is, because
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: it's way, way bigger. So we're just looking at a
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: little piece, and that's why it looks flat. And that's.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: One of the ideas. Now, when you say flat, like that...
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: My brain doesn't understand this because from our perspective, when
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: you look up at the Milky Way, you see all
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: these stars all over the place. So if you're saying flat,
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: like how much height and what are you saying in
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: terms of like the way to measure it?
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: The best way to think about it is not to
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: think of three dimensions of space because then we can't
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: picture it. But you can think of two, like this tabletop.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: And that's all right. We just forget the other one
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: for now. And so you know what flat is on
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: this table. I mean, you could define it. So you
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: could say, for example, that if I draw a triangle
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: on the top of the table, then all the angles
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: add up to 180 degrees. So that actually defines flat.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: If you did that on the surface of the Earth
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: with a big triangle, then the angles wouldn't add up
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: to 180 degrees. Or you could draw a circle and say,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: what's pi? So pi is the ratio of the circumference
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: of a circle to its diameter. That's only true on
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: a flat surface. It's different if the surface is curved.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: So you can define flatness.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: So when you're saying flatness, what is the height and
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: what is the width? Like if you're talking about it
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: as if it's a table, there must be some sort
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: of a, there's a dimension to it, correct?
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's a third dimension of space. But the
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: same applies. It's just a generalization of geometry then. So
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: the point is we can picture it in two dimensions.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: But you can draw, you can quite literally, you could
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: imagine sending light beams out. And we do this measurement, actually.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: We can look at the most distant light we can see,
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: which is something called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: if you imagine looking out, if you look at the
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Andromeda Galaxy, which we can see with the naked eye
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: here in LA, you can see that. It's the most
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: distant object you can see with the naked eye. And
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: it's about 2 million light years away or so. which
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: means the light took 2 million years to get to us.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: So it's a long way away, but it's very big.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: So as you look further out into the universe to
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: more and more distant galaxies, you're looking further back in
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: time because you look at something that's a billion light
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: years away, then the light took a billion years to
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: get to us. So you see it as it was
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: a billion years in the past. And we can actually
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: look so far out that we can see almost back
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: to 13.8 billion years ago, which is very close to
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang. So we can look to light that
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: began its journey before there were galaxies. And that's the
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: oldest light in the universe, which is, by the way,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: one of the pieces of evidence when people say, I
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: don't believe in the Big Bang. The answer is, well,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: you can see it. So it's just there. You can
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: see it. We have pictures of it. That light, it
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: turns out that there are sort of structures or ripples
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: in that light, which we can use as a ruler.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: So quite literally as a ruler on the sky. And
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: then because that light's been traveling through the universe, we
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: can see how that rule has been distorted as the
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: light has traveled through space. And so we can infer
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: whether space is flat or curved or how it warps,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: if you like, just from that measurement. It's a beautiful measurement.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Is it possible that in the future we'll be able
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: to see past 13.8 billion years?
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: Not with light.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: Not with light.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Because the picture is that before, it actually was released 380,000
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: years after the Big Bang. a very precise number you
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: might say how do you know that well before that
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: time the universe was so hot that atoms couldn't form
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: so you had a soup of electrically charged particles it
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: was just too hot for electrons to go into orbit
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: around nuclei so the universe was opaque to light so
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: you just couldn't it's like one almost like a big
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: glowing star if you like and then when it was
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: expanding it cooled past the point where the atoms could
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: form And at that point, it becomes transparent, really almost
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: instantly in a cosmic timescale. And so the light could
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: then travel in straight lines through the universe, and we
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: can see that light. So we see the light from
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: that time. But further back than that, it's opaque. So
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: you can't see past that with light. But you can
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: potentially with gravitational waves, which is this measurement that got
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago, the LIGO
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: experiment here in the United States. And that looks for
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: ripples in the fabric of space and time. And in principle,
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: if we had a big enough detector, you could see
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the ripples from the Big Bang. So you could take
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: an image of the Big Bang in gravitational waves, which
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: would be... But you need an enormous space-based detector that
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: we're not going to build anytime soon.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: Now, obviously, this is all through equipment and technology that's
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: been invented over the last few hundred years and perfected.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: Is it possible that things could get better and you
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: could get some ability to detect things even in a
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: far more distant way?
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, gravitational waves are incredible. I mean, Einstein
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: predicted them in 1915. Never thought they'd be detected because
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: you need such a high... You need lasers. They didn't
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: have lasers. But they think LIGO, this experiment, which is
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: half near Seattle in Washington State and half in Louisiana.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: So they've got two detectors. And they're basically... So I've had...
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: I don't know, three-mile-long laser beams that just sit and
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: measure the sort of stretching and squashing of space as
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: the ripples in the fabric of the universe go through.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: And what they've been observing are collisions of black holes.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: So you can imagine how extreme... like a colliding black holes.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: It's an incredibly extreme event. So it shakes the fabric
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: of the universe and the ripples come across the universe.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: And these laser beams, which are just basically rulers, can
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: detect it. They just sort of ring almost like, you know,
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: just vibrate as the ripples go through in space and time.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Kip Thorne got the Nobel Prize last year for this.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: He's one of the greatest living physicists. I once saw
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: him describe it as a storm in time. So you've
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: got this time storm. It's a beautiful image. So that
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: technology is incredible. Because the change in length, I can't
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: remember the exact number, but it's way, way, way less
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: than the diameter of an atomic nucleus. So the change
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: in length of the beams. It's tiny measurement, but we
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: can do it.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: So this collision of black holes, the idea that you
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: can detect that.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The paper, the first paper they published, They're two
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: black holes and they were about 30 times the mass
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: of the sun each. And they were orbiting each other
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: and spiraling in towards each other.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: And they accelerated.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: At one point, they were approaching each other at one
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: third the speed of light. And they accelerated to two
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: thirds the speed of light in a tenth of a
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: second and then hit each other. And the explosion, the
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: energy release was, I think I'm right, it was something
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: like 50 times the energy release that the power of
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: all the stars in the observable universe glowing. And it
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: was something like 50 times that amount of energy for
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: a tiny fraction of a second. But it's an unimaginably
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: violent event. And that's why our detectors can see the
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: ripples that that makes in space and time. And we detected,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: I can't remember, it's two or three of them now,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: and also two neutron stars colliding. We saw that as
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: well with it. So it's an incredible phenomenon. machine, which
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: is why it got the Nobel Prize.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: Now, there's a supermassive black hole at the center of
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: every galaxy. Yeah. But there's also other black holes that
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: aren't necessarily in the center of galaxies.
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: So these little ones, well, little, you know, a few
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: times the mass of the sun. And they're from collapsed stars.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: So they are stars at the end of their life,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: very bigger than the sun, more massive than the sun.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: But they run out of their fuel and they start
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: to collapse because gravity squashes them. And if they're sufficiently massive,
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: then there's nothing that can stop the collapse. And so
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: they collapse, as far as we know, to a point,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: essentially an infinitely dense point. We don't really know what happens,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: we don't know what happens right in the middle. But
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: they collapse to such an extent that there's a region
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: around it from which light can't escape. So nothing can escape,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: and that's a black hole.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: And what happens to them? Do they travel? Are they
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: moving through space?
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're still stars. So they're still there. They're surrounded
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: this region where if you fall in, it's called the
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: event horizon. And if you go across that horizon, then
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: you are going to the center. There's one way of
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: thinking about it, which is quite cool, which is that
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: the time and space sort of flip is one way
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: to think about it. So in the same way that
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: we are going into the future now, So we're going
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: to tomorrow. There's nothing we can do about it. We
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: are going to tomorrow. In the same way, if you
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: fall in across the event horizon of a black hole,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: you are going to the middle, the singularity, it's called.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: So that's your future. Every line of your future points
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: to the center of the black hole. So it's kind
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: of the ultimate of no escape, the ultimate prison. You're
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: going to get squashed to an infinitely density.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: So not every star becomes a black hole at the
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: end of its life?
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: No, because if something like the sun.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: We have a small star.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: It's quite small, yeah. And when it collapses, there's a
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: sort of a pressure, a force, if you like, which
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: is caused by the fact that electrons don't like to
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: be very close to each other. So it's called the
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Pauli exclusion principle. But essentially what happens is So as
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: they get squashed closer and closer together, they move faster
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: and faster to get out of each other's way, if
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: you like. And that makes a force which holds them up.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: And so that creates what's called a white dwarf star.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: So you can have a blob of matter. They're about
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: the size of the Earth, but they're about the mass
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: of the sun. And so that's for smaller stars. They
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: end up as these white dwarf things, which are very
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: dense objects. There's another version, which is called a neutron star,
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: which is the same thing. but for neutrons. And they
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: move faster and faster. So if it's massive enough that
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: it overwhelms the electron thing, then the electrons sort of
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: crush into protons and turn into neutrons. And the whole
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: thing starts again. And so a neutron star can be,
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: you know, at least one and a half times the
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: mass of the sun, let's say. But it can be about, what,
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: 10 miles across? So that's an incredibly dense ball of
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: matter held up by this The neutron's moving around. It's
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: got a fancy name. It's called neutron degeneracy pressure, but
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: that's what it is. But if you go even bigger,
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: then even that can't hold it up. And as far
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: as we know then, there's no known force that we
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: know of that can hold the thing up if it's
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: too massive. And so that's when it just almost winks
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: out of existence, if you like. It collapses and collapses
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: and collapses. And that's when you get a black hole.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: We try to put that into perspective. The sun is
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: a million times bigger than the Earth. Yeah. And this
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: neutron star is, would you say one and a half
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: times the mass of the sun, but 10 miles wide?
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And there's loads of those around. They're called pulsars.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: So we see those all over the place. The first
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: one that was discovered was called LGM-1 because they spin
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: very fast. And then it was called LGM-1 because it's
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: a very regular pulse and they thought it was little
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: green men. So they called it kind of jokingly little
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: green men one. And then- So, yeah, we've seen that
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: there's one called the Crab Pulsar, which is in the
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: Crab Nebula, which we saw the supernova explosion. So that's
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: when one of these stars explodes at the end of
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: its life and then collapses to form a neutron star.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: And we saw that in 1054 AD.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: Wasn't there some speculation that our solar system at one
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: point was a binary star system and that one of
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: those stars had become a dwarf?
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: Someone had read something about that in relationship to the
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: dense object they believe is outside the Kuiper Belt.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there's some evidence, there's a bit of
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: evidence that there's something out there, yeah. Because of the
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: periodic extinctions and things on Earth, you get periodic bombardments
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: from out in the Kuiper Belt. So, yeah, I think
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: one of the theories is that.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: Periodic extinctions.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, so for example, there have been mass extinctions
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: on Earth when a lot of the life died. And
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: we don't know what caused all those, but sometimes they're
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: impacts from space. That seems clear. And so, yeah, there
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: are theories that there's something orbiting out there which can
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: disrupt all these objects out in the Kuiper Belt that
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: sends loads of comets and asteroids inwards to the inner
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: solar system and can cause havoc. And so there's some
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: people look at those theories.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: It's one of those, it is a possibility that there's
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: something out there.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: The speculation was that there's something out there, correct me
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: if I'm wrong, something called a galactic shelf, like that
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: it gets to a certain space and it indicates that
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: there's something far larger out there?
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I think I don't know about the
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: stellar-sized or mass objects out there. I don't know that.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are some sort of suggestions there's another
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: planet out there, a big planet, for example. But you're right,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: there can be stuff orbiting way beyond the Kuiper Belt.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: And we're talking a light year away or something like
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: that now.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: It's interesting because it's incomprehensible, the distance, right, in our minds,
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: how far that must be out past what we used
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: to call Pluto. But for whatever reason, that becomes more
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: interesting because it's in our neighborhood. Whereas if they find
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: some distant star system and it might have a planet
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: that's similar to Earth That doesn't seem as compelling for
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: whatever weird reason.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I think the planets around Alpha Centauri
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: and Proxima Centauri, which are the closest stars, it seems
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: like there are planets around those now. And that was
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: interesting because we could conceive of going there.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: And there was this idea, Stephen Hawking actually and some
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: others before he died had this idea called Breakthrough Starshot,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: which is the idea to send a little probe out
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: to the Alpha Centauri system. And I think in their view,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Uri Milner as well, the entrepreneur, wanted to do that.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: And I think it's something like 100 years travel time
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: or something with our current technology. And they pointed out
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: that we don't do that now. We don't think 100
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: years in the future. But if you go back when
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: people were building cathedrals, people used to routinely start projects
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: that would take 100 years to bear fruit. And so
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: we could imagine going there. And that then becomes fascinating,
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: I think, because then you've got a solar system, another
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: solar system that you could go and visit conceivably.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: Conceivably. Yeah, I mean, what kind of speed are we
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: talking and how long would it take to get there?
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean, so it is... I think the...
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: The idea was about 100 years to get there. So
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: it's going four light years or so in 100 years
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: or whatever that is.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: So you would have to essentially do what they did
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: in the Ridley Scott alien film and put people into
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: some sort of a.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, a robot probe. It wouldn't be a crewed probe.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: Wouldn't be possible for a crew? Well, it is. But
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: you'd have to freeze them?
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's always... When you talk to engineers, you had
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Elon on, didn't you? Engineers always say... Physicists go, well,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: it's possible in principle, so over to you.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: You do it now.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: There are no laws of physics that tell us we
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: can't do it, so we just do it. That's a
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: weird relationship between.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: The physicists and the engineers.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: But yeah, in principle, you're right. If you can send
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: a little robot spaceship there, you can send a crude
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: spaceship there.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: I'm of the opinion as time goes on and augmented
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: and virtual reality gets better and better that it doesn't
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: really totally make sense unless we're talking about colonizing some place.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: to send biological life to another planet. If we can
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: send some probe that doesn't have to worry about the
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: biology being affected by radiation or by the speed of
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: travel or even by food, we can send something out
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: there and almost be there by virtue of goggles, virtual
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: reality goggles or something else. Yeah, you hear that.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: In science, at the moment, space science, we have this
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: debate a lot, actually, because, of course, space probes like
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: Curiosity that's on Mars at the moment, that's really cheap
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: compared to sending people to Mars. And so quite often
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: the scientists who want to find out about the world
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: will say, well, we should spend it on robots. We
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: shouldn't spend it on people. I think crude space exploration
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: is in some ways, I mean, it's clearly true at
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: the moment that humans can do more than robots can.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: So we can explore the place better.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: For now.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But I think it has to be, it's about
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: something else. I mean, it's about, and it's not only,
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: it's about living and working off the planet, which I
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: think is quite a persuasive argument, actually. We've already industrialized
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: near-Earth orbit. So it's already a multi-billion dollar industry, you know,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: communication satellites and weather satellites, GPS, whatever. We're already up there.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: And so learning to live and work in space is,
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: I think, a natural extension of our civilization. Plus the fact,
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: if you talk to Elon or Jeff Bezos, they point
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: out that the amount of resources available just slightly above
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: our heads is vast. And so I remember I talked
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: to Jeff Bezos actually once, and he thinks really simply.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: And he said, for example, in the asteroid belt, there's
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: enough metal, I think, to build a skyscraper.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: What is it?
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: Something like 800 stories tall and cover the Earth in it, right?
