Brian Cox and Joe Rogan dive into the universe’s mysteries, from TGT Studios’ nixie tubes to his Arctic-to-U.S. tour exploring 13.8 billion-year-old cosmology, including 2 trillion galaxies and flat space curvature confirmed by cosmic microwave background radiation. Cox highlights quark-gluon plasma—40 billion tons per cubic centimeter—created at CERN’s LHC, while questioning dark matter’s elusive nature despite upgrades for higher collision rates. Nobel-winning dark energy, discovered via supernovae in the 1990s, remains unexplained, though Einstein’s "cosmological constant" blunder and Lemaitre’s expansion theory hint at deeper truths. Their discussion suggests humanity’s place in the cosmos is fleeting, tied to rare atomic configurations, while AI and scientific collaboration—like CERN’s success—offer both challenges and hope for future progress. [Automatically generated summary]
It starts next week in the UK. And then we go everywhere from the South Island of New Zealand all the way to the Arctic Circle, to Svalbard, which is the furthest north that you can go on a commercial aircraft.
In the middle, we're in the States for a month, mainly in May.
And yeah, it's about cosmology and about the questions that cosmology raises.
So if you're interested in the science of how did the universe begin, even questions of what may have been there.
Is the universe eternal?
Is there such a thing as before the Big Bang?
What is the future of the universe?
How does complexity emerge spontaneously in a universe?
I mean, we sort of take it for granted that there's a Big Bang and it's all hot and there's just this kind of hot glow of stuff.
And out of that, spontaneously, in 13.8 billion years, you get something like the Earth with a civilization and life on it.
So how does that...
Do we know anything about that?
I mean, we do.
I'm asking the question rhetorically.
We know quite a lot about it.
So it's really about showing the size and scale of the universe, but addressing those questions that I think everybody has about what does it mean to be human, this tiny little finite life that we lead in a possibly infinite universe.
Well, it's incredibly exciting to me that there's a giant audience for this and that what Neil deGrasse Tyson had been doing and what a lot of public touring intellectuals are doing now, they're doing these giant theaters and these people are coming out to see these shows and we're realizing that there's, I hate to use the term market for this, but there's a demand for this and there's a lot of people who are incredibly fascinated by this and it's spreading information, it's spreading knowledge.
Yeah, I mean, in the UK particularly, I mean, Wembley Arena, for example, you know, you're talking about 10,000 people, 12,000 people in these shows.
And you're right, they are coming, although, you know, they're big shows, spectacular screens and all that, they're coming for, to think, they're coming to hear about what we know about the universe and nature.
I'm not surprised people are interested because these are questions that everybody asks.
Why am I here?
Everybody's sat there asking that question.
But my point is that there is a framework.
There's a framework of knowledge.
There are things we know about the universe.
So it is true that scientists are not going to tell you why you're here.
They're not going to tell you what the meaning of life is.
But there are things you need to know if you want to start to explore those questions for yourself.
You need to know that there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
You need to know that the Milky Way galaxy has got 200 billion stars.
Most of those stars now we know have planetary systems.
We estimate there are something like 20 billion Earth-like planets or potentially Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
So if you're asking questions about what is my place in the universe, you need to know those things, first of all.
I mean, even the small number, 200 billion, which is the number of stars in one galaxy.
And then when you say 2 trillion...
I challenge anyone to be able to picture that.
But it is the reality that we've observed.
We haven't counted all two trillion, by the way.
We have a thing called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which maps the positions of galaxies.
So you know how much of the sky you've surveyed, and you know how many galaxies you've counted, and then you can spread that across the wider universe.
And you get this picture of a vast and possibly infinite universe.
We know that the universe, or very strongly suspect, that the universe is much bigger than the piece we can see.
So we have good reason to think that's the case.
Whether it's infinite or not is another question.
And then that goes to your, you know, can you picture infinity?
Well, no one can picture infinity.
There's a weird thing as well about, you know, we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.
So that's a measurement, because we can measure the speed that all the galaxies are flying away from us, essentially.
And then you can run time backwards, if you like, to find out when they were all on top of each other.
And so it's quite a simple measurement, and we've done that.
So we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.
But actually, all we know really was the universe was very hot and very dense at that time.
And we have some theories that the universe was in existence before that, and perhaps some sort of circumstantial evidence.
And that means that actually the universe could have always been there, eternal.
And when I talk to people sometimes, they get a bit...
Some people get upset about that.
Some people would rather it had a beginning.
The idea that it might have been around forever is more frightening somehow than the fact that it began.
It's interesting the way that people's minds work.
What terrifies you the most, an eternal universe or a finite universe?
The eternal universe, if there was an eternal universe, does that negate the theory of the Big Bang or does it mean that there's a constant cycle of Big Bangs and then expansion and then recompression?
So yes, some of them say that there's a cycling universe.
So the Big Bang is an event when space gets very hot and very dense and filled with particles.
And that may happen again.
Or some of the other theories, there's a theory called eternal inflation, which is a theory that And it's actually the most popular theory, I think, at the moment, for what happened, for why the Big Bang is the way that it is.
Because it's got some very special features, the Big Bang, which we could talk about.
But inflation is the idea that space, space-time, was around before the Big Bang, and it was expanding extremely fast.
There was doubling in size in the most popular of these theories, every 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.00000 with 37 knots, one of a second.
So it's an unimaginably fast expansion.
And then the idea is that draws to a close, so it quite naturally sort of dies away and the expansion slows down.
And all the energy that was taken that was causing that expansion sort of gets dumped into space and heats it up and makes particles, and that's what we call the Big Bang.
And those theories, the slight extension to those, say that that slowing down just happens in little patches.
So most of the universe, the overwhelming majority of the universe, is still inflating at that insane speed.
And just little patches stop and they're big bangs.
So you get multiple universes, a multiverse, it's called the inflationary multiverse, and we are in one of those bubbles.
I can sort of visualize it in some sort of a graphic form, but it's incomprehensible.
My mind doesn't have the capacity to expand...
This sense of distance and size to that grasp.
Is this because of just the way we evolved?
We evolved here on Earth to deal with the space that's in front of us, and now over the course of industrial civilization and education, we're now grasping these concepts that are so Alien to the reality, the tangible reality that we exist in every day?
You know, even very simple things, like you go back to the Greeks, so Aristotle and the great, you know, very clever people, but they thought the Earth was at the center of the universe.
Why?
Because it feels like it's at the center of the universe.
It feels like we're not moving.
And that's quite a deep point, actually, in physics.
It's like, why is it?
That we're flying around relative to the sun very fast at whatever speed it is, 18 miles a second or something like that.
And the whole solar system is going around the Milky Way galaxy and so on.
Why is it that we don't feel it?
And the Greeks quite naturally said, well, because we're at the center of the universe.
They also said everything falls towards the Earth.
So therefore, the Earth must be at the center.
It's natural.
And actually, it's quite a deep thought to understand why it doesn't feel that we're moving.
You have to go all the way to Einstein, really, for someone to take that very seriously.
And what he said, actually, he said, well, there's a great little explanation in Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time about this, that the idea that you can't tell whether you're moving or not demolishes the notion of absolute space.
So if we think about space, if I said space to you or most people, I suppose, you'd think the way that Newton did, of a big box within which things happen.
And that's got to be, that's a natural picture of space and the universe, isn't it?
It's a thing in which all the planets and galaxies are placed.
But in The Brief History of Time, Hawking says, well, imagine bouncing a ball.
So we bounce a ball on the table now, a tennis ball.
So I drop it and I catch it again.
So let's say I drop it and it takes a second to bounce up.
So in that second, the Earth has moved about 18 miles or so in space around the Sun.
