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April 10, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:42
Edition 390 - Marcus Chown

London-based "urban scientist" Marcus Chown explaining groundbreaking science in easy-to-understand ways

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, wherever in the world you are, nice to know that you are there.
The weather report from here, as we begin springtime in the United Kingdom, is pretty damn good.
I'm looking out at a clear blue sky, and the branches on the trees, which are just beginning to green, are swaying gently in a breeze.
When I was a kid, and we know that this is a long time ago, okay, I'm willing to admit that, weather like this was usually reserved for June, but we have it now, and I'm not complaining at all, you know that.
Thank you very much for all of the emails, the nice things you've said, if you've made a donation recently at theunexplained.tv, thank you for that.
And thank you to everybody who's been sharing, posting, and getting involved in my Facebook page.
The official one, which is growing slowly but surely.
It's only been running for a few months, and I haven't done anything I have to say to promote it.
But it is growing all by itself, osmotically.
That's a good word.
I don't know whether that's the right one.
You can tell me.
So find my official Facebook page, and please join in there.
And I promise that I will be adding more content to it as and when I'm able to.
Shout outs this time.
Dean, Linda, John Charleston, Brian in Fraserborough, Scotland, Chris with a K in Atlanta, Georgia.
Nice to hear from you.
Jason in Sheffield.
PJ in what PJ calls Wild Wiltshire.
Well, that's where all the UFOs are, isn't it?
They tell me, and the crop circles.
And Craig as well.
Also, Ian Liston Smith.
All old friends of the show, or rather Ian, old friend of the show.
Craig is too, actually.
From Matt.
Matt says, hello, Howard.
My girlfriend Sam and myself are both avid listeners to your show.
We are both truck drivers across and beyond mainland Europe, moving music tours around.
What a great job that is.
Have you moved anybody famous recently?
Can you tell me?
Your shows, they say, help the hours fly past for us at the wheel at night.
Can we have a shout out?
Matt and Sam, trucking across Europe and beyond.
Where's the beyond?
Nice to hear from you, and consider yourself shouted out to.
If you want to get a mention on this show, if you want to tell me what you think of it, make some guest suggestions, tell me anything, go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the link for sending me a message from there.
The guest on this edition, somebody we've waited a good long time to get back on, but I remember when he first appeared on my radio show, and that was 2005, when the original radio show was running, which was basically heard on AM radio across Europe.
My producer, Dave Brain, at the time, guy who's gone on to much bigger and better things since those days.
I think it was Dave's first radio gig.
And he was enthralled at many of the guests, but he was a big fan of Marcus Chown.
I remember him coming in and saying, Marcus Chown, man of science, what a great guest.
That guy is such a cool dude.
So, 2005, 14 years, we're going to get him back now on this edition.
Let me tell you a little bit about him.
Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, cosmology consultant of New Scientist, and prolific author.
Books including The Ascent of Gravity, which won a big award in 2017, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, and the latest one.
This is just three of them.
There are many, along with his broadcasts and other writings.
Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand.
We'll be talking about that.
What a great title that is.
Marcus Chown, the kind of guy that you can run pretty much any scientific or cosmological question to, and he will give you an amazing answer.
So Marcus Chown, coming soon.
As you know, I've been doing a radio show, radio version of The Unexplained, for three years now.
It's just celebrated its third anniversary.
Now, radio is an amazing roller coaster of a fascinating but uncertain business.
So basically what I'm saying is I'm loving doing it, and I'm loving your response to it.
But in the way of things, should it ever end, then please know that my show continues online at theunexplained.tv and all the places where you get it.
So whatever happens in my various other pursuits and exploits and career activities, I will continue doing this here, because for me, this is where it all began, and this is where I began to reach a worldwide audience.
So please know that fact.
You know, I'm not telling you anything is going to happen, but inevitably in the way of life, things do.
Okay, let's get to Marcus Chown in London now, scientist, broadcaster, radio astronomer, cosmology consultant, and many, many other things.
Marcus, thank you very much for returning to my show.
Thanks for inviting me.
And we're on a telephonic connection just to explain to my listener to Central London because we had difficulties with the digital connections.
So, you know, sometimes you find with people of science, sometimes the digital connections, you would expect them to work for them, but they don't, Marcus.
I think it's called Murphy's Law, they used to call it, yeah?
Well, you know, I'm interested about black holes and exploding galaxies, but, you know, not so brilliant at the technology.
Well, there's no reason why you should be.
Look, your biography is a work of great brevity, but in many ways, great clarity, too, because it describes you as writer, broadcaster, author, formerly radio astronomer, scientist, cosmologist, in fact, cosmology consultant of New Scientist, very prestigious publication.
How do you describe yourself and your work?
I just think of myself as a writer, journalist, and broadcaster.
When I was at school, I liked science and I liked English.
But when I was at school, you were not allowed to do both for any level.
So I ended up doing science, but I always liked writing.
And gradually, I got back into writing.
And I've combined my two interests, really, which are physics and writing and English.
The greatest difficulty, it seems to me, and it's been something that's been a problem or an issue since I trained to be a journalist, was finding ways of explaining science, which becomes more and more fascinating and more and more complex to people who don't talk scientific language.
And I include myself in that.
Is that still the issue that it used to be?
It is.
And you should just put your finger on what I do that most other people don't do because I can talk to Nobel Prize winners in their own language, and I can then communicate that to somebody who probably is sitting on the number 26 bus.
Maybe someone who's unfortunate enough to be sitting next to me on the number 26 bus.
So my wife is a nurse.
She's an NHS nurse, and I write for her to understand it.
So if she gets, her eyes glaze over and she turns up the sound on EastEnders, I feel as if I have to try harder.
Just to explain to my American listeners, maybe you see it there too, EastEnders is a very good, I've been following it for years, soap opera on TV here.
But I mean, that's the difficulty.
You're trying to explain all of these difficult concepts to people like me who watch EastEnders.
