Lawrence Krauss and Joe Rogan examine gauge symmetry, a cornerstone of physics where forces like electromagnetism emerge from mathematical invariance—like flipping chess colors without altering rules—while the Higgs mechanism explains mass via quantum fields, confirmed by CERN’s 2012 discovery. He argues the universe’s structure, including life, stems from accidental field configurations in its infancy, not divine design, critiquing religious dogma for suppressing science and fostering divisiveness. On AI, Krauss optimistically frames it as a potential successor to humanity, capable of preserving culture even if biology evolves, while Rogan cautions about unintended malevolence. They debunk black holes as universe portals, noting dark matter’s role in galaxy formation, and explore quantum fluctuations—like photons spontaneously appearing—as evidence the cosmos arose from nothing without supernatural intervention. [Automatically generated summary]
And in every book I write, I usually learn something.
And always when you're explaining stuff, most teachers say the first time they understand anything is when they teach it.
And gauge symmetry, I'd never thought of really how to explain it.
And I tried to explain to my editor, which was great because she didn't know any science and she kept not understanding it.
And then I came up with this explanation involving these chess boards, which is still subtle, but I realized afterwards it was kind of neat because...
When I developed this explanation for gauge symmetry, I not only understood it in a new way, but I realized, gee, I now understood physically, if I'd had this explanation before, I could have predicted this Higgs mechanism and all the things I only see mathematically all come out of the picture I gave.
So I loved that.
It's a new way for me to think about the world that I didn't before.
And if you can picture the fact that it's fundamental to nature, and therefore if you really want to understand nature, at some level you've got to grapple with it.
In fact, that's why it's the greatest story ever told so far, because it's bizarre.
And the fact that it's bizarre and we've come this far is amazing.
I mean, it's just amazing.
We could have come this far in a few hundred years.
And it's kind of sad that people don't realize, because they get all stuck at all this myth and superstition, and the real world is so much more interesting.
It is unbelievably fascinating when you delve into the world of quantum mechanics and quantum physics and all these bizarre things that are happening far smaller than the eye can see.
Well, it seems like magic, but the fact that We get it at some level is remarkable because the other thing I find that makes it magic is when you realize that the world we experience is such an illusion.
That the real world is so different and I love telling you a story of how we got there because you see scientists are biased and prejudiced and have You know, they know where they're going, even when it's wrong.
But science can overcome those biases and prejudices and drag us kicking and streaming in the right direction.
And that's why the story is neat, but it's also lately, I've been thinking in terms of politics, why it's also neat.
Because we need that to cut through the crap that we're hearing about in Washington.
The same scientific methods of skeptical inquiry, of reliance on empirical evidence, of testing, of looking at many sources.
All those things are so essential for the work of our democracy.
But they're the same tools that have led us to, from just beginning to understand how balls fall when you let them go, to understanding the inner workings of atoms and nuclei and how the universe came to be and why we're here.
I just find the story so wonderful that it's a shame more people don't appreciate it.
And the best part is the so far part to me because every day the story gets better.
Unlike that other greatest story.
Which was written by illiterate peasants 2,000 years ago and never changes because it was just as boring then as it is now.
And this one keeps changing, and we're surprised every day.
Well, I think one of the things that's important that you said is that scientists sometimes have ego problems and they have an idea where it's going, even if the evidence disproves them, but that science corrects it.
So I think that, like, using that...
Explanation, or using that definition, it sort of defines what's important about it.
Because human beings, even the most brilliant ones, are flawed because we do have egos and we are just people.
And this story that I tell, which is, for me, actually, for me it was interesting because I really had to learn, I thought I knew the history, but of course when you write something down, you...
You suddenly realize you don't.
And I had to learn it more.
And you want to take some of these people and shake them and say, look, the solution's right here.
You've got it.
Why are you waiting 20 years?
You're looking in the wrong direction.
The example I was just thinking about the other day when I was giving a talk, I don't know if you ever saw this video where you're supposed to look at these people bouncing basketballs and you're supposed to, I'm going to ruin it for you and all your listeners if they haven't.
Where you're supposed to count the basketballs and see how many people are, and there's a guy walking between them in an ape suit and a gorilla suit, and you never see him.
You don't even see him because you're so focused on the wrong thing.
And that's the way physics often happens.
We think the direction is one direction.
We're so focused on it, we don't even realize the solution is there before our very eyes.
And I think it's important because, you know, people think that science...
You know, that scientists and science are the same thing, and they're not.
The good thing about scientists, the good scientists, is they're at least willing to recognize in the end that they're wrong.
So they have these preconceptions, and the great thing about science is it trains us, yeah, there are these things that are central to our being, but ultimately we realize we're wrong and we're willing to change our minds.
That's the difference between science and religion, really, is that, yeah, we have biases, yeah, we have prejudices, yeah, we want to believe.
We really want to believe, just like the X-Files.
But eventually, when nature tells us otherwise, we throw out those beliefs like yesterday's newspaper.
So it turns out that there's a fundamental principle in nature, which really was discovered by this wonderful woman mathematician, Emmy Nerther, who wasn't even allowed to get a job because she was a woman at the turn of the century.
But she discovered...
So there's things we say, and we tell kids, unfortunately, in schools...
Energy is conserved and momentum is conserved.
It sounds like the Ten Commandments, like we come up with them because we like them.
And now we understand them differently.
We understand that everything that is conserved, that doesn't change in the world, is due to a fundamental symmetry of nature.
So energy is conserved because we now understand the laws of physics don't change over time.
As long as you contest that the laws of physics are the same tomorrow as they are today, then we know energy is conserved.
It's not something we take on faith.
It's a mathematical consequence of that.
Momentum conservation is a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics don't change from place to place.
That they're the same in this studio here as they would be if we were having this conversation in New York.
That seems reasonable.
And she showed mathematically it's the case.
So there's a famous, everyone's experiences who learned any physics, conservation of charge.
You know, the electric charge in any system doesn't change magically over time.
That's a fundamental property of electricity and magnetism.
You've got a certain amount of charge at the beginning.
It's got to be the same at the end.
That's a consequence of the fact that it's arbitrary.
There's a symmetry of nature that says, you know, Benjamin Franklin called electrons, you know, negative, negatively charged.
But it doesn't mean anything because I could have called them positively charged.
It's just an arbitrary definition.
If I changed every negative charge in the world to positive charge and every positive charge to negative charge, everything would work the same way.
A symmetry of nature represents something that doesn't change about nature when you make a change in a definition.
So, calling electrons positively charged and protons negatively charged would not make the world difference.
It's an arbitrary name.
Martians could call electrons positively charged and protons negatively charged.
There's nothing fundamentally important about the word positive charge.
It doesn't mean any different than a negative charge.
So I could change every...
Right now, I could change the charge on every electron in the universe And flip it.
It's a sign.
So every electron is negatively charged now, but now suddenly I'm God and I make every electron positively charged and I make every proton negatively charged.
I can arbitrarily change each white square in a chess board to a black square.
I can choose randomly which white squares to change to black squares.
And I can still make the game of chess the same if I just have a rulebook.
And the rulebook tells me, oh, if you're on that square, you can do what you could have done if it was a white square.
So if I have the rulebook, then it doesn't matter what colors the squares are.
If I know I was in the square that used to be white, but I call it black, and I look and I say, okay, my knight can do this in that square, but I couldn't do that.
So if I have a rulebook, then I'm arbitrarily free to change the color of each square in a chessboard, as long as a rulebook tells me what I've done.
That's electromagnetism.
Because it turns out, electromagnetism has a symmetry that says, you know what, I could change the definition of the charge on an electron here, but in the next room differently, so I could call this electron positive and that one negative, and it wouldn't change anything as long as I had a rule book that told me That I made that change and how the electromagnetic interaction would be the same.
As long as I'm free to change the definition of what I call positive and negative charge locally, not globally.
That means I can do it differently here and there.
As long as I have a rule book that says, you know what, that electron used to be negative, so it'll still repel this electron here, even though I call it positive and I call that negative.
I've changed locally the definition, but I also changed the rules.
Now, it turns out that the rulebook really tells you it's a rule at each point in space, right?
It's a rule.
It tells you what you can and can't do at each point in space.
So we call that a function, because a function is a number or a rule at each point in space.
A function at space is exactly that.
Well, it turns out the function that does that is the electromagnetic field.
If you ask what would be the mathematical characteristics of a quantity that would make sure the rules remain the same no matter what I called an electron place to place, and you ask how I could write it down mathematically, It would have exactly the mathematical form of the electromagnetic field, the thing that we call the electric field or magnetic field.
The mathematics of it is precisely fixed.
By being able to allow us to change the definition of charge from place to place in a way that doesn't change the ultimate dynamics, doesn't change the way the world works.
It's prescribed by the mathematics, the rule book is prescribed, and the mathematics of that rule book turns out, magically almost, to be exactly the mathematics of Maxwell's equations, which are the equations of electromagnetism.
Well, because, I mean, what it says is that nature somehow has a symmetry.
It doesn't depend, you don't want to, but it says nature has designed itself such that the definition of electric charge from place to place is arbitrary.
It really came, if you want to step back, Einstein told us, You know, that length and time are kind of relative to...