So you could ask the question, did that ball return to the same place in space or not?
And the answer is, you can't answer it.
It does from our perspective.
But from the perspective of someone watching the Earth go all the way around the Sun, when I caught it again, it had moved 18 miles.
And then from some other perspective, it would have done something else.
So the point is, you can't say this is a point in space.
It came back to the same place.
Because that just depends on your perspective.
Depends on whether you're watching the Earth go around the sun or whatever it is.
So Einstein said that means there's no such thing as absolute space.
Which kind of follows if you think about it.
But that's a difficult, it's a cool but difficult thought process.
And Einstein elevated that to a principle and said, if you're not accelerating, you're just moving at a constant speed in a plane, or now.
I mean, that's essentially what we're doing now.
We're moving around the sun at effectively constant speed.
Then you can't tell.
So there's no experiment you can do.
We could look at the decay of a radioactive nucleus or some electricity and magnetism or bounce a ball, have a pendulum, whatever it is, and there's no experiment you can do to tell you whether you're moving or not.
Therefore, that concept has no meaning because you can't measure it.
And that's led Einstein to relativity.
So that's the basis of general relativity, which is our best theory of the universe.
Well, one point is that it's expanding and we always see the same radiation out there, the glow of the Big Bang.
But there are some deeper reasons.
One, from the theory of inflation, the best way to explain the universe, the properties that we see, is that it's very much bigger than the piece we can see.
So, for example, We measure space to be what's called flat.
I don't even have to say what's called flat.
It is flat.
So if you imagine slices of space, let's imagine slices of them at different times.
So you just slice the universe and say there's a big sheet like this table.
There's a sheet of space and there's another sheet and another sheet.
And it can have a geometry, right?
It can be flat like a tabletop or it could be curved like a sphere or it could be curved in the opposite direction, sort of like a saddle or a bowl.
And we can measure that.
And when we measure it, we see it's absolutely flat.
And that's a very unusual thing for it to be like.
It requires, because what Einstein's theory says is that the shape of space, that the curvature of space is determined by the stuff that's in it.
That's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Put stuff in space and it curves it and bends it and warps it and stretches it and so on.
And what we find is that there's precisely the right amount of stuff in the universe to have a completely flat universe.
And the explanation, the most favoured explanation for that, is the universe is way bigger than the piece we can see.
And so it's like looking at a piece of the Earth.
If you look at a little one mile square of the Earth, then it's flat.
You have to look at big distances, kind of a border, the radius of the Earth, you know, bigger than one kilometre anyway, or one mile square.
To see that actually you're on a curved surface.
And that's one of the ideas about the universe and why it appears to be the way that it is.
But you can draw, you can quite literally, you could imagine sending light beams out.
And we do this measurement actually.
We can look at the most distant light we can see, which is something called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is...
If you imagine looking out, if you look at the Andromeda galaxy, which we can see with the naked eye here in LA, you can see that.
It's the most distant object you can see with the naked eye.
And it's about two million light years away or so, which means the light took two million years to get to us.
So it's a long way away, but it's very big.
So as you look further out into the universe, to more and more distant galaxies, you're looking further back in time because you look at something that's A billion light years away, then the light took a billion years to get to us.
So you see it as it was a billion years in the past.
And we can actually look so far out that we can see almost back to 13.8 billion years ago, which is very close to the Big Bang.
So we can look to light that began its journey before there were galaxies.
And that's the oldest light in the universe, which is, by the way, one of the pieces of evidence when people say, I don't believe in the Big Bang.
The answer is, well, you can see it.
So it's just there.
You can see it.
We have pictures of it.
That light, it turns out that there are structures or ripples in that light, which we can use as a ruler.
So quite literally, as a ruler on the sky.
And then because that light's been traveling through the universe, we can see how that rule has been distorted as the light has traveled through space.
And so we can infer whether space is flat or curved or how it warps, if you like, just from that measurement.
Because the picture is that before, it actually was released 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
It's a very precise number.
You might say, how do you know that?
Well, before that time, the universe was so hot that atoms couldn't form.
So you had a soup of electrically charged particles.
It was just too hot for electrons to go into orbit around nuclei.
So the universe was opaque to light, so you just couldn't.
It was almost like a big glowing star, if you like.
And then when it was expanding, it cooled past the point where the atoms could form.
And at that point, it becomes transparent, really almost instantly in a cosmic timescale.
And so the light could then travel in straight lines through the universe, and we can see that light.
So we see the light from that time, but further back than that, it's opaque, so you can't see past that with light.
But you can, potentially, with gravitational waves, which is this measurement that got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago, the LIGO experiment here in the United States.
And that looks for ripples in the fabric of space and time.
And in principle, if we had a big enough detector, you could see the ripples from the Big Bang.
So you could take an image of the Big Bang in gravitational waves, which would be...
But you need an enormous space-based detector that we're not going to build anytime soon.
Yeah, I mean, the gravitational waves are incredible.
I mean, Einstein predicted them in 1915. Never thought they'd be detected because you need such a hyper...
you need lasers.
They didn't have lasers.
But they think LIGO, this experiment, which is half near Seattle in Washington State and half in Louisiana.
So they've got two detectors and they're basically sort of, I don't know, three mile long laser beams.
That just sit and measure the sort of stretching and squashing of space as the ripples in the fabric of the universe go through.
And what they've been observing, collisions of black holes.
So you can imagine how extreme, like colliding black holes.
It's an incredibly extreme event.
So it shakes the fabric of the universe and the ripples come across the universe.
And these laser beams, which are just basically rulers, can detect it.
They just...
Sort of ring almost like, you know, just vibrate as the ripples go through in space and time.
Kip Thorne got the Nobel Prize last year for this.
He's one of the greatest living physicists.
I once saw him describe it as a storm in time.
So you've got this time storm.
It's a beautiful image.
So that technology is incredible because the change in length I can't remember the exact number, but it's way, way, way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus.
And when it collapses, there's a sort of a pressure, a force, if you like, which is caused by the fact that electrons don't like to be very close to each other.
So it's called the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
But essentially what happens is that as they get squashed closer and closer together, they move faster and faster to get out of each other's way, if you like.
And that makes a force which holds them up.
And so that creates what's called a white dwarf star.
So you can have a blob of matter.
They're about the size of the Earth.
But they're about the mass of the Sun.
And so that's for smaller stars.
They end up as these white dwarf things, which are very dense objects.
There's another version, which is called a neutron star, which is the same thing, but for neutrons.
And they move faster and faster.
So if it's massive enough that it overwhelms the electron thing, then the electrons sort of crush into protons and turn into neutrons, and the whole thing starts again.
And so a neutron star can be...
You know, one and a half times the mass of the Sun, let's say.
But it can be about, what, 10 miles across?
So that's an incredibly dense ball of matter held up by this...
The neutron's moving around.
It's got a fancy name.
It's called neutron degeneracy pressure, but that's what it is.
But if you go even bigger, then even that can't hold it up.
And as far as we know then, there's no known force that we know of that can hold the thing up if it's too massive.
And we saw that in 1054 AD. Wasn't there some speculation that our solar system at one point was a binary star system and that one of those stars had become a dwarf?
The speculation was that there's something out there, correct me if I'm wrong, something called a galactic shelf, like that it gets to a certain space and it indicates that there's something far larger out there.
It's interesting because it's incomprehensible, the distance, right, in our minds, how far that must be out past what we used to call Pluto.
But for whatever reason, that becomes more interesting because it's in our neighborhood.
Whereas if they find some distant star system and it might have a planet that's similar to Earth, that doesn't seem as compelling for whatever weird reason.