And it can be done because you've proved it can.
Anything can be explained to anyone.
I mean, obviously, for some reason that we do not understand, the exact metaphor for physics, for our universe, is mathematics.
No one knows why the universe is describable by mathematics.
But there are other metaphors which are not as accurate, which allow us to communicate these ideas to anybody, really.
But obviously you do lose something, and only the person who appreciates all of it, the mathematics and the visual language, gets the full idea of physics.
Well, the problem, I think, is with maths.
I was very bad at maths or math at school, and it really depended on the quality of teaching.
If I had a teacher who was a disciplinarian and would hit you or be very angry with you if you weren't getting it right, my brain used to switch off.
It was only when I had somebody who was good at imparting the theories of mathematics and sympathetic that I was interested in learning.
And I guess a lot of people had that problem with numbers.
Because a lot of people say to me, you know, I wasn't any good at science, you know, I didn't do math.
And I actually say to them, you had a bad science teacher.
You had a bad math teacher.
You know, that's really what happened because I think that science is fundamentally interesting.
And when you talk to people about it and you say it's about, ultimately about origins, it's about, you know, the origin of the universe, the origin of the earth, the origin of the human race, you know, where we all came from, when you put it in those terms, people get quite excited about it and they think, well, I didn't learn that when I was at school.
So I would say most likely you weren't taught very well.
Well, yeah, I had one very good teacher, Mr. Henwood, if you're still around, thank you very much.
And at least he gave me the ability to add, subtract, divide, and have a certain knowledge of equations.
But when it comes to anything like that, because of the teaching that I had from others, not him, I have a problem with that.
So we've established the fact that it's difficult to impart concepts, but it is possible.
It depends on how you serve it up.
And it seems to me also that it's very important that people have more of an understanding of science now, because we're reading and seeing more about it.
It's becoming more and more a part of our lives.
Even including, and I see that you were, according to your biography, a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
It's becoming more and more important if we read stories about our place in the cosmos.
And it seems to me that even people of science, even the likes of Arve Loeb, who's been on this show from Harvard, but others as well, are beginning to posit the idea that not only we may not be alone in this universe, which you don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to suggest, but also we may be closer to coming into contact with whoever the other occupants of our universe might be.
Well, I mean, that would be a wonderful thing, wouldn't it?
The truth is, of course, that the universe is very, very big.
And the galaxy that we live in, which is one of about 2 trillion galaxies, contains like 200 billion stars.
The likelihood is if there is other intelligent life, it's going to be quite a long way away.
Or it may have missed us.
You know, it may have become extinct a billion years ago or a million years ago or whatever.
So that's the big problem.
It's so vast.
Almost certainly we're not the only intelligent life form.
But the nearest one could be a long way away and we may well have missed it.
That's the worry.
And what about the idea that I was reading about only today in a newspaper and I think it appeared three days or so ago?
The intriguing idea that perhaps aliens, if you want to call them that, or something that is not from here, is already here or has been here already.
We simply do not have the capacity, in terms of what we can perceive, to know that.
Well, that's possible, but in a more mundane way, I mean, very recently, an object came through the solar system.
I can't even pronounce it.
You probably know it's got a Hawaiian name.
Listen, I spent on the radio, as my listener will know, it took me about two months to get this right.
I used to stumble all over it.
It became easy for me when I learned to say Umuumua.
Oh, right, okay.
Umuamua.
It came through the solar system, and it was immediately when it was picked up by it was recognized that it was traveling too fast to actually be trapped by our sun and it flew straight through our solar system.
So it was from another star, from another star system.
It was an asteroid.
We don't know much more about it.
It appeared to be very long and thin.
But anyway, it turns out that a technological civilization like ours is constantly losing stuff into interstellar space.
You know, there are collisions in space between bits of rockets.
There are explosions of rockets, which means that bits of debris escape the sun's gravity.
And I remember a Ukrainian radio astronomer called, I think his surname was Arkhipov, who said, well, if this happens to us, then it's obviously going to happen to other extraterrestrial civilizations.
And their space junk is going to be accidentally ejected from their solar systems, and it's going to come our way.
And he made some very simple assumptions.
He said, well, we have an asteroid belt which we're now looking at and thinking, oh, we could mine precious materials and things.
There are commercial companies looking into this.
Say we turned 1% of our asteroid belt into objects, into technological objects, and we would lose a percentage of those.
And if this happened to other extraterrestrial civilizations around Neirstar, some of their stuff would come out.
Anyway, putting all the numbers in, he was able to say that there would be many thousands of objects the size of a, I'm going to say a Marmite jar, because Americans don't know about Marmite jar, maybe a peanut butter and jelly jar.
There could be thousands of those, tens of thousands of those, which have fallen to the Earth, extraterrestrial objects in the history of the Earth.
So again, you know, you have to put in numbers, like what percentage of stars have technological civilizations, what percentage of their asteroids built so they turn into technological objects, all that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot of assumptions that go into it.
But the bottom line is there are certainly, if there are other extraterrestrial civilizations, there are certainly extraterrestrial artefacts on the Earth.
Now the big problem is, of course, if they fell, they're most likely to fall into the oceans.
If they fell to Earth many millions of years ago, or billions of years ago, then they would have been taken beneath the surface by tectonic plates or whatever.
So the problem, of course, would be recognizing such an artefact.
I mean, even if we were to go back in time and we were to show a silicon chip to a Victorian scientist, what would they make of it?
They just think it's made of silicon, you know, which is one of the most common materials on Earth.
It comes from sand.
You know, they wouldn't recognize that it could do calculations, that it could, you know, link to the internet or anything like that.
So the problem would be recognizing such an artifact.
But no, I mean, it's just a numbers game.
If there are other extraterrestrial civilizations, some of their junk must have come our way.
And we may not be able to recognize it.
But going back to Umuamua.
That's a problem.