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: If you want.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: Now, we don't want to do that. But his point
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: was that the energy from the sun is all up there.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: The resources are up there. So you could almost imagine
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: trying to zone the Earth residential at some point in
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: the future to protect the planet and do your heavy
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: industry off the planet, for example. And it sounds like
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: science fiction, except that... Now, SpaceX and Blue Origin, those
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: people have got reusable rockets. So suddenly the economics become sensible.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: So I think expansion is good. And I think we
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: will expand. And I think we will expand outwards because
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: there's not much room left on this planet to expand.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: So I think we'll do it. But that's a whole
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: different idea. It's not about gathering scientific information. It's about
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: a frontier and all the benefits that come from operating
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: as a civilization on a frontier, which we've lost on
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: the Earth because there is no frontier left. And so
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: I like that idea that Mars, and when you talk
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: about Mars, especially with Elon, he's right that that's the
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: only place you can go. So there is no other
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: planet we can go to other than Mars. You can't
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: go to Jupiter or Saturn. You can't go to Mercury
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: or Venus. So if we want to go somewhere and
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: expand our civilization, it has to be Mars. And everything's
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: there that you need. So that's a different thing saying
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: you want to find out stuff. You're right. If we
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: just want to find out stuff, then you send robots.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: But as far as expanding actual civilization and bringing it
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: to another place, one of the things that freaks me
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: out is people get depressed about living in Seattle. I mean,
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: you're going to live on Mars? I wouldn't. I agree
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: with you.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: It'd be a horrendous thing. It'd be like the western frontier.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: It's the frontier when people cross the states.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: An incredibly dangerous thing to do.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: When people cross the states, they still got to Wyoming
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: and beautiful places and Colorado. Yeah.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: But it was hard.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't have wanted to do it.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: But once you got there, there's a river and there's
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: trout in the river and the meadows are green.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: I agree with you, right? I'm not going to go
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: there until there are vineyards and hotels and things. However,
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: it is true that there are people who like the challenge.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: And what is true about Mars, it's interesting actually because
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: we know something about the history of Mars now, quite
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: a lot about the history of Mars. And it's certainly
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: clear that there was water. Almost certainly oceans, rivers. And
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: that water is almost certainly still there. So I would
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: say certainly still there.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: Well, they have found large quantities of ice now, right?
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's certainly ice. There may even be pockets
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: of liquid water below the surface somewhere. So couple that
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: with all the minerals and the resources that we know
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: are there, and you have everything you need. So that's
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: the thing about Mars. It's quite nice relative to everywhere
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: else other than the Earth. You can't go to Venus.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: You'd just melt. It's, what is it, 400 and something
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: degrees and 90 atmospheric pressure. So Mars is quite nice,
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: but I wouldn't go there. I agree with you.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: What's the gravity of Mars in relationship to Earth?
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: It's, what is it, about a third, I think.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Third. Right, yeah, something like that. So it would still
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: have a significant weakening effect. Like if you went to
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: Mars and then somehow or another in the future they
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: were able to get back to Earth.
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: Your body would have a real problem with that, right?
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: It would, but there is still gravity. It's a bit
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: more than a third. I can't quite remember, but it's
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: something like that. But yeah, so there's still gravity. So
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: there's gravity. There's some protection from... You'd probably want to
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: live in the caves, actually, or something like that. Because
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: there's no magnetic field there. So it's quite a high
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: radiation environment, but not too bad. It's further from the
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: sun than we are. It's not too... There are places
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: on Mars, there's a very deep crater called Hellas, which
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: is a big impact basin. And at the bottom, it's
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: so deep, you could fit Everest in it. So you
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: put Mount Everest in there, the summit of Everest wouldn't
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: reach the rim of the crater. So it's something like,
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: I don't know what it is, seven miles deep or something,
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: six miles deep. So you could go there and at
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: the bottom, the atmospheric pressure is so high that you
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: could just about have liquid water. occasionally on the floor
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: of that crater. And it's quite warm sometimes. It can
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: be 20 degrees.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there, Celsius. Wow, that's better than Minnesota right now. Exactly.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: Minnesota's experiencing a serious cold front.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: That's right, yeah. So it can be warmer than Minnesota.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: So there are places where it's not horrendous on Mars.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: So the Martian is kind of realistic in that sense.
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: Sort of.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: Bits of it.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: Do you watch those movies and shake your head?
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: I like them.
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: Do you?
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: I like science fiction.
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I don't sit there. I grew up with
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: Star Wars. That was when I was nine years old
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: or something like that.
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: It's funny watching it now.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not having this.
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: I had an argument.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: With Neil deGrasse Tyson, not an argument, but a debate
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: with him about lightsabers once because I claimed that they're physically,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: in principle, they're possible. And he was trying to say
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: that they aren't.
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: But they are. Would it have to loop back around
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: because the light's not continuing? The fact that it goes
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: to a certain distance and pauses?
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: We'd have to have a mirror or something, I guess, yeah.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Something would have to be at the end of it, right?
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: That's true. So it would be a different kind of light.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: The only point I was making is that photons, particles
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: of light, can bounce off each other. So we see
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: that in really high-energy experiments in particle accelerators, we can
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: collide photons together. So my point was a bit of a,
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: pedantic physicist one but it is true that light can
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: bounce off it can hit light but very very.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: High energy but when they press that button it goes
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: to a certain.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: Distance that's engineering I agree with you the distance thing doesn't.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: Work there's no mass to it so as you're swinging
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: it around you wouldn't have the leverage of a long
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: thing so why not make it really long Because it
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: wouldn't be difficult to swing around. Like you could stab
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: someone with a lightsaber a mile away.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: That's true.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: That's just a laser, isn't it? Yes.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: Like why make it so short?
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: It's ridiculous.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: You have to swing. You have to be close to
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: hitting a person with it. That's a silly design.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: You are picking holes correctly in the engineering part of mine.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: The only point I was making is the physics is that,
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: which I think is quite interesting, is that light can
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: bounce off light. Yes.
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: But there would have to be something that causes it
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: to stop at the very end.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah. yeah yeah which would be you're right it'd have
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: a mirror but it wouldn't look cool would it if
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: there was a no kind of thing with them well.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: What drives me crazy about star wars is not the
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: lightsabers it's the lasers when they're shooting the guns i'm
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: like why can i see that when i can't see
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: bullets This is supposed to be way faster than a bullet.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Why is it easy to see this? Because it's like,
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: you can duck. You can get out of the way
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: of those things.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: They're really slow, aren't they?
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: They're so slow. I would be so angry. I'd be like,
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: this is so dumb. I could go warp speed in
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: this Millennium Falcon and travel the speed of light, but
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: for whatever reason, these lasers are so slow that you
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: could duck out of the way of them. That's so dumb.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: And it's not only Star Wars. It's everything. Every single
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: film does that. Yeah.
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Well, it's like films like, also, I worked on one
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: of these films years ago, Sunshine.
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, that was a great movie. Very, very underappreciated movie.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: I think it's a brilliant film.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: But in that, so they asked me, and Danny said,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: I want to do it right, so I'll do the
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: spacecraft without any sound, so when it's traveling through space,
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: it'll be silent. And it looks shit. When you watch it,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: it's the same when you try and film astronauts, and
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: you And they're in zero G and they always move slowly.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: It's like, why?
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: You're right. You'd be able to move as fast as
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: you want.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: But it looks silly. So there's kind of a, I
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: suppose it's what audiences have got used to over the years.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: And so in the end, you're very, and the spacecraft
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: goes fast. Apart from 2001, which didn't do it. It
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: was silent in 2001.
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: Well, Kubrick was a stickler for science and for, he
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: was apparently, he would do complex mathematics in his spare time.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: What a fascinating guy that must have been.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I read that they just, someone just found an interview,
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: didn't they, the other day where he explained the ending
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: of 2001.
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: I didn't see that.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: I saw it yesterday, actually. And it was kind of
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: a really simple version of it. He just said, well,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: the super intelligent beings take him in and put him
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: in a zoo, basically, and watch him grow old and
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: then send him back to the earth as a super being.
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: That's the worst explanation at the end of 2001 I've
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: ever heard. But it was Kubrick's. That's what Kubrick said.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: So he falls into the monolith. They just put him
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: in this room, which is kind of a bad version
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: of a French chateau or something. Watch him grow old
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: and then send him back to the earth as a
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: super being.
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: Wow. Okay.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: That was Kubrick's version.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: Strange. It's a weird genre, right? Because sometimes people get
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: things right. Like, didn't H.G. Wells predict a significant amount
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: of scientific inventions in the future?
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: Well, there was his... I mean, it depends which one,
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: doesn't it? There was a moon one, wasn't there? He
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: did a journey to the moon. I mean, his time
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: machine is not... Right, that one hasn't.
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: Really worked out yet.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: But yeah.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: I always liked science fiction. I like Arthur C. Clarke
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: a lot. Because I think it is, you're right, it's
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: a form that you can let your imagination wander and
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: address things without restriction, I think.
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: Did you like the Alien series? I loved it.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: I saw Alien when I was at school. It was 1979.
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: And we had a school film club. And in the 70s,
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: they weren't like they are now. So the first films
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: they put on, the three films, I was 11. And
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: it was Alien, Apocalypse Now, and Life of Brian.
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: So that was my introduction to cinema. Wow.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: Well, those are three great choices. But I feel like
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: Ridley Scott's original Alien is probably one of the greatest
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: horror science fiction movies of all time and one of
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: my all-time favorite movies. But I really like the newer
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: ones as well. I like Prometheus, and I really like Covenant,
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: the last one.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Prometheus.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah, it's not the best one. I
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: kind of like what they're trying to do with it,
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: the whole idea about the engineers coming back in time.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: That's why I was disappointed with it, because I thought
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: the opening is brilliant, and I thought this is just
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: going to be brilliant. And then I thought it just
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: lost its way, and it was a disappointment because it
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: could have been so brilliant.
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, I agree with you. Yeah, the beginning was fantastic.
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: But I think Covenant was more exciting. Well, it's also preposterous. Like,
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: if you went to another planet, Like the last thing
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: you'd be doing is just breathing in the air, right?
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, we'd have to be really– if there was
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: a life on the planet, we'd have to be really careful, A,
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: not to contaminate, but B, not to be contaminated, right?
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, there's also– I mean, you know, the
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: other thing in science fiction films is gravity because you
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: always– even in Alien, you always just say the spaceship's
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: got gravity. Again, there's only 2001 where everybody floats around.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: Because– Or has a spinning thing. Right.
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: The spaceship has gravity. And then when you land, the
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: gravity is exactly like Earth.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: Perfect. Yeah. But it's... No. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I mean,
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: what are the odds that you would find a planet
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: that is exact... Like, even if a planet was one
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: and a half times the size of Earth, it would
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: have far more gravity. Right? And that's really common for
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: a planet to be, like, just a little bit bigger. Yeah.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: And then we would be like, fuck. Everywhere we'd be walking,
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: we'd be getting crushed. Right?
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: I agree with you.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: But I suppose that's not the point. It's about ideas,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: isn't it?
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: Yes. And, you know, this whole idea where you're just
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: supposed to let it, let the, you know, let the
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: story play out.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, Sunshine was, you know, the premise is silly.
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's the premise is the sun is dying
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: and we're going to go and fix it.
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: So both of those things, it fails on its first
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: line in terms of realism. But the idea is that
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: it's not about that. It's about the sun as a
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: god in some ways. So it's about our response to
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: the power of nature. And it's about deifying this thing
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: and worshipping it and how ultimately you go mad. If
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: you remember the film, there's Pim Bakker, who's the first
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: captain that went to the... Captain the first mission to
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: go and restart the sun, which is the mad bit,
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: but then became a religious fundamentalist, essentially, and then decided...
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: it's a fascinating idea that he decides to bring meaning
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: to his life. He will become the last, last man,
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: the last human. And so he wants to be the last.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: He wants the sun to die and he wants it
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: to take humanity with it. And he decided to make
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: that happen. So he stays there waiting for the second ship.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: And I like those ideas that, you know, that what,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: what's your reaction to the power of nature? This happens in,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: One of the things I do in my shows, I'm
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: not being a commercial person, I've just thought of it.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: One of the great things about cosmology is that it
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: is terrifying in the truest sense of the word. I mean,
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: we talked a bit about the size and scale of
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: the universe and black holes colliding and those things. You know,
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: it is very frightening, but also the, I think the
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: act of trying to understand our place in nature and
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: the size and scale of the universe and our a
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: tiny presence within it, is valuable. So that you can
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: be terrified, but also inspired and interested. And it's part of,
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: if you want to find, if you want to ask
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: questions about what it means to be human and means
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: to be alive, then I think you find the answers
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: in confronting that reality, which is that we live in
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: a terrifyingly vast universe, the powers in the universe that
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: we cannot comprehend, as you said. But that's what you've
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: got to face because that's reality. So you can't hide
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: your head in the sand and just duck it. And
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: it can send some people crazy.
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: I'm sure. And it is really interesting that we need
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: that suspension of disbelief in order to sort of make
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: a film on space. You almost have to go, well,
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: this isn't really how it would be, but this is
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: how you have to make it in order to fit
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: it into a two-hour movie.
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And then the film... as with Sunshine becomes about
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: then you can have the film about something.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: Else yes because it's not really about that well did
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: you like Event Horizon yeah I did actually I thought
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: that was quite a cool film ridiculous I haven't seen
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: it for years I always wanted to ask about their
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: concept of propulsion that you almost like space would be
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: flat you would fold space over and you would intersect
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: those two points and you would be able to travel
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: vast distances instantaneously right I'm doing a terrible job of
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: explaining I'm sure but Is that a concept that people
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: have actually considered?
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you can, in general relativity. So Einstein's, I should
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: say what it is, Einstein's theory of general relativity is
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: our best theory of space and time. And so it
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: really is, as we've talked about before, it's you imagine
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: space and time as a sheet. Just imagine it as
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: a thing, sort of literally a sheet surface. And all
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: the theory says is that if you put matter and
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: or energy into that then it curves it and distorts it,
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: and it can stretch it and make it shrink. And
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: so it's the response of space and time to matter
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: and energy. So the simplest version would be the sun.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: So you put a big spherical ball of stuff in there,
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: and it warps space and time such that the nice
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: straight lines, something just traveling, minding its own business, through
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: that warp space turns into an orbit.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: And that's why you can actually kind of see things
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: that are behind the sun?
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So light bends around the sun because it's just
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: traveling through the curved space. The earth goes around the
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: sun because it's just rolling, minding its own business through
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: the curved space. So an example would be, you might say, well,
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: how does curved space, how can that give rise to
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: something that looks like a force, which is gravity? So
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: the best analogy I know of is to think of
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: walking around on the surface of the earth. So if
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: you stand on the equator of the earth, with your friend,
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: and you say, we're going to walk due north. So
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: we're going to set off, let's say we're a thousand
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: miles apart on the equator and we're going to walk
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: due north. What's going to happen? So you walk in
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: straight lines. You don't change direction. You don't do any accelerating.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: But the straight lines are the lines of longitude on
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: the surface of the Earth. So as you go further
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: and further north, you get closer and closer together. And
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: if you carry on to the pole, you bump into
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: each other. But nothing's happened. No one's There's no forces acting.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: It's just that you're moving on a curved surface, and
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: so you get closer. And that's basically Einstein's theory of
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: general relativity. Now, why did I start talking about that?
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: Event horizon, the idea of folding. Oh, yeah.
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: So all you have to do to those folded kind
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: of geometries is you have to try and specify where
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: you would put the matter and what kind of stuff
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: you'd put there to make the geometry fold in that way.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: And you can do it so you can write down
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: that geometry. It's called a warp drive geometry, I think
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: it's called. It's in textbooks. So you can do that
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: to have a warp drive. The question becomes what sort
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: of stuff would you have to actually put into the
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: real universe to make it warp in that way? And
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: it always, it usually turns out that it's the kind
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: of stuff that doesn't exist, right? But it has properties.
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: It's that sort of matter or sort of energy. that
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: has properties that do not exist in nature as far
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: as we can tell. But you can still write the
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: geometry down in Einstein's theory.
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: So if you had the significant force or mass or
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: whatever it is, if you had that stuff that doesn't exist,
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: it is a concept that.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so the geometry exists. So you can do it
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: and you can do the calculations and you can see
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: the warp drive. You can construct wormholes that connect distant
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: regions of the universe, which you could use as time machines.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: You can do all that in the theory, but in nature,
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: you'd have to have the right stuff to do it.