Yeah, I mean, I think the planets around Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, which are the closest stars, it seems like there are planets around those now.
And I think that was interesting, because we could conceive of going there.
And there was this idea, Stephen Hawking, actually, and some others, Before he died, he had this idea called Breakthrough Starshot, which is the idea to send a little probe out to the Alpha Centauri system.
And I think in their view, Yuri Milner as well, the entrepreneur, wanted to do that.
And I think it's something like 100 years travel time or something with our current technology.
And they pointed out that we don't do that now.
We don't think 100 years in the future.
But if you go back when people were building cathedrals, people used to routinely start projects that would take 100 years to bear fruit.
And so we could imagine going there.
And that then becomes fascinating, I think, because then you've got a solar system, another solar system that you could go and visit conceivably.
I'm of the opinion as time goes on and augmented and virtual reality gets better and better that it doesn't really totally make sense unless we're talking about colonizing someplace to send biological life to another planet.
If we can send some probe that doesn't have to worry about You know, the biology being affected by radiation or by the speed of travel or even by food.
We can send something out there and almost be there by virtue of, you know, goggles, virtual reality goggles or something else.
In science at the moment, space science, we have this debate a lot, actually, because, of course, space probes like Curiosity that's on Mars at the moment, that's really cheap compared to sending people to Mars.
And so quite often the scientists who want to find out about the world will say, well, we should spend it on robots.
We shouldn't spend it on people.
I think crude space exploration is, in some ways, I mean, it's clearly true at the moment that humans can do more than robots, so we can explore the place better.
But I think it has to be, it's about something else.
I mean, it's about, and it's not only, it's about living and working off the planet, which I think is quite a persuasive argument, actually.
We've already industrialized near-Earth orbit, so it's already a multi-billion dollar industry, you know, communication satellites and weather satellites, GPS, whatever.
We're already up there.
And so learning to live and work in space is, I think, a natural extension of our Of our civilization.
Plus the fact if you talk to Elon or Jeff Bezos, they point out that the amount of resources available just slightly above our heads is vast.
And so I remember I talked to Jeff Bezos actually once and he thinks really simply and he said, for example, in the asteroid belt, there's enough metal, I think, to build a skyscraper.
What is it?
Something like 800 stories tall and cover the earth in it, right?
If you want.
Now, we don't want to do that.
But his point was that the energy from the sun is all up there.
The resources are up there.
So you could almost imagine trying to zone the earth residential at some point in the future to protect the planet and do your heavy industry off the planet, for example.
And it sounds like science fiction, except that...
Now, SpaceX and Blue Origin, those people have got reusable rockets.
So suddenly the economics becomes sensible.
So I think expansion is good.
And I think we will expand.
And I think we will expand outwards.
Because there's not much room left on this planet to expand.
But that's a whole different idea.
It's not about gathering scientific information.
It's about a frontier and all the benefits that come from operating as a civilization on a frontier, which we've lost on the Earth because there is no frontier left.
And so I like that idea that Mars...
And when you talk about Mars, especially with Elon, he's right that that's the only place you can go.
So there is no other planet we can go to other than Mars.
But as far as expanding actual civilization and bringing it to another place, one of the things that freaks me out is people get depressed about living in Seattle.
So it would still have a significant weakening effect.
Like if you went to Mars and then somehow or another in the future they were able to get back to Earth, your body would have a real problem with that, right?
Maybe it's a bit more than a third, I can't quite remember, but it's something like that.
But yeah, so there's still gravity.
So there's gravity.
There's some protection from...
You'd probably want to live in the caves, actually, or something like that.
Because there's no magnetic field there.
So it's quite a high radiation environment, but not too bad.
It's further from the sun than we are.
It's not too...
There are places on Mars that there's a very deep crater called Hellas, which is a big impact basin.
And at the bottom, it's so deep, you could fit Everest in it.
So you put Mount Everest in there, the summit of Everest wouldn't reach the rim of the crater.
So it's something like, I don't know what it is, seven miles deep or something, six miles deep.
Wow.
So you could go there, and at the bottom, the atmospheric pressure's so high that you could just about have liquid water occasionally on the floor of that crater.
I could go warp speed in this Millennium Falcon and travel the speed of light, but for whatever reason, these lasers are so slow that you could duck out of the way of them?
I read that they just – someone just found an interview, didn't they, the other day where he explained the ending of 2001. I didn't see that.
I saw it yesterday actually.
And it was kind of a really simple version of it.
He just said, well, the super intelligent beings take him in and put him in a zoo, basically, and watch him grow old and then send him back to the earth as a super being.
That's the worst explanation at the end of 2001 I've ever heard.
But it was Kubrick's.
That's what Kubrick said.
So he falls into the monolith.
They just put him in this room, which is kind of a bad version of a French chateau or something.
Watch him grow old and then send him back to the earth as a super being.
But I feel like Ridley Scott's original Alien is probably one of the greatest horror science fiction movies of all time and one of my all-time favorite movies.
But I really like the newer ones as well.
I like Prometheus and I really like Covenant, the last one.
Well, I mean, Sunshine was, you know, the premise is silly.
The premise is the sun is dying and we're going to go and fix it.
So both of those things.
It fails on its first line in terms of realism.
But the idea is that it's not about that.
It's about the...
It's about the sun as a god in some ways.
So it's about our response to the power of nature.
And it's about deifying this thing and worshipping it and how ultimately you go mad.
If you remember the film, there's Pimbacker, who's the first captain that went to the...
Captain the first mission to go and restart the sun, which is the mad bit, but then became a religious fundamentalist, essentially, and then decided...
It's a fascinating idea that he decides to bring meaning to his life.
He will become the last, last man, the last human.
And so he wants to be the last.
He wants the sun to die.
And he wants it to take humanity with it.
And he decides to make that happen.
So he stays there waiting for the second ship.
And I like those ideas that, you know, what's your reaction to the power of nature?
One of the things I do in my shows, I'm not being a commercial person, I've just thought of it.
One of the great things about cosmology is that it is terrifying in the truest sense of the word.
I mean, we talked a bit about the size and scale of the universe and black holes colliding and those things.
It is very frightening, but also I think the act of trying to understand our place in nature and the size and scale of the universe and our tiny presence within it is valuable.
So that you can be terrified but also inspired and interested.
And it's part of, if you want to find If you want to ask questions about what it means to be human and means to be alive, then I think you find the answers in confronting that reality, which is that we live in a terrifyingly vast universe, powers in the universe that we cannot comprehend, as you said.
But that's what you've got to face, because that's reality.
So you can't hide your head in the sand and just duck it.
I always wanted to ask about their concept of propulsion, that almost like space would be flat and you would fold space over and you would intersect those two points and you would be able to travel vast distances instantaneously, right?
I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it, I'm sure.
Is that a concept that people have actually considered?
Yeah, in general relativity, I should say what it is, Einstein's theory of general relativity is our best theory of space and time.
And so it really is, as we talked about before, you imagine space and time as a sheet, just imagine it as a thing, literally a sheet surface.
And all the theory says is that if you put matter and or energy into that, then it curves it and distorts it and it can stretch it and make it shrink.
And so it's the response of space and time to matter and energy.
So the simplest version would be the Sun.
So you put a big spherical ball of stuff in there and it warps space and time such that the nice straight lines, something just travelling minding its own business through that warp space, turns into an orbit.
So all you have to do, those folded kind of geometries, is you have to try and specify where you would put the matter and what kind of stuff you'd put there to make the geometry fold in that way.
And you can do it so you can write down that geometry.
It's called a warp drive geometry, I think it's in textbooks.
So you can do that to have a warp drive.