Only partly because I enjoy saying the name.
But going back to Umuamua, now that I can say it.
Umuamua.
I know now how to pronounce it.
Trust me, I've been doing radio for years.
It took me two months to get it right.
And I only got it right when I broke it down into Umu Umua.
And I probably got that wrong.
Professor Arvi Loeb from Harvard has suggested this thing may be some kind of craft.
There is a possibility that it might, and this is only a hypothesis, be some kind of light sail, something that is powered by sunlight in a way that when I was a kid, maybe when you were a kid, Marcus, we used to get little plastic submarines free in serial packets, and you could make them move, and they were any tiny, they were smaller than your finger, and you could make them move by putting a little bit of washing up liquid on the back.
And the idea I think that Arvie Loeb had was that there is a possibility, and scientists are working on the light sail idea now, that Umuamua, there's that name again, was powered or has been powered on its journey by sunlight.
What do you make of that?
Well, it's clearly very controversial, but I mean, I know where he's coming from because the object did not move precisely as would be expected if the only force acting on it was the force of gravity from the sun.
So it was tracked for a while.
Unfortunately, it was moving so fast with the solar system that's not possible to track it for long.
But its motion was quite anomalous.
And could have been caused by material outgassing from it.
We can see sometimes asteroids in our own solar system or even comets where when they get close to the sun, material outgasses.
And it's like a kind of rocket exhaust and it moves the asteroid in the opposite direction.
So if you'll pardon the word, it's almost a kind of cosmic farting.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Pardon me for putting it that way.
This object was it would be extremely cold.
I mean, it would come in from interstellar space, only briefly passed through the solar system, so it would be extremely cold.
And generally, to get what you just talked about, cosmic farting, you would need some heat source to actually, you know, to eject some gas from one side of it.
So I think that was probably what Abby was talking about, you know, that it was difficult to explain its anomalous motion in those terms.
And so he was talking very controversially that it could be some kind of interstellar spacecraft.
And of course, the minute this object was discovered, many people who had read science fiction immediately thought it's Rama, because Arthur C. Clarke, the British science fiction writer who lived in Sri Lanka, wrote an award-winning novel called Rendezvous with Rama, in which a cylindrical object came into the solar system and flew back out again.
And would you believe it?
This was a cylindrical, we believe this was a cylindrical object, you know, maybe ten times longer than it was wide, coming through the solar system.
So the parallels with the Arthur C. Clark and Offer were quite strong.
Which, you know, we mustn't write off the occasional parallels between what happens in science fiction and what actually develops in science fact.
You know, you've only got to look at Star Trek to know that sometimes these things are right.
It would be incredibly exciting.
And of course, what actually happens in the novel is that you never actually discover anything about the Ramans.
It's a giant cylinder, I don't know, it's many tens of kilometers long, and it was time for a spacecraft to go from Earth to it and investigate its interior, but we are treated with complete, we're dismissed, you know, basically this object is just coming through the solar system and is using the gravity of the sun to slingshot it in another direction,
and we are treated with that monumental Indifference, which of course probably a superior technological civilization would treat us with indifference.
I mean, we don't spend much time communicating with ants or bacteria, and an advanced technological civilization could very well be millions or billions of years ahead of us.
And, of course, we're not going to get the answers about Oumuamua, there's that name again, because Oumuamua has gone on its way.
Absolutely, and we do not have powerful enough telescopes to pick up the sky I can't remember, but it was a few hundred meters long.
And it would be reflecting very little sunlight, so it would be very difficult to spot.
But what this is actually encouraged astronomers, and they now believe that these objects are very, very common, and there may be very large numbers of them in interstellar space.
And we may see another one come through the solar system fairly soon.
They may have been coming through the solar system a lot, but we just happened to spot this one.
Now, if we can't talk anymore about Umuamu because it's gone on its way, people have started talking about an asteroid called Bennu and saying that that may be full of alien and extraterrestrial technology.
Do you know anything about Bennu?
Bennu, I think, was visited by a Japanese spacefrog, wasn't it?
Yes, that was the one they landed on.
So interestingly, there's a long history to this because in the early 60s, a Russian, a very, very well-respected Russian astronomer called Joseph Shlovsky actually suggested that Phobos, which is one of the two moons of Mars, was artificial and that it was hollow.
And it was because Phobos, I mean, Phobos, by the way, means fear, and the other moon of Mars, Deimos, means terror.
And they were both predicted hundreds of years ahead of their discovery by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels.
Anyway, not many people know that.
That's a great bit of information.
Yes, he predicted, I mean, he predicted that Mars had two moons, and he pretty much predicted their orbital periods, because one of them goes around so fast that it rises twice in a night.
You know, imagine the moon coming up over, on Earth, coming up over the horizon twice in one night, but one of the moons of Mars does.
The orbit of Phobos was changing in an odd way, and he thought it could be understood if it was actually hollow and it was suffering drag from the outer limits of the Martian atmosphere.
Turned out that it didn't need an explanation like that, but it's interesting you mentioning Bennu because this has been suggested before.
So all of these things, or a lot of these things, come round again.
You gave a talk in Glasgow about something fascinating, and I think it was within the last five years or so.
And I'd never really thought about this.
But of course, if you think about it, I'm recording this on a Monday.
Yesterday was a Sunday.
But there would have been a day at some point in our history that didn't have a yesterday.
That's right.
I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at the Glasgow Center.
That's right.
And yeah, I called it the day without a yesterday.
Because, I mean, really, that's got to be the greatest discovery in the history of science.
That there was a day without a yesterday.
You know, the universe has not existed forever.
It was born.
That's an amazing discovery.
The universe was born.
It was born about 13.8 billion years ago.
In a titanic explosion, all matter, energy, space, and even time erupted into being.
And this fireball began expanding and cooling.
And out of the cooling debris, there congealed the two trillion galaxies we've just been talking about.
And we're living on one of them, the Milky Way.
