Oct. 21, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| While mainstream media focuses on Trump's locker room talk and Clinton's emails, | ||
| there are actually a whole slew of other interesting political stories happening right now | ||
| related to the presidential election. | ||
| This election has seen a massive shift in America's political alignment on both the left and the right. | ||
| On the left, we've seen a real divide between the Bernie wing of the Democrats and the Clinton camp. | ||
| Bernie's message against Wall Street, money in politics, and his chastising of the political establishment has been swallowed wholly by the political Clinton machine. | ||
| While Bernie is now supporting Hillary, it's pretty clear that many of his supporters aren't following his lead in either donations or enthusiasm. | ||
| This division is one of the reasons Hillary is still struggling with young people and overall connecting with new voters. | ||
| Meanwhile, on the right, we've seen the absolute fracturing of the Republican Party as we know it. | ||
| Mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Jeb Bush are now on the outside looking in as Trump has aggressively gutted the party. | ||
| It's pretty clear that if Trump wins in November, the old guard of the Republicans will be out and his inside circle of people like Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, and Ben Carson will be in. | ||
| While the list of Republicans not voting for Trump continues to grow, the Republican base who voted during the primaries is still with him, and whether the party is supporting Trump or not, those people are. | ||
| Trump's rise also fractured the Republican Party ideologically. | ||
| Neocons are either in hiding or defecting to Hillary, while the Christian conservatives are backing Trump, a candidate who was probably their last choice when this election began. | ||
| Let's not forget, this is a guy who compared his own book to the Bible. | ||
| As they say, politics can make strange bedfellows. | ||
| For both the Democrats and the Republicans, 2016 will be looked back on as a watershed year. | ||
| Regardless of who wins, it's clear the parties are in flux and they both desperately need new ideas and new leaders. | ||
| The fact that we have a 69-year-old Democrat running against a 70-year-old Republican tells you all you need to know about the aging state of our two-party system. | ||
| How is it that these two were the best our system could churn out? | ||
| While it's easy to mock millennials, just imagine how you would feel if this was the first presidential election you ever really paid attention to or had a chance to vote in. | ||
| We've got the ultimate reality star running against the ultimate insider. | ||
| And while they may hate each other, they're also perfect for each other. | ||
| By the time this thing is over, they'll have thrown out everything but the kitchen sink, but that'll only be because they needed it to wash their dirty hands. | ||
| One of the many issues which seems to have been almost totally shelved during this campaign is science. | ||
| I guess in some ways science is the obvious sacrificial lamb in an election contest focusing so much on mudslinging instead of discussing the actual issues that affect our lives. | ||
| As we discussed during my chat with transhumanist Zoltan Istvan two weeks ago, there are so many huge upcoming scientific breakthroughs coming down the pike, from stem cell research to cloning to artificial intelligence, that we must talk about these issues now so that we'll know how to deal with the ramifications of them, both good and bad, when they're right in front of us. | ||
| Scientific breakthroughs will continue to happen whether we're prepared for them or not. | ||
| Perhaps we can never be fully prepared, but we at least need leaders who believe in the merits of science in the first place. | ||
| My guest this week is theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. | ||
| Krauss is the foundation professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department at Arizona State University, as well as the director of the Origins Project at ASU, which focuses on the origins of humans and the universe itself. | ||
| Krauss has been outspoken this election related to politics and science, particularly the seeming lack of knowledge in this department by Donald Trump. | ||
| We're going to dive deep both into science and politics, as well as the many places that the two intersect. | ||
| I figure if a guy can spend his adult life trying to figure out the mysteries of the | ||
| universe, then maybe, just maybe, he can figure out the mysteries of our current political | ||
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existential crisis. | |
| Joining me this week is an author, a theoretical physicist, and a professor at the School of | ||
| Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. | ||
| Lawrence Krauss, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| You are in the middle of like 8,000 things, and we're going to have to use some theoretical physics to fit this in the space-time continuum. | ||
| Yeah, 8,000 plus or minus a million, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, plus or minus a million. | ||
| All right, well, I'm very excited to talk to you. | ||
| I think I publicly shamed you into doing this several times at the Reason Rally. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's hard to publicly shame me, but you did try. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you did, yeah. | ||
| But I wanted to do it. | ||
| It's just a matter of fitting in, and it's great that we can be here today. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so I'm very excited. | ||
| You're heading to UCLA to do some more talks after this, but let's jump right into the election. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We have to. | ||
| Maybe we'll talk about science. | ||
| No, why not? | ||
| As a man of science, How do you feel about just the tenor of this? | ||
| And not just the tenor, but as someone that cares about empirical evidence, that cares about facts, how do you feel about just the state of what is going on right now? | ||
| Every year I always wonder if it could be worse. | ||
| Because, you know, let's face it, politics and empirical evidence don't go together very well as a rule, and for a long time I've been interested in trying to make sure public policy is based on that, and in a lot of different ways. | ||
| In my writing, and we actually created a group in 2008 called Science Debate, We tried to get a presidential debate on issues of science and technology. | ||
| Not to ask them the 10th digit of pi, but the issues that really matter, that are going to affect the future for people, are not the issues that are ever talked about. | ||