They depend upon the observer.
And his theory of general relativity actually said, I can define locally...
What my coordinate system is, what my length is, what my time is, I can define that arbitrarily locally, and it may differ from place to place.
My rulers could differ from place to place, but the universe doesn't care, because there's this thing called the gravitational field that takes into account of that, and nature has that symmetry, so it doesn't matter if I change the rulebook, if I change what I define as space and time locally, the universe behaves exactly the same.
What we've discovered is that the playing field determines the rules.
The characteristics of the playing field determine the rules.
If you played baseball and there were five bases instead of four, the rules would be different.
If the distance between home plate and first base was a mile, the rules would be different.
If you had 25 outfielders in outfield, it would be different, okay?
So the playing field determines the rules, right?
Baseball would be a very different game if it were played on a field that's different.
What we've discovered in nature is we used to think the forces were kind of fundamental.
You know, Newton told us F equals MA and all that.
What we've discovered is the thing that really constrains what can happen in the world is the playing field and the characteristics of the playing field.
And for physicists, what determines the characteristics of the playing field are the symmetries of that playing field.
Baseball, the fact that it looks like a diamond is a symmetry, right?
The playing field looks the same.
I could call first base home plate and home plate first base if I rotated the whole field, right?
It determines, in some sense, that's a characteristic of baseball that sort of determines the rules of the game.
Okay?
And what we've learned is what's really fundamental in nature is the characteristics of that playing field and what determines the characteristics of that playing field are the symmetries of nature.
The things that demonstrate to us that what we think is fundamental is really just an arbitrary label.
Like electric charge, we've discovered, is an arbitrary label.
Locally as well as globally.
And that determines the whole nature of the forces that can happen.
Once you say that electric charge is an arbitrary thing and nature doesn't care what you call positive and negative from here or Mars, that determines the nature of the force, of what we call the electromagnetic force.
It's completely prescribed.
And it turns out that's true for all the forces in nature.
The nature of gravity is determined, as Einstein showed, by the fact that you can change what I define as one meter Here, and on Mars, call one meter something else, and nature doesn't care what I label as a meter.
It turns out gravity takes that into account and says what we define as length is irrelevant.
The fundamental gravitational field is due to a curvature of space that is independent of what we define as length or time locally.
It's a weird thing, but it's a property of space and time that Einstein discovered for general relativity.
We've discovered it for electromagnetism.
It turns out all the forces in nature respect that same kind of mathematical symmetry, that there's some quantity that you can change in your equations.
I can change its definition in the equations, but the physics remains the same.
And the nature of the equations is prescribed, the mathematical form of the equations is prescribed precisely by the requirement that I can change, in the case of electric charge, that electric charge is arbitrary.
I can call an electron positive or negative anywhere I want in space, and the equations don't care.
That prescribes the form of the equations.
They have to have a very particular form, a unique form, and that unique form happens to be the form that it has.
Now, so you can say, look, it's an accident, that really there's something fundamental, that the equations have this form, and lo, and we've discovered this mathematical symmetry is an accident.
Or you can say that the mathematical symmetry is fundamental, it's a property of nature, and it prescribes the form of the kind of forces that nature That the world allows.
I mean, that's the great thing about physics, about science in general.
It's kind of like Hollywood.
If it works, you copy it.
And so we often find the same mathematical formalisms apply to vastly different systems.
So there's a very famous set of equations of predator and prey for ecosystems, and you can look at those equations, and they're the same kind of equations that apply in many different systems.
In oatmeal boiling.
It's amazing how the same mathematics appears in very different systems.
And we can therefore use what we've learned in one case to apply to another.
That's why we copy it, because it works so broadly.
It's amazing that very few equations turn out to so broadly describe so many vastly different systems.
And predator-prey relationships, which is, I think, what you're talking about in ecosystems, how, you know, there's a very...
When they think it might be taxing, they don't want to think about it.
But the interesting thing is, that doesn't apply in other areas.
So people can be...
They don't think they have to be Eric Clapton to enjoy guitar music, or Picasso to enjoy weird paintings, or Shakespeare to enjoy plays.
But somehow...
And all of that's taxing in its own way.
Let's take Bach.
The more you understand music, I'm sure the more you appreciate Bach cantatas, all the different voices.
But I can enjoy just listening to it.
But people say, in every other activity, it's fine.
But when it comes to science, they say, nah, it's not easy for me.
I can't even touch it at all.
And what I try and do in my books and other places is, look, you don't have to master it.
And so, you may not master gauge symmetry, which is the most subtle and complicated thing in all of modern physics, but you can still, even if you skip that section of the book, there's still things in there you can appreciate about how we understand the world that we couldn't appreciate before, and have that orgasmic aha experience.
That, hey, the world is different than I thought.
And that's what's wonderful.
So, you can appreciate science without mastering it, sure.
Gate symmetry and things like it are basically mathematical concepts, so to talk about them in language without math is always sort of verbose.
Well, I think what's important about your book, chapter 10 or 11, I think, I think what's really important about it is you're not speaking in layman's terms, but you're also not speaking in theoretical physicist's terms.
Well, yeah, and someone, I think Richard, a few people nicely said about the book that, they claimed, as Einstein said, I'm trying to make it simple, but not simpler than it can be.
For people like me that have never studied it, when I read what you're doing, and I read what's been done, and I read all of the people out there that are trying to decipher all this magical stuff out there in the universe, It's important just to be aware that this is going on, because I think for the vast majority of the seven billion people on the planet, this is just unknown.
I completely agree, and I love that quote in the book.
I think that for a lot of people, that discomfort is just, people are tired.
They work, they've got jobs, they've got families, they've got a lot of stuff to do, and something like this comes along that just throws a monkey wrench into the gears of the mind.
Yeah, it does, but sometimes you want your mind blown.
And sometimes, you know, you can skim over or try with each of my books to say, okay, so that part you can get, but, you know, it's not like suddenly you won't understand the rest of the book.
And the stuff is so neat.
The idea that there's this invisible field everywhere in the universe that changes the way you haven't got there in the book yet, but that changes our picture of the universe.
It's amazing, and people should have the opportunity to know that our picture has shown that we are a cosmic accident, that we're just like an icicle on a window whose direction, if you lived on that icicle, might seem very special to you, but is an accident.
And it turns out...
The forces of nature are what they are by the same kind of accident, because some field froze in the early universe in some direction.
If it had frozen in another direction, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation.
Well, in fact, in most cases, you wouldn't even have you and me, because there wouldn't be particles that have mass, and you wouldn't have stars and galaxies and planets.
Now, what there would be, I can't say.
But I can definitely say that everything we see in the universe would be gone.
And so what I'm saying is, Our universe is the way it is because a field froze in a certain direction.
Now, sure, there are laws of physics that say the field can freeze in that direction, but it's also laws of physics that say the field could have frozen maybe in another direction.
It's some quantity that's defined in each point in space.
And the neat thing in particle physics is every field, like an electric field, every field is associated with an elementary particle.
So the electric field is produced by a coherent state of photons, the ultimate quanta of electromagnetism.
The individual particles that are going into your eye right now and are being absorbed by your eyes so you can see me.
The reason you can see light is it's a lot of little particles entering your eye that are reflecting off my eyes, so you can see them.
And it turns out in quantum mechanics, every field, which is a function of points in space, the electric field in this room, there's a magnetic field in this room because the Earth has a magnetic field, right?
If you put a compass here, we'll feel the magnetic field.
That's because actually there's this coherent state of Photons that are basically very regular in space.
That's really what a field is in quantum physics.
A very regular configuration of elementary particles that are sort of hidden in space.
And it turns out there's this background field, we call the Higgs field, which is everywhere in space and happens to have a very particular configuration.
And then when the particles that make your body and my body up, when we move through it, they experience a resistance that causes them to behave as if they have mass.
If the field wasn't there, the particles would be massless.
It's like swimming in molasses.
If you're swimming in water, you feel pretty light, but if I filled the pool up with molasses and you tried to do 100 meters, you'd be pretty damn tired at the end of it.
You'd feel like you weighed thousands of pounds.
We're swimming through molasses.
We just don't see it.
It's amazing.
It's there.
I mean, it sounds like, as I was just saying to a group earlier today, it sounds like Religion, right?
I think there's an invisible field everywhere that's responsible for our existence.
That sounds like religion, except for the fact in physics, we can say that's not good enough.
If it's there, we've got to find it.
And if it's there, what do we do?
If that field is associated with particles, if I, as I like to say, it's cosmic sadomasochism, if I spank the vacuum, if I dump enough energy in empty space at a single point, I should kick out real particles if that field is there.
If the Higgs field is there, if I dump enough energy in empty space, I'll kick out real particles.
I'll call them Higgs particles.
And you know what?
Let me build a big machine in Geneva, the biggest and most complicated machine humans have ever built, called the Large Hadron Collider, that dumps enough energy into a point in space that can maybe kick out Higgs particles if they're really there.
And you know what?
They're there.
On July 4, 2012, we announced the discovery of 50 particles that looked and sounded and walked and quacked like Higgs's, and we now have tested them much more, produced many more, and they're Higgs particles.
It gives us evidence that that field exists.