Now, this idea is an idea that scientists, astronomers, physicists had to be dragged kicking and screaming to because the last thing they wanted to actually accept was the Big Bang theory.
Because immediately you say everything popped into existence 14 billion years ago.
Everyone says, well, what happened before?
And that is a question that is a very sticky question.
And it's why at that time, when people were forced to believe this by the evidence, pretty much everyone believed in what was called the steady state theory.
And that was the idea that the universe had actually existed forever.
So you didn't have to ask that awkward question, what happened before.
Which would have been acceptable to people because we accept the idea, even though it gives everybody, well, it gives me a headache, the idea that space is infinite.
If you accept that, then you can accept that we've existed forever.
Yeah, yeah.
And interestingly, I mean, the great irony is that the person who came up with the steady state theory, or he was one of three scientists, was the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle.
And he was the person who named the Big Bang theory, which he never believed in.
It was in the BBC radio broadcast in 1949.
He was hunting around in his mind to think of some expression that he could use to explain this idea of the universe, which he didn't believe, that the universe had popped into existence.
And he just coined the term Big Bang.
And since then, nobody has thought of a better description.
But I don't like the Big Bang phrase because it gives you completely the wrong impression in every conceivable way.
So if you think of it, it gives you an impression of an explosion.
Well, an explosion begins in one point.
You know, you have a stick of dynamite and debris explodes outwards from that point.
But the Big Bang did not happen at any point.
It happened everywhere.
And the explosion of a stick of dynamite, the debris goes into the pre-existing air around.
But of course, in the Big Bang, there was no pre-existing void behind.
So in every conceivable way, it paints the wrong picture of what's happening.
So does that mean that this idea of a Big Bang, a great big, massive, huge climactic event that suddenly gives birth to everything, actually, scientifically, that's not possible?
Well, this all goes back to Einstein's theory of gravity, which he presented in Berlin in November 1915, at the height of the First World War.
And this was the first time that you could begin using this theory, it was the first time you could begin to well it was about gravity and and and about mass and how it creates gravity.
And And so he applied it the following year to the biggest source of gravity he could think of, which was the whole universe.
And cosmology, the science of the universe, was born.
But ironically, Einstein did not see the message in his own equations, which was that his theory was saying that the universe could not be sitting still.
It had to be in motion.
It had to be either expanding or contracting.
He was wedded to the idea that the universe was static.
So he missed that message.
So it all goes, but all the theory actually describes is every point moving away from every other point.
So that's all it does.
It's not telling us that there was an explosion in one place.
It just tells you that space came into being and began expanding everywhere.
Now that space could have been infinite.
So if you can imagine an infinite grid of points or whatever, like a checkerboard, like a chessboard, just appearing and then all expanding.
And it could be an infinite checkerboard and it expanded everywhere.
So all the theory tells us is that every point moves away from every other point.
It's not telling us that there was actually an explosion at any particular point.
What does that mean then for our knowledge of this?
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, it turns out that nobody can understand that.
I get the way that you put the conundrum.
Actually, what you've been talking about is another one of those things that give me a headache.
But the conundrum that you provide us with is very understandable.
There wasn't an explosion, but there is this spreading out.
But the only problem is that you said that it was impossible for material to spread backwards in time.
So there could not have been a day before, there couldn't have been a day before we all got here, if you see what I'm saying.
Well, again, in the modern picture, we have this idea of inflation, which you may have heard of.
And this preceded the Big Bang.
And this was an expansion or an explosion that was so violent that it's been likened to a nuclear explosion compared to the stick of dynamite of the Big Bang, which followed when inflation ran out of steam.
So there was this earlier period driven by something ridiculous, which was driven by the energy of the vacuum, what we call the quantum vacuum.
But that's, again, in the modern picture, we don't actually have any real direct...
It's still controversial.
And in fact, one of the people you just mentioned, Abby Lowe, created a storm only about two years ago when he wrote an article in Scientific American saying that inflation was very questionable.
So there was this epoch before the Big Bang, but then even inflation itself has to start.
So where does that come from?
So do you know, it reminds me of Stephen Hawking in his book, The Brief History of Time, he writes about, I think it was Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, who was giving a talk, I think in America actually, and it was about the state of the universe.
And at the end of it, some woman put up her hand, some old woman, and she said, what you're talking about, Professor Russell, is complete rubbish.
Everybody knows the universe sits on the back of a turtle.
And he then said, ah, but what does the turtle sit on the back of?
And the woman said, you're not going to catch me out there.
It's turtles all the way down.
And really, unfortunately, that is the situation we're in.
So before the Big Bang, we have this epoch called inflation, but then what happened before that?
I mean, it may be a meaningless question.
Stephen Hawking likened it to saying, what's beyond the North Pole?
Maybe that isn't a reasonable question because obviously the Earth is rounding me on the North Pole.
You come back south again.
But if it's a meaningless question, why do we meaningful question to ask?
Okay, but if it's a meaningless question, which it might be, why are we as a human race then impelled and compelled to keep asking it?
Well, it's absolutely incredible.
Well, it's because we just want to know, it's the origin question again, isn't it?
I mean, incredibly, we've discovered, I mean, the evidence of the Big Bang is all around us.
It's in the room where you are.
It's what we call a microwave background.
So if you tune an old-style television between the channels, something like 1% of that static that you see on the screen is the relic from the Big Bang.
It's all around us.
So we know it's all around us.
And we know that it was about 14 billion years ago.
So that's only three times older than the age of the Earth that the universe popped into existence.
And we're totally fascinated by this because we are the first...
We can actually see to the edge of our universe, okay, the observable universe.
We can see to the edge with our telescopes.
And within this observable universe, we count up something like 2 trillion galaxies.
We know that those galaxies originated in an explosion 14 billion years ago.
This is the kind of information that previous, or the picture of the universe that previous generations would have killed for.