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: But that stuff is not real.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: That seems to be the case.
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: As far as we know. Yeah. Now, what would have
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: to happen? You would have to have enough power or
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: mass to be able to fold those two things together?
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: It tends to be weird stuff, like stuff that has
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: a negative pressure or something like that. So stuff that
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: has physical properties that are just bizarre. and that no
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: matter or energy that we know of in the universe has,
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: to make the geometry happen.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: But it's conceivable in theory that this could exist, even
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: though it doesn't.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: It's a debate, ultimately. So wormholes is a good example.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: So that would be, quite literally, we talked about the
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: surface of the Earth. So you fly to Australia from LA,
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: and you have to go quite a long way around
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: the edge of the Earth. Or you could tunnel straight
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: through and get there quicker, right? So that's a wormhole.
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: Jamie's got a little graphic up there on the screen
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: for us. There it is.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: There's a wormhole. So you could go all the way
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: around the edge, or you could take the shortcut. So
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: you can do that in Einstein's theory. You can write
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: down that geometry, and there it is. So the first
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: question is, can you make it? And as we said,
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: we don't think that stuff exists. There's a second set
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: of theoretical bits of theoretical work, which if you had
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: a wormhole... then what would happen if you tried to
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: travel through it? And what seems to happen is that
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: they become unstable the moment anything tries to go through.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: So you get kind of a feedback of stuff going
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: through and through and through and through. And so it collapses.
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: And there's a great book by Kip Thorne, actually. We
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: just mentioned him. He got the Nobel Prize last year
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: for the gravitational waves. And he wrote a brilliant book,
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: I think it's in the 80s, called Black Holes and
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: Time Warps, where he talks about... The answer is we
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: don't fully know, but most physicists think that even if
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: they existed, they would be unstable. And as soon as
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: you even try to transmit information through them, send a
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: bit of light through, then there would be this sort
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: of feedback and they'd collapse. And ultimately, the reason we
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: don't really know absolutely is because you need what's called
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: a quantum theory of gravity, and we don't have one.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: So we don't have the theoretical tools to be absolutely sure.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: that these things would be unstable or don't exist in nature.
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: But we strongly suspect that they don't. If they did,
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: you could build a time machine. So Stephen Hawking wrote
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: a paper called The Chronology Protection Conjecture. And conjecture is
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: the important word. So the conjecture basically was that the
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: laws of nature will be such that you can't have
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: stable wormholes and you can't build time machines.
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: And if you send something through it, it would destabilize it.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: And if it didn't destabilize it, how would your physical
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: body deal with the stress of that?
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: Well, it doesn't have to be. You can build them.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: That's called the tidal gravitational force. So it's the difference
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: in gravitational pull across your body, which is one of
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: the things that gets you if you fall into a
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: black hole. So before you actually get to the singularity,
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: you can get... It's called spaghettified. It's a technical word.
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: And it's just like the moon's tidal effects on the Earth,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: which are... quite small but they still raise tides on
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: the oceans so that can be a if you think
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: about something like a black hole that can be a
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: massive difference in gravitational pull from your head to your
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: feet and so it can stretch you out and so
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: but you can with wormholes you you can you can
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: write the geometry down in Einstein's theory such that you
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: could go through so so you don't have to be
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: destroyed or anything weird happen to you.
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: Would you have to have some something protecting you some
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: force some some sort of a.
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: You just literally you fall through i mean so so
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: you know if they were if they would exist you
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: just you just go through you sit in a little
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: spaceship but you you you wouldn't there's nothing inherently in
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: them that says that you would be ripped apart or
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: anything like that but.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on on alien life on life
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: outside of this planet Is it something you think about?
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there must be. Even in the solar system,
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: I would not be surprised if we find microbes on
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter or
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: Saturn where there's liquid water.
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: Like Europa. Yeah.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: And the reason is, if you think about, the reason
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: I think that, and it's a guess, is because if
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: you look at the history of life on Earth, then,
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: so Earth formed, and it was just a, there was
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: no life. It was a ball of rock. And almost
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: as soon as it cooled down, we see evidence of life.
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: So certainly 3.8 billion years ago, possibly even further back
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: than that, we see evidence of.
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: Life on Earth.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: So somewhere along the line, geochemistry, active geochemistry became biochemistry
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: on Earth. And we have some idea that if you
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: get gradients of temperature and acid and alkaline and the
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: conditions that are naturally present on the surface of oceans,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: then complex carbon chemistry spontaneously happens. So we know that life,
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: almost certainly we know that life began on Earth. I mean,
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: the other option is it came from space or something
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: like that, but it probably didn't. It probably began on Earth.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: So that means that at least here, that happened. And
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: we know that the conditions that led to the origin
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: of life on Earth were present on Mars. 3.8, 4
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: billion years ago. And we know that they're present on
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: Europa today. So I don't see that there's anything special.
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: Life is just chemistry. And the idea that geochemistry becomes
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: biochemistry is not fanciful because it happened here. So I
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: think that given the same conditions, it would be surprising
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: to me if the same thing didn't happen in that
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: life begins. So that's one of the To test that
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: is one of the great frontiers of science now. It's
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: one of the great challenges, which is why, another reason
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: we're interested in Mars, because we know those conditions were there.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: We know there were what's called hydrothermal vent systems on
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: the floors of oceans on Mars 3.8 or 4 billion
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: years ago. So it would be good to know what
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: I've said is right. And the way we find out
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: is to find life or evidence of past life.
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: Are you aware of the speculation that was going around?
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: How recent was it that Occupy thing, the octopus eggs?
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: There was a group of scientists that were speculating that
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: it's possible, you know, panspermia, the idea of panspermia, that
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: it's possible that Occupy had come from somewhere else. Some
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: frozen eggs had actually come from somewhere else and landed
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: on Earth. And these were like legitimate scientists that were
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: contemplating it, not morons.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: Have you seen this? No, I didn't. So panspermia doesn't
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: have to be unlikely. I mean, for example, you might
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: have seen the other day we found an Earth rock
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: on the moon. Well, it's back on Earth now because
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: the Apollo astronauts brought it back, didn't they? It's four
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: billion years old or something like that.
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: One of the oldest rocks ever found.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: So we know that material gets transferred between planets. And
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: so it's not inconceivable that microbes could survive that journey.
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: We know that microbes can survive in space. for example.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: So that isn't mad. It's probably unlikely, but it's not mad.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: But with the octopus, I hadn't heard that. But the
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: thing is that the octopus is still extremely similar biologically
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: to us. I mean, the differences are negligible. So it's
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: still got the same energy system with the single ATP
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: and DNA and all that stuff. It's all very, very similar.
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: It was something about RNA and DNA. Did you find
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: that article?
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: I'm looking at a different one from a different website.
• 59:36
  Speaker 3: It's about the same thing. It has to do with
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: the Cambrian explosion. And there were 33 authors on a
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: paper that got published in The Progress in Biophysics and
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: Molecular Biology that talked about this possibility. There are other
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: people that disagree with it, though.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, I suppose I haven't seen it. So I
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: think it's unlikely because the octopus is extremely similar to us.
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: So that suggests a common origin to me. That I
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: suppose the counter-argument you could advance would be there's only
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: one way to do life. So you could say that
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: actually given– because the laws of physics and chemistry are
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: the same everywhere. So maybe DNA is the only way
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: to do it. So that's the way it gets done.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: Which is why they're so similar to us, although so
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: alien as well.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're not though. That's the thing about– that's why
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: I'm surprised about it. Because they're not that alien. They're
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: very similar.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: Well, in their abilities. I mean, their ability to transform
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: their outer texture and their color almost instantaneously. Oh, yeah.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, they have incredible camouflage abilities that really don't
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: exist in the mammalian world.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but on a cellular level. You look at an
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: octopus cell under a microscope, and you wouldn't be able
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: to tell the difference between an octopus cell and a
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: human cell.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: So the only way that that would make sense is
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: if all life, comes from basically the same kind of
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: building blocks and just varies depending upon the conditions and
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: where it takes place.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing, but yes, that must be the only way
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: you could sustain that, given that they're so similar to us,
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: because they really are. Biochemically, is that, that's the only
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: way it can be done, given the given the building block,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: the toolkit, the laws of nature and the elements and
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: so on that we have in our universe.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: We have so many different life forms on our planet,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: but if we found anything that's remotely similar to what
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: we have here on Earth on another planet, it would
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: be such an incredible discovery. Like if we found a
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: frog on the moon, I mean, the world would stop, right?
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: I'd be very surprised if we found a frog on
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: the moon.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: But I mean, if we found anything anywhere that is
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: in any way similar, an insect on Mars.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: Well, this is.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: As I say, it'd be micro, I think it'd be
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: single-celled things. Remember, I mean, you mentioned the Cambrian explosion.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: So that is, what we do know about Earth is
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: that although life began, let's say, 3.8 billion years ago,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: it wasn't until around 600 million years ago or so,
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: or maybe at most 700, that you see any complex
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: multicellular organisms at all. So for something like 3 billion years,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: it was single-celled, alone. And that's one of the reasons
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: why I would guess, if I had to guess, I
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: would say that microbes would be common because life began
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: very quickly on Earth. And I wouldn't be surprised if
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: we find it on Mars. But complex life, multicellular life, insects, plants, intelligence,
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: I would guess would be very rare because it took
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: so long on Earth to get there. I mean, just slime.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: Three billion years of slime was that... That was it.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: What happened? How did it go from slime to giraffes?
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: It did it very quickly once it got going. And
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: it's one of the great unsolved mysteries in biology. One
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: thing that is true is that we seem to be,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: all complex creatures seem to be, we're called eukaryotes, right?
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: Which is cells with a cell nucleus and all that
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: kind of stuff. And they look like they're the merger
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: between two simpler life forms, bacteria, and a thing called
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: an archaea, an archaean. So it looks like somewhere in
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: 2 billion years ago, whatever it was, in some ocean,
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: the bacteria cell got inside the archaean and survived as
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: a symbiotic organism, essentially, and then somehow, unbelievably, managed to
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: reproduce and replicate in that configuration. And that does seem
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: to be the origin of all complex multisalar life on Earth.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: So it's called a fateful encounter hypothesis. And if that's true,
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: then it's just a bit of luck. And it happened once.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: And that's why we're here. Now, when you.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: Consider, like, how many billion Earth-like planets did you say
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 2: exist just in our solar system alone?
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: In the galaxy, 20 billion, something like that. So one
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: in 10 stars.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: So the odds of complex life out of our incredibly
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: fortunate situation, but the odds of that occurring on any
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: of these billions of other planets that exist?
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: We don't know, but let's say the earth is, let's
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: say it was on the fortunate side. So, so we're,
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: we're talking about give or take four billion years, right?
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: From the origin of life to now. And we have
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: a civilization now and we've had it, our species has
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: been around what, a quarter of a million years or something.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: So it's just now basically. So let's say 4 billion
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: is on the fortunate side. Let's say that it was
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: double that or triple that on the average. Suddenly, that's
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: the age of the universe, right? That's a third of
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: the age of the universe it took. So how many
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: of those worlds have been stable for three or four
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: billion years? That's quite a tall order, actually. It looks
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: like our solar system might be quite unusual in that
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: respect because the planet's got to remain stable in a
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: stable orbit. The stars got to remain stable, at.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: Least in our solar system.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: The large moon helps us. Jupiter plays a big role.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 2: Takes the asteroids. Yeah. Sucks them in.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: And that, you know, there's a thing, there's a theory
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: called the Grand Tech Theory, which is, so it's very
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: hard to explain the evolution of our solar system. So
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: when you do computer models of solar systems, you don't
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: tend to get four rocky planets to close to the
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: sun and four big gas giants further out. And one
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: of the current best theories, and I say this because
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: it shows you how lucky we might be, is that Jupiter,
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: they tend to form these big gas giants and migrate
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: inwards towards the star. So in almost all the computer simulations,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: just because you've got this big gas giant orbiting in
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: all the dust around the star, they tend to drop inwards.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: And it looks like Jupiter did that. So it looks
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: like it formed and came in, and came in almost
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: to where Mars orbits today, and cleared out the region
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: around Mars, actually, which is maybe the reason Mars is
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: so small compared to Venus and Earth. but then Saturn
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: was coming in as well. And in the computer models,
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn stopped Jupiter coming in
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: before it gets to the earth and they both get
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: dragged out again. And so to where they are today.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: And so that, and that, that seems to be, it's
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: one of the best theories for the evolution of our
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: solar system. So what are the chances? You know, the
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: chances of that are so minuscule, tiny. So, that's the
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: thing I think about these rocky planets. In order to
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: get a civilization on them, I think you need, I
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: guess you need quite unusual solar systems. And that would
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: be a guess. And you need quite unusual stability on
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: the planet for billions of years. And that's why I
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: think we might be quite lucky.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: And how does Bode's Law work? Bode's Law is a
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: method of detecting, if you look at the mass of
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: a planet, you can accurately detect how much mass and
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: the size of a neighboring planet?
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: I think it wasn't just the positions of the orbits,
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: I think.
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: Right, where it is. Yeah.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: And one thing that is true about our solar system
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: is that if you get the computer simulations, you can't
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: put more planets in. So if you try and put
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: more planets in, it becomes unstable very quickly.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: So the mass of, like, if you measure Mars, you
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: can accurately depict where the next planet close to it would.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: Be it was I mean it was that's what was
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: done was it 17th century or something I can't remember
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: it was just one of those things where you notice
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: a pattern they were just trying to figure out what
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: the planets were which is there's nothing to that really
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: other than to say that most simulations of the solar
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: system if you put other planets in they tend to
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: get thrown out by gravitational interactions So there is a
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: sense in which our solar system has got as much
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: stuff in it as it could have. So the planets
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: are nicely spaced, and you're right, given the mass of them,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: that depends on how close another planet can be before
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: the interaction goes wrong and it gets thrown out into
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: galactic space or something, because planets do that. We know
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: that planets get thrown out of solar systems by gravitational interactions. So, yeah,
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: so again, it points to the fact that solar systems
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: are not are not stable over long periods of time.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: They're not like clockwork things. They're not like, you know,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: Newtonian clockwork and it just goes on forever. They're not
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: like that. They evolve and planets can shift orbits and change.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: And we know, if you look at the surface of
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: the moon, for example, it's covered in craters. And that
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: was caused, they all seem to hit about the same time.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: And it's about 3.8 billion years ago or so. And
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: that's called the late heavy bombardment. So we know that
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: if you look at, crazy. rates on Mars and on
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: the moon, it all seemed to happen in this, not all,
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: but a big peak around that time. And that seems
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: to be correlated with Neptune moving outwards in the solar
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: system and into the Kuiper Belt, basically, or towards the
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: Kuiper Belt and causing all sorts of havoc. And everything
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: comes into the inner solar system. So those things happen.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: But it didn't happen when life was established on the Earth.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: So it's all extremely old stuff that this shifting took.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 2: But how long has the solar system been in this
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: particularly stable situation.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: That it's in now? It's since about 3.8 billion years ago.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: So if it had been unstable at any point since then,
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: then we likely wouldn't be here.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: Do you?
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: Think that it's possible, do you ever entertain the idea
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: that it's possible that we are the only intelligent life
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: in the known universe?
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: I tend to restrict myself to the galaxy. So I
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: do think it's possible that at the moment there's one
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: civilization in the Milky Way, and that's us. And I
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: think that's important, actually. And it goes back to what
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: I was saying at the start about the astronomy and
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: cosmology aspects being part of the framework within which you
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: have to think if you're looking for meaning or you're
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: looking for how we should behave even politically you know
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: that that has a bearing to me i mean imagine
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: that we're the only place where there is intelligence in
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: this galaxy and how should we behave right should we
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: actually notwithstanding the fact that we're tiny and fragile things
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: and insignificant physically should we consider ourselves extremely valuable In
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: that respect, because there's nowhere else where, you know, I
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: would go as far as to say there would be
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: nowhere else where meaning exists in the Milky Way. Because
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: meaning is one of those things that scientists don't talk
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: about very much. Although Richard Feynman, one of my great heroes,
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: did talk about it. There's a quote where he says,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: what is the meaning of it all? It's a great
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: essay called The Value of Science. And so what is
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: self-evidently true is that meaning exists here. because it means
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: something to us. So that's kind of an obvious statement.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: Life means something to you and me, and so meaning exists.