| Their energy, the environment, security, all of that depends on an understanding of science and technology policy. | ||
| And so it's always been ignored and we've been frustrated by it, but I have to say that this year, of course, with Donald Trump, takes the cake in so many ways. | ||
| I wrote a piece in the New Yorker which more or less called him the anti-science candidate, if such a thing is possible. | ||
| The only person, I think, on the Republican slate that was more anti-science, remarkably, was Ben Carson. | ||
| Right, let's just talk about Carson real quick. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
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Because he's such a fool. | |
| He's a neurosurgeon, right? | ||
| How can you be a neurosurgeon and against so many of the things that a scientist Well, not just against, ignorant about them. | ||
| That's what amazed me. | ||
| It's one thing to be ideologically opposed, but he would talk about evolution in a way which clearly didn't understand evolution, which is the basis of biology, besides calling the Big Bang a hoax from the devil and all. | ||
| Well, that's a fact. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That and the fact we didn't land on the moon. | ||
| So what it demonstrates is, and it's unfortunate, But actually it's relevant. | ||
| My mother wanted me to be a doctor and she made the mistake of sort of getting me interested in science and wanted me to be a scientist and then I discovered when I was in high school that doctors weren't scientists. | ||
| I apologize to all doctors in the audience but they're not and he's a perfect example. | ||
| To be That's not to say, many doctors try to keep up with science, obviously, but to be a good neurosurgeon requires eye-hand coordination and an understanding of what to do when you open up a brain. | ||
| I will get in trouble for saying this, but it's a very sophisticated kind of car mechanic. | ||
| And so he clearly was very good at those technical things, but obviously Obviously, he not only did not know much science, but he willfully...and this is the real problem with religion. | ||
| With someone like him, he decides what's right based on the Scriptures, and anything he disagrees with it must be wrong. | ||
| That's the real difference between religion and science, where in religion you know the answers before you ask the questions. | ||
| And in science we try and ask the questions and find out the answers and they may surprise us. | ||
| And they may change over the course of time. | ||
| Not only may, they often do. | ||
| And the willingness to say you're wrong or to change your mind is profoundly important in science, which brings us back to Donald Trump. | ||
| But real quick, just to finish with Carson, because it's such an interesting example of this. | ||
| I'm glad you made the distinction of saying that he's a neurosurgeon, not a scientist, because I've now fumbled it twice. | ||
| Because a neuroscientist has to really have the scientific knowledge. | ||
| The way you're describing a souped-up car guy, car mechanic, it's like really he's doing a physical... | ||
| He's repairing damage and he needs to know how to do that. | ||
| Again, one doesn't want to generalize for all neurosurgeons based on Ben Carson, but it demonstrates that there's a difference. | ||
| And I'm assuming he was good at what he did and it wasn't all hype. | ||
| I'm willing to grant him that. | ||
| But in everything else he says, he expressed more ignorance, not just antagonism, but ignorance about fundamental science. | ||
| Then any other candidate in the Republican Party, which says a lot, because it has unfortunately become the anti-science party of late, and it wasn't always that way. | ||
| The Republican Party has been a big supporter of science over the years. | ||
| Right now, because they insist on denying the existence of climate change, and many on the right insist on denying the existence of evolution or even the Big Bang, and their attitudes towards homosexuality, they have necessity by ideology been forced to confront the evidence of science and ignore it or | ||
| disregard it or lie about it. | ||
| Right, so basically they've staked out a position based on non-fact and then that sort of boxes them in their own sort | ||
| That's the real problem. What do you do when you're wrong? | ||
| of... | ||
| And you can't afford to say you're wrong. | ||
| And the problem, actually, the real problem with politics is people are not willing to say, | ||
| "You know what? We had this policy, but it was wrong. We've changed our minds." | ||
| And one of the reasons I wanted to insert more science into public policy | ||
| is not the knowledge of science, but the process of science, which is based on empirical evidence and testing and | ||
| evolving your views. | ||
| If we really want to have sound public policy, we can't just be willing to say, oh well, someone was wrong once and therefore we're not going to listen to them. | ||
| Stating that you're wrong and explaining why, to me, raises you to a higher level. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| In fact, as a scientist, I often say, as a theoretical physicist, I say the two greatest states to be in are being wrong or confused, because that means there's a lot more to learn. | ||
| Yeah, there's a little room there for some change. | ||
| A lot of room. | ||
| Learning is a process of discovering errors in what you're thinking. | ||
| I've said, in fact in my new book I said somewhere that one of the purposes of science is to make People are uncomfortable. | ||
| And I don't mean that in a bad sense, but if we're always comfortable, it means we're never going outside our comfort zone. | ||
| It means our myopic views are never being questioned or confronted. | ||
| And that's what living is all about. | ||
| That's what music, art, and literature are all about. | ||
| I mean, it's, you know, I'll bring in, happens to be today, I'm excited because Bob Dylan I just won the Nobel Prize in literature. | ||
| But people like Bob Dylan force us to confront, I remember when I was young, our views about the way society worked. | ||
| And science should be the same way. | ||
| And good politicians should be all about that. | ||
| It's amazing to me when I've been in some other countries and confronting presidents or prime ministers who actually "know something." (laughs) | ||
| And then, that's not to say, I mean, Obama's, yeah, anyway, I don't wanna, I'll get a hate mail | ||
| no matter what. - Yeah, we can, you're gonna get hate mail, well, wait 'til you see | ||
| what happens on Twitter. - Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But we can talk about Obama and Clinton too, but interestingly, it sounds like you're saying | ||