So we have this wonderful picture, but we don't actually know yet that because we have this picture, we have more questions.
So we know it originated in a Big Bang, but we don't know what the Big Bang was.
We don't know what drove the Big Bang, and we don't know what happened before the Big Bang.
But we are actually in a position where we can ask these questions, ask what was the Big Bang, what drove it, scientific questions, and have some good chance of answering those questions perhaps in the next few decades.
So we're in a remarkable position in history, that we have all this information and we know where we are in the universe.
The questions that we asked on the radio show that you were on with me a long time ago, 15 years ago now when we were both on radio.
Long ago.
Long ago.
And my prod like I say, my producer Dave was was enthralled with you.
But the one thing that made all of us turn the lights down in that studio and look outside and just think was when we started talking about black holes.
And I wonder, do we know any more about them since we last talked?
We do, we do, because something astonishing actually happened in 2015.
We discovered gravitational waves.
Okay, so we've been, these are ripples in the actual fabric of space.
They were predicted by Einstein in 1916, and they were detected.
And they came from, so gravitational waves are like sound waves.
Okay, so we've been able to see the universe with our eyes and our telescopes.
Now we can hear it.
And what we heard was the sound of two black holes merging.
And it was exactly what we would have expected.
So we could predict from Einstein's theory what the sound of two black holes spiralling together and merging would be like.
And what we saw was exactly what was predicted.
So we actually pretty much know that black holes exist now.
But we're now at an incredibly exciting point because they're very difficult to spot directly black holes because, let's face it, they're black.
And the universe is black.
So now it's very, very small.
They're the most compressed, you know, matter has been compressed into a very, very small volume.
So they're very difficult to spot.
However, so we know there are black holes the size of stars, but they're far too small for us to see with our telescopes.
Every galaxy, like our Milky Way, for some reason we do not understand, has a supermassive black hole in its core.
Some of them are about 50 billion times the mass of the Sun.
But the problem is, although these are much bigger black holes, they're a lot further away.
However, there is one black hole that is relatively near and is also relatively big, and it's called Sagittarius A star, and it's in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
And at the moment, there's this project called the Event Horizon Telescope, which involves lots of telescopes, radio telescopes all over the world cooperating in a network to make basically a radio telescope the size of the Earth.
And they've already taken a picture of this black hole at the center of our galaxy.
And at the moment, they're actually processing their data.
So probably within the next six months to a year, we will see the first ever picture of a black hole.
And do you think they will increase our understanding of black holes to the extent that we'll be able to know whether a black hole is, as some people speculate, some kind of portal that will allow us to travel in space and time or space-time that would allow us to jump into it.
And then suddenly, if we were able to survive the monumental forces within, we would appear somewhere else.
The problem with that is that a black hole, the fundamental thing about a black hole is the event horizon that cloaks it is one way.
So you can only go in and you can't come out.
Okay, so if you came out somewhere, it wouldn't be in our universe.
So that's a bit of a problem for traveling.
But that makes it all the more exciting and intriguing, though, doesn't it?
You need an object with a two-way horizon.
Such an object is a wormhole.
You may have heard of wormholes.
And these are also predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity.
They're very unstable and they snap shut very quickly.
But Kip Thorne from Caltech came up with a recipe for holding open one of these wormholes.
He did it for Carl Sagan, who wrote a book called Contact.
Carl Sagan, the American astronomer and TV presenter, who'd written a science fiction novel called Contact.
It became the film with Jody Jody Foster in it.
That's right.
And Sagan needed to transport one of his characters from one side of the galaxy to the other, and he was going to use a black hole.
And Kip Fawn, he contacted Kip Fawn, and Kip Fawn said, no, no, you can't do it with a black hole because there are only one way.
You need a wormhole.
And he worked out how to do it.
And it involved propping open the mouth of this wormhole with stuff with repulsive gravity.
Now, that might sound mad to you.
What is repulsive gravity?
What is repulsive gravity?
The major mass component of the universe is something called dark energy.
It counts for two-thirds of the mass of the universe, and it's speeding up the expansion of the universe.
It has repulsive gravity.
So we do know that this kind of stuff with repulsive gravity does exist.
So in principle, you could build a wormhole and possibly there could be the equivalent of an interstellar subway system around the galaxy.
I don't know.
I mean, we may not be seeing extraterrestrials because they're just zipping around through wormholes.
If you could build one on Earth, you could perhaps go in one mouth, crawl a few meters and appear in, I don't know, Mars, something like that.
But this is all a possibility.
But if you'd had this discussion, say, in the 1960s or the 1950s, chances are quite a few erudite people would have laughed at you.
They wouldn't be laughing, I don't think, now.
And certainly if they'd seen that Jody Foster film, that made it all very clear that this kind of thing, even though that was science fiction, might one day happen.
She used, it was on television again the other night, and even though I own it on DVD, I still watched it on the TV.
They built this kind of rotating, strange, chocolate-orange type thing that spun around with electromagnets, and suddenly she was, either it was a dream or she was catapulted into another dimension, another existence.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, you know, we don't really know what is possible.
Things like time machines are incredibly not ruled out by the laws of physics.
You know, people have been trying for 100 years to show how, you know, Einstein theory can show would not allow time machines, but unfortunately it does.
So who knows?
I mean, who knows?
I mean, in the 19th century, I mean, I'm just, I'm in central London here.
James Clerk Maxwell was probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein.
He used to actually walk in Hyde Park in central London, where I walk every day.
And he came up with a unified description of electricity and magnetism.
And it predicted this theory, the existence of invisible electromagnetic waves.
And those turned out to now transform our world.
Our entire wireless world, our radios, our television, our radar, our entire world is dependent on sending information.
And yet before he had that thought, the idea of electromagnetic waves which we depend on would have seemed as futuristic and improbable as what we've just talked about in relation to Jody Foster.
And I'm just saying, you know, we're talking about the theory of electromagnetism.
