Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Man, Welcome back to George NORII with Brian Keating. He's
Speaker 2: got a couple of books, including Into the Impossible that
Speaker 2: is one. The other is called Losing the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2: We talked a little bit about that in the moment,
Speaker 2: and his website is linked up at Coast tocoastam dot com. Brian,
Speaker 2: there are some that believe we're living in a simulated universe,
Speaker 2: and for years I thought that was ridiculous. Now I'm
Speaker 2: not so sure anymore. What do you think of that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the simulation hypothesis is actually kind of proposed by
Speaker 3: a friend I hosted on my podcast named Nick Bostrom.
Speaker 3: He's a philosopher, and his essential argument goes like this,
Speaker 3: with the rapid pace of computer power, transistor number, and
Speaker 3: eventually memory and quantum computers and then artificial intelligence, we're
Speaker 3: now able to effectively replicate the most complex dynamics, the
Speaker 3: physics of small oak and collisions and particles smashing together
Speaker 3: near the speed of light in the universe as a whole.
Speaker 3: And then the question is, well, what do we like
Speaker 3: to simulate? Do we simulate you know, just a cup
Speaker 3: of water sitting on a desktop for hours in thermal equilibrium. No,
Speaker 3: that's kind of boring. But we would simulate something like
Speaker 3: a you know, a massive explosion or collision of galaxies.
Speaker 3: So it tends to be more interesting to simulate more
Speaker 3: complex phenomena and more complex dynamics. In fact, you'll find
Speaker 3: thousands of times more simulations of galaxies colliding together or
Speaker 3: neutrinos passing through the human body than you will find
Speaker 3: water and a mug just sitting on a table. So
Speaker 3: if you keep extrapolating that kind of logic, it seems
Speaker 3: to be that well, perhaps you know, in the great
Speaker 3: distant future there will be simulations of every individual, every
Speaker 3: human being. After all, what's more interesting and precious than
Speaker 3: a human being and what we can do in our
Speaker 3: a capacity for curiosity, wonder and imagination. Well, you keep
Speaker 3: thinking like that, and you keep thinking that computing power
Speaker 3: is just going to keep growing, artificial intelligence will keep growing,
Speaker 3: then it may be that we are that that already happened,
Speaker 3: and we experience these kind of the sensations and whatnot,
Speaker 3: but they're effectively just chemical reactions and reactions to stimuli
Speaker 3: which are passed through chemical you know, sinasids in our brain,
Speaker 3: and there's really no distinction between the chemical process to
Speaker 3: a physical materialist and the process itself. In other words,
Speaker 3: there's no notion of soul or self or identity. So
Speaker 3: according to people like this, there is no reason to
Speaker 3: suggest that we're actually who we think we are and
Speaker 3: not a simulation. And how would we be able to tell?
Speaker 3: And so it's an ancient question. I mean, it goes
Speaker 3: back to Rene des Cartes and Coke or Gosom. I
Speaker 3: think therefore I am, and they're really not been very
Speaker 3: any satisfactory and ways that you could test that simulation hypothesis.
Speaker 3: And a scientist what we want to do is not
Speaker 3: groove of a hypothesis, but we really go about disproving
Speaker 3: everything else, and what's left via Ocom's razor will be
Speaker 3: likely closest to the possible truth. So yes, there are
Speaker 3: a great many people so think about this, and then
Speaker 3: the question of ethics and morality and all sorts of
Speaker 3: interesting things come up in that simulation hypothesis.
Speaker 2: So you can't rule it out.
Speaker 3: That's right, That's right. You can't really rule it out.
Speaker 3: I mean you can say that it's implausible. You could say, well,
Speaker 3: who's who's you know running the simulation? Is that? Is
Speaker 3: that an entity? Is that an AI? Well who created that?
Speaker 3: And you could make sort of logical suppositions and maybe
Speaker 3: lead to contradictions, and you may even be able to say, well,
Speaker 3: there are certain things that are so called, you know,
Speaker 3: continuous variables, like an angle is you know, it has
Speaker 3: infinite number of degrees and numbers between say zero ninety degrees.