| you don't necessarily care if the president knows that much about science, but you at least want them | ||
| to be intellectually curious enough to assign the right people to deal with it. | ||
| Look, the president can't be an expert in everything. | ||
| But the president needs to know they're not. | ||
| The first thing is to know you're not an expert in everything, which Donald Trump hasn't yet figured out. | ||
| And secondly, to be intellectually curious. | ||
| And thirdly, to choose the right people. | ||
| That's really what you want a president to do, is to have good advisors, is to know enough to distinguish people who are full of Garbage, I'll use that word. | ||
| And people you can trust, whose opinions you can trust, because you know that they're willing to be wrong, too. | ||
| And so, I think that's really the mark of a president. | ||
| In the current climate, you obviously can't be an expert in anything. | ||
| And it amazes me when we talk about, you know, having debate on science, they say, well, the president shouldn't be a scientist. | ||
| You know, we have a debate on national security, but the president doesn't have to be a military expert. | ||
| He has to surround himself or herself with reasonable people who know what's going on on diplomacy. | ||
| So is the intellectual curiosity part of it? | ||
| Is that the part that about Trump gets you the most? | ||
| Well, it's intellectual curiosity and skepticism, and skepticism is a key part of science. | ||
| Asking yourself, is this evidence reasonable and why should I believe that? | ||
| Yeah, the thing that, it's hard to know what, Trump is such an anomaly, but the fact that when he says, you know, who do you take advice from? | ||
| He says, from myself, because I'm, you know, I know. | ||
| When someone says that, No matter what they're running for, whether it's president or head of a school board or whatever, you should worry about that. | ||
| And so I think it's that and his incredible Anger and vindictiveness and you know people have called him a bully but you know I did a dialogue with a Hollywood friend of mine named Johnny Depp and he pointed out that he actually played Donald Trump, you should watch it on Netflix, it's a great show where he looks just like him, it's great, but he said that Donald Trump isn't a bully, he's a brat and that defines the man to me, he's not a bully so much, he's just a spoiled brat who if he's losing finds a reason to blame other people | ||
| Again, he's the center of his own universe and all of that is terrifying and ignorant in the extreme. | ||
| I mean, when I wrote about science and the candidates this year, That's politics 101. | ||
| Is that one real? | ||
| that Trump made that just to me epitomizes the level of ignorance of the | ||
| man because first of all a lot of what he says is just meant he doesn't care | ||
| whether it's true or not he thinks it'll play well or not that I can understand | ||
| that's when you say you know why are we worried about the ozone why can't I have | ||
| you know aerosols in my hairspray because I only use my hairspray indoors | ||
| so it can't affect the atmosphere. Is that one real? Yeah he really said that now | ||
| that's the kind of thing you say oh my goodness gracious so anyway yeah that | ||
| That one's tough. | ||
| Okay, so we've got your feelings on Trump. | ||
| I think they're clear, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, I've been trying to moderate them to be less... You know, I just wrote a piece in The New Yorker today on the nuclear threat, and... | ||
| To be more serious, his misunderstanding of the fact that nuclear weapons are not meant to be used. | ||
| In fact, as I pointed out, it demonstrates a lot of the illogical nature of our nuclear policy. | ||
| But when he says, if we build them, why can't we use them? | ||
| Anyone who's thought about it realizes you can't use them in any strategic way. | ||
| And if he wants to encourage other countries to build them, he misunderstands the whole point of proliferation. | ||
| Those things are serious. | ||
| We can't laugh over that stuff. | ||
| I really tried to be fair to him and whatever. | ||
| So when he's talked about the nuclear stuff, and he'll say something like, you know, Japan should have nukes so that they could defend themselves potentially from China. | ||
| It seems to me that there's some grain of truth in the concept of that, that we shouldn't have to feel like we have to defend Japan. | ||
| But you're saying it really throws off every sort of precept of how all these nations have Well, it throws off the precept of really what we should be trying to do with nuclear weapons, which isn't talked up enough today, which is we want to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world because there's really no good use for them. | ||
| And we built up this incredible stash of nuclear weapons because of the Cold War, and we had this policy of mutually assured destruction, so we had to have enough to ensure the total annihilation of the Soviet Union when they were the Soviet Union. | ||
| That's okay, but we then, even at the time of Nixon, we signed a non-proliferation treaty. | ||
| Most people think the non-proliferation treaty, and this is so typical of the US, is designed to say no one should have nuclear weapons but us. | ||
| And that's not what it's about. | ||
| It's trying to say we don't want nuclear weapons to spread, but the other thing that the nuclear nations agreed to in the non-proliferation treaty was to disarm. | ||
| And so we have an obligation. | ||
| We are violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty today, in this country, as much as North Korea may be by trying to get nuclear weapons, or getting nuclear weapons, or Iran, which happily they've been stopped from getting them for the moment, because we are not making an open effort at its arm. | ||
| And Obama, who Whose heart was certainly in the right place. | ||
| He said, you know, the world should get rid of nuclear weapons. | ||
| And initially, his administration actually did enter an agreement with the Soviet Union, with Russia, to reduce the number of arms. | ||
| But we still have way too many. | ||
| We still have a thousand nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, which means they can be launched instantaneously if there's a warning of an attack, whether the warning is real or not. | ||
| The president only has a few minutes to decide. | ||
| That is not necessary in the modern world. | ||
| And also, unfortunately, and I'm happy to see that Hillary Clinton seems to be against it, we are barking at a one trillion dollar modernization of the nuclear weapons fleet, which is only reasonable if we plan to keep our nuclear weapons level at what it is. | ||