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: But I think it is a local and temporary phenomenon.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: I think it emerges. Meaning emerges from configurations of atoms,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: which is what we are. We are simply that. We're
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: nothing more than that. We're very, very rare configurations of atoms,
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: I think. And so that means that we are If
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: you go all the way down that line of logic,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: we are the only island of meaning in the galaxy.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 2: Meaning only to ourselves.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: It means something to us. Because we're the only ones
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: who can grasp the concept. And we are finite. We
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 2: are a finite organism. We have this temporary existence while
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 2: we're here. And to us, there is meaning. Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: And that's, I don't know any other way to define it.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: So I'll define it like that.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: I don't think there's global, you know. Otherwise you have
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: to believe there's some kind of global meaning and that's
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: a God type thing. And I don't think that's, I
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: think it's more wonderful and more challenging to us because
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: we have to take responsibility for it to say we
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: should operate such that we are it in this galaxy.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: There's nothing else. I'm sure. I'm just, I'm sure there
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: are other civilizations out there in the universe because there
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: are 2 trillion galaxies. I just can't believe this hasn't
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: happened in other places. The question is how often does
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: it happen and how widely spaced are the civilizations? And
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: I think they're very widely spaced. And I think there
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: may be one or two per galaxy on the average.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: But that, as you said, what you said it beautifully,
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: what else can we think?
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: And what else do you want? I mean, I think
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: what it says is you have to take responsibility for
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: all those things, those spiritual things that you think about
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: and the emotional things you think about. you you are
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: you are responsible for that you are that right that
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: whatever that is it exists in you and it will
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: only exist for a short amount of time and so
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: what you know make the best of it would be
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: my view.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: It's so unbelievably compelling though to consider the idea that
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: somewhere out there there's another civilization that may be even
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 2: more advanced than us and this i would This thought
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 2: of it is just so attractive. It's incredible.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: There should be. If civilizations are common or even slightly common,
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: then there should be civilizations ahead of us.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: Because there's been so much time.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 2: But wouldn't you want to see what that's like?
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, we've been around.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: It's so compelling.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: You imagine the timescales. We've been around. A civilization, let's
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: say 40,000 years. I don't know how long our civilization
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: has been around. Let's say that. The galaxy is pretty
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: much as old as the universe. It's 13 billion years
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: worth of time. So the idea that there are no
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: civilizations arose, you know, 100 million years ago, 200 million
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: years ago, 1 billion years ago. And imagine what they'd
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: be like if they'd survived. I mean, we've been around,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: we've had science for, let's say, since Newton or Copernicus,
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: 500 years at most. And look what we've done. We've
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: gone beyond the solar system with Voyager. We've walked on
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: the moon. We're about to go to Mars, I would think.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: So we're about to begin colonizing our own solar system.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: So we've done that in 500 years. So imagine a
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: million years in the future. It's one of the arguments
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: often used to say there aren't any civilizations out there
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: in the galaxy. It's called the Fermi paradox. Because if
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: you imagine a civilization that's a million years ahead of us,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: They should have written their presence across the sky by now.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: You should see them. I mean, you'll see us. If
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: we survive a million years into the future, actually even
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: a few thousand years into the future, we will be
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: exploring the galaxy. We will have spacecraft that are going
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: through the stars. We will be doing it. So our
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: signature will become visible, I'm sure, if we last forever.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: into the medium term.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 2: Would we choose to not do that? Here's my thought
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 2: on that is uncontacted tribes. Like, do you, you know
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 2: about the, the gentleman who was the missionary who visited
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 2: North Sentinel Island and was killed by the natives North
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: Sentinel Island, which is a really unusual place because they
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: branched off from Africa 60,000 years ago and they've been
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: living on this one small island, the size of Manhattan.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 2: And as well as we know, there's only about 39
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: of them left somewhere around there. And, um, We're not
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 2: supposed to contact them. We're supposed to leave them alone,
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 2: and they're a rare tribe. When they find them in
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes, our initial instinct is back off,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: back off, leave them alone, leave them alone. Do you
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 2: think that perhaps the universe, like if there is a
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 2: civilization that's a million times more advanced than us, been
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: around here for millions of years of life as opposed
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 2: to a quarter million, why would they let us know?
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 2: Would they look at us dropping bombs on each other
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: and polluting the ocean and sucking all the fish out
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: and putting clouds into the skies of dirt and particles?
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: Why would they? Look at these crude monkeys. Look at that.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 2: They're so far beyond where they need to be before
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 2: they could join the galactic civilization network or whatever.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: It is true. It's an argument that there is an
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: argument as well that technology is so advanced that would
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: be difficult for us to detect. I mean, we tend
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: to think of, you know, when you say written across
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: the sky, I suppose it's true. I'm thinking of starships
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: and things like Star Wars, right? Big energy things that
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: you can see the signature of. But actually, maybe the
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: civilization just becomes a nano civilization, a tiny little nanobot,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: because that's more efficient. It's a better way to do things.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: So it's possible, I suppose, that there are space probes
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: all over the place that are so small and it's
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: so efficient and use so little energy. that we just
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: don't see them. I suppose that is possible.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: My other thought is that where we are headed, it
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: seems to me that there's some sort of a strange
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: symbiosis that's taking place. there's a strange connection that we
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 2: have to electronics and ultimately to an artificial creation, artificial intelligence,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 2: whatever you want to call it, artificial life, something that's
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: created by carbon-based beings, cellular beings that isn't cellular, but
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 2: also acts like life, that this may be the future
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: of life, that we are so connected to the idea
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: of flesh and blood and bones But maybe this is
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: just a temporary situation until we transition or if not
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 2: us transition till it surpasses us. And this is the
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 2: next stage of life. But this stage has no need
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: for all the human and biological reward systems that are
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: in place that made sure that we survive, whether it's
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: ego or fear or emotions. No need for that, that
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: it will just exist and maintain its equilibrium and as
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: this new form of life, and that this is the
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: future of life in the universe, and that we'll get there.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: Maybe it'll only be 100, 200 years from now, but
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: that's what exists all throughout the cosmos. So there's no
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: need to peacock. There's no need to show our signal
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 2: in the sky, and that it just exists in this form. Yeah,
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: I agree.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't be surprised either. Yes, that's the counter argument
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: to this Fermi paradox argument that I talked about. Well,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: exactly as you've just said, that basically you evolve to
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: a point very rapidly where you just don't create a signature.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: And you don't really get involved, as you said, maybe...
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: It just maintains.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 2: Well, there's no motivation, right? Our motivations are so weird, right?
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: We have these biological motivations to survive and there's motivations
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 2: to conquer and to innovate and to spread our genes
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 2: and to move into new territories. But if you didn't
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 2: have biology, if you existed completely from man-made materials or
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 2: from materials found on Earth and that this new form
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 2: of life is created out of that. It wouldn't have
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: those unless you programmed them. And why would you do that?
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: It is interesting, isn't it? Because we don't know what
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: consciousness is.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: So it's often called the hard problem in science.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: We don't know.
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: So it's a good question whether you can build, let's
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: say you want to build a self-replicating machine, which is
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about, something that can go and maybe
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: go to the moon or Mars and replicate itself and
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: then carry on, which is a living thing, I suppose. Yes.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: does it have to have a sufficient level of intelligence
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: that it actually is conscious? And all these things that
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: we talked about, this word meaning that we used earlier
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: that we all understand but can't define, is that an
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: emergent property that has to emerge if you've got something
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: that's intelligent enough to replicate itself and live and, as
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: you said, be the... I don't know the answer, but
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: it's worth considering that this... this emotion, meaning, love and
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: fear and all those things are just the things that
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: happen when you are intelligent.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that, but it could
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: possibly be.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: And does consciousness have to have a local origin? Like,
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: does it have to come from a thing? Like, if
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: you think about cellular communication, if you send me, if
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 2: you're in England and you send me a video from
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: your phone and it reaches my phone, It's getting to
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 2: me through space. It's going through the sky. It's like
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 2: literally from a device not connected by any wires or anything.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: It's coming to me. If there's a possibility to create
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: some sort of global intelligence through electronics that's non-local, if
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 2: one piece of it falls off, it just repairs itself
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: or figures itself out. But it's the same consciousness existing
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: on a global scale. through some sort of an electronic network,
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 2: that instead of the idea that you and I have
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: that Brian and Joe, you have your mind, I have
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 2: my mind, and we exist as intelligent beings separate from
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: each other, but instead of that, that all of it
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: is connected and that all of it is something that
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 2: we can't even conceive of because our brains are too crude,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 2: like trying to explain to, you know, Australia Pythicus what
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: a satellite is. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, yes.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you think about our brains, they are ultimately,
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: what are they? They're just a distributed network of cells
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: connected by neurons. And I mean, they're very complicated, but
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: they are a colony of things that are autonomous in
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: a sense, and they're communicating with each other. So yeah,
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: I don't see why you can't scale that up in principle.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, I should just, the caveat is always that
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: we don't know about this. It's just not understood.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 2: Well, I think there's something weird happening.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: It's physical, though. I'm damn sure it's physical. I'm damn
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: sure that there's nothing going on in my head other
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: than what is allowed by the laws of nature as
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: we understand them.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 2: So eliminating who, you mean? The idea of a soul
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: being some sort of a divine thing that's inside the
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 2: housing of the body.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I would say we can rule that out, actually.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: I've argued in the past.
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: How do you rule it out?
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: I've argued we can rule that out. In the following manner.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: So here's my arm, right? So it's made of electrons
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: and protons and neutrons. And if I have a soul
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: in there, something that we don't understand, but it's a
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: different kind of energy or whatever it is that we
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: don't have in physics at the moment, it interacts with
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: matter because I'm moving my hand around. So whatever it is,
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: it's something that interacts very strongly with matter. But if
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: you look at the history of particle physics in particular,
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: which is the study of matter, We've spent decades making
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: high-precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts. And we look,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: for example, for a fifth force of nature. So we
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: know four forces, the gravity, the two nuclear forces, called
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. And that's
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: what we know exists. And we look for another one
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: with ultra-high precision, and we don't see any evidence of it.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: So I would claim that we know how matter interacts
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: at these energies, so room temperature now, these energies, we
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: know how matter interacts very precisely. And so if you
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: want to suggest there's something else that interacts with matter strongly,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: then I would say that it's ruled out. I would
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: go as far as to say it is ruled out
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: by experiment. Or at least it is extremely subtle. And
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: you would have to jump through a lot of hoops
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: to come up with a theory of some stuff that
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: we wouldn't have seen when we've observed how matter interacts.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: that is present in our bodies. And presumably if you
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: believe in the soul, you want it to exist outside.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: When you die, you still want the thing to be there.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: And you might believe in ghosts and things like that.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, look at a ghost. I mean, it's a,
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: it is something that carries the imprint of you, presumably.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: It looks like you, right? So that means that it
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: interacts strongly with the matter that is you, because it
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: carries a pattern. If it carries a pattern, it carries information.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: If it carries information, there has to be an energy
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: source that allows that information to persist and the pattern
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: to persist and so on. So again, you end up
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: with a theory that is postulating something. It interacts with
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: light because if you think a ghost is the soul,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: then it's something that people see sometimes. So that means
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: it interacts with light, but we know how light interacts
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: and we've ruled out anything but the most subtle further
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: interaction that we haven't seen. So I would, I claim,
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: and I started off as a joke, this, actually. I
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: wrote it in an Infinite Monkey Cage book, this radio
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: show that I do. But it ended up, when I'd
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: written it down, I thought, actually, it makes sense. And
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: I read something similar, actually. I think Sean Carroll, I
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: don't know if you've had Sean on the show.
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, a couple times.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: He's said something the same, I think, in the book
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: that he wrote, The Big Picture. I think he has
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: a similar argument, actually. So it's occurred to him as well.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: It's roughly the same argument.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: So if you.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 2: So this energy that's interacting with matter, even if you're
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 2: not moving at all, if you're just thinking it's interacting
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: with the matter that encompasses your mind or your brain
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 2: or your nerves, your neurons, it's something in there that's
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 2: interacting with matter, whether you like it or not. So
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 2: even just a simple thought process or a dream is
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 2: still something that's interacting with matter. Yeah.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: Well, obviously, cause it, You know, it's your will, isn't it,
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: in that sense? When you move, it's presumably moving.
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: But even if you're not moving, the idea like you're
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 2: saying like your body's interacting with matter as you're moving
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 2: your arm. But even if you're not moving, if you're
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: just thinking and you're completely still, which is not totally
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: possible because your heart's beating and you're breathing and all
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 2: that stuff. But if somehow or another you were able
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 2: to isolate just the thought, the thoughts themselves are still
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: interacting with matter because they're interacting with the brain itself. Yeah.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 2: So there's something in there.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: There's something that interacts with the physical structure of your body.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: And I would say there isn't.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 2: So that's... The woo-woo version is that the brain itself
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 2: and the body, the physical, the spiritual self, you are
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: merely an antenna that's tuning in to the great consciousness
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: of the universe.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: But why... But then you have to answer what... we
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: know what we are made of.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: So we know how those particles behave and interact.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: So, so why do the particles not, uh, in any
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: way interact with that stuff? Cause we interact. We don't,
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: if that's true, we don't only just interact with it.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: We interact extremely strongly with it. We're interacting with it now. Yeah.
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: Every movement I make is an interaction between that.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 2: Every thought you have.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: Well, everything, if I move my fingers, everything that I'm doing,
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: is an interaction between that stuff and me. So it's
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: a very strong interaction with matter, but we don't see
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: it in all our precision measurements. The answer for that,
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: the answer is because it's not there.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: The answer is Jesus, and you can't measure God.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: That may be an answer, but the point is, as
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: we talked about earlier with absolute space, if you can't
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: measure it, it's not there.
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: Right. Right. it's but for for whatever reason for people
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: there is some incredible motivation to find a divine something
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: or another that's there's something greater than this physical being
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 2: that there's something what do you think that is What
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: is that compulsion?
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: We've already talked a bit about it. I think it
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: goes to the heart of this question of what it
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: means to be human. So I would say that being human,
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: the answer, right? I don't have the answer to the
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: meaning at all. But an answer would be we are
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: small creatures finite beings, right, which are just clusters of atoms.
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: As we said before, they're very rare, but we understand
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: roughly how they came to be. And we have a
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: limited amount of time, not actually unfortunately, but because of
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: the laws of nature. The laws of nature forbid us
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: to be immortal. Immortality is ruled out by the laws
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: of physics. But also, Actually, what's interesting about if you
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: look at the basic physics of the universe, going from
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang to where we are today, then the
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: physics is driven by the fact that the universe began
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: in an extremely ordered state. So it was a very
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: highly ordered system. And it is tending towards a more
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: disordered system at the moment. And that's called the second
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: law of thermodynamics. And it's that basic common sense thing
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: that things go to shit. Basically, it's the second law
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: of thermodynamics. What we strongly suspect, and I would say no,
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: is that in that process of going from order to disorder,
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: complexity emerges naturally for a brief period of time. So
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: it's a natural part of the evolution of the universe
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: that you get a period in time when there's complexity
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: in the universe. So stars and planets and galaxies and
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: life and civilizations But they exist because the universe is decaying,
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: not in spite of the fact the universe is decaying.
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: So our existence in that sort of picture is necessarily
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: finite and necessarily time limited. And it is a remarkable
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: thing that that complexity has got so far that there
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: are things in the universe that can think and feel
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: and explore it. And I think that is the answer.