The question becomes, what sort of stuff Would you have to actually put into the real universe to make it warp in that way?
And it usually turns out that it's the kind of stuff that doesn't exist.
But it has properties.
It's sort of matter or sort of energy that has properties that do not exist in nature as far as we can tell.
But you can still write the geometry down in Einstein's theory.
So you could go all the way around the edge, or you could take the shortcut.
So you can do that in Einstein's theory.
You can write down that geometry, and there it is.
So the first question is, can you make it?
And as we said, we don't think that stuff exists.
There's a second set of theoretical bits of theoretical work, which if you had a wormhole, then what would happen if you tried to travel through it?
And what seems to happen is that they become unstable the moment anything tries to go through.
So you get kind of a feedback of stuff going through and through and through and through.
And so it collapses.
And there's a great book by Kip Thorne, actually.
We just mentioned him.
He got the Nobel Prize last year for the gravitational waves.
And he wrote a brilliant book, I think it's in the 80s, called Black Holes and Time Warps, where he talks about The answer is we don't fully know.
But most physicists think that even if they existed, they will be unstable.
And as soon as you even try to transmit information through them, send a bit of light through, then there will be this sort of feedback and they'd collapse.
And ultimately, the reason we don't really know Absolutely.
It's because you need what's called a quantum theory of gravity.
And we don't have one.
So we don't have the theoretical tools to be absolutely sure that these things would be unstable or don't exist in nature.
But we strongly suspect that they don't.
If they did, you could build a time machine.
So Stephen Hawking wrote a paper called the Chronology Protection Conjecture.
And conjecture is the important word.
So the conjecture basically was that the laws of nature will be such that you can't have stable wormholes and you can't build time machines.
Even in the solar system, I would not be surprised if we find microbes on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn where there's liquid water.
The reason I think that, and it's a guess, is because if you look at the history of life on Earth, then...
So Earth formed and it was just a...
There was no life.
It was a ball of rock.
And almost as soon as it cooled down, we see evidence of life.
So certainly 3.8 billion years ago, possibly even further back than that, we see evidence of life on Earth.
So somewhere along the line, geochemistry, active geochemistry became biochemistry on Earth.
And we have some idea, you know, that if you get gradients of temperature and acid and alkaline and the conditions that are naturally present on the surface of oceans, then complex carbon chemistry spontaneously happens.
So we know that life, almost certainly we know that life began on Earth.
I mean, the other option is it came from space or something like that, but it probably didn't.
It probably began on Earth.
So that means that, at least here, that happened.
And that we know that the conditions that led to the origin of life on Earth were present on Mars 3.8, 4 billion years ago.
And we know that they're present on Europa today.
So I don't see that there's anything special.
Life is just chemistry.
And the idea that geochemistry becomes biochemistry is not fanciful because it happened here.
So I think that given the same conditions, it would be surprising to me if the same thing didn't happen, in that life begins.
So to test that is one of the great frontiers of science now.
It's one of the great challenges, which is another reason we're interested in Mars, because we know those conditions were there.
We know there were what's called hydrothermal vent systems on the floors of oceans on Mars.
3.8 or 4 billion years ago.
So it would be good to know if what I've said is right.
And the way we find out is to find life or evidence of past life.
Are you aware of the speculation that was going around?
How recent was it, that Occupy thing, the octopus eggs?
There was a group of scientists that were speculating that it's, you know, panspermia, the idea of panspermia, that it's possible that octopi had come from somewhere else, some frozen eggs had actually come from somewhere else and landed on Earth.
And these are like legitimate scientists that are contemplating it, not morons.
Yeah, but on cellular level, you look at an octopus cell under a microscope and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an octopus cell and a human cell.
So the only way that that would make sense is if all life comes from basically the same kind of building blocks and just varies depending upon the conditions and where it takes place.
I'm guessing, but yes, that must be the only way you could sustain that, given that they're so similar to us, because they really are, biochemically, is that that's the only way it can be done, given the building block, the toolkit, the laws of nature and the elements and so on that we have in our universe.
We have so many different life forms on our planet, but if we found anything that's remotely similar to what we have here on Earth on another planet, it would be such an incredible discovery.
Like, if we found a frog on the moon, I mean, the world would stop, right?
I mean, as I say, it'd be micro, I think it'd be single-celled things.
Remember, I mean, you mentioned the Cambrian explosion.
So that is, what we do know about Earth is that although life began, let's say, 3.8 billion years ago, it wasn't until around 600 million years ago or so, or maybe at most 700, that you see any complex multicellular organisms at all.
So for something like 3 billion years, it was single-celled, alone.
And that's one of the reasons why I would guess, if I had to guess, I would say that microbes would be common because life began very quickly on Earth.
And I wouldn't be surprised if we find it on Mars.
But complex life, multicellular life, insects, plants, intelligence, I would guess would be very rare because it took so long on Earth to get there.
It's one of the great unsolved Mysteries in biology.
One thing that is true is that we seem to be...
All complex creatures seem to be...
We're called eukaryotes, right?
Which are cells with a cell nucleus and all that kind of stuff.
And they look like they're the merger between two simpler life forms.
Bacteria and a thing called an archaea, an archaean.
So it looks like somewhere in...
Two billion years ago, whatever it was, in some ocean...
The bacteria cell got inside the Archean and survived as a symbiotic organism, essentially, and then somehow, unbelievably, managed to reproduce and replicate in that configuration.
And that does seem to be the origin of all complex multisolar life on Earth.
exist we don't know but let's say the earth is let's say it was on the fortunate side so so we're we're talking about give or take four billion years right from the origin of life to now and we have a civilization now and we've had it our species has been around what a quarter of a million years or something so it's just now basically so let's say four billion is on the fortunate side Let's say that it was double that or triple that on the average.
Suddenly that's the age of the universe.
That's a third of the age of the universe it took.
So how many of those worlds have been stable for three or four billion years?
That's quite a tall order, actually.
It looks like our solar system might be quite unusual in that respect.
Because the planet's got to remain stable, in a stable orbit.
The stars got to remain stable, at least in our solar system.
You know, there's a theory called the grand tack theory.
It's very hard to explain the evolution of our solar system.
So when you do computer models of solar systems, you don't tend to get four rocky planets too close to the sun and four big gas giants further out.
And one of the current best theories, and I say this because it shows you how lucky we might be, Is that Jupiter, they tend to form these big gas giants and migrate inwards towards the star.
So in almost all the computer simulations, just because you've got this big gas giant orbiting all the dust around the star, they tend to drop inwards.
And it looks like Jupiter did that.
So it looks like it formed and came in, and came in almost to where Mars orbits today, and cleared out the region around Mars, actually, which is maybe the reason Mars is so small compared to Venus and Earth.
But then Saturn was coming in as well.
And in the computer models, the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn stopped Jupiter coming in before it gets to the Earth.
And they both get dragged out again to where they are today.
And that seems to be...
It's one of the best theories for the evolution of our solar system.
So what are the chances?
The chances of that...
Are so miniscule, tiny.
So that's the thing, I think, about these rocky planets.
In order to get a civilization on them, I think you need, I guess you need quite unusual solar systems.
And that would be a guess.
And you need quite unusual stability on the planet for billions of years.
Bode's Law is a method of detecting, if you look at the mass of a planet, you can accurately detect how much mass and the size of a neighboring planet.
Other than to say that most simulations of the solar system, if you put other planets in, they tend to get thrown out by gravitational interactions.
So there is a sense in which our solar system has got as much stuff in it as it could have.
So the planets are nicely spaced.
And you're right, given the mass of them, that depends on how close another planet can be before the interaction goes wrong and it gets thrown out into the intergalactic space or something.