Now you take the theory of Einstein's theory of gravity, which is a theory of space-time.
And if you can walk space-time, you can make wormholes, you can make black holes, you can make time machines, all of these things.
I mean, it all sounds completely mad, but it is no madder than people would have thought you were if you, if, you know, if at the time of Clark Maxwell, which would have been the 1860s, you said, well, the implications of this theory are all the things that we see around us today, you know, which are quite extraordinary.
I mean, you walk along a street and the chatter of billions of people is flying through the air all around you.
I mean, how ridiculous is that?
We've talked on my show an awful lot and in many other places about quantum physics.
The only thing I really know about quantum physics is it is the thing that is supposedly about to transform everything.
We'll make computing lighter, faster, cheaper, amazing.
Everything's going to move at lightning speed.
And I've read recently, and I'm quoting from something that I read here on a website, a mind-boggling quantum physics experiment has seemingly confirmed the existence of multiple realities.
Now, it's a lot more complicated than that headline, but if you read into the piece, it kind of does.
There was an experiment that seems to depend on the observer of a photon, a photon being observed, and the person observing it sees it change state.
And a person outside the place where it's being observed sees it differently.
So consequently, in the same moment, there appear to be two different realities existing at the same time, which on one level is astonishing, and on another level is completely mind-boggling to me.
To me, I mean, I know what you're talking about.
You're really up to date, because I was only reading about that in New Scientist, English Science magazine, only this weekend.
But yes, I mean, that's very interesting because quantum theory is our most successful physical theory.
It's pretty much created the modern world.
I mean, everything from lasers to computers to nuclear reactors, you know, it explains why the sun shines, why the ground beneath your feet is solid.
You know, it's the most successful physical theory.
But what you're looking for, if you want a better theory and we don't believe it's the final word, what you're looking for is a contradiction.
Okay, so that is the seed of a better theory.
So for instance, Einstein found a contradiction between the laws of motion and the laws of electricity and magnetism.
When he was 16, he thought to himself, what would it be like to ride along beside a light wave?
And what he realized is if you're moving at the same speed as a light wave, the light wave will appear frozen.
You know, like imagine a wave on a frozen sea because you caught it up.
But the theory of electromagnetism said that no such wave could possibly exist.
So what Einstein has found was a contradiction.
The theory of electromagnetism and the theory of Newton's laws, they were not compatible.
Something had to give.
And so he then found, you know, he created a better theory, which was relativity.
So what you're looking for is a contradiction.
And if what you're talking about is true, and this experiment which has been proposed shows that there are two contradictory, that the theory predicts two contradictory things, that is a paradox, which is very important because it may tell us that the theory is not 100% correct and it may indicate a deeper, better theory.
And we certainly know that we have this, the theory of the very small quantum theory, the theory of the very big is Einstein's theory of gravity, and they are not compatible.
So one or both of them has to give.
And you may think, why do we need to unite the theory of the very small and the theory of the very big?
And that is because in the Big Bang, something very big, the universe, was very small, smaller than an atom.
So we need the quantum theory, which describes atoms, to describe the universe.
So if we ever want to know about the birth of the universe, we need to unite these two theories.
So what you're talking about, if it's true, it's very, very interesting because what we need is our theories to break down.
I mean, a classic example is the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva found the Higgs particle.
It's kind of like an invisible treacle.
So when you're walking around, you're actually walking through this invisible treacle, and that resistance is what gives you mass.
But the theory that predicts it is called the standard model.
And the standard model is the high point of fundamental physics.
But we know it's not correct because it doesn't uniquely tell us what the masses of things like electrons and all the building block particles or what they should be.
And so what people really wanted was to find a Higgs particle, which was not what they predicted, because then it might indicate what the better theory than the standard model is.
But unfortunately, it's exactly what we predicted.
So the physicists are really scratching their heads because it hasn't indicated in any way what the better theory is.
But this experiment...
This experiment that I don't think I described it very well, but I tried to sum it up in my strange journalist way.
What we're saying is that what happens on the ultra, ultra, ultra-microscopic level and the way things behave at that level, we need to be understanding because if things behave differently at that level, that opens up the possibility for us to develop a whole new kind of science where we can do things we didn't think we were able to do.
Absolutely.
I mean, every time we get a better theory, we get new insights and new technologies.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, when you were talking about the, I think you were talking about the many worlds there, that's a very interesting thing because you may have all heard of quantum computers.
And one of the weird things about the quantum world, quantum theory is a fantastic recipe.
It's a fantastic recipe for making things and understanding things.
So as I said, it allows us to make computers and lasers and all these kind of things.
But it also provides a kind of window on a counterintuitive, like Alice in Wonderland world that's just beneath the skin of reality.
You know, atoms can do all kinds of things that everyday objects can't do.
Like an atom can be in two places at once, which is incredible.
And by exploiting this ability of atoms to do many things at once, to do many calculations at once, we make a quantum computer.
And the thing about quantum, they're very, very difficult to make quantum computers.
I mean, no one's actually made a proper one yet.
But potentially, they could do hugely more than a normal computer.
And they do a lot more because they can do calculations simultaneously.
Okay, so one of the problems, this is a philosophical problem, it's very easy to imagine a quantum computer which has enough bits, they're called qubits by the way, quantum bits rather than normal bits, enough bits that it could do more calculations than there are particles in the universe.
So simultaneously.
And David Deutsch, who's a physicist at the University of Oxford in England, has said this actually is very important because if you could build something that could actually do more calculations simultaneously than there are particles in the universe, then you have to ask yourself the question, where is the computer doing the calculations?
Because your computer can only do the calculations for which it's got the physical resources, you know, the numbers, it can only do calculations on the transistors it's got.
But if a quantum computer can do more calculations simultaneously than there are particles in the universe, you have to ask yourself, where is it doing the calculations?
Deutsch's answer is that it's doing the calculations in parallel universes.
