The Cosmos - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 7/29/24

He's a philosopher, and his essential argument goes like this, with the rapid pace of computer power, transistor number, and eventually memory and quantum computers and then artificial intelligence, we're now able to effectively replicate the most complex dynamics, the physics of small oak and collisions and particles smashing together near the speed of light in the universe as a whole. And then the question is, well, what do we like to simulate? Do we simulate you know, just a cup

of water sitting on a desktop for hours in thermal equilibrium. No, that's kind of boring. But we would simulate something like a you know, a massive explosion or collision of galaxies. So it tends to be more interesting to simulate more complex phenomena and more complex dynamics. In fact, you'll find thousands of times more simulations of galaxies colliding together or neutrinos passing through the human body than you will find

water and a mug just sitting on a table. So if you keep extrapolating that kind of logic, it seems to be that well, perhaps you know, in the great distant future there will be simulations of every individual, every human being. After all, what's more interesting and precious than a human being and what we can do in our

a capacity for curiosity, wonder and imagination. Well, you keep thinking like that, and you keep thinking that computing power is just going to keep growing, artificial intelligence will keep growing, then it may be that we are that that already happened, and we experience these kind of the sensations and whatnot, but they're effectively just chemical reactions and reactions to stimuli which are passed through chemical you know, sinasids in our brain,

and there's really no distinction between the chemical process to a physical materialist and the process itself. In other words, there's no notion of soul or self or identity. So according to people like this, there is no reason to suggest that we're actually who we think we are and not a simulation. And how would we be able to tell? And so it's an ancient question. I mean, it goes

back to Rene des Cartes and Coke or Gosom. I think therefore I am, and they're really not been very any satisfactory and ways that you could test that simulation hypothesis. And a scientist what we want to do is not groove of a hypothesis, but we really go about disproving everything else, and what's left via Ocom's razor will be

likely closest to the possible truth. So yes, there are a great many people so think about this, and then the question of ethics and morality and all sorts of interesting things come up in that simulation hypothesis.

And you could make sort of logical suppositions and maybe lead to contradictions, and you may even be able to say, well, there are certain things that are so called, you know, continuous variables, like an angle is you know, it has infinite number of degrees and numbers between say zero ninety degrees. There's an infinite number of numbers, So how could there You would require an infinite amount of memory, for example, to simulate every trajectory of every meteorite in the media

in the universe. So yes, that that might be overwhelmingly difficult, and then you might have to wonder why is it doing that? But I think you know a lot of people point out, well, the same kid be asked of the concept of God, and in fact a lot of those same questions I say, morality, ethics, et cetera. Does the master simulator of the of this program that we call consciousness, does heich it ay whatever? Do they have

a moral obligation to us? And you know I always answer that question, well, if it's true that we're all simulated, why are there you know, why are there so many Kardashians, Like, do we really need so many Kardashians? I feel like that might be a disproof of it, But you're right, we really can't prove it wrong or disproved falsify the hypothesis that we are in a simulation.

the most interesting and cutting edge physics. One such branch is called string theory, where we believe, according to string theory, that just as we can divide up a chunk of rock into smaller chunks eventually into molecules, to buy those molecules into atoms, to buy those atoms into protons and neutrons, divide those protons and neutrons into quarks, we believe, according to string theory, that the quarks themselves, which were formerly

thought to be indivisible, could actually be fractionalized and broken into even tinier things called strings or sometimes super strings. And the question of that reductionism leads to a notion of what's called the string theory landscape, meaning that how many different possibilities for different particles, for different manifestations of matter. It depends on a property of the underlying theory called the vacuum state, and there's effectively an infinite number of

those things. So you come up with an infinite number of possible the universes that we could live in, and that is a form of multiverse multiverse meaning multi many verse, meaning effectively the universe. But when we grew up, you and I grew up, there was just one universe. We call that the universe. But according to many cosmologists, including as a consequence of the theory of inflation that my experiments that aim to test, there is concomitant with that

a multiverse. In other words, you cannot have these waves of gravity that suffuse the universe, traveling at the speed of light, emanating from the first trillions of a trillions of a trillionth of a second of our history in the universe. You cannot have that unless they're so called insulation. Well, inflation itself requires a multiverse. In other words, there cannot

be just a single universe. And therefore what we think of as everything there is is just everything that we could possibly see since the origin of our observable universe, but there could literally be a universe right next door, one light day away, and when your listeners wake up in the morning, we could announce, well, we bumped into that universe after waiting one more light day, after the impending thirteen point eight billion years that led us up

to this point. So, yes, the multiverse is of core concept in many modern models.

These are all physical forces. Where it gets messy and where I lose interest, George, is when you have this dealing with personality, psychologies, politics. I would say I love doing astronomy because no one wakes up in the morning and says, oh I hate that democratic constellation. Oh man,

that republican asteroid is really no, it's politics. Free it's a safe zone, and we need that, the species needs to have a place of relaxation where we can contemplate those great issues that make us uniquely human.

of the explosive origin of the cosmos. We claimed we detected it at a press conference at Harvard University. It was on the front page of the New York Times, it was on CNN, ABC, all these different institutions saying we had made the perhaps the greatest discovery of all time, and that we had found not only that the universe began with a big bang, but we found the big banger, if you will, If you were religious, it was akin to understanding what or who put the bang in the

Big Bang, what gave it the energy? Why did the universe start expanding? It didn't have to. It could have started off collapsing. They could have expanded at a very slow rate, but no, it expanded at this ultra luminous rate. And so we came extremely close. And the thing that caused us to slip up, that caused me and my colleagues and Bicep at Caltech and Harvard in Minnesota and