| If we say, no, you know, eventually we want to reduce them, we don't have to spend that much money trying to maintain the arsenal we now have. | ||
| It's interesting to me to see that the nuclear issue, which over time has been has raised and lowered in importance, the public doesn't seem to think about it, but it is still... | ||
| The major threat, the major existential threat to civilization. | ||
| And we as a country are not doing enough. | ||
| And it is true at the same time. | ||
| We're probably going into this more than you wanted. | ||
| But it's true that Russia is getting more worrisome than they were before. | ||
| The saber-rattling, the arguments about nuclear weapons are much worse now under Putin in the last few years than they were. | ||
| So there's some concerns in that regard. | ||
| We could take unilateral steps which would lead us in the right direction. | ||
| Right, so even if Russia was ten times worse than you might think it is, if we had half of our stockpile, it would still be more than enough to destroy the world many times over. | ||
| If we had a tenth of our stockpile, we could still not only annihilate the Soviet Union, but essentially create enough mess to destroy the world. | ||
| We need to realize that fact and realize that we can, as I say, unilateral actions are often responded to. | ||
| For example, another area where we spend money that's a waste of time, for the most part, is missile defense. | ||
| One of the things I love is that George Bush claimed that they were going to have a missile defense system ready in 2004, he was during the election. | ||
| And of course, it turned out that 50% of the American public thought we already had one. | ||
| And as they argued at the time, what they should say is, we already have one. | ||
| Because it's just as effective as a system that doesn't work, but it doesn't cost a hundred billion dollars, so it's a lot less expensive and it serves the same effect. | ||
| So how much of this, though, is just that a huge percentage of our economy is tied into the military? | ||
| It is, but what you're hearing in the presidential election is we're not spending enough. | ||
| And that's what's scary. | ||
| What we need to do is spend rationally. | ||
| People have said that for a long time. | ||
| We spend almost a trillion dollars on defense every year, and the question is we have to look and say what are... we need, look, It's not as if we can disarm as a nation completely in all ways. | ||
| The world is a dangerous place. | ||
| But the question is do we need to spend that kind of money and the answer I think for many people is we could spend less more effectively. | ||
| Do you think there is any situation where ethically we could use nukes? | ||
| I mean if let's say because I don't think it's going to be through a nation state but let's say they you know somebody got a dirty bomb in here and blew up Times Square. | ||
| So the question is what do you I think the answer generally Is no nuclear weapons right now are useful for deterrence to stop other people from doing things But it is you hit an interesting point that that when might you use them and the cunt what many people may not realize is that the country | ||
| Most people think the U.S. | ||
| has a no-first-use policy. | ||
| Namely, we would never be the first ones using them. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| Because we said, well, what if not someone uses nuclear weapons, but what if someone launches biological weapons, shouldn't we be allowed to nuke them? | ||
| Or what if someone nukes South Korea, shouldn't we be allowed to nuke in response? | ||
| And so, these are questions that you can debate. | ||
| But on the whole, the question is, what do you gain versus conventional forces? | ||
| Other than an act of anger... Right, if the act has already been done here, what do you potentially gain? | ||
| The idea should be to stop... | ||
| That and the future. | ||
| And inevitably the problem is that under many scenarios, once you start using nuclear weapons, it proliferates. | ||
| And what's been pointed out by a bunch of physicists even about ten years ago, You may remember nuclear winter with Carl Sagan and that | ||
| was sort of discredited a little bit but in fact even at a limited nuclear war say between | ||
| India and Pakistan of 50 or 100 weapons which may sound like a lot but it's the kind of | ||
| thing you might expect in a nuclear war would raise enough basically dust in the | ||
| atmosphere to for a decade affect agriculture ultimately perhaps killing a billion people | ||
| through starvation. | ||
| So there's no such thing as a limited nuclear war and everyone including the right wing | ||
| guys like George Shultz and Henry Kissinger came up a bunch of years ago and said we need | ||
| to basically work towards a nuclear free world because as long as we have nuclear weapons | ||
| we're all at risk. | ||
| So how do you untie that then from the legitimate parts of deterrence? | ||
| If your argument is that deterrence is an important piece of a strategy because by having deterrence you don't necessarily have to fight a ground war, how do you untie those two things? | ||
| Well, for example, you can ask right now, how many nuclear weapons do you need to deter an aggressor? | ||
| It's an you certainly don't need we the United States of 5,000 Soviet the Russia Russia excuse me | ||
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I grew up in the Soviet Union's keep forgetting what year it is. Yeah. Yeah, I know I know exactly | |
| Russia has Russia has another 5,000. That's you know we don't need 5,000 weapons to deter | ||
| You know 100 nuclear weapons would be more than enough to destroy | ||
| Basically any country and and dramatically affect the world So, maybe we could immediately go down to Honda weapons. | ||
| So what's the difference then, ultimately? | ||
| For someone that's hearing you and saying, well, if we have them but we're not using them, what's the difference whether we have 5,000 or 200? | ||
| Well, to maintain a fleet of 5,000 weapons, including the infrastructure, requires an incredible amount of money. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| So that alone, in fact, this one trillion dollar modernization gives you an example of the infrastructure costs. | ||
| So there are economic costs as well as security costs. | ||
| And if we decided rationally, you know what, it's better to, you know, it's like if you have ten cars, it costs you a lot more money to maintain them than if you have one. | ||
| It's not just the cost of the cars. | ||
| Yeah, so as a theoretical physicist, when you talk about all of this stuff, you have an insight into how things actually work that the average person doesn't have. | ||