So he says that this is the device, the technological device, that's going to force upon us a completely, a real change in our view of the universe.
So what he thinks the quantum computer does is you give it a problem, it splits into copies of itself in parallel universes, like the pages of an infinite book, and all of those copies work on strands of the problem, and then they come back together with an answer which the quantum computer spits out.
Now, that's obviously very controversial, but he's saying that that view would be forced on you if you had a machine in your hand that was doing more calculations than there are particles in the universe, more calculations simultaneously, which apparently quantum computer may well be able to do.
So even though we can't see or experience, as far as we know ourselves, other realities or other dimensions, the realization of them would be forced upon us by the physical reality of something that we might create.
Absolutely.
He says this would be the technological device that forces on us acceptance of parallel universes.
Doesn't that mean then, if we get to that, and listen, I'm hugely excited by what you've just said, but doesn't that mean we have then lost control of technology?
Lost, in what sense?
Well, if it's doing things that we don't understand and producing results that are beyond our current ken, our current capabilities, then it's taken on a mind of its own, literally.
Well, this is a fundamental problem that we're facing with artificial intelligence now.
You know, this is a real problem.
The kind of intelligence that we're creating in machines is not our intelligence.
You know, it's the intelligence that it gives the appearance of intelligence because it can sift through vast amounts of data.
So we can have a computer that can sift through all the data on the internet or whatever.
No human could ever do that and find connections and correlations that we wouldn't ever find.
And this is a real problem because then we don't know how it came to its conclusion.
So if we use artificial intelligence to do anything, so maybe we use artificial intelligence to catch people speeding in their cars or breaking the law, then at the moment, if you're in court because you've committed a crime, you can defend yourself and the police can explain why they are actually, you know, why you're being accused of the crime.
But if you've been caught by an artificial intelligence system, how can you defend yourself?
The police themselves will not know why it picked you out.
But that takes us into a whole new ballgame, quite literally, doesn't it?
Because we then have created technology, going back to what we were talking about two minutes ago, that is doing amazing things, but we're not quite sure what those amazing things are.
The one thing about science in the past is we make something happen, a result is garnered, but we then have an explanation for that.
We're able to write it down in a notebook.
You're talking about something so complex that it's going to happen, but we won't understand it.
that's scary.
Artificial intelligence is not artificial human intelligence, it's intelligence of a completely different order to ours.
I mean, you know, we don't sift through vast amounts of data.
However, the brain works, it doesn't work in that way at all.
So we're actually creating systems where we won't be able to follow the logic, you know, because literally a computer system can look at so much more data than a human being and find connections and correlations that we can't.
So yeah, that is a fundamental problem.
Talking about AI then, Marcus, that means that science is going to have to be honest about this.
The machines are going to take over.
That is not a phrase from science fiction.
That's what is going to happen.
And people often say things like, oh, well, you know, artificial intelligence, you know, there's some jobs that will be safe.
You know, you probably think your job's safe.
Not at all.
Oh, well, it's only going to be people who work in shops.
But actually, if our brain is a computer and it's doing no more than a computer, I mean, obviously it's got about 100 billion neurons.
So, I mean, that's as many computing units as there are stars in our galaxy.
That's what's in your brain.
But if it is just functioning like a very complex computer, then in principle, everything it does can be done by a machine.
And there's nothing that anybody does, whether it's a creative thing, whether they're a novelist, whether they're a painter, there's nothing at all that cannot be done by a machine, which is very, very worrying.
But then again, could that be that we are creating our successors?
I mean, could it be that we don't see any evidence in the universe when we look out of any biological life?
The biological life creates its successors, which are artificial life.
I don't know.
And maybe biological life like us.
Maybe biological life is old hat and maybe vast amounts of the universe, vast other places that we're not aware of, actually that penny dropped for them billions of years ago and they're already in that quantum artificial intelligence universe and flesh and blood.
We're very fragile.
We're very fragile.
Biology is very fragile.
You know, your brain is three pounds of jelly and water.
I mean, you go outside the atmosphere, you have to worry about being fried by radiation from the sun.
You have to take your oxygen with you.
If you want to go on an interstellar journey, even if we could attain speeds of a fraction and the speed of light, we're talking about maybe centuries to get to the nearest star.
We're just not equipped for interstellar travel.
However, something made out of silicon or whatever, robotic, would be.
It could be hardened against radiation and all that sort of stuff.
So it could be that we're building our successors.
So we are not going to be superseded then so much.
We're not going to be assimilated, rather, so much as completely superseded.
We won't be taken on board.
We won't be assimilated.
Well, we would hope that we would be taken on board, but again, we have to be very careful that, you know.
Well, in other words, what you said is that we are unconsciously the architects of our own destruction.
If we're not very careful, that's the way it's going to go.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, we have to be very, very, very careful with the constraints that we put on artificial intelligence systems.
But, yeah, I mean, all technologies are potentially dangerous.
I mean, the technologies by which we are manipulating, you know, editing genes, you know, They can be good or bad.
They can be used for good or bad.
But, yeah, I think, you know, there are some very serious problems that we have to face, really.
And do you think that science is actually...
Because these are very real and present dangers that you're talking about.
And I don't see anybody addressing them.
I mean, now I'm in London here, and as you probably know, politics is in complete turmoil in Britain.
Oh, yes.
And really, the big issues, which are the scientific issues of the day, global warming, all these, are not being addressed at all.
Not at all.
So when even these massive threats to global civilization are not being considered, I mean, I've seen in recent weeks the House of Commons, which is like the equivalent of the Senate in America, pretty much empty for a debate on global warming.
So that's just one example.
But there are many other technologies that have potential benefits, but also potential risks.
And one of the big problems is politicians tend to have an arts background.
They tend not to have any scientific background or any scientific understanding.
And that's something that the scientific community really needs to address more.
We need more people with scientific understanding who can communicate to politicians or become politicians to understand some of these technologies that could potentially change life on Earth.