Because planets do that.
We know that planets get thrown out of solar systems by gravitational interactions.
So, again, it points to the fact that solar systems are not stable over long periods of time.
They're not like clockwork things.
They're not like Newtonian clockwork and it just goes on forever.
They're not like that.
They evolve and planets can shift orbits and change.
And we know, if you look at the surface of the Moon, for example, it's covered in craters.
And that was caused, they all seem to hit about the same time.
And it's about 3.8 billion years ago or so.
And that's called the late heavy bombardment.
So we know that if you look at cratering rates on Mars and on the Moon, it all seemed to happen in this, not all, but a big peak around that time.
And that seems to be correlated with Neptune moving outwards in the solar system and into the Kuiper Belt basically or towards the Kuiper Belt and causing all sorts of havoc and everything comes into the inner solar system.
So those things happen but it didn't happen when life was established on the Earth.
So I do think it's possible that at the moment there's one civilization in the Milky Way, and that's us.
And I think that's important, actually.
And it goes back to what I was saying at the start about the Astronomy and cosmology being part of the framework within which you have to think if you're looking for meaning or you're looking for how we should behave even politically, you know, that has a bearing to me.
I mean, imagine that we're the only place where there is intelligence in this galaxy.
And how should we behave?
Should we actually, notwithstanding the fact that we're tiny and fragile things and insignificant physically, should we consider ourselves extremely valuable in that respect?
Because there's nowhere else where...
I would go as far as to say there would be nowhere else where meaning exists in the Milky Way.
I mean, I think what it says is you have to take responsibility for all those things, those spiritual things that you think about and the emotional things you think about.
You are responsible for that.
You are that.
Whatever that is, it exists in you and it will only exist for a short amount of time.
It's so unbelievably compelling, though, to consider the idea that somewhere out there, there's another civilization that may be even more advanced than us.
North Sentinel Island, which is a really unusual place because they branched off from Africa 60,000 years ago and they've been living on this one small island the size of Manhattan.
And as well as we know, there's only about 39 of them left, somewhere around there.
We're supposed to leave them alone, and they're a rare tribe.
When they find them in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes, our initial instinct is back off, back off, leave them alone, leave them alone.
Do you think that perhaps the universe, like if there is a civilization that's a million times more advanced than us, been around here for millions of years of life as opposed to a quarter million, Why would they let us know?
Would they look at us dropping bombs on each other and polluting the ocean and sucking all the fish out and putting clouds into the skies of dirt and particles?
Look at these crude monkeys.
Look at that.
They're so far beyond where they need to be before they could join the galactic civilization network or whatever.
There is an argument as well that technology so advanced would be difficult for us to detect.
I mean, we tend to think of...
You know, when you say written across the sky, I suppose it's true.
I'm thinking of starships and things like Star Wars, right?
Big energy things that you can see the signature of.
But actually, maybe the civilization just becomes a nano civilization, a tiny little nanobots, because that's more efficient.
It's a better way to do things.
So it's possible, I suppose, that there are space probes all over the place that are so small and are so efficient and use so little energy that we just don't see them.
My other thought is that where we are headed, it seems to me that there's some sort of a strange symbiosis that's taking place.
There's a strange connection that we have to electronics and ultimately to an artificial creation, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, artificial life, something that's created by carbon-based beings, cellular beings that isn't cellular, but also acts like life.
That this may be the future of life.
That we are so connected to the idea of flesh and blood and bone.
But maybe this is just a temporary situation until we transition.
Or if not us transition, until it surpasses us.
And this is the next stage of life.
But this stage has no need for all the human and biological reward systems that are in place that make sure that we survive.
Whether it's ego or fear or emotions.
No need for that.
That it will just exist and maintain its equilibrium as this new form of life.
And that this is the future of life in the universe.
And that we'll get there, maybe it'll only be 100, 200 years from now.
But that's what exists all throughout the cosmos.
So there's no need to peacock.
There's no need to show our signal in the sky that it just exists in this form.
We have these biological motivations to survive and You know, there's motivations to conquer and to innovate and to spread our genes and to move into new territories.
But if you didn't have biology, if you existed completely from man-made materials or from materials found on Earth and that this new form of life is created out of that, you wouldn't have those unless you programmed them.
Does it have to have a sufficient level of intelligence that it actually is conscious?
And all these things that we talked about, this word meaning that we used earlier, that we all understand and can't define.
Is that an emergent property that has to emerge if you've got something that's intelligent enough to replicate itself and live?
I don't know the answer, but it's worth considering that this thing, emotion, meaning, love and fear and all those things, Are just the things that happen when you are intelligent?
And does consciousness have to have a local origin?
Like, does it have to come from a thing?
Like, if you think about Cellular communication.
If you're in England and you send me a video from your phone and it reaches my phone, it's getting to me through space.
It's going through the sky.
It's like literally from a device not connected by any wires or anything, it's coming to me.
If there's a possibility to create some sort of global intelligence through electronics that's non-local, if one piece of it falls off, it just repairs itself or figures itself out.
But it's the same consciousness existing on a global scale through some sort of an electronic network that instead of the idea that you and I have that Brian and Joe, you have your mind, I have my mind, and we exist As intelligent beings separate from each other,
but instead of that, that all of it is connected and that all of it is something that we can't even conceive of because our brains are too crude, like trying to explain to Australiapithecus what a satellite is.
I've argued we can rule that out in the following manner.
So here's my arm, right?
So it's made of electrons and protons and neutrons.
And if I have a soul in there, something that we don't understand, but it's a different kind of energy or whatever it is that we don't have in physics at the moment, it interacts with matter because I'm moving my hand around.
So whatever it is...
It's something that interacts very strongly with matter.
But if you look at the history of particle physics in particular, which is the study of matter, we spent decades making high precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts.
And we look, for example, for a fifth force of nature.
So we know four forces, the gravity, the two nuclear forces, called the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism.
And that's what we know exists.
And we look for another one with ultra-high precision, and we don't see any evidence of it.
So I would claim that we know how matter interacts at these energies, so room temperature now, these energies.
We know how matter interacts very precisely.
And so if you want to suggest there's something else that interacts with matter strongly, then I would say that it's ruled out.
I would go as far as to say it is ruled out by experiment.
Or at least it is extremely subtle.
And you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to come up with a theory of some stuff that we wouldn't have seen when we've observed how matter interacts that is present in our bodies.
And presumably if you believe in the soul, you want it to exist outside.
When you die, you still want the thing to be there.
And you might believe in ghosts and things like that.
I mean, look at a ghost.
I mean, it is something that carries the imprint of you, presumably.
So this energy that's interacting with matter, even if you're not moving at all, if you're just thinking, it's interacting with the matter that encompasses your mind or your brain.
Or your nerves, your neurons.
It's something in there that's interacting with matter, whether you like it or not.
So even just a simple thought process or a dream is still something that's interacting with matter.
But even if you're not moving, you're saying your body's interacting with matter as you're moving your arm, but even if you're not moving, if you're just thinking and you're completely still, which is not totally possible because your heart's beating and you're breathing and all that stuff, but if somehow or another you were able to isolate just the thought, the thoughts themselves are still interacting with matter because they're interacting with the brain itself.
The woo-woo version is that the brain itself and the body, the physical, the spiritual self, you are merely an antenna that's tuning into the great consciousness of the universe.
I think it goes to the heart of this question of what it means to be human.
So I would say that being human, the answer, right?
I don't have the answer to the meaning at all.
But an answer would be, We are small, finite beings, which are just clusters of atoms.
As we said before, they're very rare, but we understand roughly how they came to be.
And we have a limited amount of time, not actually unfortunately, but because of the laws of nature.