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: If you want an answer to the meaning of it all,
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: it's that. that you are part of the universe because
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: of the way the laws of nature work. You are
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: allowed to exist, but you're allowed to exist for a
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: temporary or for a small amount of time in a
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: possibly infinite universe.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 2: One of the biggest mind-blowing moments, I think, of my
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: limited comprehension of what it means to be a living
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: being was when I found out that carbon and all
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: the stuff that makes us has to come out of
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 2: a dying star. Like that alone, that there's this very
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 2: strange cycle of these enormous fireballs that forge the material
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 2: that makes Brian Cox. Like what? That one alone, that
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 2: there is some strange loop of biological life that comes
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 2: from stars, which is like the most elemental thing that
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: we can observe. We see these things in the sky.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 2: We see the sun in the sky. It's this all-powerful
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 2: ball of fire. And that that is where the building
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 2: blocks for a person come from. I know.
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: And they will be from the carbon atoms in our body.
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: You're right. They all got made in stars because there
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: was none of it at the Big Bang. There's only
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: hydrogen and helium, a tiny bit of lithium to be precise,
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: but nothing else. And so it was all made in stars.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: And it's probably from different stars. The atoms in your body,
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: they're not all from one star that cooked it and
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: then died. There'll be a mixture of stuff from many
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: stars in your body now. And I agree with you.
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: What more do you want? When I see people who go,
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: I want more than that. There must be more to it.
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: What do you mean? The ingredients in our bodies were
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: assembled in the hearts of long dead stars over billions
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: of years. and have assembled themselves spontaneously into temporary structures
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: that can think and feel and explore. And then those
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: structures will decay away again at some point. And in
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: the very far future, there'll be no structures left. So
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: there we are. We exist in this little window when
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: we can observe this magnificent universe. Why do you want
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: any more?
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 2: Well, I think to people, I think a lot of
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 2: people aren't aware of all the information, right? And then
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 2: I think on top of it, for some people.
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: It's just.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: It's so overwhelming, this concept of 13.8 billion years of
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: everything to get to this point that we're at right now.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: It's so overwhelming that they want to simplify it. They
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: want to put it into some sort of a fable structure,
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 2: something that's very common and similar and familiar.
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. But I think that's the.
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: It's the journey that we go on. The real treasure,
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: I think, is in that journey of trying to face
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: the incomprehensible.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: It's in that realisation that it's almost... It's almost impossible
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: to believe that we exist. That's a wonderful thing. And
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: I think that's what I think you miss out. I
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: think if you decide to simplify it because you don't
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: want to face that, you don't want to face the
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: infinity that's out there in front of us. And you
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: don't want to face those stories, as you said, that
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: you look at your finger and its ingredients was cooked
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: in multiple styles over billions of years. That's, to me,
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: a a joyous and powerful thing to think about.
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: And I think you're missing out if you don't want
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: to face that.
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 2: Well, I think the distribution of information has changed so
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: radically over the last couple hundred years, and particularly over
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 2: the last 20, that you're seeing these trends now where
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 2: more people are inclined to abandon a lot of the...
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 2: Even if you remain religious or remain... You keep a
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 2: thought or a belief in a higher power... people are
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: more inclined to entertain these concepts of science and to
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: take in the understanding of what has been observed and
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 2: documented and written about among scholars and academics. And there's more,
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 2: there's more people accepting that. If you look at the
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 2: number of agnostic people now, as opposed to 20, 30
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 2: years ago, it's, it's, it's rising, it's changing. And I
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 2: think there's also because of you and because of Neil
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 2: deGrasse Tyson and you know, Sean Carroll and all these
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 2: other people that are public intellectuals that are discussing this
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 2: kind of stuff, people like myself have a far greater
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: understanding of this than I think people did 30, 40
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 2: years ago. And that trend is continuing, I think, in
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 2: a very good direction.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, you know, what we should say is
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: that science, we don't know all the answers. So we
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: don't know where the laws of nature came from. We
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: don't know why the universe began in the way that
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: it did, if indeed it had a beginning. So we
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: don't know why the Big Bang was very, very highly ordered,
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: which is ultimately, as Sean Carroll, actually, you mentioned him,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: often points out, and he's right, that the whole difference,
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: the only difference between the past and the future, the
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: so-called arrow of time, is that in the past, the
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: universe was really ordered, and it's getting more disordered. And
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: that necessary state... of order at the start of the
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: universe which is really the reason that we exist that's
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: the reason because the universe began in a particular form
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: we don't know why that was so we we will
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: probably find out at some point and it'll be something
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: to do with the laws of nature but so i'm
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: always careful i don't want to science can sometimes sound
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: arrogant right it can sometimes sound like it's the It's
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: the discipline of saying to people, well, you're not right.
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: And it's not the discipline of saying you're not right.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: It's saying this is what we found out. So I
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: like to say that it provides a framework within which
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: if you want to philosophize or you want to do
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: theology or you want to ask these deep questions about
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: why we're here, you have to operate within that framework
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: because it's just an observational framework. So everything we've said
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: is stuff we've discovered. It's not stuff that someone made up.
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: We understand nuclear physics. We can build nuclear reactors, for example.
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: So we understand the physics of stars. So we understand
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: that the stars built the carbon and oxygen, and we
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: know how they did it. We can see it, because
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: as I said before, if you look far out into
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: the universe, you're looking way back in time. And as
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: you look back in time, you see less carbon and
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: less oxygen. So we have a direct observation that in
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: the earliest universe, there wasn't any because we can see it.
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: And now we see that there is some, and we
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: know how it was made. So I think it's important
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: to be humble when you're talking about science. And you're
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: not saying, this is the way that it is. I mean,
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: you are in a sense, but it's not able to
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: answer ultimate questions at the moment. It's not able to
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: answer even whether the universe had a beginning or not.
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: We don't even know that. And I gave a talk to,
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: I was asked to give a talk to some bishops
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: in the UK about cosmology. And I said, yeah, that'll
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: be great fun. And so I went and gave him
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: this talk. and and at the end i said i've
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: got some questions so if the universe is eternal and
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: it might be it might not have had a beginning
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: if it's eternal what place is there for a creator
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: you know that's that's a good question right they didn't
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: they didn't have an answer of course right an eternal
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: creator But I think that these, it might be eternal
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: and we might discover that. So we don't know at
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: the moment, but we might. So I think my point
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: is that these other human desires, it's very natural to,
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: religion's a natural thing, right? People, you see it all
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: across the world in all different cultures. But I think
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: that in the 21st century, religion needs to operate within
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: that framework. If it's going to operate... There are still
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: great mysteries and it is appropriate to think about what
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: it means to be human. And I've given you my
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: view of what it means. But I don't think the
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: problem comes when your theology or your philosophy forces you
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: to deny some facts, some measurement. Now, these things are measurements.
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: We're not saying it's not my opinion the universe is 13.8
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: billion years old. We measured it. It's like having an
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: opinion between the distance from L.A. to New York. You
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: can't have an opinion on that.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 2: Right. We know what it is.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: And it's the same, you know, it's like, you know,
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: these things, you know, people say the earth's flat or whatever.
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: It isn't. And we've measured it. So it's just stop it.
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean you can't be spiritual and you
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: can't be religious. I would say it doesn't mean you
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: can't believe in God or gods or whatever. that's not
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: ruled out by science, but some stuff's ruled out.
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: Well, I love the way you communicate this because it
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 2: takes into consideration human nature. And like, I love Dawkins.
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 2: He's fantastic. I think he's very, very, very valuable, but
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 2: he likes to call people idiots. And the problem with
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: that is people go, fuck you. You're an idiot. It
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: like is a natural inclination when you insult people to
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: argue back, and to sort of dig their heels in.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 2: And you don't do that. And I think that's very important.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 2: And I think that a guy like Dawkins just gets
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 2: frustrated from all these years of debates with people who
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 2: are uneducated or saying ridiculous things. He's a bit of
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 2: a curmudgeon. And he seems to be softening as he's
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: getting older.
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: Well, he's an evolutionary biologist, and that's the front line
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: in some sense, isn't it?
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is.
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, the thing about particle physics is that you
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: don't get a lot of shit because people don't understand
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Whereas evolutionary biology is right there.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: So I understand his frustration.
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 2: Oh, I do too.
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: Having said that, I've kind of softened a bit over
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: the years, actually, because... Now, I think at this point,
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: both in the US actually and in Britain and in
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: some other countries, we are at a point, you've sort
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: of alluded to it, where everybody's angry. There's a lot
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: of anger. And a lot of it's justified, by the way.
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, we could talk about that, you know, income
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: inequality and all those things. So there's justified anger. But
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: it seems to me that there are people of goodwill
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: who need to band together to diffuse the anger in
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: our societies. Otherwise, we won't have countries like the United States.
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: The United States, because it's united and everybody... You've got
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: the American flag there. There's a sense of belonging and
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: identity and togetherness in a country which you've got to preserve.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: And so I've stopped actually picking. I used to, for example,
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: quite enjoy picking fights with Deepak Chopra on Twitter. And
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: it's just fun.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: It's a laugh.
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: And you just do it. I've picked some fights with
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: him too. He says some crazy stuff. But I've stopped
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: doing it going, well, but relatively. To some of the
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: other people.
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: He's someone who means well.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: I don't agree with virtually anything he says. However, he's
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: a well-meaning person.
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: And so I've started trying to seek common ground. Now,
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: that's why I, for example, gave a talk to the
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: bishops that asked me to come. I don't agree with
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: them on their framework, their theological framework. But they mean well,
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: most of them.
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: I think seeking consensus and diffusing anger, as you said,
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: is it is incumbent on all of us, especially people
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: like us who have a public voice. We need to
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: diffuse some of this anger because otherwise it will consume everyone.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, I've tried very hard to evolve in that respect
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 2: and just get better at communicating ideas and get better
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 2: at understanding how people receive those ideas. And I think
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 2: that's it's there's. it's easy to get lazy and to
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 2: insult and to.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: And sometimes it's fun.
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 2: It's funny, you know? Well, especially me. I mean, I'm
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: a comedian. Part of what I do is insult people.
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: It's funny. For humor. I want to entertain people. That's
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 2: the whole idea behind it. But I think in terms
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 2: of discussing ideas, especially that are so personal to people,
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 2: like religion, I've reexamined the way I interpret these ideas
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 2: and the way I talk about these things. Yeah.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: There's a, it's interesting, there's a, I did a BBC
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: programme ages ago. I was asked to do it on the,
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: this thing called the Reith Letchers that the BBC have
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: done since 1952, I think it was. And Robert Oppenheimer
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: did them in 53. And it was, it's fascinating. You
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: can get the transcripts online, they're free. And you can
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: get one recording of the five. They taped over the
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: other four. Can you believe it?
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: They erased them.
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 2: What?
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: Because they wanted to tape something else. No.
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 2: It's just unbelievable.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: But one of them exists of Oppenheimer giving these lectures.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God. How could they do that?
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: But you can read it. They taped over them. Can't
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: you buy more tapes? And Bertrand Russell did them. They
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: taped over them.
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 2: They taped over Bertrand Russell?
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: I know.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: It's just bizarre. Because tape was so expensive.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 2: But. That's crazy. But it's brilliant.
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: It's called Science and the Common Understanding. And they weren't
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: very well received because they thought he was going to
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: talk about the Manhattan Project. So they thought he was
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: going to talk about the atom bomb. He ran it, basically.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 2: But he didn't.
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: He talked about how thinking like a scientist, which means
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: thinking in the way that nature forces you to think,
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: can be valuable in other areas. And that's an insight
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: in itself. The great thing The unique thing about science
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: is nature forces you to think like that. You can't
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: have an opinion. You can't have an opinion about gravity.
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: If you jump off a building, you're going to hit
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: the ground. That's it. It doesn't matter what your opinion is.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: And he said, so if you think about, for example,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanics, so sometimes you think of a particle like
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: an electron. Sometimes it's a point-like object. It behaves like
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: a little billiard ball thing, a pool ball that bounces around.
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: But sometimes it behaves like an extended thing, like a
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: wavy thing. And nature forces you to hold both ideas
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: in your head at the same time in order to
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: get a complete picture of the object, a description of
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: an electron. And he said that's the valuable thing about
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanics. Unless you're doing electronics or inventing lasers, you
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: don't need to know this stuff. But if you want
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: to learn how to think, it's valuable to be forced
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: to hold different ideas in your head at the same time.
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: it's really teaching you not to be an absolutist it's
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: really teaching you the example he uses is because he
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: was I think he was had problems with McCarthy and
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: all those things didn't he so you think he's right
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: in the 50s so he said you can either be
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: you can be a communist which in his definition would
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: be that you think the needs of the many outweigh
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: the needs of the few right so so society is
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: all that matters or you could be a libertarian right
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: on the far conservative end where you think that the
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: individual is the only thing that matters and that's it
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: But actually, of course, to have a function in society,
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: you need a mixture of the two. And we can
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: weight it one way or the other, but you need
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: to hold both ideas in your head at the same time.
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: And he said that's one of the most valuable things
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: about science, because it forces you into modes of thought
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: that are valuable. And that's what we're talking about here.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: Some absolute positions are always just a blinkered subset of
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: what's actually happening. You can't understand the world By being
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: an extremist.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: You've got to hold all these views in your head.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 2: Well, I find that so often on this podcast because
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 2: I talk with people I agree with and disagree with.
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 2: And I always try to put myself in the head
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 2: of the person that I disagree with. I always try
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 2: to figure out how they're coming to those conclusions or
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 2: where they're coming from. And I think it's so important
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 2: to not be married to ideas. I got a conversation
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 2: with someone about this. And they said, sometimes you change
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 2: your opinions a lot. I go, yeah, I do. I do.
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 2: It's a bad thing. I'm flip-flopping. I'm not a politician.
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 2: I'm not flip-flopping. I'm thinking. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 2: I will have one opinion on a thing, whether it's
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 2: a controversial thing like, Universal basic income. I'll change my
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 2: mind 100% in two weeks. And I'll go, no, no, no.
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 2: Now I think it's probably a good idea. And then
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 2: I'll go back and forth. No, no, no, no, no.
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 2: People need, it's as cruel as it seems. They need motivation.
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 2: And I don't know. I bounce around with these things.
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 2: But I've tried really hard as I've gotten older to
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 2: have less absolute opinions.
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Richard Feynman, another great physicist, wrote a similar essay
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: at a similar time to Oppenheimer. And he also had
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: worked on the Manhattan Project. And it's called The Value
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: of Science. And I think that was 1955. And they
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: both shared actually a surprise, I think, that they were
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: still alive. Because they thought that the power they'd given
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: to the politicians, the atom bomb, would destroy everything. They
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: didn't think that the political system would control it, and
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: it did. So that's a remarkable thing.
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 2: We're still here.
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: But in that essay, he said that the most valuable
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: thing about science is the realization that we don't know.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: And he said, He said in that statement, he calls
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, by the way. He
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: said in that statement is the open door, the open channel,
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: he called it. So if we want to make progress,
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: we have to understand that we don't know everything and
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: we have to leave things to future generations and we
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: can be uncertain and we can change our minds. And
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: he said that it's a great last line. I can't
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: remember exactly what he says, but he said it's something
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: like it's our duty as scientists to communicate the value
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: of uncertainty and the value of freedom of thought to
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: all future generations. That's the point. That's what freedom of
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: thought means. Freedom of thought means the freedom to change
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: your mind. In fact, that's what democracy is, if you
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: think about it. Democracy is a trial and error system.
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: So it's the admission that we don't know how to
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: do it. Therefore, we'll change. Every four years, we'll change
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: the president, or every eight years, we'll change the president. Why?
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: Because the president doesn't know how to do it. So
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: someone better. There will be someone better that comes along.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: And then someone worse and someone better. But it's a
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: trial and error system. And he's right. And he's right
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: that that is the open door. That's the road to progress.