Oh, fascinating thoughts, chilling thoughts that we really need to be getting our heads across.
Otherwise, we're going to have a great big problem.
Just finally, in our last few minutes together, Marcus, and this conversation, every bit as fascinating as the last one, even though it was 14 years ago.
Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand is, I think, your most recent book.
You ask a question in it.
You asked many questions in it, but one of them fascinated me.
In the future, Taiwan, In the future, time might run backwards.
How could that be?
That's a really complex thing to describe in a couple of minutes.
But the direction of time is a very Interesting because all the laws of physics are time reversible.
They don't have a direction.
But the direction of, I don't think I can explain it in a short time, but the direction of time is the direction in which the universe goes from being ordered to disordered.
You may have heard of the second law of thermodynamics, that everything becomes chaotic.
We go from order to chaos.
This is the second law of thermodynamics, one of the fundamental laws of physics.
And so ultimately, the reason that we are growing old rather than growing young is that the universe is actually going from a state of order in the Big Bang to becoming more disordered.
But if the universe were to expand and its expansion would run out of steam, and the expansion would be reversed, and it would contract down to a big crunch.
So that's kind of like a time-reversed big bang.
Then the universe would be going from a disordered state down to an ordered state in a big crunch.
And so what we call the error of time, the direction of time would be reversed.
So if you were to live in that phase, the contraction phase of the universe, time would run backwards.
So things would, coffee would grow warm when you left it on a tabletop, babies would, or people would grow young, all that kind of stuff.
Parcels would uncrumble, eggs would unbreak.
But the interesting thing there is this.
You perceive the universe with your brain, and your thought processes would also be reversed.
Okay, imagine if you have a double negative.
If I say it's not hot, it's hot.
Okay, so if you're seeing, if there's a universe where everything's going backwards in time, but your thought processes are also backwards in time, you will see the universe as normal.
So actually, we could be in the contraction phase of the universe.
And we just wouldn't know it.
And we wouldn't know it.
And one of the best bits of proof for that, I suppose, is those things they used to show on television when we were both kids, where they would give somebody a pair of glasses that would turn everything upside down.
And then they'd make the person wear those glasses for a day or so, take the glasses off, and the person for a while would continue to see things upside down.
Yes.
I don't know if you ever saw those things on TV, but I remember seeing them.
James Burke.
Yeah, the great James Burke, who's been on this show at the age of 81, I think he was one of the people to do that.
Yes.
So that speaks to exactly what you've just said.
A lot of it is about our perception.
And we might be going back in time.
We just may not, we may have adjusted.
It's like taking those glasses off.
Well, the interesting thing is that there would be complete symmetry between the beginning and end of the universe because the big crunch would look exactly like the big bang to anyone who was in the contraction phase.
But anyway, it's a weird idea.
Physics is weird.
It's stranger than science fiction.
But thank God, Marcus Chown, there are people like you asking questions like the ones that you're asking because they're at the core of everything, whether we like it or not.
And whether we'd rather just sit back and watch EastEnders or any other soap opera that you might fancy.
These are the big questions.
Definitely, definitely.
I mean, I have to live in the normal world and I have to get my shopping as well.
But I think it is really important to think about those big questions.
And certainly when we get bogged down in, you know, everyday life and politics and everything, it's good to look up.
And I use Twitter a lot.
And I find that when I tweet a picture that gives people perspective, so for instance, a good one I like is the Voyager picture of the most distant picture of the Earth ever taken, which is a single dot.
And I just say, you know, in 2019, how about us all of us remembering we're all on this dot together?
People really do like it because it gives them a sense of perspective.
We need to look up as well as look down as well because we can get bogged down with our own everyday problems.
We need to get a real sense of what is important.
Marcus, we've got to talk again.
You have a fantastic website.
It's a beautiful piece of design.
It is both simple and excellent.
What's the address of that website so my listener can go look?
www.marcuschown that's m-ar-r-c-u-s-c-h-o-w-n.com.
I'm glad you like it because I really wanted a very simple website and I had someone to design it and I kept saying, no, I want it simpler.
I want it simpler.
So I'm glad you like it.
It's got fantastic functionality, but it looks great.
Are you working on another book?
I've just delivered a book two days ago to my publisher Faber in England.
I'm very interested in the central magic of science, the fact that you can write down an arcane formula on a piece of paper and it can predict something that when you go and look in the real world is actually there.
You know, so whether it's the Hicks particle or whether it's gravitational waves or it's the planet Neptune, this is just incredible.
This magic is so magical that even the scientists can't quite believe it.
So famously, Einstein wrote down his theory of gravity and it predicted black holes and the Big Bang, but he didn't believe it.
Okay, which kind of suggests, and we don't have time for this conversation, but that this is a whole other conversation in itself, that perhaps by having a thought about something, we actually create it.
I mean, there is an extreme version of what we call quantum theory, and that And that tells us the universe is not there unless we observe it.
But I'm not sure everyone quite believes that.
But yeah.
Big questions, big topics.
Marcus Chown, thank you very much.
And we won't leave it 14 years next time.
Okay, I'll be dead by then.
So thank you very much.
Thank you, Marcus.
I think you'll be going strong until you're 95 at least.
Thank you, Marcus.
All the best anyway.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
The remarkable Marcus Chown, and I'll Put a link to him and his website on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Well, thank you very much for being part of this.
You know, if you have a guest suggestion, thoughts about the show, how it can be done better, whatever, then you can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and tell me what you think.
There's always a bit of pressure here from what I see as two different factions to do with the show.
There are people who want to hear more ghosts and more spooky stories, which I love.
There are people who want to hear more science and hard science-based stories.
And then there are people like me who sit in the middle and they want to hear all of it.
So I try and please everybody, but you know, there's an old saying that you can't please everybody all of the time.
But I think if we get a good average going, then we're doing all right.
Always good to hear from you.
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So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
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