It was an outrageous and audacious claim that the properties of the universe we see are an accident due to this background field that's there, and if that background field wasn't there, the world would look very different.
Well, the properties of the universe we experience are a consequence of that field, but that field being there is as much an accident as an icicle freezing on a window in a certain direction.
The field could have frozen with a different value.
Because really, the beer would rather be frozen, but when it's under pressure in the bottle, it's liquid.
Okay?
But, for example, if you open the top, suddenly the pressure is released and it suddenly freezes.
Okay?
The beer has changed from one state to another.
It's gone from liquid to solid.
When it's gone to solid, it suddenly releases a lot of energy.
Okay?
If you wish...
You could think of the properties of that beer as a field.
It can either be liquid or solid.
Okay?
And it changes depending upon the temperature and the pressure and all the rest.
Turns out the state of the universe changes as the universe cools.
And you could think of that Higgs as like sort of a cosmic fluid that's everywhere.
And as the universe cooled down, suddenly it found it would rather be in a certain configuration.
It would rather be frozen than liquid.
And it's some numbers that tell you whether it's acting like it's frozen or liquid.
Just like I could describe the beer, I could define some numbers that would tell me whether the beer was frozen or liquid.
And so as the universe cooled, that cosmic fluid, which is everywhere, all these elementary particles, if you wish, that are permeating space, suddenly found themselves preferring, as the universe cooled down, to be in a certain configuration rather than another configuration.
In some sense, the accidents of the dust that's on your window and the wind that's blowing and everything else is going to determine what that pattern looks like.
But every day, if you had a new cold day, the icicle pattern would look different.
Okay?
It's not as if every day you'd have the same icicle pattern on your window.
It would be different.
And that's what I mean by an accident.
It's not as if the laws of physics at some level couldn't have told you that if you knew all the configurations on that day why it would look one way or another.
But it's not significant.
That's what I mean.
There's no special significance to that pattern that meant God meant it to be.
And there's no special significance to the universe in which we live that meant God meant it to be.
It could have been quite different.
We should celebrate that it's not quite different, because you and I can have this conversation.
So it's a wonderful thing that it is the way it is.
And let's celebrate that we've evolved, and I can still say that word in this country, we've evolved a consciousness so that we can appreciate all of the wonders of the universe.
Let's celebrate that.
So it doesn't mean we're meaningless just because the universe has no purpose.
We make our own purpose in our own life.
It means to me, in some sense, that life is more purposeful.
There isn't someone pulling the strings.
We're pulling the strings.
And so It's okay to live in a purposeless universe.
It doesn't make life worse.
It makes it much better.
We just always ascribe significance to things that happen to us.
The physicist Richard Feynman used to go up to people and he used to say, you won't believe what happened to me today.
You won't believe.
And people say, what?
He'd say, absolutely nothing.
Okay?
Because when things happen to you, suddenly they're significant.
You know, you have a million crazy dreams, and then one night you dream that your friend is going to break their arm, the next day they break their leg, you go, oh my god, I'm clairvoyant.
You know, or he'll say this, he'll say, you know, I just saw a license plate.
You wouldn't believe, I just saw a license plate, it was J24796, can you believe it?
Because, you know, that's as significant as seeing a license plate that says, 1-1-1-1-1-1, or a license plate that says, I am God.
Okay?
They're all just as significant, but the things that appear to mean something to us suddenly take on some significance, because we're hardwired to want to believe.
Just like the X-Files said, we want to believe.
We all want to believe.
Why?
Well, here's the reason.
We want to ascribe meaning to everything, and I think there's an evolutionary reason for that.
For example, if you're an early modern human on the savannah in Africa, the leaves can be rustling in the trees next to you.
You can say, ah, no reason.
Or you can say, maybe there's a lion there.
And what happened was, so maybe there's a lion causing, maybe there's a cause for that happening.
Now, those of our potential ancestors that said, eh, there's no reason.
But when you're talking about clairvoyance or when you're talking about some sort of a divine intervention by a deity, you're talking about something powerful.
This is the one that is meant to be the leader of this tribe because he's going to lead us.
It works at all levels from the fact that the leaves are rustling and it means it's lying.
But once we have that hardwired thing, then our desire to believe continues.
And social beings maybe found that if they imposed some meaning on the universe, on a universe which otherwise is hostile and dangerous, that maybe it might help bind them in tribes, that maybe it would help make them happier about being alive early on because they might be so scared of a universe that maybe it would help make them happier about being alive early on because they might be so scared of a universe that So there's obviously an evolutionary purpose to what is religion.
Because if there wasn't, religions wouldn't be everywhere, right?
I mean, pretty well all human cultures have religions.
Each one is inconsistent with every other one, which is the reason we know that they're probably all wrong.
But...
It works.
The fact that it's universal must mean there's some evolutionary utility to believing.
But then, certain things eventually, even though they worked and were useful early on, as our human condition changes, they may not be so useful.
I would argue that religion is turning out to be counterproductive now.
It may have been useful early on in human history, but now what it's doing is it's getting in the way not only of progress, but of human cooperation.
And so evolution is now counterproductive.
But the great thing is we have a consciousness, we have an intellect, so we can actually overcome that evolutionary predilection by realizing we have that predilection.
And as Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself.
So if you're a scientist, what you have to do is ask yourself, am I believing that because I want to believe or because there's evidence?
So if we constantly are skeptical of ourselves, we can know to overcome that ingrained impulse we have to want to believe.
That's one of the utilities of science.
So I may listen to you and like you, and I may listen to another radio person and not like them, and I may be therefore naturally willing to assume that they're wrong and you're right.
But I should also say to myself, Is it really the case, or is it just because I like Joe Rogan and I don't like, you know, you pick your favorite right-wing nut?
And so we should be asking ourselves, okay, maybe I should go beyond my predilections, beyond my biases, to ask why I am sympathetic to what I'm hearing.
And if we did that in everyday life, I think we'd cut through the crap more carefully.
So science says, look, we are hardwired to want to have these weird beliefs.
And it's fine.
Maybe some of them are right.
But the only way to know is to test them.
If we're not willing to test our beliefs, And subject them to the test of nature, then we're going to be deluded.
And that's the problem with a lot of what's happening in our government.
People are saying, you know what, I really want to believe in this absurd story, and therefore I refuse to accept evolution.
If you're Mike Pence, the Vice President of the country, you say, I don't believe evolution, because it doesn't agree with my ridiculous fundamentalist And he said that in Congress, right?
He said, we shouldn't be teaching evolution in schools.
It might be, I think, because he knows that a large percentage of the country finds comfort in a leader that subscribes to the same sort of superstitions that they do.
In fact, as Steve Weinberg, who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, has said, and I love it, he said, so there are good people in the world, there are bad people.
Good people do good things, bad people do bad things.
Do you think that religion in its earliest stages was, in a sense, primitive man with no science, trying to figure out the world and trying to have some sort of rules, like almost like a scaffolding in order to move to the next?
If you see that it exists in so many different cultures, that it might have been something along those lines.
It was their effort to understand the world around them based on what they knew.
It was noble.
You know, they tried to understand the world.
And so there's nothing wrong with it.
But claiming that we today should be guided by the worldview of illiterate peasants in the Iron Age peasants who didn't know the Earth orbited the Sun and wrote down scriptures based on their beliefs at the time, they argue that that should guide our life today when we discovered 100 billion galaxies in the universe and discovered all this stuff, is ludicrous.
So you're absolutely right.
The birth of science...
And religion are the same.
And in fact, modern science grew out of religion.
People point that out, and they say to me, how dare you talk about religion, you know, as being outdated?
Science grew out of religion.
And I say to them, well, that's fine, but children outgrow their parents, right?
It's so great.
No doubt, religious ideas, and all our early scientists were religious, because there's the only game in town.
You couldn't be educated, except the church controlled all the universities, and so it was like the National Science Foundation of the 16th century.
It's not surprising they were all religious, because that was the only game in town.
So that helped create the birth of modern science, but science outgrew it.
You know, we made this movie called The Unbelievers, which followed Richard Dawkins and I around the world as we talked about this stuff.
And it was nice, and maybe, and I hope, and it's a well-made film.
I like the filmmakers who made it.
But I found people come up to me I had no idea of this.
It's one of the negative aspects of religion that I never appreciated.
I have people come up to me, almost every day I write me, and saying, you know what, I saw that movie, and I realized I'm not a bad person for asking questions.
And I'm not alone.
You know, these people from small towns in Georgia, they have no one to talk to.
They think they're the only ones who's asked the question, is God real?
Is it okay to not believe in God?
And they're told by everyone else, not only you'll go to hell, but you're a bad person.
And suddenly they discover that's not true.
And so I think there are a lot of people who have that force down their throat.
It's really hard when you're a kid, you know, and have these...
And that's why I do think any kind of religion for kids is kind of child abuse, no matter what, because these concepts of a deity and the possible existence of a purpose of the universe are very deep and subtle concepts.
And to expect a three-year-old kid...
To ram that down a three-year-old kid's throat is unfair, because the kid can't address it.
It ends up being internalized in ways, and a lot of people, you know, I hear a lot of people who've had deep religious educations who say, you know, it's hard to outgrow that, because when that's thrust into you as a child, it's really hard to ever overcome it.