Speaker 3: There's an infinite number of numbers, So how could there
Speaker 3: You would require an infinite amount of memory, for example,
Speaker 3: to simulate every trajectory of every meteorite in the media
Speaker 3: in the universe. So yes, that that might be overwhelmingly difficult,
Speaker 3: and then you might have to wonder why is it
Speaker 3: doing that? But I think you know a lot of
Speaker 3: people point out, well, the same kid be asked of
Speaker 3: the concept of God, and in fact a lot of
Speaker 3: those same questions I say, morality, ethics, et cetera. Does
Speaker 3: the master simulator of the of this program that we
Speaker 3: call consciousness, does heich it ay whatever? Do they have
Speaker 3: a moral obligation to us? And you know I always
Speaker 3: answer that question, well, if it's true that we're all simulated,
Speaker 3: why are there you know, why are there so many Kardashians, Like,
Speaker 3: do we really need so many Kardashians? I feel like
Speaker 3: that might be a disproof of it, But you're right,
Speaker 3: we really can't prove it wrong or disproved falsify the
Speaker 3: hypothesis that we are in a simulation.
Speaker 2: Where does the multiverse theory come in?
Speaker 3: The multiverse is a consequence. It's not really a theory,
Speaker 3: but it's a consequence of many, many different branches of
Speaker 3: the most interesting and cutting edge physics. One such branch
Speaker 3: is called string theory, where we believe, according to string theory,
Speaker 3: that just as we can divide up a chunk of
Speaker 3: rock into smaller chunks eventually into molecules, to buy those
Speaker 3: molecules into atoms, to buy those atoms into protons and neutrons,
Speaker 3: divide those protons and neutrons into quarks, we believe, according
Speaker 3: to string theory, that the quarks themselves, which were formerly
Speaker 3: thought to be indivisible, could actually be fractionalized and broken
Speaker 3: into even tinier things called strings or sometimes super strings.
Speaker 3: And the question of that reductionism leads to a notion
Speaker 3: of what's called the string theory landscape, meaning that how
Speaker 3: many different possibilities for different particles, for different manifestations of matter.
Speaker 3: It depends on a property of the underlying theory called
Speaker 3: the vacuum state, and there's effectively an infinite number of
Speaker 3: those things. So you come up with an infinite number
Speaker 3: of possible the universes that we could live in, and
Speaker 3: that is a form of multiverse multiverse meaning multi many verse,
Speaker 3: meaning effectively the universe. But when we grew up, you
Speaker 3: and I grew up, there was just one universe. We
Speaker 3: call that the universe. But according to many cosmologists, including
Speaker 3: as a consequence of the theory of inflation that my
Speaker 3: experiments that aim to test, there is concomitant with that
Speaker 3: a multiverse. In other words, you cannot have these waves
Speaker 3: of gravity that suffuse the universe, traveling at the speed
Speaker 3: of light, emanating from the first trillions of a trillions
Speaker 3: of a trillionth of a second of our history in
Speaker 3: the universe. You cannot have that unless they're so called insulation. Well,
Speaker 3: inflation itself requires a multiverse. In other words, there cannot
Speaker 3: be just a single universe. And therefore what we think
Speaker 3: of as everything there is is just everything that we
Speaker 3: could possibly see since the origin of our observable universe,
Speaker 3: but there could literally be a universe right next door,
Speaker 3: one light day away, and when your listeners wake up
Speaker 3: in the morning, we could announce, well, we bumped into
Speaker 3: that universe after waiting one more light day, after the
Speaker 3: impending thirteen point eight billion years that led us up
Speaker 3: to this point. So, yes, the multiverse is of core
Speaker 3: concept in many modern models.
Speaker 2: The physics so many things we just don't know, Brian,
Speaker 2: isn't there.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's what makes sience so interesting. There's everything within physics,
Speaker 3: and I like to say physics is the most interesting
Speaker 3: of all subjects because it literally covers everything from astronomy
Speaker 3: to zoology. If you think about it, everything that's made
Speaker 3: of matter is comprised of entities that are governed by
Speaker 3: the laws of quantum mechanics, high article physics, gravity, electromagnetism.
Speaker 3: These are all physical forces. Where it gets messy and
Speaker 3: where I lose interest, George, is when you have this
Speaker 3: dealing with personality, psychologies, politics. I would say I love
Speaker 3: doing astronomy because no one wakes up in the morning
Speaker 3: and says, oh I hate that democratic constellation. Oh man,
Speaker 3: that republican asteroid is really no, it's politics. Free it's
Speaker 3: a safe zone, and we need that, the species needs
Speaker 3: to have a place of relaxation where we can contemplate
Speaker 3: those great issues that make us uniquely human.
Speaker 2: How close did you come, Brian, to winning a Nobel
Speaker 2: Prize for all this work.