Stanford and elsewhere to lose. Then about prizes, as the title of my first book was none other than the most common substance the universe, dust, little microscopic grains of dust, effectively micro meteorites. And I actually give away these meteorites on my website Brian Keating dot com that your team is linked to. I give away meteorites every month. They are magnificent things, George, because they're actually fragments of the

earliest moments of our Solar system's history. They're older than the Earth, and these meteorites are able to encode the properties and the conditions of the early Solar System, and that early Solar system was a very chaotic place. It was filled with dust and boulders and asteroids, but it was also filled with a lot of tiny little grains of magnetized dust. When you get these meteorites for me, you'll find them, and they have magnetic properties. Cout them

on a refrigerator magnet. They can attract the compass needle. They're incredibly powerful magnets and they get aligned by magnetic fields, I should say, And so in our Milky Way galaxy was a magnetic field. There is a magnetic field, just like every substance we know in the universe. We think every rupture, from planets to people to birds, that inst they have some degree of magnetism, and so do galaxies

and clusters of galaxies. And our Milky Way galaxy caused an imprint exactly like the kind we would have seen if the universe began from a multiverse in the inflationary explosive origin. And that tricked us, George, into seeing what we really wanted to see. It's a very common bias in science, called the confirmation bias, when a scientist sees what he or she wants to see. Because I always knew creating bisept that if we were successful, we would

win Nobel Prizes. There was no doubt about it, and in fact, the publicity that we got right afterwards is proof of that. You don't get on the front page of the New York Times very often for scientific discovery. And yeah, exactly. So this we was very painful because we had to retract the discovery and say, after working with our competitor on a competing spacecraft called the Plank Satellite,

that we were wrong. We made a mistake. We didn't make a blunder, you know, we didn't put our thumb in the in the viewfinder or leave the lens cap on the eyepiece of the telescope. No, no, no, We really did see an astrophysical signal of dust in our galaxy, which is cool and interesting and some people spend their whole careers it allows you to learn about our galaxy history and the magnetic fields within it, et cetera, and how stars form. But it wasn't cosmological. It didn't originate

from the Big Bang's earliest birth pangs. And so the story that I tell in my cosmic memoir called Losing Them of All Prize is really a tale of you know, sort of humility, but possible humiliation. We came so close. And then right after that, George, right after that, a couple of months later, I got a letter mailed letter, if you can believe it, in my office that you see San Diego. And I said, Professor Brian Keating, we are writing you from the non Committee. My heart skipped

to beat. I was like, didn't you guys hear we kind of had to retract this discovery. You Swedes, you don't even remember. But I was like, maybe they've made a mistake, maybe they'll give it to me anyway. No, it said instead, Professor Bryan Kinney, we're giving you the honor of selecting and nominating winners of the Nobel Prize for next year. And George, I don't know if you

can imagine the disappointment. Imagine if you're a car dealer, you know, and somebody calls you up, you haven't made a sale in a while, calls you up and says, hey, George, you know I'm looking for a great car dealer. That's great, I'm going to sell some car. Can you tell me your competitor's name? And you know who hadn't find it

on the internet. It was humiliating in some sense, but I went through the process of nominating people for the Nobel Prize in the year twenty sixteen, and that would have been potentially the Nobel Prize that my colleagues and I might have shared. And I found a disturbing set of kind of un you know, forgivable sins had been way against this great man known as Alfred Nobel, one of the most interesting, creative and fascinating characters in all

of history, and really not well understood. People know his name from the Nobel Prize, but I don't know what a great man he was. He died childless, he never married, He gave his wealth. He was like Elon Musk times ten. He had the hundreds of patents, and he was incredibly wealthy. They called him, you know, one of the richest men in the world at that time, and by today's standards, he would be like a trillionaire because he invented dynamite and that made him incredibly wealthy. But it also made

him incredibly guilty. And that's very common thing that happens in science. We create things of great power and great understanding, but knowledge. The word science exactly exactly like that or Einstein. The word science in Latin means knowledge, but it doesn't mean wisdom, and so there's a very big difference in my interviews. I've done interviews with twenty Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, and I'm always trying to see, is it possible, George, that you can have enough brilliance that

you become wise. I'm not so sure, and so part of my investigations into the Nobel Prize's history was to dig up what Alfred Nobel wrote in his will. He died on December tenth, and that's every year when the Nobel Prizes are given out, not on his birthday. It's given you know, with flowers taken from the place of his death or his burial. It's a very macabre kind of ritual. You have all these incantations and rituals. You have to bow down and get a gilded graven image

of the patron saint of science, Alfred Nobel. And it's a wonderful thing, and it's a very difficult thing because it challenges the way that science is actually done. We teach students about it, but we never really teach our students the ethics of it. What do you do when you have to, you know, retract a discovery claim that was on the front page of the New York Times. That's not something that you can teach and freshman electromagnetism.

And so it's a great challenge to me. And it's a very interesting story about how science is done by scientists and scientists despite the stereotypes, George, we're normal human beings. And you know, there's a there's an old trope about scientists. You know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. And it's really true. We don't we don't do enough communication.

We don't share this wonderful story, this beautiful script that we've been given by Mother Nature or God or whoever you want to claim that is the greatest story ever told. But we are some of the worst you know, screen uh, you know script readers that there are. And part of my mission on my YouTube channel and my podcast is to show the human side of scientists and show that we're wonderful, fascinating, childlike people with a great deal of stories to tell.