The guilt feelings that many religions introduce, the fundamental notion that, you know, Ultimately sinful, and no matter what you do is sinful, is something a lot of people have hard times with.
And that claim of sin is just so, you know, I've debated people who argue that homosexuality is sinful.
And it's unnatural.
God intended it to be otherwise.
And then I point out, well, you know what?
You take all mammals, 10%, in every species almost, 10% have homosexual relationships.
10% of sheep have long-term homosexual relationships.
Are they sinful?
It's not unnatural at all.
It's a natural consequence of whatever...
Now, why it's a case, it's an interesting evolutionary question, but it's certainly not unnatural.
And so, to argue that it's both unnatural and wrong is to misunderstand biology.
But people grow up being told it's evil because the Bible said it.
And then they don't want to give people who are homosexual the same rights as other people because they say God didn't want them to have the homosexual.
So the problem is people are told these things that are ultimately wrong because for whatever reason the tribe that wrote down that scripture Wanted to make sure that there weren't homosexual relationships in the group.
Well, it's really baffling when you talk to people about the Bible and the Old Testament versus the New Testament, and they don't even understand where the New Testament was created by Constantine and a bunch of bishops.
And the reason that nowadays the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity may seem a little less violent than Islam for some people is because people take the Koran literally.
That's part of fundamentalism.
Very few, very few people take the Bible as literally as, namely, hey, we're going to stone kids.
In the 12th century they may have, but now we've outgrown it, and Islam is 600 years younger.
And so it's just, the Old Testament is just as violent as the Koran, but no one takes it seriously.
Most people who call themselves religious They pick and choose the things they like from the Bible or the New Testament or the Old Testament.
They pick and choose the nice, kinder, gentler things.
You know, Richard Dawkins Foundation in England did an interesting survey.
So the British government does a census, you know, and they ask people's religions as part of it.
And in the last census, remarkably, only 55% of the people said they were Christian.
Church of England, which was one of the lowest ever.
But fine.
They went to those 55% people.
They did a survey of those.
And they said, okay, why do you call yourself Christian?
Do you believe in the virgin birth?
Do you believe in transubstantiation?
Do you believe in...
And went down the list.
And people say, no, no, no, no, no.
And then they'd ask, why do you call yourself Christian?
And the answer was, we like to think of ourselves as good people.
So religion has usurped morality.
And somehow...
People throw out all of the evil, and it's not just the Old Testament.
No one talked about hell more than Jesus Christ.
A guy who's supposed to love everyone talked about hell, this eternal damnation for people who disobey, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, God is like a cosmic Saddam Hussein.
But worse, because Saddam Hussein used to just torture his enemies while they're alive.
God is worse.
He takes the people who doesn't like it, tortures them for all eternity.
And when you think about, I mean, and this is, if you've actually ever looked at this, it's amazing.
So people say, the Bible, you know, is just the Word of God.
But they don't realize that this came by, in fact, the King James Version was decided by a bunch of people who decided what to throw out.
There were parts of the earlier Bible they didn't like, they threw out.
They determined what is now the Old Testament in the King James Version was a bunch of people who got together and decided to throw things out and how to translate things and what to do.
It was his determination after 14 years of deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding, that it was really all about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults.
It's fascinating, but there are a lot of people who have written really interesting books on the early history of the Christian religion and Judaism.
And I know a number of those scholars, and it's really fascinating.
In fact, there's really great evidence that Jesus wasn't even divine in the early Christian way.
I mean, his divinity came about 300 years later.
It's some really interesting work.
And so religion has evolved, and we now take it as if it was sort of obvious.
Apparently, according to the books I've been reading lately, there's really good evidence that, you know, Not only did Jesus never call himself God, his followers never did either.
And this resurrection thing was put in later when people wanted to make him divine.
Yeah, but the point is that people who criticize me never read the piece, which often happens for my work, because there was a title, and the editor chose the title, which is fine, but what I said was, When I simply asked the question, could it be that Jesus was, you know, what I just said, could it be that Jesus wasn't always considered divine in the Christian religion?
You know, a scholarly question.
When I asked that question, in many cases I'm called a militant atheist.
So if simply questioning makes me a militant atheist, then all scientists should be militant atheists, because we should adore questioning.
And so I wasn't arguing, you know, we should be handing out pamphlets.
I said, we should be asking questions.
And so the discussion you and I just had would be viewed by some people, and will be viewed by some people, as sinful, as sacrilege, should not be on the air, should not be allowed to have that discussion, because how dare we question the divinity of Jesus Christ, because after all, He was God, and to question His divinity is to do the work of the devil.
And that's so sad, because, you know, you should be questioning.
And it is fascinating where people draw that line, too, whether they draw the line at the New Testament, or whether they go back to the Old Testament, or whether they even...
I mean, how many people are believers in the Dead Sea Scrolls?
I mean, how many people have gone over the work from Qumran with a fine-tooth comb?
But it is strange to me that people do draw those arbitrary lines at when they decide the doctrine is real.
They'll tell you, you know, if you start talking to them about the Old Testament and they're trying to be a Christian apologist, they'll say, well, listen, you're talking about the Old Testament, and we don't go by that.
We go by that thing that Emperor of Rome created with a bunch of bishops, and he wasn't even Christian himself until he was on his deathbed.
There are people who are more generous and give to charity because of religion and help their neighbors and go to, you know, at Christmas time, go to soup kitchens and all.
And I know people who go to soup kitchens at Christmas time who are atheists.
The point is, it's not necessary.
So for some people it helps.
I would argue that on average, and this is where you can have a debate, but on average I would say the net effect of religion is negative.
And I know colleagues of mine, some of whom would disagree with me on that, but I think if you look at the net effect of religion on society in the current world, and maybe even over human history, The net effect is negative.
And I would argue you could probably get many of the same features.
If we dispense with religion right now, it'd be a problem.
Because right now, for many people, religion gives them community, a sense of community, a sense of belonging, and maybe for many a sense of comfort and death and all sorts of things.
So we couldn't just sort of...
It provides useful things, as I said before.
It fulfills evolutionary purposes.
If it wasn't, it wouldn't be so ubiquitous.
But I can imagine, at least, a world where we could fulfill those things in other ways.
For example, instead of bringing people together for church every Sunday, we could bring them together for a rock concert every Sunday.
Okay?
And they'd get the same sense of community.
Or maybe for a quantum mechanics class every Sunday.
But maybe they might find it fun if they made quantum mechanics.
Or maybe they'd find a sense of community in everyone rolling their eyes just like you did now.
Because I suspect that happens in church a lot, too.
But the point is, what bothers me when people say, well, therefore, we need religion.
And the answer is, maybe now.
But could we imagine building a sense of community because we care about each other and we have a commonality in other ways?
That's another thing that makes science so wonderful, right?
I've called the Large Hadron Collider the Gothic Cathedral of the 21st century because the Gothic The cathedrals were built in the 11th or 12th century by thousands of artisans over centuries working together.
They had different languages, different cultures, different religions maybe, not so many different religions back then, but they worked together.
The Large Hadron Collider is built by 10,000 scientists from over 100 different countries with different languages, different religions.
They're working together.
They have a commonality.
Science really, much more effectively than religion, I would argue, binds people globally.
Because religions are still an us-versus-them thing.
I'm Christian, you're a Jew.
I'm Christian, you're Islam.
You know, whatever it is.
I'm Buddhist.
It's always us versus them.
With science, in principle, anyone can do it.
And we're all working towards a common goal, which is to understand how the universe works.
We're not interested in pushing our own picture or joining together to believe anything.
That's the other thing people think of.
Scientists push evolution because we all get together at night and with special rings and talk to each other and say, we don't want to believe anything else.
They don't realize if you're a scientist.
The biggest way to become famous, and what we all do when we go into work every day, is try and prove our colleagues wrong.
Because that's how you really make progress.
Hey, something we thought was right is really not what we thought it was.
Those are the great discoveries that push people forward.
So it's not as if we all buy into the same thing.
We're all trying to push knowledge forward, which means we're trying to discover...
Perhaps old biases and overcome them.
And so scientists are bound together not to push their own...
I mean, of course we all have theories, but we're all willing to throw them out if the theories are proven wrong.
And we're all willing to celebrate being wrong.
And that's a wonderful thing, and as I always say, if you're a theoretical physicist, the two favourite states to be in are either wrong or confused, because that's great, because then you're going to learn something.
And if we are more comfortable with not knowing, which is the other aspect, I think, that science for many people is terrifying, because if you deeply believe you know the answers, if you deeply believe there's a God, you can put aside that uncertainty.
And for many people, uncertainty is terrifying.
But being comfortable with not knowing is wonderful.
And moreover, I would argue, is better for teachers and for parents.
You know, your kids ask you questions and you really want to always give them the answer, whether you know it or not.
But it'd be much better to say, you know what, I don't know.
Let's figure out.
If anyone knows this.
Because then they participate in the joy of discovery.
They're not told something by some authority.
And same with teachers.
I do think we should be teaching questions rather than answers.
We should be teaching kids how to question and then how to search for the answers.
How to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
How to distinguish the nonsense from the scents.
Especially in our society right now, we used to teach school as if it's just a compository of information.