| Do you worry that you'll ever stumble upon something or, you know, somehow accidentally or maybe intentionally you find something and then realize how it could be turned into something Horrific, I mean that's like the big apocalyptic question. | ||
| I'm always pleased to say that what I work on has no practical significance whatsoever. | ||
| I heard you say that. | ||
| I'm proud of it. | ||
| I'm worried about the origins and history of the universe. | ||
| The great thing about science is you never know What's going to be discovered or what the implications are. | ||
| But if you had to pick one area that had less direct practical significance, it'd be hard to find one more than mine, where I try and understand how the universe began and how it's going to end. | ||
| And these questions are incredibly important for us culturally. | ||
| But the kind of new physics that we try and develop and understand affects the universe on scales that really are divorced from human scales directly. | ||
| Obviously they relate to what the reasons, you know, how we got here. | ||
| My new book Which I will plug, called The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far. | ||
| It comes out in March 2017. | ||
| But the subtitle is called Why Are We Here? | ||
| And ultimately we want to understand those questions, and unfortunately religion tries to usurp those questions, and I want to point out how science can address them. | ||
| So they're fundamental sort of cultural questions, but But I like to say, although it's pretentious because I don't want to make a comparison, but my work is, or the work by people like me, is as useful as a Mozart symphony. | ||
| I mean, at its best, at its best it could be as useful as a Mozart symphony. | ||
| It enhances the cultural experience of being human. | ||
| So I'm happily, I'm not as worried about that, but on the other hand, What we need to do is, there's an old expression I think from Pasteur, but it could be from later on, I've tried to track it down, that fortune favors the prepared mind. | ||
| And what we need to do is think about what the possibilities are so we're prepared to act. | ||
| And we can't be prepared to act if we put our heads in the sand. | ||
| We can say, oh, we should never do genetic engineering, but it's happening. | ||
| So we can talk about artificial intelligence and say, we need to stop that, but it's not going to be stopped. | ||
| What we need to do is think about the possibilities. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why the Origins Project that I run at ASU is, for me, so exciting. | ||
| Because we try to bring scientists together to look at forefront questions, but then we have public events where 3,000 people attend and listen. | ||
| And the point is, And then, you know, you can't have a good democracy without an informed population. | ||
| And so to try and raise these questions and get people to think about what the possibilities are will allow us to be better prepared for... | ||
| For surprising possibilities in the future, because we don't know where the future lies. | ||
| I often say, and I said it on a film recently, that if someone tells you they're a futurist, in my mind, that's when you stop listening. | ||
| I try not to make predictions about anything other than like two trillion years in the future. | ||
| What do you call that? | ||
| A super futurist? | ||
| Well, yeah, because first of all, no one will be around to test it, and it's much easier, but we don't Discoveries are called discoveries because they're surprises. | ||
| But we can try and at least anticipate the set of possibilities so we'll be a little less surprised. | ||
| And all of us can do that. | ||
| And that's why, you know, you say I'm a scientist and I have access. | ||
| It's true I have access to some information people don't normally have access to. | ||
| But the process of science, we can all be at least have a perspective of what's happening. | ||
| And that's why it's important. | ||
| That's why I spend time In my public hat, trying to explain and explore science for the public, not just because it's interesting and exciting, and it is, it's fun, and people are fascinated by it, but because hopefully it'll be useful when people try and confront the challenges of the 21st century. | ||
| All right, so I wanna spend the rest of this talking about your actual work and origins and stuff like that, but my last question on this part goes to you. | ||
| I have no agenda. | ||
| I know you don't, you made it very clear, which I love that. | ||
| But my last part goes to your public hat, because clearly you're willing to talk about politics, you're willing to speak about things freely, and as you emailed me, I have no agenda or anything. | ||
| Do you ever fear that that will have a professional cost, just by saying things. | ||
| It does all the time, but I suppose to some extent. | ||
| No, if I feared about that, I would have stopped a long time ago. | ||
| I guess, look, I think, there's not a day goes by that I don't realize | ||
| I'm fortunate in a way that people, for one reason or another, want to listen to me, | ||
| or at least I have a public profile. | ||
| And therefore I have a responsibility, it seems to me, to use that profile responsibly. | ||
| And that means, of course, to try and... | ||
| And popularize science in a way, but also to try and do what I can to have an impact. | ||
| So in some sense, you know, it goes hand in hand with what I said to you about my work. | ||
| My work has no practical significance whatsoever, but as a human being, I'm very political, I'm very interested in what's going on, and therefore, in some sense, maybe I make up for the fact that my work has no usefulness by taking advantage of my public profile to try and do useful things. | ||
| And one of the useful things can try and be at least to provoke people All right, so now let's get into the work part of it. | ||
| This part that apparently has no meaning or... No, it has lots of meaning, but no significance. | ||
| No, it has significance in a global sense, in a cosmic sense, in an existential sense, but it doesn't... | ||
| It won't cause a better toaster to be built. | ||
| That's one of the problems with science, is that it has practical utility. | ||
| It's obviously not a problem, because we couldn't be doing this show. | ||
| People wouldn't live as long as they live. | ||
| Our modern society is based on the results of science. | ||
| But because science produces technology that changes our lives, people suddenly think that unless it's related to the technology, it's not interesting. | ||
| Whereas, as I say, art doesn't produce anything practical, so people don't expect, they're not going to say, you know what, that Picasso painting hasn't produced something that makes me live longer. | ||
| And so, because science has that practical side, people forget the cultural side, the knowledge side. | ||