Speaker 3: You've done well. In twenty fourteen, I'm Saint Patrick's Day
Speaker 3: at Harvard University, an experiment whose predecessor, BICEP that we
Speaker 3: spoke about, had been upgraded. Just like your iPhone or
Speaker 3: Android gets updated every year, we update our experiments too,
Speaker 3: and the second generation of BICEP, called BICEP two, had
Speaker 3: detected what we thought were the exact hallmarks, the exact
Speaker 3: imprints of inflationary gravitational weights, these leftover fragments of shrapnel
Speaker 3: of the explosive origin of the cosmos. We claimed we
Speaker 3: detected it at a press conference at Harvard University. It
Speaker 3: was on the front page of the New York Times,
Speaker 3: it was on CNN, ABC, all these different institutions saying
Speaker 3: we had made the perhaps the greatest discovery of all time,
Speaker 3: and that we had found not only that the universe
Speaker 3: began with a big bang, but we found the big banger,
Speaker 3: if you will, If you were religious, it was akin
Speaker 3: to understanding what or who put the bang in the
Speaker 3: Big Bang, what gave it the energy? Why did the
Speaker 3: universe start expanding? It didn't have to. It could have
Speaker 3: started off collapsing. They could have expanded at a very
Speaker 3: slow rate, but no, it expanded at this ultra luminous rate.
Speaker 3: And so we came extremely close. And the thing that
Speaker 3: caused us to slip up, that caused me and my
Speaker 3: colleagues and Bicep at Caltech and Harvard in Minnesota and
Speaker 3: Stanford and elsewhere to lose. Then about prizes, as the
Speaker 3: title of my first book was none other than the
Speaker 3: most common substance the universe, dust, little microscopic grains of dust,
Speaker 3: effectively micro meteorites. And I actually give away these meteorites
Speaker 3: on my website Brian Keating dot com that your team
Speaker 3: is linked to. I give away meteorites every month. They
Speaker 3: are magnificent things, George, because they're actually fragments of the
Speaker 3: earliest moments of our Solar system's history. They're older than
Speaker 3: the Earth, and these meteorites are able to encode the
Speaker 3: properties and the conditions of the early Solar System, and
Speaker 3: that early Solar system was a very chaotic place. It
Speaker 3: was filled with dust and boulders and asteroids, but it
Speaker 3: was also filled with a lot of tiny little grains
Speaker 3: of magnetized dust. When you get these meteorites for me,
Speaker 3: you'll find them, and they have magnetic properties. Cout them
Speaker 3: on a refrigerator magnet. They can attract the compass needle.
Speaker 3: They're incredibly powerful magnets and they get aligned by magnetic fields,
Speaker 3: I should say, And so in our Milky Way galaxy
Speaker 3: was a magnetic field. There is a magnetic field, just
Speaker 3: like every substance we know in the universe. We think
Speaker 3: every rupture, from planets to people to birds, that inst
Speaker 3: they have some degree of magnetism, and so do galaxies
Speaker 3: and clusters of galaxies. And our Milky Way galaxy caused
Speaker 3: an imprint exactly like the kind we would have seen
Speaker 3: if the universe began from a multiverse in the inflationary
Speaker 3: explosive origin. And that tricked us, George, into seeing what
Speaker 3: we really wanted to see. It's a very common bias
Speaker 3: in science, called the confirmation bias, when a scientist sees
Speaker 3: what he or she wants to see. Because I always
Speaker 3: knew creating bisept that if we were successful, we would
Speaker 3: win Nobel Prizes. There was no doubt about it, and
Speaker 3: in fact, the publicity that we got right afterwards is
Speaker 3: proof of that. You don't get on the front page
Speaker 3: of the New York Times very often for scientific discovery.
Speaker 3: And yeah, exactly. So this we was very painful because
Speaker 3: we had to retract the discovery and say, after working
Speaker 3: with our competitor on a competing spacecraft called the Plank Satellite,
Speaker 3: that we were wrong. We made a mistake. We didn't
Speaker 3: make a blunder, you know, we didn't put our thumb
Speaker 3: in the in the viewfinder or leave the lens cap
Speaker 3: on the eyepiece of the telescope. No, no, no, We really
Speaker 3: did see an astrophysical signal of dust in our galaxy,
Speaker 3: which is cool and interesting and some people spend their
Speaker 3: whole careers it allows you to learn about our galaxy
Speaker 3: history and the magnetic fields within it, et cetera, and
Speaker 3: how stars form. But it wasn't cosmological. It didn't originate
Speaker 3: from the Big Bang's earliest birth pangs. And so the
Speaker 3: story that I tell in my cosmic memoir called Losing
Speaker 3: Them of All Prize is really a tale of you know,
Speaker 3: sort of humility, but possible humiliation. We came so close.