Now we know, in my phone I have more information than in school, but I also have more misinformation.
How do I tell the difference?
It's the process, and that's what we need to teach in school, the process of skeptical inquiry, relying on evidence, checking many sources, testing your ideas constantly.
Those are the tools kids need to deal effectively in the modern world with an internet that's full of, and with news sources which are equally full of misinformation as well as information.
One of the biggest issues I think that people are having with religion in the 21st century is these areas where you're not allowed to question and explore.
That things hit these walls where this is God's will and this is the way it is.
Or people say, and this amazes me, I get people saying, you will never understand the origin of the universe.
You'll never understand what love is.
Science will never, ever explain love.
Science will never, ever explain X. Well, what will?
And then I say to them, well, that's incredibly a pompous statement.
Because if you say that science will never explain this, you must understand it.
Because how do you know that we'll never explain it?
We never know what we won't be able to explain until we try.
And maybe there are things about our universe that we'll never understand.
But we don't know until we try.
You can never say up front that science will never explain this or that because you haven't tried.
And in my experience as a scientist, I've been, you know, there could have been brick walls, but I've watched progressively those brick walls crumble as we move around them, or we break them, and it is so exhilarating, and that's why it's the greatest story ever told.
It's so exhilarating to see them knocked down, and things you thought we'd never understand.
I remember one of the forces in nature, a very prominent physicist, the 19...
It will be a hundred years before we discover, understand this interaction.
Next year the theory came out.
And it's so wonderful to see how the story surmounts The biases and the anticipation of individual scientists.
Well, what's ridiculous about saying no one will ever figure anything out is that what we figured out over the last 200 years is monumental and that human language has only been around for 40,000.
As long as we don't, as long as we keep open inquiry.
You could imagine moving, I mean, look, we went through a few hundred years of the Middle Ages where the incredible inquiry-based civil culture of the Greeks was just forgotten.
You know, Greeks had determined the circumference of the earth, not only that it was round, but what its circumference was by simple measurements that were then not accepted because of dogma.
So we have to, if we want to progress, we have to beware of dogma.
Well, what he said was, look, So, at a certain time of day, a certain time of the year, the sun is directly overhead at 12 noon.
Okay?
And I can tell that by looking down a deep well, and I see the reflection of the sun exactly in that deep well.
Okay?
So the rays of the sun, which are coming down in the same direction towards the Earth everywhere, comes down in the deep well.
But 100 miles away, the well, because the surface of the Earth is curved, the well is pointing in a little bit different direction.
So the sun's rays come at a slightly different angle.
So on this day, I will measure that the Sun is directly overhead for me, but I'll get my friend 100 miles away to measure the angle of the Sun relative to the well, and that tells you that the Earth is curved.
And if you do the geometry, you can work out if the 100 miles of the Earth's surface causes the Sun's rays to suddenly be at that angle, how curved the Earth is and what the circumference of the Earth is.
It's plain geometry that, in principle, any high school student could do.
Well, what's even more hilarious is that they, well, we talked about this before the podcast started, the Japanese weather satellite that takes an image, a full image of the earth.
What is the name of that satellite again, Jamie?
It takes a full image of the earth from 22,000 miles away.
People keep saying in this flat earth theory thing that there's no images of the earth in full, that they're all composites.
There are images of the earth that are taken every 10 minutes by this one satellite and they're high resolution.
You can access them online anytime you want.
But people see those and they want to think they're fake, but yet they believe there's an ice wall around Antarctica that you cross over and you fall to the abyss.
Where's this photo of the ice wall?
unidentified
How does someone fly from Japan to the United States?
They don't believe that people can fly around the world.
I've done it.
And that they're all lying.
Here's another one.
Have they ever thought of time zones?
Why are there time zones if the Earth is flat?
Why are there time zones?
They should go from New York to L.A. and see, you know what?
The time is different.
Leprechauns.
Well, no, but they probably think it's a human invention.
But you know, the sun is still shining in L.A. when it's gone down in New York and they can call their friends and check.
And if the Earth was flat, that wouldn't be the case.
It's only the case because the Earth is curved.
So those simple things should convince people.
But people are willing to throw out evidence if they have a belief That's really firm.
And what I said before is we have to realize the easiest person to fool is yourself.
So if you're not willing to question your beliefs, especially those that you hold particularly cherished beliefs in, if you're not willing to question those, you're not going to ever grow.
Yeah, well, that's a good way to put it, particularly cherish, because I think a lot of people do cherish these ideas, things like the earth being flat, because it gives them some sort of information leg up on everybody.
Again, Richard Dawkins tells me about an astrophysicist he knows who, during the day, you know, studies objects in the sky and looks at galaxies or stars and measures that they're 12 billion years old or whatever.
But yet he goes home at night and is convinced that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
But I think you're talking about measurable things and elements and things that you could sort of expose and explain.
But what these people seem to be really obsessed with is people lying about stuff and covering up secrets about, like, the earth being flat or Yeah, they like to believe there's a conspiracy.
The world doesn't treat me fairly, doesn't treat you fairly, it doesn't give a damn about my well-being.
So, hey, I'm being treated unfairly.
Isn't it better for me to think that someone is actively being unfair to me than to assume it's just the way it is?
Because then I can blame it.
And so I tend to think conspiracy theorists tend to say, you know, the things I don't like, there's a real reason for it.
It's not an accident.
It's not just haphazard.
It's not anything.
And, you know, I've lost my job because there's got to be a reason.
There's got to be a villain.
There's got to be someone making it happen.
Just like the reason we burned witches, right?
Because there were storms or there wasn't, you know, there wasn't crops that year.
And a lot of people say, it's an interesting historical...
theory, which I think seems quite plausible to me, that when Newton discovered the laws of gravity, the universal law of gravity, it contributed to the ending of the burning of witches.
And then when Newton discovered that even the planets are affected by the same laws that an apple is, there's a universal loss.
It meant that physical effects had physical causes.
And when bad things happen, there's a physical reason.
There's not someone you can blame and witches or whatever.
And so there's a lot of arguments that suggest that that kind of development in physics led to the end of blaming people for bad crops or for bad things happening.
But I think that's the kind of thing when we want to find someone to blame, rather than just saying, the universe doesn't give a shit about me.
And anybody interested in this, this is a really fascinating subject, but the whole Salem witch trial thing, there's a lot of really convincing evidence that seems to point towards ergot poisoning, that there was a late freeze, and that this particular type of fungus grew on some of their wheat that makes ergot, which has very LSD-like properties, and they think these people thought they were being bewitched because they're being contaminated.
But let's understand, I think behind that is, you know, we've all had, I mean, I think what we're seeing are extremes of characteristics that we all have.
I think many of us assign blame when we shouldn't.
When I lose my keys, sometimes I say to my wife, where did you put the keys, right?
And then I learned very quickly that I shouldn't have said that.
And so I think it's a characteristic of being human, and accepting it as a characteristic of being human doesn't diminish us.
But what's really great is we can understand that and try and work And try and figure out ways to avoid those pitfalls.
And then we have to look at those things and ask what there is.
And if we explore those things, then there's a better chance that we can deal with them and ask what's useful and what isn't.
But if we refuse to acknowledge that those things exist and that they may be the purpose of our religion or our beliefs or whatever, then we can't possibly overcome them.
That may be, but on the other hand, it could be that intelligent AI decides that there's no need.
For example, here's something that one of the people who was at our workshop, Jan Tallinn, who founded Skype, was one of the coordinators of our workshop.
He says, well, you know, oxygen is really bad for oxidation of electronic systems, okay?
So if AI could control, you know, technology, they might want to systematically reduce the oxygen content of the atmosphere.
That wouldn't be so good for humanity.
So you can imagine the other extreme where basically intelligent AI systems control most of the technology in the world and maneuver things so humans become extinct.
So you can imagine one realm or the other, but unless you think about the ways that you can try and ensure that the future is as good as it can be, you've got to at least confront those possibilities.
You don't put your head in the sand and you don't go, oh my god, the world is ending.
You say, look, there are changes that are going to happen.
For example, AI will displace millions of people from their work.
Well, there are two possibilities, and one of them was imagined by John Maynard Keynes when he thought about what industrialization would do.
He said, you know, the effects of it is that, yeah, machines are going to do a lot of the work that people are going to do, but the great thing is that'll free people from the work.
They'll be able to go have coffee in coffee shops, go read books, see plays.
The quality of their life will improve.
But of course, that didn't happen because, you know, the increased resources that were, the increased money and all of that that was generated by industrialization wasn't uniformly distributed at some point.
When we are billions of people out of work, we're going to have to decide to say, you know what?
Those machines have produced a higher net potential quality of life for everyone.
Either we, as machines, begin to do just that, we have a choice to move in that direction, it seems to me, or we have a choice to move in a direction of incredible socioeconomic...
That's going to create huge, huge societal problems.
And I'm worried that in our society, for example, that doesn't even want to provide health care to everyone, where some people say, why should I pay for you when you're sick?
Even though we live in a society that's wealthy enough to do just that, that we'll never get to a point where we say, you know what, these machines have generated incredible wealth.
Let's allow all the people who've been displaced to benefit from that wealth.