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 2: It's certainly better than humility. Yeah. One of the things
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: that I love so much about Bertrand Russell and about
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 2: Feynman was how human they were. They were very human.
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 2: Feynman liked to play the bongos and these. chasing girls
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 2: and Bertrand Russell was addicted to tobacco. He would talk
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 2: about how he wouldn't fly unless he could smoke. Like
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: he had to get us, was back when they had
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 2: smoking sections on airplanes and he had his pipe and
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 2: he just refused to fly without tobacco. He couldn't imagine
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: being without tobacco. I'm like, that's so strange for such
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 2: a brilliant guy to be addicted to such a gross thing.
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right. Because I think these are people that
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: found existence joyous right they wanted to know they just
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: wanted to know stuff yeah they didn't want to know
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: everything because you can't know everything right um you know
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: i suppose that's what if you think about what the
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: job of the scientist is it's to it's to stand
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: on the edge of the known because you're a research
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: scientist so if there's nothing to know then you've got
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: no job right so you have to be naturally comfortable
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: with not knowing and i if there's one thing i
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: really do think we was How do we begin to
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: patch our countries back up again? One of the reasons,
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: I think, in education is to teach people the value
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: of uncertainty, of not knowing. It is not weak to
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: not know. It's actually natural not to know.
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 2: And that's one of the problems with religion is to
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 2: say that you know when you do not or to
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 2: say that you have absolute truth and absolute knowledge of something. Yeah.
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 2: when it can't really exist. Yeah.
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, history tells us, doesn't it? That, you know,
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: anyone who thinks they've got absolute knowledge is a cause
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: is trouble.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, did you see ex machina? Yeah. Did you
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 2: enjoy it? Yes.
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: I know. Um, Alex Garland, cause he wrote sunshine.
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 2: Oh, right. That's right.
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: And 28 days later.
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: And yeah.
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 2: So that other new movie, the weird one, the alien movie,
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 2: he wrote that as well. Right. Um, annihilation. Yes. Yeah.
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: Great soundtrack.
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Um, Are you scared of artificial life, artificial intelligence?
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 2: Elon Musk scared the shit out of me.
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 2: When he talked about it. He talks about it like
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 2: we're in the opening scene of a science fiction movie
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 2: where he's trying to warn people and then they don't
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: listen to the genius and it goes south.
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: Sort of depends. I chaired a debate on this with
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: the Royal Society in London a few weeks ago. And the...
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: So it's true now, at the moment, what people tend
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: to be frightened of are general AIs. AGI, they call it,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: artificial general intelligence, which is like what we talked about earlier,
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: a human-like capability thing. And we're miles away from that.
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: We don't know how to do it. We haven't got them.
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: And we're miles away. So at the moment, artificial intelligence
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: is expert systems and very focused systems that do particular things.
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: You can be scared of them. in a limited economic sense,
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: because they're going to displace people's jobs. And actually, interestingly,
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: in this panel discussion we had, it's going to be
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: what you might call middle-class jobs in the UK, so
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: white-collar jobs.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 2: Which is why people are interested in universal basic income,
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 2: to sort of replace money that's going to be lost,
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 2: because there will be no jobs for all these people,
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 2: otherwise we have just a mass catastrophe.
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're very good. Someone said that these systems, artificial
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: intelligence systems, at the moment are very good at doing
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: things like lawyers' work. So they're very good at reading
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: contracts and things like that. It's interesting because it's a revolution.
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: It's not like the Industrial Revolution where it's manual labor
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: that gets hit necessarily. This is kind of interesting because
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: it hits that kind of intermediate level that usually escapes.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: So you're right. One of the answers is to tax.
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: There was an example was a robot tax. So in
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: a car factory, you say to the manufacturer, well, OK,
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: you can have a robot. Well, you pay the robot
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: the same as you pay a person. And then that
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: money goes into funding universal basic income or something like that.
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: So I think there's got to be an economic change
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: because these systems will be there. But all the experts
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: I spoke to agreed that the idea of a terminator
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: style general intelligence taken over the world is miles away.
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: And so whilst we might start thinking about the regulation,
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: it's not going to happen soon is the general point,
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: I think. So I would disagree with him on that.
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: I think it's too far in the future at the moment.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: I might be one of those people that's going, eh,
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: it's going to be all right. And then, you know,
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: my iPhone takes me out on the way to the airport.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: That's the thing.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's our choice at the moment, isn't it?
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, don't give your iPhone a laser, for example.
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: And it doesn't matter if it goes crazy and tries
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: to take over the world. I know that's a bit
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: facetious because they can– He would say they could take
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: other power grids and all that kind of.
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 2: Stuff, I guess. Well, it's these concepts that are really
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 2: hard to visualize, like sort of Kurzweil's idea of the
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 2: exponential increase of technology leading us to a point in
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 2: the near future where you're going to be able to
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 2: download your consciousness into a computer. You talk to computer experts,
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 2: they're like, there's no way, we're miles away from that.
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or neuroscientists.
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: Neuroscientists go, One brain cell probably we can't.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 2: But Kurzweil's convinced that what's going to happen is that
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 2: as technology increases, it increases in this wildly exponential way
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 2: where we really can't visualize it. We can't even imagine
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 2: how much advancement will take place over 50 years. But
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 2: in those 50 years, something's going to happen that radically
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 2: changes our idea of what's possible. And I think Elon
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: shares this idea as well, that it's going to sneak
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: up on us so quickly. then when it does go live,
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 2: it'll be too late. Yeah.
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's worth putting the framework in place, I think,
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: the regulatory framework. Even as you said, for the more
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: realistic problem, which is people's jobs are going to get displaced.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: And there's a great... I was at a thing and
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: someone said, I can't remember who it was, but they
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: said that the job... It was a politician. The job
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: of the innovation system is to create jobs faster than
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: it destroys them. So you've always got to remember that
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: as a government and as regulators.
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 2: If you're going to allow.
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: technologies into the marketplace that destroy people's jobs, it is
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: your responsibility to find a way of replacing those jobs
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: or compensating those people, as you said. Otherwise you get breakdown,
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: social breakdown.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 2: Being a human, being those that people need some meaning,
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 2: like they just giving them income, I think is just
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: going to, I mean, it's just my speculation, but it
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 2: can create mass despair. Even if you provide them, you
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 2: provide them with food and shelter, People need things to do,
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 2: so there's going to be some sort of a demand
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 2: to find meaning for people, give them occupations, give them something,
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: some task. It seems to be one of the critical
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 2: parts of being a person is that we need things
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: to do that we find meaning in. Like you were
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 2: talking about, we're the only things that we know of
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 2: that have meaning, that find meaning and share meaning and
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 2: believe in that. We're going to need something like that.
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 2: If universal basic income comes along, I don't think it's
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 2: going to be enough to just feed people and house them.
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 2: They're going to want something to do. If a person
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: is a– you're doing something for an occupation and this
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 2: is your identity and then all of a sudden that
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 2: occupation becomes irrelevant because the computer does it faster, cheaper, quicker,
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 2: these people are going to have this incredible feeling of
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 2: despair and just not being valuable. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, the utopian sort of version of this is
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: that everybody gets to do what we're doing now, which
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: is make a living sort of thinking and creating. So
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: that's the utopian ideal is you don't need to do
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: the stuff, the job that you don't really want to
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: do in the factory. You can do the thing that
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: humans are best at. But I agree, that's a very
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: utopian view. Does everybody want to do that or does
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: everybody have the mindset?
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 2: Well, it would be great if everybody had an interest
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 2: like that, if everybody went on to make pottery and
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 2: painting and doing all these different things they've always really
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 2: wanted to do. And their needs are met by the
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 2: universal basic income money that they receive every month. But, boy,
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 2: there's a lot. a lot of people I don't think
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 2: have those desires or needs and to sort of force
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 2: it onto them at age 55 or whatever it's going
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 2: to be seems to be very, very difficult. Yeah, I agree.
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: I agree. It's a big challenge.
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 2: But I think that in concept at least, it's inevitable
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 2: that we do have some sort of an artificial intelligence
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 2: that resembles us or that resembles something like Ex Machina.
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 2: If people choose to create that, I mean, choose to
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 2: create it in our own image, but that's very God-like,
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 2: isn't it? God created us in his own image.
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, yeah, I don't know. When I talk
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: to people in the field, as you probably have, most
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: of them say, don't know how to do it. Yeah.
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: It's really... Right. It's going to be miles away. So
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: maybe I'm hiding my head in the sand a bit,
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: but I don't think so. I think it's... I think
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: we'll know it when... I don't think anyone's going to
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: do it accidentally.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 1: So I don't think it's just suddenly going to be
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: upon us. I think we will see ourselves acquiring that capability.
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 2: We'll see ourselves getting close.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: We'll see those systems beginning to emerge, and then we'll
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: think about it, I think.
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 2: 200 years ago, if you wanted a photograph of something,
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 2: you want a picture of something, you had to draw it.
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, there was no photography 200 years ago. Yeah.
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 2: I mean, just think of that. It's almost inconceivable. No automobiles,
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 2: no photography. What was automobile? Maybe there was some sort
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 2: of machines that drove people around, right? Something close. There
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 2: was trains earlier than that. You go back 500 years,
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: you have almost nothing. It's crazy.
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, we've been quick.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: It's so fast. It's so fast. And then this, what
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 2: we're doing right now, there's people right now in their
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: car that are streaming this. So they're in their car
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 2: and they're listening as they're driving down the road. Maybe
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 2: they have a Tesla. Maybe they have an electric car.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: They're driving down the road, streaming two people talking where
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 2: it's ones and zeros that are broken down into some
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 2: audible form and you can listen to it. In your car.
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 2: That is bananas. Yeah. I agree.
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: We've been quick.
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 2: So quick.
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: Well, think of the world, you know, the internet. I mean,
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: it's not long. I mean, I remember it being invented.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: Well, certainly the web.
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: When did you get on?
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: So the web, well, it was very early for me
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: because I was doing particle physics. And, of course, the
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: web comes from CERN, the WWW bit.
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: So certainly in the early 90s, I was involved in that.
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: you know, in the university environment with email and all
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. So I don't know when... It
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: kind of didn't really... You could have a web browser
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: that just... The only sites that were there were NASA.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: And I think NASA had one of the early sites
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: and CERN. And there's very little else.
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 2: When did you become involved with CERN?
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: So that would be... I started doing particle physics in 95.
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 2: And when did the Large Hadron Collider go live? That was.
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: I remember it was 2007, I think it was, or 2008.
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: It's so long ago.
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 2: I can't remember.
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 1: It was about 10 years ago. But it started up,
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: and then we had a problem with it, and then
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: it took a while to fix. So it hasn't been
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: taking data that long. But it's a tremendously successful thing now,
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: and it's operating beyond its design capabilities. It's quite incredible.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 2: It's so stunning as a physical thing. that this, I mean,
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: how large is it? How large is the loop?
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: It's 27 kilometers, so it's about 16 miles.
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 2: 16 miles, and it's a circular sort of a building.
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, it's a big tube. I mean, you think
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: basically it's mainly under France and partly under Switzerland, and
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: it accelerates protons around in a circle both ways. One
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: beam goes one way, one goes the other way, and
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: they go around 11,000 times a second, so that's very
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: close to the speed of light, 99.999999% the speed of light.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: And then we cross the beams and collide the particles.
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: And in those collisions, you're recreating the conditions that were
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: present less than a billionth of a second after the
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: Big Bang. So we know that physics. So going back
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: where you said about the carbon and the oxygen, we
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: can trace that story back way beyond the time when
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: there were protons and neutrons to when there were quarks
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: and gluons around and go all the way back and
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 1: the Higgs boson doing its thing back then. So we
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: can see all that physics in the lab. So that's
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: why we have a lot of confidence in that story.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 2: It's so fascinating that they were able to talk someone
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 2: into funding that. That they got a bunch of people
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: together and that you were able to explain to politicians
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 2: and regular people what you're trying to do.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: It's a great example of how you get something done.
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: So it was the 50s when CERN was established. I
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: think it was 53 or 54. I can't quite remember.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: It's something like that. And it was built out from
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: the Second World War. So you have Europe at the
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: end of the war. And it was realized that the
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: only way forward for Europe was collaboration to rebuild the
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: scientific base for peace, for peaceful purposes. And so CERN
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: was set up as an international collaboration in Europe initially.
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: with that political ideal, that it would explore nature just
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: for freely and for peace, for peaceful means, peaceful reasons.
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: And so that was, the politics was right. So it
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: was set up by international treaty so that the member
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: states are bound together by a treaty and they pay
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: a small amount, relatively small amount each into CERN every year,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: which is a percentage of their GDP. And that's the
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: money they use to do the experiments and build the accelerators.
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: So it's very hard to get out of it. And
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't really want to because it's a small amount
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: of money per country. And CERN doesn't get extra money
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: to build things. It just takes its money and basically
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: saves up and plans itself. But because it's got a
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: regular stream of money, it can do it. So it
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: can say, we're going to build this machine. And it
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: will take eight years because that's how much money we've got.
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: And we'll build it in eight years. And we know
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: how much money we've got, so we can do it.
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: It's a lesson. I mean, the reason that the U.S. collider,
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: the SSC, failed is because it's the problem you have
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: in the U.S. with the funding system, as you've seen
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: in the last few weeks, is that it's very arbitrary
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: and it's open to political maneuvering and things can be
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: shut down. And CERN is not like that. CERN has
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: got a guaranteed stream of funding, small, from each country.
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: And so you can do these projects.
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 2: And the one in the U.S., that was during the
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 2: Clinton administration? Is that what it was? Yeah, it was.
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: Was it Clinton? It was closed down by Congress on
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: a very slim vote. And it was in Texas. So
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: it was one of those things where you've got states
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: vying for money. And it was half built. And everyone
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: was there. And the thing, it was bigger than the LHC.
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: And it was closed down. So you waste a.
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 2: Lot of money. Is that a huge disappointment for the
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 2: scientific community? Like, were people very hopeful that this was
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 2: going to go live?
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was being built. So it dug half the tunnel.
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 2: What would it be able to do that the LHC
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 2: couldn't do?
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: It was a higher energy accelerator than the LHC. So
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: it would have discovered the Higgs particle first.
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: Had it been running.
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 2: But the half-built part, is it useless now? Or can
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 2: they sort of recharge it up again?
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: No, I think they filled it in.
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 2: Filled it in?
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: I think so. I mean, it was just half a tunnel,
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: you know?
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 2: So that... That's the thing.
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: You can do these wonderful things for not a lot
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: of money if you just do it over many years
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: and have stable funding and just commit to doing it.
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 2: The filling it in part is like.
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: And you look at CERN as well. People ask me now,
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: I think the UK pays about, it's about $ 100 million
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: a year. That's what the UK pays in. And it's
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: the same for Germany, same for France and so on.
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: And so people say, what do we get for that?
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, it's not. The whole budget
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: of CERN is about the same as the budget of
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: a medium-sized university. So it's not a lot. It's about
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: a billion dollars a year or something, which is what
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: a university has. So it's not a lot in the
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: scheme of things. What's it done, though? Well, we invented
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: the World Wide Web, as we've just said. A lot
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: of the medical imaging technology that we use comes from CERN.
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: It's pioneered the use of these very high-field magnets, which
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: is what it needed. So it's engineering at the edge.
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: And engineering at the edge generates spin-offs and expertise to
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: get used in other fields. So there's cancer treatment, so-called
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: hadron beam therapy. So if you've got a brain tumour now,
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: it's quite likely that you'll have one of these targeted
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: particle beam therapies, which is like very highly targeted sort
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: of chemotherapy. It's not chemotherapy, it's just radiation that you
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: can target in a beam into your head and attack
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: the tumour. And those are particle accelerators. So most particle
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 1: accelerators today are in hospitals and in medicine. But they
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: came from doing particle physics. So the spinoffs of these
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: big experiments at the edge of our capability are always immense,
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: which is why they're worth funding at these very low levels.