The laws of nature forbid us to be immortal.
Immortality is ruled out by the laws of physics.
But also, actually what's interesting about if you look at the basic physics of the universe, going from the Big Bang to where we are today, then the physics is driven by the fact that the universe began in an extremely ordered state.
So it was a very highly ordered system.
And it is tending towards a more disordered system at the moment.
And that's called the second law of thermodynamics.
And it's that basic common sense thing that things go to shit.
Basically, it's the second law of thermodynamics.
What we strongly suspect, and I would say no, is that In that process of going from order to disorder, complexity emerges naturally for a brief period of time.
So it's a natural part of the evolution of the universe that you get a period in time when there's complexity in the universe.
So stars and planets and galaxies and life and civilizations.
But they exist because the universe is decaying, not in spite of the fact the universe is decaying.
So our existence in that sort of picture is necessarily finite and necessarily time-limited.
And it is a remarkable thing that that complexity has got so far that there are things in the universe that can think and feel and explore it.
And I think that is the answer.
If you want an answer to the meaning of it all, it's that.
That you are part of the universe because of the way the laws of nature work.
You are allowed to exist, but you're allowed to exist for a temporary or for a small amount of time in a possibly infinite universe.
One of the biggest mind-blowing moments, I think, of my limited comprehension of what it means to be a living being was when I found out that carbon and all the stuff that makes us has to come out of a dying star.
I think if you decide to simplify it because you don't want to face that, you don't want to face the infinity that's out there in front of us.
And you don't want to face those stories, as you said, that you look at your finger and its ingredients cooked in multiple stars over billions of years.
Well, I think the distribution of information has changed so radically over the last couple hundred years and particularly over the last 20 that you're seeing these trends now where more people are inclined to To abandon a lot of the,
even if you remain religious or remain, you keep a thought or a belief in a higher power, people are more inclined to entertain these concepts of science and to take in the understanding of what has been observed and documented and written about among scholars and academics and There's more people accepting that.
If you look at the number of agnostic people now as opposed to 20, 30 years ago, it's rising.
It's changing.
And I think there's also, because of you and because of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Sean Carroll and all these other people that are public intellectuals that are discussing this kind of stuff, people like myself have a far greater understanding of this than I think people did 30, 40 years ago.
And that trend is continuing, I think, in a very good direction.
I mean, you know, what we should say is that science, we don't know all the answers, so we don't know where the laws of nature came from.
We don't know why the universe began in the way that it did, if indeed it had a beginning.
So we don't know why the Big Bang was very, very highly ordered, which is ultimately, as Sean Carroll actually, you mentioned him, often points out, and he's right, The whole difference, the only difference between the past and the future, the so-called arrow of time, is that in the past the universe was really ordered and it's getting more disordered.
And that necessary state of order at the start of the universe, which is really the reason that we exist, that's the reason, because the universe began in a particular form.
We don't know why that was.
So we will probably find out at some point, and it'll be something to do with the laws of nature.
So I'm always careful.
Science can sometimes sound arrogant, right?
It can sometimes sound like it's the discipline of saying to people, well, you're not right.
And it's not the discipline of saying you're not right.
It's saying this is what we found out.
So I like to say that it provides a framework within which If you want to philosophize or you want to do theology or you want to ask these deep questions about why we're here, you have to operate within that framework because it's just an observational framework.
So everything we've said is stuff we've discovered.
It's not stuff that someone made up.
We understand nuclear physics.
We can build nuclear reactors, for example.
So we understand the physics of stars.
So we understand that the stars built the carbon and oxygen, and we know how they did it.
We can see it, because as I said before, if you look far out into the universe, you're looking way back in time.
And as you look back in time, you see less carbon and less oxygen.
So we have a direct observation that in the earliest universe, there wasn't any, because we can see it.
And now we see that there is some, and we know how it was made.
So I think it's important to be humble when you're talking about science.
And you're not saying, this is the way that it is.
I mean, you are in a sense, but it's not able to answer ultimate questions at the moment.
It's not able to answer even whether the universe had a beginning or not.
We don't even know that.
I was asked to give a talk to some bishops in the UK about cosmology.
And I said, yeah, that would be great fun.
And so I went and gave them this talk.
And at the end, I said, I've got some questions.
So if the universe is eternal, and it might be, it might not have had a beginning, if it's eternal, what place is there for a creator?
Having said that, you know, I've kind of softened a bit over the years, actually, because Now, I think at this point, both in the US actually and in Britain and in some other countries, we are at a point, you've sort of alluded to it, where everybody's angry.
There's a lot of anger.
And a lot of it's justified, by the way.
I mean, we could talk about that, you know, income inequality and all those things.
So there's justified anger.
But it seems to me that there are people of goodwill who need to band together to diffuse the anger in our societies.
Otherwise, we won't have countries like the United States.
Yes, I've tried very hard to evolve in that respect and just get better at communicating ideas and get better at understanding how people receive those ideas.
And I think it's easy to get lazy and to insult and sometimes it's fun.
But I think in terms of discussing ideas, especially that are so personal to people, like religion, I've re-examined the way I interpret these ideas and the way I talk about these things.
Well, I find that so often on this podcast because I talk with people I agree with and disagree with, and I always try to put myself in the head of the person that I disagree with.
I always try to figure out how they're coming to those conclusions or where they're coming from.
And I think it's so important to not be married to ideas.
I got a conversation with someone about this.
And they said, like, sometimes you change your opinions a lot.
I go, yeah, I do.
I do.
Like, I'm flip-flopping.
I'm not a politician.
Like, I'm not flip-flopping.
I'm thinking.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
Like, I will have one opinion on a thing, whether it's a controversial thing like universal basic income.
Richard Feynman, another great physicist, wrote a similar essay at a similar time to Oppenheimer.
And he also had worked on the Manhattan Project.
And it's called The Value of Science.
And I think that was 1955. And they both shared actually a surprise, I think, that they were still alive.
Because they thought that the power they'd given to the politicians, the atom bomb, would destroy everything.
They didn't think that the political system would control it.
And it did.
So that's an remarkable thing.
We're still here.
But in that essay, he said that the most valuable thing about science is the realization that we don't know.
And he said, in that statement, he calls science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, by the way.
He said, in that statement is the open door, the open channel, he called it.
So if we want to make progress, we have to understand that we don't know everything and we have to leave things to future generations and we can be uncertain and we can change our minds.
And he said that it's a great last line.
I can't remember exactly what he says, but he said it's something like, it's our duty as scientists to communicate the value of uncertainty and the value of freedom of thought to all future generations.
That's the point.
That's what freedom of thought means.
Freedom of thought means the freedom to change your mind.
In fact, that's what democracy is, if you think about it.
Democracy is a trial and error system.
So it's the admission that we don't know how to do it.
And that's one of the problems with religion is to say that you know when you do not or to say that you have absolute truth and absolute knowledge of something when it can't really exist.
He talks about it like we're in the opening scene of a science fiction movie where he's trying to warn people and then they don't listen to the genius and it goes south.
I chaired a debate on this with the Royal Society in London a few weeks ago.
So it's true now, at the moment, what people tend to be frightened of are general AIs, or AGI they call it, artificial general intelligence, which is like what we talked about earlier, a human-like capability thing.
And we're miles away from that.
We don't know how to do it, we haven't got them, and we're miles away.
So at the moment, artificial intelligence is expert systems and very focused systems that do particular things.
You can be scared of them in a limited economic sense because they're going to displace people's jobs.
And actually, interestingly, in this panel discussion we had, it's going to be what you might call middle-class jobs in the UK, so white-collar jobs.