I suspect that won't happen, and I'm pessimistic about the future, although as my friend Cormac McCarthy says, because he's a really chipper fellow, but he writes very dark books, and when I first met him, I said, how can you be so cheerful?
And he said, you know, I'm a pessimist, but that's no reason to be gloomy.
And in fact, actually, I do think, ultimately, if machines can program themselves and ultimately become better, then it will be difficult for biology to keep up.
And our future as humans could easily be...
What you would call the Borg in Star Trek.
It could easily say, the only sensible way is to merge.
And you know what?
It's really interesting.
So then the dominant life form, it'll be really interesting.
So we tend to think of, why are carbon-based individuals the dominant life form in the universe?
It could be, if we're looking out in the universe and looking at the dominant life form, they're silicon-based.
They're not carbon-based.
And it'd really be interesting because, in this case, it would be intelligent design.
You can imagine a bunch of intelligent computers having a podcast in the far future saying, you know, I think we were designed by these...
And we have to try and prepare for it as best as possible to try and make sure it works out as well as possible.
I begin this book, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, with a quote from Virgil from the Aeneid saying, I think these are the tiers of things and they're I should, you know, I don't know if you have a copy of the book around.
I always try and analyze it afterwards, and sometimes as a scientist, I try not to get in the way of liking science fiction because, of course, they all involve...
suspending our disbelief and certain things.
And the difference between good science fiction and bad science fiction is not how scientifically accurate it is, it's how good a story it is.
Because if it's a good story, you can suspend disbelief easily.
Someone has asked me the other day on a science fiction podcast, where I said, "You know, what's the worst example of this?" And the example that comes to mind is I remember a New York Times reporter after the physics of Star Trek came out said, can I go with you to a science fiction movie and watch you and talk to you about it?
When you think about artificial intelligence, do you consider, like, one of the things that freaks me out is that what we consider life, when we think about instincts and needs and desires, Those won't necessarily be programmed at all into any artificial life.
Well, one of the questions that arises, and this is a huge point of discussion among AI researchers, because I've been to a bunch of meetings in preparation for our meeting, is whether, and I find this statement almost vacuous, but I'm amazed that they use it all the time, to program machines with human values.
I mean, I find that a very interesting question and a very difficult one to resolve.
My own feeling is, if you're up to me, and it's not an area of active research for me, you produce the smartest machines you can.
Just like you have kids, I have kids.
Do we want them to believe everything we believe?
No.
We want them to become the most capable human beings they can be, so that they can go out and do the best stuff.
So why is it different for a computer?
I'd want to make the most capable, intelligent, resourceful machine I ever could, because then I at least, all the evidence suggests to me that that machine will make the best decisions.
Right, but if the machine doesn't have an ability to breed sexually, and if it doesn't have ego, and if it doesn't necessarily have creativity because it doesn't need to be praised for its ego...
Well, I think, I agree with you, but I think if you're going to connect that sort of mindset to a computer or to artificial intelligence, don't you think it would have some need to create?
Like, our need to create is, like, we like to express ourselves to other people.
If you were alone on an island, do you think you would create?
Yeah, who's a great guy, an intelligent man, and very interested in science and science communication.
We've done a few events together, one with my origins project we can see online.
So he was interviewing me, or we had a dialogue, but he was interviewing me about the new book, and in the context of that and science communication.
And he said something wonderful, both there and earlier.
He said, because it's so counterintuitive to modern culture's perception, he said, art...
Art requires rigor.
Science requires creativity.
And I thought, wow, because that's the opposite of what most people think.
But in fact, science, art requires rigor.
You've got to just get just the right colors and work really hard to get the right patterns, whether that art is music or, you know, by art, I'm talking very broadly.
Whereas science makes progress because we're creative.
It's also rigorous.
But people somehow have this artsy-fartsy notion that, oh, artists are creative and scientists are nerds.
You know, they're just rigorous.
Science is just rigorous garbage.
It's not.
It's creative, just like art.
And art is rigorous.
And the scientists who say, oh, these artists, these musicians, they're not as good as we are, they're equally bad.
Because art...
Doing anything well requires rigor.
Discipline, effort, and rigor.
And I think that beautiful dichotomy, that juxtaposition of art and rigor and science and creativity is something wonderful that Alan said, and we should realize it's a characteristic.
Science does involve creativity and rigor, but so does all the areas of human activity that make the story of humans so wonderful.
That's why it's the greatest story ever told so far.
Because we've developed in them problem-solving capabilities.
And because they're self-aware.
And they want to ask questions because they're self-aware.
They may want to improve their understanding of the world, partly for technology.
They may want to make the world better for themselves.
All sorts of reasons, but we'll see.
To some extent, we'll input it in programming, but to some extent, we'll see.
And to some people, that's terrifying that we won't know the motivations.
Of course it's terrifying.
I'm not as terrified about it.
I guess I'm concerned that we've got to make sure we understand what we're doing at each step so we don't produce massive negative results that could have been avoided.
But I'm not as concerned that the future will be different than the past.
When you see some of the emerging technologies like CRISPR, some of these genetic engineering technologies where they're starting to use non-viable human fetuses and run some tests on them, are you concerned at all about that?
Are you concerned about...
I shouldn't even use the term concern, because obviously you have that mindset.
Watch what's going to happen, try and anticipate the results, understand them in detail, anticipate what the results are, and avoid negative ones to the extent you can.
I mean, except for, you know, Mike Pence and other people.
The rest of us are happy, or, you know, I can pick a lot of radio commentators, but most of us are happy that the world has gotten more open, more interesting, and so that's part of the human drama, is that it's going to go places and we don't know where it's going to go, and that's okay, but we should all work as much as we can to try and make sure, to the extent that we can, that the direction it heads is a good one, is beneficial, more interesting, more exciting, more possibilities, more fun for everybody.
And maybe even more sustainable, because it seems reasonable that it should be sustainable if we think we care about not just our children, but our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
And so it's self-interest in some sense, to be interested in conservation and sustainability instead of immediate profit.
Of course, you might say, if I amass enough wealth, then my children will be fine forever.
And who gives a damn about the rest of the people's children?
But, you know, we can decide that maybe it's in the best interests of everyone, if human society is sustainable, because there'll be less likelihood for extreme war, extreme violence, blah, blah, blah.
I would argue that we behave well...
In large part because of reason.
And my point is, and I've had this, we had a session in my origins project, a whole meeting on the origins of morality.
And I've had this debate with a number of colleagues who point out, I think it was Hume who said, you can't get ought from is.
Okay?
You can't get ought from is.
Just by rationality, you can't decide how to behave.
Maybe, maybe.
But here's the point.
Without is, you can never get to ought.
Without knowing the consequences of your actions, which is what science is all about, you can't decide what's good and bad.
And so science and reason is an essential part of any progress because we can't possibly decide what economic policies to enact or what social policies or what technological policies if we don't know the consequences of actions.
That's why, for example...
Here's an example.
It was so stupid for the Republicans to design this healthcare policy and promote it before anyone had analyzed, say, the economic impact of it.
I mean, they could have still decided to do it.
But at least that data would have been useful for making a final decision.
But getting back to that CRISPR thing, if that becomes available, and if it advances to the point where it's available to people that are live today, would you give it a shot?
Because, you know, we can hack computers, and if you can hack DNA, as a lot of kids want to do, in fact, I was told years ago, I'm chairman of the board of something called the Bull's Need of Atomic Scientists, the board of sponsors, that sets the doomsday clock every year.
And so we have to think about existential threats to mankind.
I remember about seven or eight years ago, we had a professor from MIT who said his...
Computer science students were most interested in hacking DNA. Much more interested than hacking DNA. Because it's just a code.
And so, if you can manipulate arbitrarily, in a very precise way, DNA, then of course there are many good things that can come.
And maybe you can make yourself stronger, bigger, whatever you want.
Maybe we're not you, maybe your children, whatever.
And maybe you can overcome genetic diseases, which of course would be great.
But you can also, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
And with that you can also imagine hacking, right?
And creating new viruses or whatever you want.
And so, yeah, it's any new technology.
Is terrifying.
Does that mean we shouldn't create new technologies?
I mean, cars are terrifying.
Cars kill.
Look how many people cars kill.
Now maybe we'll have self-driving cars.
Maybe fewer people will die.
Some people are afraid of self-driving cars because they do present moral problems.
If a car is designed to minimize the number of people it kills, and it can do that by killing you, if you're faced with running into five school children or the car turning and hitting a wall...
And these are fascinating questions we will have to address.
But technology can be used in many ways, and it's terrifying, but it's trite to use this old expression.
But I do think of it at times, which is a little thing I gave my stepdaughter once that said, ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are meant to do.
I mean, you can bury your head in the sand, you can never go outside the house for fear of being run over by a car or being embarrassed or whatever, or you can choose to live a life.
It's your choice.
But to me, living the life is more interesting.
That's why, in the book, I point out you can choose how to look at the world.
You can choose to say you're the center of the universe, and if that makes you feel better, fine, and the universe was created for you.
Or you can choose to let your beliefs conform to the evidence of reality and assume the universe exists and evolved independent of your existence.
And in that case, you're bound to be surprised.
Isn't it better to have a life full of surprise than a life that doesn't have any?