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: But it's not just the knowledge. It's the engineering expertise.
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 2: That there is a practical application for every day life.
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: There always is.
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: It's just finding out how to do hard things is
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: usually useful is the moral.
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 2: And it wasn't just the Higgs boson particle that you
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 2: guys are doing. What is quark-gluon plasma?
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's shortly after the billionth of a second
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: after the Big Bang.
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: You end up with a soup of quarks and gluons.
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: So quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons,
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: and gluons are the things that stick them together. So
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: a proton has two up quarks and a down quark,
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: and a neutron has two down quarks and an up quark,
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: and so on. So they're the constituents, the protons and neutrons,
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: which are the constituents of our atomic nuclei. So if
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: you go to very high temperatures or high energies, then
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: the protons and neutrons fall to bits. Then you end
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: up with a soup of quarks and gluons, and that's
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 1: a quark-gluon plasma.
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: And it's insanely dense, right?
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, very high energy. So you get that. So
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: we've been exploring that because we don't only collide protons together.
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: We can collide lead nuclei together or silver nuclei together
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: at the LHC. And that's when you make these kind
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 1: of soups of nuclear matter, if you like, very hot
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: nuclear matter, to explore that physics, that nuclear physics.
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 2: Wow. And I was reading something about the weight of
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 2: that stuff, like a sugar cube. Like, what is the
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 2: actual weight?
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: Well, it depends how dense it is. I mean, the
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: thing I remember is the sugar cube of a neutron
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 1: star material, which is, I don't know how many hundred
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 1: million tons, I can't remember. You know, it depends. So
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: I don't know with the quark-gluon plasma.
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 2: I don't know what number you're... There was something, there
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 2: was one of the things after the discovery, they were
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 2: talking about the massive weight of quark-gluon plasma in Like,
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: almost incomprehensible. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know the number, but...
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 2: But something crazy. Yeah.
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 2: Now, once these... You got something? Oh, here it is.
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 3: 40 billion tons.
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God. A cubic centimeter would weigh 40 billion tons. Oh.
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: Good Lord.
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 2: I know David. I know David, actually.
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: That's so crazy.
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 2: The densest matter created in the Big Bang machine. Yeah.
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 2: And what are they doing right now?
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: It's closed for engineering and upgrades.
• 2:10:17
  Speaker 2: Upgrades.
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, one thing we're trying to do is,
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: one of the things in particle physics is that you
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 1: want as many collisions per second as you can generate.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: And we have a collision, we have what's called a
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: bunch crossing at LHC. We can vary it, but it's
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: something like 25 nanoseconds, depending on what. So it's really,
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: we get a lot of collisions per second. And the
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: more collisions per second you can get... the more chance
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: you have of making interesting things like Higgs particles or
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: whatever else may be out there waiting to be discovered.
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's possible there are other particles out there
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: that we haven't yet discovered that could be within the
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: reach of the LHC.
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 2: And if this one that was in Texas had gotten
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 2: built and it was more powerful than the LHC, you'd
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 2: have even more opportunity to do something like that. Yeah. Now,
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: when these things are created by these collisions, how long
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 2: do they last? Oh.
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 1: Fractions of a second. So the general rule in physics,
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: in particle physics, is that the more massive it is
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: and the more things it can decay into, the faster
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: it will do that. So basically the heavy things decay
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: into light things. And so the stable particles are things
• 2:11:29
  Speaker 1: like electrons and some of the quarks, the up quarks
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 1: and down quarks are stable things. So everything tends to
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: decay very fast. So we're talking fractions, billions of a
• 2:11:41
  Speaker 1: second fractions.
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 2: And how are they.
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: Less than that.
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 2: How are they registering its existence? Like, what is being
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 2: used to measure it?
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 1: So what you see, if you collide... At the IC,
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: we collide protons together. And protons have got loads of
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: stuff in them, loads of gluons and the quarks. So
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: you get a big mess, first of all. So most
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 1: of it's a load of particles that are spraying out,
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 1: which you're not interested in. But sometimes, when you... let's
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 1: say a couple of the gluons bang together, and they
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 1: can make something interesting, like a top quark or a
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 1: Higgs particle.
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 2: What's a top quark?
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 1: Top quarks are very heavy. There are six quarks. So
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 1: there's up and down, charm and strange, bottom and top.
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: Charm and strange? Yeah.
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: So strange was literally in the, what was it, the
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 1: 50s when we discovered them. Someone said that's really strange.
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 1: So it's a strange, a new kind of particle. So yes,
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 1: we have six quarks. They're in three families. So the
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 1: up and down are one family. And then the charm
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 1: and strange are another family and the top and bottom
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 1: are the third family. And so for some reason, so
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 1: the only particles we need to make up you and
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 1: me are up quarks, down quarks and electrons. But for
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: some reason, there are two further copies of those which
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 1: are identical in every way except they're heavier. So there's
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 1: the charm and the strange quark and a heavy electron
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: called a muon. And then there's the top and the
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: bottom quark and another heavy electron called the tau. And
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: that's it. So there's this weird pattern that we don't understand.
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 1: So it seems like you only needed the first family
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: to build a universe.
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 1: But for some reason, there are two copies. And the
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 1: heavy ones decay into the lighter ones is the point.
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: So when you make them, they're not around very long.
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 1: And just to answer your question, what happens is that
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 1: when they decay, they throw their decay products out into
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: our detector. So we take a photograph of the cascade
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: of particles that comes from these heavier particles decaying. And
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: the trick is to patch it all up to see,
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: to try and sort of work out what everything came from.
• 2:13:47
  Speaker 2: Wow. Now, when they find these unexpected particles, then what happens?
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 2: Then there's the study of them. Then everybody gets together
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 2: and go, okay, what the hell is that?
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 2: What is that? What do we do?
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: So we want to know where the Higgs particle is.
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: We know what it does, which is it gives mass
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 1: to everything. So it's fundamentally the thing that gives mass
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: to all the other things in the universe at the
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: most fundamental level. So electrons, for example, and the up
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 1: and down quarks, they get their mass from their interaction
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: with the Higgs. That's why they're massive. That's another reason
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: we exist. You know, we go right back. We wouldn't
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: exist if there wasn't mass in the universe. And the
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: Higgs is ultimately responsible for that mass. I keep caveating
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 1: it because then you get other sorts of mass that
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: are generated, but the fundamental basic seed, as it were,
• 2:14:42
  Speaker 1: is from the Higgs. So what we want to know
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 1: is we want to know how that thing behaves. So
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 1: you want to study it. So you want to make
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 1: a lot of them so you can take a lot
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: of pictures of it and study it a lot and
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: see exactly how it does that. And so that's what
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 1: we're doing. That's what we're engaged in at the moment.
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: We're making high precision measurements of the way that particle behaves.
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 1: So we can understand the laws of nature. That is
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 1: the laws of nature. How are those particles behaving and
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 1: what are they doing?
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 2: But it is possible that some new form of particle,
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 2: something else, could be discovered. Yeah. That we don't know
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 2: about yet.
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: Because we know, almost know, that there are other particles
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 1: out there in the universe.
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 2: We almost know?
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: There's a thing called dark matter.
• 2:15:28
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: So we look out into the universe. And we see
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 1: that there's a lot of stuff there that's interacting gravitationally,
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 1: but is not interacting strongly with the matter out of
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: which we are made and the stars are made. So
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 1: it's almost certain that that's some form of particle, that
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: that fits beautifully. And we see lots of different observations
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: of the way galaxies rotate and interact. And even the
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 1: oldest light in the universe, the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation,
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 1: we see the signature of that stuff in that light
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 1: as well. So we think that there's some other particle
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 1: out there. And to be honest, we thought we would
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 1: have detected it, I think, at LHC. We have lots
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 1: of theories called supersymmetric theories that make predictions for all
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: sorts of different particles that would interact weakly with normal matter.
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 1: And I think it's broadly seen as a surprise that
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 1: we haven't seen them at LHC. So that just may
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 1: well mean that either They're a bit too massive, so
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: we need more energy to make them, and we just
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 1: haven't quite got enough. Or we're not making enough of
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 1: them often enough to see them, which is one of
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 1: the reasons we're upgrading the LHC. So we also look
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 1: for them, by the way, directly. So we have experiments
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: under mountains. We bury them under mountains so the cosmic
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 1: rays from space don't interfere with them. And we're looking
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 1: for the rare occasions when these dark matter particles bump
• 2:16:53
  Speaker 1: into the particles of matter. in the detector. So it's a,
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 1: because the idea would be this room's full of them.
• 2:16:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, the galaxy is swimming with dark matter as
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 1: far as we can tell, but it interacts very weakly
• 2:17:05
  Speaker 1: with this matter. So it doesn't bump into us very often.
• 2:17:08
  Speaker 1: So we're looking for the direct detection of it. And
• 2:17:11
  Speaker 1: we're looking to make those particles at LHC.
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 2: So it's everywhere, but it doesn't interact with us. Very weakly.
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: So it interacts through gravity. And the archetypal particle that's
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 1: everywhere that doesn't interact strongly is a neutrino. So we
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 1: do know about neutrinos. We've detected those. And there are
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 1: something like 60 billion per centimeter squared per second passing
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: through your head now from the sun. So they get
• 2:17:39
  Speaker 1: made in nuclear reactions in the sun. But they go
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 1: straight through your head and then actually straight through the
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 1: earth pretty much. Occasionally one of them bumps into something.
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 1: And we can detect those because there are so many.
• 2:17:50
  Speaker 1: of them going through but we only detect you know
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 1: I don't know one or two a.
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 2: Day and the idea is that dark matter encompasses an
• 2:17:58
  Speaker 2: enormous percentage of the universe.
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: Yes it's five times as much matter as dark matter
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 1: than is normal matter and the number is 25% of
• 2:18:11
  Speaker 1: the universe. So roughly speaking, about 5% of the universe
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: is normal matter, stars and gas.
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 2: 25% is dark matter.
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so about, yeah, 5% is normal matter, about 25%
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: is dark matter, and about 70% is dark energy.
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 2: That's the other thing I.
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 1: Was going to ask you about. Yeah.
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 2: So what the hell is that?
• 2:18:28
  Speaker 1: Don't know.
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 2: Know what it does.
• 2:18:32
  Speaker 1: So again, we talked about Einstein's theory earlier. So Einstein's theory,
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 1: which works spectacularly well, says that if you put stuff
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 1: into the universe, as we said before, then it warps
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: and deforms and stretches. And it very precisely tells you,
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 1: given the stuff that you put in it, how much
• 2:18:51
  Speaker 1: does it stretch and how does it stretch? And the
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 1: measurement we have is how it's stretching. So the thing
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 1: we observe is how the universe is expanding and how
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 1: that expansion rate is changing and how it's changed over time.
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 1: So we have very precise measurements of that. So then
• 2:19:10
  Speaker 1: we can use the theory to tell us what's in it,
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: given that we know how it's responding to that stuff.
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: And that's how we discover dark energy. So we notice
• 2:19:19
  Speaker 1: that the universe's expansion rate is increasing. So the universe
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 1: is accelerating in its expansion, which is exactly the opposite
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 1: of what we thought. And this is in the 1990s
• 2:19:29
  Speaker 1: that we discovered that. So we can work out what
• 2:19:33
  Speaker 1: sort of stuff and how much of that stuff you
• 2:19:35
  Speaker 1: need to put in the universe to make that happen.
• 2:19:38
  Speaker 1: And that's where we get these numbers from.
• 2:19:41
  Speaker 2: Was there a resistance to that when that was first proposed?
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember one of my friends at Brian Schmidt
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 1: got the Nobel Prize for that. And I remember I
• 2:19:50
  Speaker 1: talked to him and he said, he was a postdoc,
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 1: I think, at the time, so a young researcher. And
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: he's making measurements of supernova, the light from supernova explosions,
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 1: which are so bright that you can see them, you know,
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 1: hundreds of millions, billions of light years away. And he
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 1: noticed that if you look at the data, the light
• 2:20:07
  Speaker 1: is stretched in the wrong way so we look at
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 1: the stretch of light as it travels across the universe
• 2:20:13
  Speaker 1: and the universe is expanding it stretches the light so
• 2:20:16
  Speaker 1: it changes the colour and he noticed that there was
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: a discrepancy which said that the universe that the expansion
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 1: rate is speeding up it's been speeding up for I
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 1: think something like 7 billion years or so it's been
• 2:20:29
  Speaker 1: speeding up so he thought that he's done something wrong
• 2:20:34
  Speaker 1: so he checked it and checked it and checked it
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 1: and he couldn't find anything wrong So he did what
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: a good scientist does, which is he published it so
• 2:20:41
  Speaker 1: that somebody else could find out what he'd done wrong.
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 1: And he said that he thought it would be the
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 1: end of his career. He thought he'd be a life
• 2:20:47
  Speaker 1: in stock. And he got the Nobel Prize because he
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 1: was right. It is a stretch.
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:20:52
  Speaker 1: It's a great lesson. It means that if you're sure
• 2:20:55
  Speaker 1: that you can't see what you've done wrong, then you
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 1: publish it. It goes back to that thing about humility
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 1: we talked about earlier. Ultimately, we're not trying to be right.
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: We're trying to find out stuff. And so... A good
• 2:21:08
  Speaker 1: scientist will be really happy if they turn out to
• 2:21:10
  Speaker 1: be wrong because they've learned something. It's good that he
• 2:21:13
  Speaker 1: took that path because he got the Nobel Prize.
• 2:21:16
  Speaker 2: Now, when he received the Nobel Prize and this concept
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 2: started being discussed, what was the initial reaction to it?
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting because it's allowed in Einstein's theory, and
• 2:21:28
  Speaker 1: it was in Einstein's original theory. So it's got a name.
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 1: It's called the cosmological constant. And it's just allowed in
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 1: the equations. And Einstein actually introduced it initially because Einstein's
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 1: equations strongly suggest that the universe is expanding or contracting
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 1: and not just sat there. So even before we'd observed anything,
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 1: Einstein had a theory that suggested that the universe is
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: just not static and actually really strongly suggests that there's
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 1: a beginning. So the theory itself on its own suggests
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 1: that you can see that if the universe is stretching
• 2:22:07
  Speaker 1: today then it must have been smaller in the past
• 2:22:09
  Speaker 1: right everything must have been closer together let's say that
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 1: um so that um there's a man actually called george
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 1: lametra who was uh who worked independently of einstein but
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 1: the same time in the early 1920s before we even
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: knew there were other galaxies beyond the milky way and
• 2:22:25
  Speaker 1: they noticed that the the equation suggests the universe might
• 2:22:28
  Speaker 1: be stretching um And so he wrote to Einstein and said,
• 2:22:31
  Speaker 1: your theory suggests there was a day without a yesterday.
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 1: Because he thought if everything's expanding now, then it must
• 2:22:38
  Speaker 1: have been closer together in the past. And so there
• 2:22:40
  Speaker 1: might be a time when it was all together. And
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: he was a priest.
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:22:44
  Speaker 1: So he's a Belgian priest. So I think, I mean,
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 1: I wrote about this. It's kind of my interpretation of it.
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: But I think that he was more predisposed to accept
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: what the equations were telling him because a beginning, an origin,
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 1: for a priest is really a nice thing because it
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 1: tells you the creation event. And Einstein tried to dodge
• 2:23:05
  Speaker 1: it and put this allowed term into his equation, which
• 2:23:10
  Speaker 1: is the almost the stretchy term to say, well, if
• 2:23:14
  Speaker 1: it's all kind of contracting or something, can I put
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 1: something in to make it stretch a bit to balance
• 2:23:19
  Speaker 1: it all out so it can be eternal? And you can't.
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: You can't make it eternal that way. So he tried it.