| And that's, to me, as important as anything. | ||
| What I've quoted a number of times, but I'll quote it again here, one of my favorite statements from A guy named Robert Wilson, who was the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which is a particle accelerator near Chicago which accelerates particles to look at fundamental structure matter. | ||
| It was the largest such machine in the world until the Large Hadron Collider was built in Geneva. | ||
| But when it was being built, He was called by Congress to testify, and he was asked, will it aid in the defense of the nation? | ||
| And he gave a beautiful statement, but the end of it was basically, no it won't help aid in the defense of the nation, it'll just help keep the nation worth defending. | ||
| Ah, that actually is really beautiful. | ||
| I think it is, so that's why I quote him. | ||
| So that's sort of, it's a problem of funding things in a way, because if you fund something, people want results, and what you're saying is basically the whole playground of science isn't tied into that. | ||
| Well, it's a real problem now in government funding and in the public. | ||
| People seem to want to fund things based on, in fact, I wrote another piece on the House Science Committee, which basically wanted to require, and did to some extent, scientists in their grant applications to justify why what they're doing is in the national interest. | ||
| and the net and what i think that's really anything to do with science well | ||
| the point is that seems to me the natural the national interest | ||
| is increasing our knowledge and and it's not in | ||
| if you require things directly to have a practical application | ||
| then you're gonna miss almost everything | ||
| It's already been well documented that probably 50% of the current gross national product in this country is based on fundamental curiosity-driven research that was done a generation ago. | ||
| Accidents, you know, the discovery of penicillin, they weren't looking for antibiotics. | ||
| Even the development of the transistor wasn't... If people had said, we need to make better computers, back at the time when they were using wheels and other things, they would have missed the use of transistors. | ||
| All of the things that have changed our lives, even the World Wide Web, which was developed At Geneva, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, to help scientists communicate in large experiments when you have 10,000 scientists around the world, it was important for them to be able to exchange results without worrying about where the results were and being able to communicate. | ||
| That's what developed the World Wide Web and, of course, that's changed the world. | ||
| You need to support fundamental curiosity-driven research. | ||
| If you stop doing that, then not only do we suffer as a species by our learning not increasing, but ultimately the spin-offs that are going to change our lives are not going to occur. | ||
| Yeah, so you mentioned Carl Sagan before, and my scientific awakening was a little slow, I hate to admit it. | ||
| I was always into sci-fi when I was growing up, and Star Wars and all that stuff. | ||
| But my real scientific awakening, I saw the movie Contact, and I had eaten pot brownies before, and I thought I was going to see I think Air Force One, but it was sold out, so I just went into Contact, had no idea what it was about, didn't really know much about Carl Sagan, but you know the opening panorama of the universe. | ||
| In my mind on Pop Brownies. | ||
| I mean, it exploded. | ||
| I since have read every Carl Sagan book and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| What was that moment for you? | ||
| I suspect it was a lot younger than it was for me. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was. | |
| I was a little younger and a lot earlier because I'm a lot older. | ||
| But actually, you know, well, it's hard. | ||
| I'm not sure there was an epiphany in that way, but there was a but the first thing I can remember was when I was in grade six reading a book about Galileo. | ||
| And it seemed romantic and remarkable to me. | ||
| The fact that he was the first one to look up at the moons of Jupiter and it changed everything. | ||
| And also the courage he had, or lack thereof at times, to confront conventional wisdom. | ||
| That seemed to me to be a romantic adventure. | ||
| That's probably one of the reasons why I write books is because it was books about him and then books by people like Isaac Asimov, well before Carl Sagan, and George Gamow, and Albert Einstein, and then Richard Feynman. | ||
| Books by people like that got me excited as a young person about the The Romantic Adventure to be the first to understand something new about the world. | ||
| And so I returned the favor. | ||
| And I'm old enough now that it's, for me, very satisfying, although a little depressing to think how old I am, when I meet scientists now who say, you know, I read The Physics of Star Trek and that's what turned me into being a scientist. | ||
| But it was those popular books. | ||
| And that's why, although it takes time out of my research directly, I'm not sure which is more useful in the long run. | ||
| And besides, I don't have control. | ||
| I have to do what I have to do, and writing is one of them. | ||
| But it's very satisfying to be able to connect. | ||
| Because the importance of a university, or of the research enterprise, is twofold. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why my Origins project is twofold. | ||
| Research universities should be based on the creation of knowledge. | ||
| But if you don't disseminate the knowledge, it's impotent. | ||
| So it has to be two-fold. | ||
| And so I like to be involved in both, for some reason. | ||
| Yeah, so the Origins Project, you're trying to figure out the origins of humans and the universe. | ||
| We're looking at the origins of everything. | ||
| It's a wonderful playground, because we look at everything from the origins of the universe, to the origins of life, to the origins of violence. | ||
| We're having, and The Origins of the Future, we're having a workshop in February on AI and its challenges. | ||
| So, if you think about it, forefront questions, there's a relationship always between the future and the past, and forefront questions are always based about the origin. | ||
| What's the origin of disease? | ||
| What's the origin of intelligence? | ||
| And so, as a curious person, I can go well beyond just my area of physics, which tends to be more related to the origin of the universe, which has got me into it. | ||
| To all these other questions. | ||
| It's like a kid in a candy shop. | ||
| I get to meet and work with the most interesting people in the world and learn a lot about a lot of things. | ||