What I'm thinking is, I'm wondering about these technological advancements when it comes to the ability to manipulate the human body, and when they get to the point where we don't have the same issues that we have today with diseases and injuries, or even with biological inferiorities.
Okay, it is true that it's amazing that most galaxies that we can measure have large black holes in the center, which leads to an interesting question we don't have the answer to, and one of the reasons we're building the James Webb Space Telescope.
And did the black holes form and that was necessary for the galaxies to coalesce around them?
Or did the galaxies exist and then the black holes built up hierarchically by swallowing things and getting bigger and bigger and bigger?
It's a question we don't know the answer to.
When we build that thing, we might have the answer to it.
It'll be an interesting question that we resolve.
It is amazing that, as far as we can tell, these supermassive black holes exist.
Even though we don't know they're black holes, by the way.
We know they kind of look like black holes and quack like black holes and walk like black holes.
But what I mean is we can tell there are mass concentrations that are immense, a billion solar masses, in a region so small that our theories tell us they should be a black hole.
But we don't know if the consequences of general relativity tell us that they are black holes, but the simplest assumption is that they are, that nothing escapes from them, that they formed classically like black holes.
And they're fascinating, and we're learning about black holes, by the way, or putative black holes in ways we never thought we could, because we now have a new window on the universe, gravitational waves.
This LIGO detector just detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes that coalesce and just discovered that the predictions of general relativity are validated.
We're like Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens and saw the moons of Jupiter.
We've just opened a new window on the universe and it'll be the new astronomy of the 21st and 22nd centuries and we will learn things we had no Knowledge about, because that new window will reveal to us the dynamics of black holes in ways we never thought possible.
So it's an amazing time to be alive.
And I tend to think that's also a time invariant statement.
But anyway, so everything, so the black, but what happens inside black holes is a question that's much different.
And the answer is, we don't know.
We don't know.
We know classically, if general relativity tells us what's happening, we know that things will collapse to an infinitely dense singularity.
But, you know, most of us physicists think infinite is a pretty bad word.
That in physical reality, things don't get infinitely dense.
That the laws of quantum mechanics are going to change things.
And when things get sufficiently dense, so that quantum mechanics has to be applied to gravity.
And the only time that really happens Operationally, or either the beginning of our universe, when our entire observable universe was in potentially an infinitely dense singularity, or at the center of black holes.
That's the only places where that matters.
When quantum mechanics must be applied to gravity, our current physical theories break down.
So we don't know what happens in the ultimate state of black holes.
One possibility is indeed they are a portal to another universe.
Because what's really interesting is what you see from the inside of a black hole and the outside are very different.
If you're inside of a black hole, the space can look like it's expanding.
Whereas outside the black hole, it can look like the black hole is contracting.
Because general relativity tells you that your perceptions of what space is doing around you, in some sense, depends upon the gravitational configuration in which you live.
In general relativity, you can be moving and standing still at the same time.
We're doing it right now.
I'm not moving much with respect to you.
I had a little bit of coffee, so I'm shaking a little bit.
But relative to...
Radio conversations that's happening in a studio at the other end of the visible universe, we're moving away at the speed of light.
And those individuals having that conversation are also at rest in their local surroundings.
But they're moving away from us at the speed of light.
How is that possible?
Because locally, space is at rest.
But globally, space is expanding.
So general relativity says that what you consider to be happening to space around you depends upon your local environment.
And so you can locally be at rest, but globally be part of an expanding universe.
Similarly, inside of a black hole, the direction of time reverses.
It turns out, because space and time are tied together.
So what you perceive inside of a black hole to be happening to the time evolution of the system you're in would be very different than what's seen from outside to be happening at the surface of the black hole.
I mean, black holes are fascinating and they're laboratories that allow us to focus on the physics we can't yet fully understand.
Well, the idea of a black hole was first thought about...
people wondered what was the ultimate state of gravitational collapse.
And people had argued that maybe the ultimate state of gravitational collapse was these things that we now call black holes.
There was a big debate about it.
Oppenheimer and Snyder in the 1940s and 50s, the person who first named black holes was John Wheeler.
It amuses me.
He came up with the term black hole in 1965 or something like that to describe the ultimate state of collapsing.
People felt it was impossible, that physically forces would stop things from collapsing to the kind of densities that black holes would format.
But based on the work of Chandrasekhar and others, it was discovered that if you have a massive object that's massive enough, Nuclear forces and all other forces cannot fight against gravitational collapse.
And eventually, things will collapse inside of what we call the event horizon.
It's the ultimate state collapse.
But it was hugely debated in the 30s, 40s, 50s.
By the 1960s, it was accepted.
And interestingly enough, Wheeler was one who first thought it couldn't happen.
Later on came up with the name black holes, and I think that's one of the reasons that people are so fascinated by black holes.
Turns out in Russian, the term for black hole was frozen star.
And you don't see movies made in Russia about frozen stars.
That their clocks are ticking more slowly than ours.
How do we know that?
Because how do they know where we are?
By triangulation.
They basically look at the time it takes They have atomic clocks, very accurate clocks.
The time it takes for a signal from your watch or your phone to get up to the satellite and back, and that other satellite and back, allows you to determine your position.
But if the clock there is ticking at a different rate, then you get a wrong answer for the time it takes for it to go on the...
the number you get from that satellite when it reports to your watch.
Due to its motion, Due to its motion, it's basically slower, but due to its motion, it's ticking at a slower rate.
Due to its height in the gravitational field, it turns out that it's faster.
So the two effects counter each other, general relativity and special relativity.
In this case, general relativity wins, I think.
It's something like, they're ticking more slowly.
I calculated once, I wrote a New York Times piece on this, and I forget the number, but it's something like, Of the order of 38 microseconds per day, they're ticking at a slower rate, 38 millionths of a second every day different.
And that may not sound important to you, but if you calculate how far light travels in 38 millionths of a second, it's pretty far.
And so therefore, if you keep getting wrong by that number, your determination of your position is going to keep getting wrong by that number.
And I worked out, and this should allow me to work backwards if I had a pad and paper.
I see a pad, but I'm not going to do it right now because I don't care.
But I remembered you'd be out by something like a kilometer in two minutes.
So we use these abstract esoteric principles and they govern our lives.
So general relativity really matters for our technology.
But it tells us, but what's really interesting, so as objects fall into a black hole, because they're getting in stronger and stronger gravitational fields, from the outside, we see them moving more and more slowly.
And eventually we see them freeze at the surface.
We will never see, from the outside, it will look like it will take an infinite amount of time for an object to fall through the event horizon of a black hole, even though in its own frame it falls through no problem.
For us, it will watch it slowly, slowly, slowly, because its clock is literally ticking at a different rate, and it will take an infinite amount of time for us, for any object, to fall through the event horizon of a black hole, if we're watching from the outside.
When we weigh galaxies, which we can do by seeing how fast the stars move around them, we find out that they weigh a lot more than can be counted by counting all the stars.
So the dominant mass doesn't shine.
We call that dark matter.
Not too surprising.
But what we have discovered, and this is the surprising part, is we can estimate how much normal matter there is.
And by normal matter, I mean the stuff made of protons and neutrons, the same as you and me.
And when we add up how much dark matter we see in the universe, there's a heck of a lot more of that than can be accounted for by the total number of protons and neutrons in the universe.
And that means that we think that dark matter is made of some new type of elementary particle, something that was created in the early history of the universe that's different than normal matter.
That's not too surprising either, because in the early universe there was lots of energy around, and if there are new elementary particles that are stable, it's not too surprising that there are lots of them around, and if they don't interact with light, we wouldn't see them.
In fact, not only is that reasonable, but we cannot understand how galaxies would form if it weren't for dark matter.
We can do the calculations and show that if the dark matter weren't made of stuff that's different than protons and neutrons, there would not have been enough time in the history of the universe for galaxies to form.
Therefore, that's really strong evidence that that stuff must be there and it must not be made of protons and neutrons because we're proof, you and I, that galaxies formed.
I watched a science documentary that freaked me out about how when they first started measuring gamma-ray bursts out into the unit, they thought there was wars going on between alien races.
I honestly don't know the answer to that question.
But the point is they were used as monitoring systems to look for nuclear weapons explosions.
And then these things which are looking downward discovered these short bursts of gamma rays, which would be a potential signature of nuclear weapons explosions, but they discovered they weren't coming from Earth.
And then they discovered they were coming from everywhere in the cosmos.
And that's how they were discovered.
These devices were monitoring the earth, looking for nuclear weapons explosions, and then sawed them out in space.
And they happen there one second, two second, one minute long, bursts that are incredibly energetic, emitting more energy than the sun may emit in its lifetime.
Because the great thing about the universe is it's big and it's old.
And therefore, rare events happen all the time.
Let me give you an example.
Stars explode, and it's good for us that stars explode in this book, because every atom in your body and every atom in my body was made inside stars that eventually explode.
How do we know that?
Because in the Big Bang, the only elements that were created were hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium.
Okay, but the importance...
Well, for some people, lithium is important, but the rest of us, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the stuff that makes us human was only created in the...
Fiery furnaces in the cores of stars.
How could it get into your and my body?
Because there were stars that were kind enough to explode.
So as I once said, and some people put on t-shirts now, so forget Jesus.