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: Then he took it out. and called it his biggest blunder.
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 2: Taking it out was his biggest blunder.
• 2:23:32
  Speaker 1: No, he called putting it in his biggest blunder. Or
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 1: at least some people think what he'd done was miss
• 2:23:38
  Speaker 1: the prediction of the Big Bang, really. So by trying
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 1: to fiddle around to have a static universe that's stable,
• 2:23:46
  Speaker 1: he missed what the equations were screaming. His own theory
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 1: was screaming to him, which is that, no, the universe
• 2:23:52
  Speaker 1: expands or contracts. And he missed it, right? So I
• 2:23:56
  Speaker 1: think that's probably what he meant by biggest blunder. But
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 1: in any case, he took it out. And then later
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: in the 1990s, it turns out that no, it's there.
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 1: But it's really small. It's tiny, tiny effect. But it's
• 2:24:09
  Speaker 1: still dominating the universe now. And it will dominate even
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 1: more in the future. So we think that we're in
• 2:24:17
  Speaker 1: a universe that will continue to expand, essentially doubling in
• 2:24:21
  Speaker 1: size on a fixed timescale, which is about 20 billion years.
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 1: So we think every 20 billion years into the future, forever,
• 2:24:29
  Speaker 1: unless something happens, the universe will continue to expand and
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 1: double in size. And that's the dark energy that's driving that.
• 2:24:38
  Speaker 1: But nobody knows what it is. It's one of the cutting-edge,
• 2:24:43
  Speaker 1: massive problems in theoretical physics.
• 2:24:46
  Speaker 2: And what is being done to try to get a
• 2:24:48
  Speaker 2: better grasp of what it is?
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's theoretical. I mean, we're making very precise
• 2:24:53
  Speaker 1: observations of it. And it looks like this constant. So
• 2:24:57
  Speaker 1: it looks like it's basically one number, if you like,
• 2:25:00
  Speaker 1: in Einstein's equations and just really simple. So it looks
• 2:25:04
  Speaker 1: like it's something that may be a property of space itself.
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 1: Don't know. But it looks like a very simple thing
• 2:25:11
  Speaker 1: that doesn't change over time and just stays there. So
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 1: it requires theoretical advance as well. And so people are
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 1: trying very hard to do that.
• 2:25:24
  Speaker 2: It's so crazy when you go from Galileo to modern
• 2:25:27
  Speaker 2: theoretical physics that they're still in the midst of this
• 2:25:31
  Speaker 2: understanding of what all this stuff is.
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, these are fundamental and difficult problems. And
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 1: we're talking about the origin and evolution of the universe. Right.
• 2:25:43
  Speaker 1: That's what cosmology is. And it's also particle physics. I mean,
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 1: the way that these things, this stuff, we keep talking
• 2:25:50
  Speaker 1: about this stuff in the universe. That's what the LHC studies.
• 2:25:53
  Speaker 1: It studies how the stuff behaves. Right now, it's very theoretical, right?
• 2:26:00
  Speaker 1: They're trying to wrap their minds around what this is
• 2:26:03
  Speaker 1: and what the properties of it are. Do you envision
• 2:26:06
  Speaker 1: a time where you can actually physically measure this and
• 2:26:09
  Speaker 1: have a real clear understanding of what it is and
• 2:26:12
  Speaker 1: what its properties are? The dark energy.
• 2:26:14
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 2:26:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, for example, there are theories that For example,
• 2:26:20
  Speaker 1: which are probably not right, but they're not necessarily wrong either.
• 2:26:23
  Speaker 1: There are theories that try to link it to the
• 2:26:25
  Speaker 1: Higgs particle. So the Higgs particle, which we've discovered and
• 2:26:29
  Speaker 1: can measure, has some properties that we think the dark
• 2:26:33
  Speaker 1: energy would need. And also this inflation that I mentioned
• 2:26:38
  Speaker 1: way back at the start of the universe, it has
• 2:26:40
  Speaker 1: some of the properties that can do that as well.
• 2:26:43
  Speaker 1: So for example, there are people who try to link them.
• 2:26:46
  Speaker 1: So we do have an observation of the Higgs. We
• 2:26:48
  Speaker 1: can study that So are they linked? Don't know. So
• 2:26:53
  Speaker 1: it could be that we can study it, even though
• 2:26:56
  Speaker 1: it's a very small, weak effect. It could be we
• 2:27:00
  Speaker 1: have direct access. So this is great. I mean, these
• 2:27:04
  Speaker 1: are big mysteries. There's something really profound we don't understand
• 2:27:09
  Speaker 1: about the way that stuff, in particular the Higgs actually,
• 2:27:13
  Speaker 1: interacts with space and time. So very naively, the Higgs
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 1: should blow the universe apart. just very naively. It's loads
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 1: of energy in a very small amount of space, huge
• 2:27:26
  Speaker 1: amounts of energy in the Higgs field. But it doesn't
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 1: do anything apart from give mass to things. It doesn't
• 2:27:32
  Speaker 1: seem to, it doesn't directly affect space. But everything else
• 2:27:37
  Speaker 1: that you put in space directly affects it so you
• 2:27:42
  Speaker 1: know there are there are kind of issues there that
• 2:27:45
  Speaker 1: we don't and it just says we don't get it
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 1: we don't we don't get it yet it's just dark
• 2:27:50
  Speaker 1: energy is another one of those they're probably late that
• 2:27:52
  Speaker 1: i if i was to guess i'd say there's some
• 2:27:54
  Speaker 1: link there you know there's something going on and solving
• 2:27:57
  Speaker 1: one of them might solve the other two, inflation, Higgs,
• 2:28:02
  Speaker 1: dark energy, something.
• 2:28:04
  Speaker 2: How many people worldwide would you estimate are trying to
• 2:28:07
  Speaker 2: grasp this and working on this? It's a good question.
• 2:28:12
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, it's probably tens of thousands.
• 2:28:15
  Speaker 1: It's tens of thousands if you count all the people
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 1: who work at CERN and the particle physicists and the
• 2:28:20
  Speaker 1: theoretical physicists. It would be tens of thousands.
• 2:28:23
  Speaker 2: Because it's so important to... for us to get an
• 2:28:27
  Speaker 2: understanding of what's going on, but yet so outside of
• 2:28:32
  Speaker 2: the grasp of most people, including me. Like, I'm listening
• 2:28:36
  Speaker 2: to you talk about this, and I'm like, thank God
• 2:28:38
  Speaker 2: there's people like you. Like, whatever. Thank quarks. There's people
• 2:28:42
  Speaker 2: like you out there that are doing this. But it's
• 2:28:47
  Speaker 2: almost like you're speaking another language. It's so strange to me.
• 2:28:51
  Speaker 1: Well, it's very new stuff.
• 2:28:52
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:28:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, even when I was at school, so when
• 2:28:56
  Speaker 1: I was at university we hadn't discovered the top quark
• 2:29:00
  Speaker 1: we sort of knew it was there we thought the
• 2:29:02
  Speaker 1: Higgs might be there but we had no idea whether
• 2:29:05
  Speaker 1: it was so we're moving in my career we're moving
• 2:29:09
  Speaker 1: quite fast and you're right these are the most fundamental
• 2:29:14
  Speaker 1: questions about why is the universe the way it is
• 2:29:19
  Speaker 1: and even possibly why is there a universe we're away
• 2:29:23
  Speaker 1: from that yet but If we're ever going to answer that,
• 2:29:26
  Speaker 1: it will be by doing stuff like this.
• 2:29:29
  Speaker 2: And this is all addressed in this live show that
• 2:29:32
  Speaker 2: you're doing, this worldwide live show. And certainly.
• 2:29:36
  Speaker 1: Also the consequences of the, not the consequences of knowledge,
• 2:29:40
  Speaker 1: but the cosmology is terrifying as we've started with. So
• 2:29:46
  Speaker 1: I think, as we've said, it raises questions. It makes
• 2:29:51
  Speaker 1: vivid questions that we all have. about, you know, what
• 2:29:56
  Speaker 1: are we doing here? So I try, and I think
• 2:30:00
  Speaker 1: this goes all the way back to me really being
• 2:30:03
  Speaker 1: into Carl Sagan. He always used to try this. You
• 2:30:06
  Speaker 1: try to link it to things that people think about naturally.
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 1: And that's why people are fascinated by this stuff, because
• 2:30:14
  Speaker 1: they do actually think about it. It might not be
• 2:30:16
  Speaker 1: with the right names or the right words or the
• 2:30:18
  Speaker 1: right facts even, but they're thinking about how did I
• 2:30:21
  Speaker 1: get here? How did I come to exist? What is
• 2:30:24
  Speaker 1: the future? Do we have a future? What was our past?
• 2:30:28
  Speaker 1: These are universal questions, I think.
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they certainly are. And the way you're doing this
• 2:30:33
  Speaker 2: with your live show, you were saying that you have
• 2:30:36
  Speaker 2: an enormous visual aspect to.
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 1: It as well. We have the biggest screen we can
• 2:30:42
  Speaker 1: get in every venue. And it's LED. It's one of
• 2:30:44
  Speaker 1: the state-of-the-art modern LED screens. So they're like Lego. And
• 2:30:47
  Speaker 1: you can build them. So you fill the venue with it. So,
• 2:30:51
  Speaker 1: you know, Wembley Arena, then it's 30 meters wide or whatever.
• 2:30:54
  Speaker 1: By eight meters high, it's enormous.
• 2:30:56
  Speaker 2: You must have a huge crew carrying all this stuff around.
• 2:30:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like 16 or 18 people. And it's like
• 2:31:01
  Speaker 1: a rock and roll show. And at some of the
• 2:31:03
  Speaker 1: venues we're doing it in North America, in Canada, they're
• 2:31:06
  Speaker 1: a bit smaller venues, but we just fill it with
• 2:31:08
  Speaker 1: screen as much as we can get. And then the graphics,
• 2:31:11
  Speaker 1: a lot of the graphics I have were done by
• 2:31:13
  Speaker 1: a D-Neg who did Ex Machina, actually, and Interstellar. Oh, wow.
• 2:31:18
  Speaker 1: And the reason I... I mean, I say chose them.
• 2:31:21
  Speaker 1: I rang them up and goes, please, please, will you
• 2:31:23
  Speaker 1: do this? And they said, how much money have you got? And,
• 2:31:26
  Speaker 1: you know, because it's way lower than Chris Nolan. And
• 2:31:28
  Speaker 1: they did it. They just liked the idea of these
• 2:31:32
  Speaker 1: messages and these ideas. So they used the software that
• 2:31:35
  Speaker 1: they'd used for Interstellar to create images of black holes.
• 2:31:39
  Speaker 1: And they used general relativity. They coded it into their
• 2:31:44
  Speaker 1: graphics software so they can ray trace lights around black holes.
• 2:31:49
  Speaker 1: And you can move the camera around the black hole
• 2:31:51
  Speaker 1: and it traces the way all the light moves around it.
• 2:31:53
  Speaker 1: So if you remember those amazing, the gargantua, the black
• 2:31:56
  Speaker 1: hole in Interstellar, that's a simulation. It's not an artist's impression.
• 2:32:01
  Speaker 1: It's a simulation of what Einstein's theory tells us a
• 2:32:04
  Speaker 1: black hole will look like. And so I can use
• 2:32:06
  Speaker 1: that to talk about what happens when you fall into
• 2:32:09
  Speaker 1: a black hole. What would you see watching someone fall in?
• 2:32:12
  Speaker 1: And you can explain all that using Einstein's theory. You know,
• 2:32:16
  Speaker 1: the idea that It's kind of a well-known idea. It's
• 2:32:18
  Speaker 1: a bizarre idea that if I was to fall into
• 2:32:21
  Speaker 1: a black hole and you were watching, you'd never see
• 2:32:23
  Speaker 1: me fall in. You'd see time slow down, my time
• 2:32:28
  Speaker 1: slow down as you watch me. So in the end,
• 2:32:30
  Speaker 1: I'd just slow down and slow down and slow down.
• 2:32:32
  Speaker 1: And then I'd get frozen on the event horizon and
• 2:32:35
  Speaker 1: just fade away as an image, a reddening image on
• 2:32:38
  Speaker 1: the event horizon. So time passes at different rates as
• 2:32:42
  Speaker 1: you move close to the black hole and far away.
• 2:32:45
  Speaker 1: because space and time are distorted by the mass of
• 2:32:48
  Speaker 1: the black hole. And so I talk about all that,
• 2:32:51
  Speaker 1: but I talk about all that with this incredible image,
• 2:32:55
  Speaker 1: which we had. It's so high resolution, by the way,
• 2:32:58
  Speaker 1: that it was higher resolution than they used for Interstellar
• 2:33:01
  Speaker 1: because my screen's so big. So we need a special
• 2:33:04
  Speaker 1: machine to play it. You can buy the most expensive
• 2:33:08
  Speaker 1: Mac Pro in the world. And it will not play
• 2:33:11
  Speaker 1: this stuff.
• 2:33:12
  Speaker 2: I love that.
• 2:33:13
  Speaker 1: From a geek perspective, it's brilliant. You have to have
• 2:33:15
  Speaker 1: a special video player to play the damn thing.
• 2:33:18
  Speaker 2: So it's just like a series of CPUs all attached
• 2:33:20
  Speaker 2: together in some sort of a supercomputer?
• 2:33:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of those big visualization graphics things. But
• 2:33:26
  Speaker 1: these files are like 20 gig video files.
• 2:33:29
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:33:30
  Speaker 1: Because there's so many pixels. The pixel resolution is 6,400
• 2:33:32
  Speaker 1: by 1536. Is that impressive, Jamie? Of my screens.
• 2:33:39
  Speaker 2: 16K, right?
• 2:33:40
  Speaker 1: It's a lot.
• 2:33:41
  Speaker 2: It's big. It's really big.
• 2:33:43
  Speaker 1: It's a lot.
• 2:33:44
  Speaker 2: They're huge files. Are you coming to Los Angeles with this?
• 2:33:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:33:47
  Speaker 2: When?
• 2:33:47
  Speaker 1: The Montalban Theater in May, the end of May.
• 2:33:51
  Speaker 2: I'm there. If I'm here. Oh, yeah. No, you've got
• 2:33:54
  Speaker 2: to come 24th of May. Oh, you're in San Diego
• 2:33:56
  Speaker 2: as well? San Diego, San Jose. I've got to see
• 2:33:58
  Speaker 2: one of these. I've got to go to one of these.
• 2:34:00
  Speaker 1: It's going to be great fun. And however much stuff
• 2:34:03
  Speaker 1: we can fit into those theaters.
• 2:34:04
  Speaker 2: Look at the picture of you, too, you handsome devil.
• 2:34:06
  Speaker 2: Look at that. Nice jacket on. Looking good.
• 2:34:09
  Speaker 1: Someone gave me that, actually. I managed to scrounge that.
• 2:34:12
  Speaker 2: But it's cool because you look like a cool guy.
• 2:34:14
  Speaker 2: Like you're a cool guy with space behind you. Wow,
• 2:34:17
  Speaker 2: that's awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for
• 2:34:20
  Speaker 2: doing this. I really appreciate you. I appreciate everything you're doing.
• 2:34:23
  Speaker 2: It's awesome.
• 2:34:24
  Speaker 1: Thank you. I always enjoy it. I loved it last time.
• 2:34:27
  Speaker 1: And people still talk about it when I was on
• 2:34:28
  Speaker 1: last time. More people ask me about meeting you than
• 2:34:32
  Speaker 1: virtually anybody else.
• 2:34:32
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. Get ready. Because it's like 100 times more
• 2:34:36
  Speaker 2: popular than it was back then. It's going to be
• 2:34:38
  Speaker 2: very strange now. But thank you again. I really appreciate it.
• 2:34:40
  Speaker 2: I can't wait to see your show. Thank you so much.
• 2:34:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 2:34:43
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Bye, everybody.