| It's really self-indulgence, which most of my life is based on. | ||
| But it's bringing a lot of good to a lot of people, so maybe self-indulgence and individuality is good? | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, that's the other thing I guess I want to say, is that most people become scientists not because they want to save the world. | ||
| It's because they like doing it. | ||
| It's fun, and that's fine. | ||
| I tell kids That's when they ask me what they should do, I say do what you enjoy, because if you don't enjoy, you're not going to do well anyway. | ||
| But I do science, you know, it's great if it has an impact in one way or another, but I do it because I enjoy it. | ||
| And I'm unabashed about that. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm very proud that on this show, which I try to bring on people of all kinds of beliefs and Political persuasions and all that stuff. | ||
| I get tons of email from religious people, even though they know that I'm not a believer and all that stuff. | ||
| So we don't have to dive too much into the atheism thing, but can you, how about you give me the best sell job in like three minutes on the Big Bang? | ||
| Like, just something that someone that is a believer of religion could say, well, maybe there's something here. | ||
| Maybe there's some... Well, the point is, it's sad that I have to do that because... Did I leave too much of that question? | ||
| Maybe I should untangle them. | ||
| No, no, no, but I mean, One makes it sound like the Big Bang is on a different footing than the fact that the Earth is round. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| The Big Bang happened. | ||
| Same with evolution. | ||
| It's not, you know, people get hung up on the word theory. | ||
| Well, you know, someone just wrote me and said, well, you know, it's a theory. | ||
| And I said, well, gravity's a theory too, so if you don't believe it, walk out the 10th floor of a window. | ||
| But the point is, theory in science means it's been tested. | ||
| Theory is a very high level in science. | ||
| It means it's satisfied the test to experiment over and over and over again. | ||
| And the fact that the universe began, that the universe was once smaller than it is today, and smaller and smaller and smaller, and was once contained in a microscopic region 13.8 billion years ago, that expanded dramatically, is a fact. | ||
| And everything we recognize about the universe is only understandable in that context. | ||
| There are lots of independent ways to measure the age of the universe, and we come up with 13.8 billion years. | ||
| We measure the fact the universe is expanding. | ||
| Working backwards it was once smaller than it is, and if we extrapolate back and say, What happened when it's smaller, we make predictions about things that we hadn't seen before. | ||
| People say evolution or the Big Bang are historical science because no one was around. | ||
| They often write me, no one was around to know so how do you know? | ||
| And I say, well the point is all science is historical because all science is based on Explaining some observations that have been done, but then making predictions of things that haven't been done. | ||
| And both evolution and the Big Bang make predictions about things that weren't seen before. | ||
| If the Big Bang happened, we were predicted, it was predicted, although a lot of sciences didn't know about it until after the fact, that there should be a universal background of radiation coming at us that was once 3,000 degrees in temperature, that's now 3 degrees. | ||
| That's been measured with exquisite prediction. | ||
| Exquisite precision, sorry. | ||
| Also, we predict that 25% of the universe should be helium, and almost 75% of the universe should be hydrogen, and one part in 10 billion of the universe should be lithium. | ||
| We go out and measure that. | ||
| Ten orders of magnitude. | ||
| So we make tons of predictions of things. | ||
| Science is not just a story, like religion. | ||
| It makes predictions, and if those predictions don't agree with observations, they're wrong. | ||
| We throw it out like yesterday's newspaper. | ||
| The word historical science, which a lot of fundamentalists use to try and discredit evolution and the Big Bang, is nonsense, because they're not historical any more than anything else. | ||
| They make predictions about observations that are going to be made in the future. | ||
| And every observation we made about the universe is consistent only with that picture, and inconsistent with any other idea. | ||
| Yeah, so you would say the evidence that we have for the Big Bang is as much evidence as we have that dinosaurs existed, right? | ||
| It's just a different, that we have physical bones in there. | ||
| Yeah, and moreover, we have evidence that dinosaurs didn't exist when humans existed, no matter what they show in that silication. | ||
| So Ken Ham's wrong, is that what you're saying? | ||
| He's wrong. | ||
| It's easy to say Ken Ham's wrong. | ||
| But there's a museum! | ||
| Yeah, I've been there. | ||
| I was there the day it opened. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| It was a remarkable experience. | ||
| I was there the day it opened. | ||
| I flew to Cincinnati and then into Kentucky on the other side where I was that morning to lead, to be the keynote speaker in a protest that morning. | ||
| And then, because it is, it's that willingness, the sadness, it's child abuse. | ||
| The idea is Okay, they believe something and therefore they don't want kids to know what really happened. | ||
| They don't want kids to know that evolution happened because somehow it might Reduce their faith in God. | ||
| And so the idea that you want your kids to not know how the universe works, for fear that they'll lose their faith, is no different than the Taliban, when they won't teach their kids anything but memorizing the Koran. | ||
| And so it's worse than ignorance, it's child abuse. | ||
| So I went there and protested and then I actually, I had credentials, I was a commentator for NPR and I Went up to right afterwards and they recognized me and they said, oh, Professor Krauss, your credentials didn't arrive. | ||
| You can't go in the museum. | ||
| So I said, that's OK. | ||
| I happen to have a crew from PBS and BBC that are following me right now. | ||
| Do you mind if they film me not being allowed in the museum? | ||
| And then I got a tour by, at the time, the vice president of the museum. | ||
| And it was shocking. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| They do a bait and switch. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| And they start out quite up front saying, reason, And faith. | ||
| Right in the front door. | ||
| Reason of faith. | ||
| And they point out that the two are different. | ||