The stars died so we could be born.
But here's the deal.
Stars explode about once every hundred years per galaxy.
So in our galaxy, once every 100 years, the stars explode.
There have been about 200 million stars explode in the 12 billion years since our galaxy's been around.
And that's produced the raw materials that 4.5 billion years ago coalesced to form our sun and the planets and you and I. So all the atoms in your body have gone through stars and been through the most intense explosion that we know of in nature, a supernova.
And every atom in your body has experienced it, maybe more than once.
Because to get to the amount of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that's in our bodies, it had to be recycled many times.
So the atoms in your left hand may have been inside a different star than your right hand.
You're really stardust.
We're all stardust.
We're really connected to the cosmos in really interesting and important ways.
We literally were created by stars.
That's a great thing, but that's not the point I wanted to make.
How can we do that if we're looking at galaxies and one star explodes every 100 years in a galaxy?
How can we use them as probes?
Well, as I say, there's one way, is to assign a graduate student to each galaxy.
You know, a PhD period can be about 100 years.
And if they die, students are cheap, so you get a new one.
Or we use this fact that the universe is big and old.
If you take your hands up tonight and weren't in Los Angeles where you could see the stars and made a dime-sized hole and looked up at a dime-sized dark region of the universe where you didn't see any stars, if you had a telescope that is as big as the telescope, say, we have in Chile, you'd see 100,000 galaxies.
100,000 galaxies in that small region.
Then if one star explodes every 100 years per galaxy, if you work out how many stars will I see explode tonight, you'll find out you'll see two or three stars explode.
And that's what makes the universe so exciting because now we can use supernovae to study the universe because astronomers write proposals and say, tonight I'm going to use the Hubble Space Telescope to look at this region and I'm going to see three stars explode.
In fact, there's a lot of astronomers who are doing, in fact, active work to try and reduce light pollution in cities near telescopes.
And there's other, I mean, the Arecibo Radios Telescope, if you've never been down to Puerto Rico, It's beautiful.
It was actually, you would have seen it in two James Bond movies, because they made it into the, like, the lair of, you know, the pictures of it in the lair of some crazy, evil scientist.
And I've been there a few times, and it's amazing, because it's this thousand-meter-wide net of wires in a natural...
Canopy?
Volcanic canopy.
It's really beautiful.
And there's jungle growing underneath it.
I've walked underneath it.
And the Ercebo Tredosculpt is amazing because it's so big, it allows us to measure lots of neat things in the universe.
In fact, you could measure a light bulb on Pluto if there was a light bulb.
It's wires, because it's only measuring radio waves, and if the wavelength is large compared to the spacing between the wires, you don't need something solid.
They were worried, and this is a real example.
They're looking for, among other things, a frequency of radiation which is ubiquitous in the universe that is emitted by hydrogen.
It was the first sort of thing that people used to do radio astronomy.
Hydrogen has a characteristic frequency of emission of radio waves due to what's called the hyperfine splitting in hydrogen.
And so people said, you know what?
That would be a wonderful frequency for aliens to communicate.
If they really wanted to show...
If they're smart enough to know how the universe works, that's a universal frequency that's everywhere, because hydrogen is the dominant kind of matter, and it always emits radiation at that frequency, okay?
It's 1,040 megahertz, I think, is the frequency, okay?
Although, again, I could be wrong, but something like that.
But they're worried because there was nearby...
There was an evangelist who had a huge radio station.
And wanted to broadcast to the continent of the United States his evangelical message.
And he was going to basically broadcast at a frequency that would mean that air speedball couldn't work anymore.
Speaking of light pollution, we talk about light pollution, but that was radio pollution.
And in this case it was pollution in many ways because everything he said was polluting.
And finally they managed to be able to fix that.
But there would have been one of the most amazing windows on the universe that would have been Blocked out by radio light, just like...
Because at the instant of the Big Bang, the whole universe was contained in a region where you'd have to understand gravity as a quantum mechanical force to really understand what was happening.
And we don't have a quantum theory of gravity.
So it's okay to say we don't know.
But we can say what plausibly was the case.
And one possibility, and the possibility that looks most plausible that I talked about, is our universe spontaneously came into being from nothing.
By quantum fluctuations.
A space and time that did not exist, so our space and our time didn't exist, and there was no matter in the universe, and it suddenly popped into existence.
And one of the neat things is if you add up the total energy of all the stuff in our universe, it adds up to zero, as far as we can tell.
If you were going to create a universe from nothing, what would you make the total energy of the universe?
But why does it have to be from nothing?
Once you realize the total energy of the universe can be zero, then the possibility that it comes from nothing becomes plausible.
Because if it doesn't, you may need a deity to create everything.
But it turns out you can create a hundred billion galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars, without violating energy conservation.
Okay?
It's the ultimate free lunch, as Alan Guth would say.
And it's amazing that that's possible.
Now, can we prove that that happened?
No.
But everything we can point to makes it plausible.
In fact, you can ask the following question.
What would a universe look like today That arose spontaneously from nothing 13.8 billion years ago, just by known laws of physics, or at least plausible laws of physics, what would it look like today if that was the requirement?
And the answer is it would look just like the universe in which we live in.
Now, does that prove that that's what happened?
No, but it makes it plausible.
And it makes it plausible without supernatural shenanigans.
And any time you can get rid of God, it's a good thing.
What is the difference between this infinitely dense small point that the universe came out of and the center of a black hole, the event horizon of a black hole?
LAUGHTER So this infinitely dense point of 13.8 billion years ago, whatever it was, this something out of nothing point, what are your thoughts about before that?
If our universe is all there is, and that, we happen to think, by the way, is not likely, but if it is, Then it doesn't make sense to ask the question what was before, because time didn't exist.
It sounds like a cop-out, and it kind of is, but it may also be true.
And if there's no before, then all of our notions of causality go out the window, because we all depend on before and after to decide causes and effects.
But if there was no before, then we have to change our notions of a cause and effect.
And that's awful, but hey, that's what we call learning.
So, this galaxy is not moving relative to its local surroundings, but it's moving away from us faster than light.
And like a surfer in an undertow, they can swim really fast in the water, but if the water's moving away from the shore, they'll never make it back to the shore.
Right?
And so that galaxy, the light from that galaxy, is traveling through space at the speed of light.
But if the space in between us and the galaxy is moving faster than light, then the poor light can never make it to us.
So the light can't catch up with the expansion of space, and it never gets to us.
And that galaxy disappears from our causal horizon, we call it.
We'll never be able to see it.
We'll never be able to interact with it.
We'll never be okay.
And it could be that there are different regions so far away from us where space is expanding faster than light, which have a very different history than our own.
Space could be infinite.
Just our simple space that we know of and love could be infinite in extent, and different regions of that space had different histories.
And some of those regions, everything we can see, we know emerged from a single point.
Okay?
We can tell that.
We can tell that by measuring the Big Bang expansion of everything we see and working backwards.
And our visible universe was once smaller and smaller and smaller.
If we go back in time, we can actually follow the laws of physics back to the earliest moments of the Big Bang until those laws break down, and we can make predictions about what the universe should look like.
All those predictions agree exactly with the observations we make, which tell us that that picture works.
But another region, if you wish, could have come from a different Big Bang.
Universe means that region of space with which at one time we could have communicated, or one time in the future, even if the future is infinite, we might communicate with.
Because that describes the region of space where cause and effect works.
And now, there are many different versions of a multiverse, but that's the simplest version.
And this picture we call inflation I just did two little clips associated with the new book.
One was for a publisher and one was for Big Think.
One is the universe in under two minutes.
So you can look up online and look for Lawrence Krauss explains the universe in under two minutes where I talk about this cosmic expansion and how it might mean there's a multiverse.
But the other is I explain the universe in terms of this beer bottle that I talked about to you earlier.
That's a video.
You can watch that.
But this theory of inflation which actually says The qualities that we see of our universe can best be explained in some early time in the history of the universe when it was a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second old.
It had a huge expansion suddenly and increased in size by 30 orders of magnitude in size in a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.
Which is, by the way, particle physics suggests is highly plausible.
And then it would produce a universe that looks more or less like we look like.
And it's right now the only explanation of how that would cause the universe to look like what it looks like.
But the neat thing about inflation is it's eternal.
So inflation, that puffing up ended in our universe, and then boom, a hot big bang followed it.
Okay, so the universe puffed up by a huge amount, then all of that energy, which was stored in empty space, got released, like the beer bottle, and we got a hot big bang, and the rest is history.
But, that's locally.
But somewhere else, between us and there, space is still expanding exponentially.
And maybe a gazillion years in the future there'll be another region of space that's expanding away from us so much faster than light so we'll never know about it.
Where suddenly that region leaves inflation and boom!
Another hot big bang happens.
And it turns out in each of those hot big bangs after the inflation ends, depending upon how it ends, the laws of physics could be different in that universe.
So we tend to think it's quite likely that there are many, many separate regions of space, and in fact it's eternal, so such regions are forming eternally for all time, and there are hot Big Bangs happening in many regions, and the properties of each of those regions, whether they're conducive to forming galaxies and stars and planets and people, may be different.
So we could say, logically in that picture, that the reason the universe looks like the way it does is because we're here to measure it.