Speaker 3: And then right after that, George, right after that, a
Speaker 3: couple of months later, I got a letter mailed letter,
Speaker 3: if you can believe it, in my office that you
Speaker 3: see San Diego. And I said, Professor Brian Keating, we
Speaker 3: are writing you from the non Committee. My heart skipped
Speaker 3: to beat. I was like, didn't you guys hear we
Speaker 3: kind of had to retract this discovery. You Swedes, you
Speaker 3: don't even remember. But I was like, maybe they've made
Speaker 3: a mistake, maybe they'll give it to me anyway. No,
Speaker 3: it said instead, Professor Bryan Kinney, we're giving you the
Speaker 3: honor of selecting and nominating winners of the Nobel Prize
Speaker 3: for next year. And George, I don't know if you
Speaker 3: can imagine the disappointment. Imagine if you're a car dealer,
Speaker 3: you know, and somebody calls you up, you haven't made
Speaker 3: a sale in a while, calls you up and says, hey, George,
Speaker 3: you know I'm looking for a great car dealer. That's great,
Speaker 3: I'm going to sell some car. Can you tell me
Speaker 3: your competitor's name? And you know who hadn't find it
Speaker 3: on the internet. It was humiliating in some sense, but
Speaker 3: I went through the process of nominating people for the
Speaker 3: Nobel Prize in the year twenty sixteen, and that would
Speaker 3: have been potentially the Nobel Prize that my colleagues and
Speaker 3: I might have shared. And I found a disturbing set
Speaker 3: of kind of un you know, forgivable sins had been
Speaker 3: way against this great man known as Alfred Nobel, one
Speaker 3: of the most interesting, creative and fascinating characters in all
Speaker 3: of history, and really not well understood. People know his
Speaker 3: name from the Nobel Prize, but I don't know what
Speaker 3: a great man he was. He died childless, he never married,
Speaker 3: He gave his wealth. He was like Elon Musk times ten.
Speaker 3: He had the hundreds of patents, and he was incredibly wealthy.
Speaker 3: They called him, you know, one of the richest men
Speaker 3: in the world at that time, and by today's standards,
Speaker 3: he would be like a trillionaire because he invented dynamite
Speaker 3: and that made him incredibly wealthy. But it also made
Speaker 3: him incredibly guilty. And that's very common thing that happens
Speaker 3: in science. We create things of great power and great understanding,
Speaker 3: but knowledge. The word science exactly exactly like that or Einstein.
Speaker 3: The word science in Latin means knowledge, but it doesn't
Speaker 3: mean wisdom, and so there's a very big difference in
Speaker 3: my interviews. I've done interviews with twenty Nobel Prize winners
Speaker 3: on my podcast, and I'm always trying to see, is
Speaker 3: it possible, George, that you can have enough brilliance that
Speaker 3: you become wise. I'm not so sure, and so part
Speaker 3: of my investigations into the Nobel Prize's history was to
Speaker 3: dig up what Alfred Nobel wrote in his will. He
Speaker 3: died on December tenth, and that's every year when the
Speaker 3: Nobel Prizes are given out, not on his birthday. It's
Speaker 3: given you know, with flowers taken from the place of
Speaker 3: his death or his burial. It's a very macabre kind
Speaker 3: of ritual. You have all these incantations and rituals. You
Speaker 3: have to bow down and get a gilded graven image
Speaker 3: of the patron saint of science, Alfred Nobel. And it's
Speaker 3: a wonderful thing, and it's a very difficult thing because
Speaker 3: it challenges the way that science is actually done. We
Speaker 3: teach students about it, but we never really teach our
Speaker 3: students the ethics of it. What do you do when
Speaker 3: you have to, you know, retract a discovery claim that
Speaker 3: was on the front page of the New York Times.
Speaker 3: That's not something that you can teach and freshman electromagnetism.
Speaker 3: And so it's a great challenge to me. And it's
Speaker 3: a very interesting story about how science is done by
Speaker 3: scientists and scientists despite the stereotypes, George, we're normal human beings.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's a there's an old trope about scientists.
Speaker 3: You know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing
Speaker 3: because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
Speaker 3: And it's really true. We don't we don't do enough communication.
Speaker 3: We don't share this wonderful story, this beautiful script that
Speaker 3: we've been given by Mother Nature or God or whoever
Speaker 3: you want to claim that is the greatest story ever told.
Speaker 3: But we are some of the worst you know, screen uh,
Speaker 3: you know script readers that there are. And part of
Speaker 3: my mission on my YouTube channel and my podcast is
Speaker 3: to show the human side of scientists and show that
Speaker 3: we're wonderful, fascinating, childlike people with a great deal of
Speaker 3: stories to tell.
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