| And they try to argue, you should believe in reason, you should believe in faith, and then halfway through the museum they make it seem like a natural history museum, so they do this bait-and-switch. | ||
| But it's hysterical because they have the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, both politically correct. | ||
| Adam is in grass up to here, and Eve has hair down to there. | ||
| But they have dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, of course, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex is there. | ||
| It's got sharp teeth. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Everything was a vegetarian in the Garden of Eden. | ||
| You may not have realized that, but if you go to the museum, you'll discover that. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| So they could open pineapples. | ||
| That's why the Tyrannosaurus Rex had sharp teeth. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| I knew I was going to learn something with you here today. | ||
| I'm glad that that will end up being it. | ||
| We only have a couple of minutes left. | ||
| I'm curious, do you find that you have colleagues that believe in everything that you just said there? | ||
| Everything that we've talked about, the ideas of everything you've said. | ||
| But at the same time, are there some people that do take the leap of faith? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| And then believe in things that aren't quantifiable at the same time? | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| First, by the way, we should say, as scientists, we should never use the word believe. | ||
| No, no, I mean, I mean, it's just, I fall in that trap, too. | ||
| Believing is, you know, is not part of science. | ||
| Is it likely or unlikely? | ||
| And that's the question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, of course, they're religious scientists. | ||
| But, as I like to say, they're scientists Republicans. | ||
| I mean, Scientists, believe it or not, are human beings. | ||
| And human beings are, in some sense, hard-wired to believe two mutually inconsistent things at the same time. | ||
| I often say that we all have to believe ten impossible things before breakfast just to get up in the morning. | ||
| You have to believe you like your job, or your spouse, or whatever. | ||
| We all invent stories to go by. | ||
| There are scientists who are religious. | ||
| As long as they don't let that religious faith interfere with their work, it doesn't matter. | ||
| And the good scientists are that way. | ||
| But making the claim that there are scientists who are religious does not mean that they're compatible. | ||
| Neither does making the claim that science derives from religion. | ||
| Because it does. | ||
| I mean, but you know, in the history of the West at least, all of Universities were once religious institutions, because as I like to say, in the 17th century the church was the National Science Foundation. | ||
| It was the only place, if you wanted to get money, then that was the place to get it, if you wanted to support your ideas. | ||
| So it's not too surprising that science grew out of religion. | ||
| But as I also like to say, and again to plug, I happen to say it in the new book, that Children often move away from their parents. | ||
| So talking about the background does not mean that science and religion are compatible. | ||
| Because they're not. | ||
| They're not compatible in the sense of being compatible with the specific doctrines of the world's great religions. | ||
| Science isn't incompatible with the vague notion that there may be purpose to the universe. | ||
| There's no evidence of it whatsoever. | ||
| And there's no need for a god, as I showed in my last book. | ||
| There's no need for even supernatural stuff to create a whole universe. | ||
| But science can't disprove the notion of some vague deity, okay? | ||
| But what it can say is, you know, the earth didn't stop when someone blew a trumpet, and there wasn't a virgin birth, and all of those things, that's incompatible with what we know about the universe. | ||
| Yeah, alright, we have two minutes left. | ||
| What is one thing that people aren't thinking about? | ||
| That you are a physicist, a theoretical physicist, you're thinking of something! | ||
| on a day-to-day basis that the average person is not thinking about. | ||
| Give me something that we should be thinking about that we're not. | ||
| Something fun is that the future of the universe is different than we might believe it might be. | ||
| In fact, we may be living at a very special time in the history of the universe, and when it turns out that what we've just discovered about the Higgs boson tells us that everything we see in the universe may be unstable, that matter as we know it Could, not immediately, so don't go ahead and sell your stocks or anything, but in the far future, not only we know the rest of the universe will disappear because it's already expanding away from us faster than the speed of light, at least it's receding from us faster than the speed of light, and so the longer we wait the less we'll be able to see of the universe, but it turns out that like an icicle on a window or an ice crystal on a window in a summer morning will eventually melt, | ||
| The Higgs field that is allowing everything we now see to exist could eventually melt in a different kind of way. | ||
| And if it does, then matter as we know it will disappear. | ||
| So we should enjoy our brief moment in the sun. | ||
| Yeah, so it's not going to happen tomorrow, but a long way in the future. | ||
| If we're right, we're on the hairy edge of it. | ||
| It may never happen, and what we're trying to discover at the Large Hadron Collider is will it happen? | ||
| Or might it happen? | ||
| But even if it was, we know it's not going to happen for a heck of a long time. | ||
| So there's time to try and make sure we keep the present world working, which means we have to vote responsibly, and ask yourself, when you hear something on TV, as the former publisher of the New York Times said, and I use it in my mantra, I like to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out. | ||
| All right, well that's a perfect ending. | ||
| I hope you'll come back in March when you do a proper press tour. | ||
| Okay, that'll be fun. | ||
| Then I can promote the book even more. | ||
| You see, I'm publicly guilting you again. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| It's good, and it sometimes works. | ||
| Occasionally it works. | ||
| All right, well for more on Lawrence's work, and there is a ton of it, and he's written a gajillion books, and we'll put the link down to the new book right below. |
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