Which is why people are interested in universal basic income to sort of replace money that's going to be lost because there will be no jobs for all these people.
Well, it's these concepts that are really hard to visualize, like Sura Kurzweil's idea of the exponential increase of technology leading us to a point in the near future where you're going to be able to download your consciousness into a computer.
You talk to computer experts, they're like, there's no way we're miles away from that.
But Kurzweil's convinced that what's going to happen is that as technology increases, it increases in this wildly exponential way where we really can't visualize it.
We can't even imagine how much advancement will take place over 50 years.
But in those 50 years, something's going to happen that radically changes our idea of what's possible.
And I think Elon shares this idea as well, that it's going to sneak up on us so quickly that when it does go live, it'll be too late.
Being a human being, though, is that people need some meaning.
Just giving them income, I think, is just going to...
I mean, it's just my speculation, but it can create mass despair.
Even if you provide them with food and shelter, people need things to do.
So there's going to be some sort of a demand to find meaning for people, give them occupations, give them something, some task.
It seems to be one of the...
Critical parts of being a person is that we need things to do that we find meaning in.
Like you were talking about, we're the only things that we know of that have meaning, that find meaning and share meaning and believe in that.
We're going to need something like that.
If universal basic income comes along, I don't think it's going to be enough to just feed people and house them.
They're going to want something to do.
If you're doing something for an occupation and this is your identity, and then all of a sudden that occupation becomes irrelevant because the computer does it faster, cheaper, quicker, these people are going to have this incredible feeling of despair and just not being valuable.
I mean, the utopian sort of version of this is that everybody gets to do what we're doing now.
Right.
Which is make a living sort of thinking and creating and all that kind of, you know, so that's the utopian ideal is you don't need to do the stuff, the job that you don't really want to do in the factory.
Well, it would be great if everybody had an interest like that, if everybody went on to make pottery and painting and doing all these different things that they've always really wanted to do, and their needs are met by the universal basic income money that they receive every month.
But boy, there's a lot of people I don't think have those desires or needs and to sort of force it onto them at age 55 or whatever it's going to be seems to be very, very difficult.
But I think that, in concept at least, it's inevitable that we do have some sort of an artificial intelligence that resembles us, or that resembles something like Ex Machina, if people choose to create that.
I mean, and then this, what we're doing right now, there's people right now in their car that are streaming this.
So they're in their car and they're listening as they're driving on the road.
Maybe they have a Tesla.
Maybe they have an electric car.
They're driving down the road, streaming two people talking, where it's ones and zeros that are broken down into some audible form and you can listen to it in your car.
So it's certainly in the early 90s I was involved in that.
You know, in the university environment with email and all that kind of stuff.
So I don't know when it kind of didn't really...
You could have a web browser that just...
The only sites that were there were NASA. And I think NASA had one of the early sites and CERN. And there's very little else.
When did you become involved with CERN? So that would be, I started doing particle physics in 95. And when was, when did the Large Hadron Collider go live?
That was, I remember it was 2000 and 2007, I think it was, or 2008. It's so long ago.
I can't remember.
It's about 10 years ago.
But it started up, and then we had a problem with it, and then it took a while to fix.
So it hasn't been taking data that long.
But it's a tremendously successful thing now, and it's operating beyond its design capabilities.
I mean, you think basically it's mainly under France and partly under Switzerland.
And it accelerates protons around in a circle both ways.
One beam goes one way, one goes the other way.
And they go around 11,000 times a second.
So that's very close to the speed of light.
99.999999% the speed of light.
And then we cross the beams and collide the particles.
And in those collisions, you're recreating the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.
So we know that physics.
So going back to what you said about the carbon and the oxygen, we can trace that story back way beyond the time when there were protons and neutrons to when there were quarks and gluons around and go all the way back and the Higgs boson doing its thing back then.
So we can see all that physics in the lab.
So that's why we have a lot of confidence in that story.
It's a great example of how you get something done.
So it was the 50s when CERN was established.
I think it was 53 or 54. I can't quite remember.
It's something like that.
And it was built out from the Second World War.
So you have Europe at the end of the war.
And it was realized that the only way forward for Europe was collaboration.
To rebuild the scientific base and for peace, for peaceful purposes.
And so CERN was set up as an international collaboration in Europe initially with that political ideal that it would explore nature just for freely and for peace, for peaceful means, peaceful reasons.
And so that was, the politics was right.
So it was set up by international treaty So that the member states are bound together by a treaty.
And they pay a small amount, relatively small amount each, into CERN every year, which is a percentage of their GDP. And that's the money they use to do the experiments and build the accelerators.
So it's very hard to get out of it.
And you wouldn't really want to because it's a small amount of money per country.
And CERN doesn't get extra money to build things.
It just takes its money and basically saves up and plans itself.
But because it's got a regular stream of money, it can do it.
So it can say, we're going to build this machine and it will take eight years because that's how much money we've got.
And we'll build it in eight years and we know how much money we've got so we can do it.
And it's a lesson.
I mean, the reason that the US collider, the SSC, failed is It's because it's the problem you have in the US with the funding system, as you've seen in the last few weeks, is that it's very arbitrary and it's open to political manoeuvring and things can be shut down.
And you look at CERN as well, and people ask me now, I think the UK pays about, it's about $100 million a year.
That's what the UK pays in.
And it's about the same for Germany, same for France, and so on.
And so people say, what do we get for that?
I mean, first of all, it's not.
The whole budget of CERN is about the same as a budget of a medium-sized university.
So it's not a lot.
It's about a billion dollars a year or something, which is what a university has.
So it's not a lot in the scheme of things.
What's it done, though?
Well, we invented the World Wide Web, as we've just said.
A lot of the medical imaging technology that we use comes from CERN. It's pioneered the use of these very high-field magnets, which is what it needed.
So it's engineering at the edge.
And engineering at the edge generates spin-offs and expertise to get used in other fields.
So there's cancer treatment, so-called hadron beam therapy.
So if you've got a brain tumour now, it's quite likely...
That you'll have one of these targeted particle beam therapies, which is like very highly targeted sort of chemotherapy.
It's not chemotherapy, it's just radiation that you can target in a beam into your head and attack the tumor.
And those are particle accelerators.
So most particle accelerators today are in hospitals and in medicine.
But they came from doing particle physics.
So the spin-offs of these big experiments at the edge of our capability are always immense, which is why they're worth funding at these very low levels.
So we've been exploring that because we don't only collide protons together, we can collide lead nuclei together or silver nuclei together at the LHC. And that's when you make these kind of soups of nuclear matter, if you like, very hot nuclear matter to explore that physics, that nuclear physics.
I mean, one thing we're trying to do is, one of the things in particle physics is that you want as many collisions per second as you can generate.
And we have a collision, we have what's called a bunch crossing at LHC. We can vary it, but it's something like 25 nanoseconds, depending on what, so it's really, we get a lot of collisions per second.
And the more collisions per second you can get, the more chance you have of making interesting things like Higgs particles or whatever else may be out there waiting to be discovered.
I mean, it's possible there are other particles out there that we haven't yet discovered that could be within the reach of the LHC. And if this one that was in Texas had gotten built and it was more powerful than the LHC, you'd have even more opportunity to do something like that.
And protons have got loads of stuff in them, loads of gluons and the quarks.
So you get a big mess, first of all.
So most of it's a load of particles that are spraying out which you're not interested in.
But sometimes when, let's say, a couple of the gluons bang together, and they can make something interesting, like a top quark or a Higgs particle, What's a top quark?
Top quarks are very heavy.
There are six quarks.
So there's up and down, charm and strange, bottom and top.
So strange was literally in the, what was it, the 50s when we discovered them.
Someone said, that's really strange.
So it's a strange new kind of particle.
So yes, we have six quarks.
They're in three families.
So the up and down are one family.
And then the charm and stranger, another family in the top and bottom are the third family.
And so we, for some reason, so the only thing, the only particles we need to make up, you and me, are up quarks, down quarks and electrons.
But for some reason, there are two further copies of those, which are identical in every way except they're heavier.
So there's the charm and the strange quark and a heavy electron called a muon.
And then there's the top and the bottom quark and another heavy electron called a tau.
And that's it.
So there's this weird pattern that we don't understand.
So it seems like you only needed the first family to build a universe.
But for some reason, there are two copies.
And the heavy ones decay into the lighter ones is the point.
So when you make them, they're not around very long.
And just to answer your question, what happens?
Is that when they decay, they throw their decay products out into our detector.
So we take a photograph of the cascade of particles that comes from these heavier particles decaying, and the trick is to patch it all up to try and work out what everything came from.
So we look out into the universe and we see that there's a lot of stuff there that's interacting gravitationally, but is not interacting strongly with the matter out of which we are made and the stars are made.
So it's almost certain that that's some form of particle.
That fits beautifully.
And we see lots of different observations, the way galaxies rotate and interact.
And even that oldest light in the universe, the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation, we see the signature of that stuff in that light as well.
So we think that there's some other particle out there.
And to be honest, we thought we would have detected it, I think, at LHC. We have lots of theories called supersymmetric theories that make predictions for all sorts of different particles that would interact weakly with normal matter.
And I think it's broadly seen as a surprise that we haven't seen them at LHC. So that just may well mean that either they're a bit too massive, so we need more energy to make them, and we just haven't quite got enough.
Or we're not making enough of them often enough to see them, which is one of the reasons we're upgrading the LHC. So we also look for them, by the way, directly.
So we have experiments under mountains.
We bury them under mountains so the cosmic rays from space don't interfere with them.
And we're looking for the rare occasions when these dark matter particles bump into the particles of matter in the detector.
Because the idea would be this room is full of them.
I mean, the galaxy is swimming with dark matter, as far as we can tell.
But it interacts very weakly with this matter.
So it doesn't bump into us very often.
So we're looking for the direct detection of it.
And we're looking to make those particles at LHC. So it's everywhere, but it doesn't interact with us.
Very weakly.
So it interacts through gravity.
And the archetypal particle that's everywhere that doesn't interact strongly is a neutrino.
So we do know about neutrinos.
We've detected those.
And there are something like 60 billion per centimetre squared per second passing through your head now from the sun.
So they get made in nuclear reactions in the sun.
But they go straight through your head and then actually straight through the earth, pretty much.
Occasionally one of them bumps into something.
And we can detect those because there are so many of them going through.
So again, we talked about Einstein's theory earlier.
So Einstein's theory, which works spectacularly well, says that if you put stuff into the universe, as we said before, then it warps and deforms and stretches.
And it very precisely tells you, given the stuff that you put in it, how much does it stretch?
And how does it stretch?
And the measurement we have is how it's stretching.
So the thing we observe is how the universe is expanding and how that expansion rate is changing and how it's changed over time.
So we have very precise measurements of that.
So then we can use the theory to tell us what's in it, given that we know how it's responding to that stuff.
And that's how we discovered dark energy.
So we noticed that the universe's expansion rate is increasing.
So the universe is accelerating in its expansion, which is exactly the opposite of what we thought.
And this is in the 1990s that we discovered that.
So we can work out what sort of stuff and how much of that stuff you need to put in the universe to make that happen.
Yeah, I remember one of my friends, Brian Schmidt, got the Nobel Prize for that.
And I remember I talked to him and he said, he was a postdoc, I think, at the time, so a young researcher.
And he was making measurements of supernova, the light from supernova explosions, which are so bright that you can see them, you know, hundreds of millions of light years away.
And he noticed that if you look at the data, the light is stretched in the wrong way.
So we look at the stretch of light as it travels across the universe and the universe is expanding.
It stretches the light, so it changes the colour.
And he noticed that there was a discrepancy which said that the expansion rate is speeding up.
It's been speeding up for I think something like seven billion years or so.
It's been speeding up.
So he thought that he'd done something wrong.
So he checked it and checked it and checked it and he couldn't find anything wrong.
So he did what a good scientist does, which is he published it so that somebody else could find out what he'd done wrong.
And he said that he thought it would be the end of his career.
Well, it's interesting because it's allowed in Einstein's theory, and it was in Einstein's original theory.
So it's got a name, it's called the cosmological constant.
And it's just allowed in the equations.
And Einstein actually introduced it Initially, because Einstein's equations strongly suggest that the universe is expanding or contracting and not just sat there.
So even before we'd observed anything, Einstein had a theory that suggested that the universe is just not static and actually really strongly suggests that there's a beginning.
So the theory itself, on its own, suggests that you can see that if the universe is stretching today, then it must have been smaller in the past, right?
Everything must have been closer together, let's say that.
So there's a man actually called Georges Lemaitre, who worked independently of Einstein, but at the same time in the early 1920s, before we even knew there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
And they noticed that the equation suggests the universe might be stretching.
And so he wrote to Einstein and said, your theory suggests there was a day without a yesterday.
Because he thought if everything's expanding now, then it must have been closer together in the past.
And so there might be a time when it was all together.
But I think that he was more predisposed to accept what the equations were telling him because a beginning...
An origin for a priest is really a nice thing because it tells you it's a creation event.
And Einstein tried to dodge it and put this allowed term into his equation, which is almost the stretchy term to say, well, if it's all kind of contracting or something, can I put something in to make it stretch a bit, to balance it all out so it can be eternal?
And you can't.
You can't make it eternal that way.
So he tried it.
Then he took it out and called it his biggest blunder.
Yeah, that's like 16 or 18 people, and it's like a rock and roll show.
And at some of the venues we're doing it in North America, in Canada, they're a bit smaller venues, but we just fill it with screen as much as we can get.
And then the graphics, a lot of the graphics I have were done by D-Neg, who did Ex Machina, actually, and Interstellar.
And the reason, I mean, I say chose them, I rang them up and goes, please, please, will you do this?
And they said, how much money have you got?
And, you know, because it's way lower than Chris Nolan, and they did it.
They just liked the idea of these messages and these ideas.
So they used the software that they used for Interstellar to create images of black holes.
And they used general relativity.
They coded it into their graphics software.
So they can ray trace lights around black holes.
And you can move the camera around the black hole and it traces the way all the light moves around it.
So if you remember those amazing, the gargantua, the black hole in Interstellar, That's a simulation.
It's not an artist's impression.
It's a simulation of what Einstein's theory tells us a black hole will look like.
And so I can use that to talk about what happens when you fall into a black hole.
What would you see watching someone fall in?
And you can explain all that using Einstein's theory.
The idea that it's kind of a well-known idea, it's a bizarre idea that if I was to fall into a black hole and you were watching, you'd never see me fall in.
You'd see time slow down, my time slow down as you watch me.
So in the end I'd just slow down and slow down and slow down and then I'd get frozen on the event horizon and just fade away as an image, a reddening image on the event horizon.
So time passes at different rates as you move close to the black hole and far away because space and time are distorted by the mass of the black hole.
And so I talk about all that but I talk about all that with this incredible image It's so high resolution, by the way, that it was higher resolution than they used for Interstellar because my screen's so big.
So we need a special machine to play it.
You can buy the most expensive Mac Pro in the world.
And it will not play this stuff.
I love that.
From a geek perspective, it's brilliant.
You have to have a special video player to play the damn thing.