Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428
- The whole point of relativity is to say there's
no such thing as right now when you're far away. And that is doubly true for
what's inside a black hole. And you might think, well,
the galaxy is very big. It's really not. It's some tens of thousands
of light years across and billions of years old. So you don't need to
move at a high fraction of the speed of light to fill the galaxy. - The number of worlds is- - [Sean] Very big. - Very, very, very big. Where do those worlds fit? Where they go? - The short answer is, the worlds don't exist in space. Space exists separately in each world. - The following is a
conversation with Sean Carroll, his third time in this podcast. He is a theoretical
physicist at John Hopkins, host of the Mindscape Podcast
that I personally love and highly recommend, and author of many books, including the most recent book series called "The Biggest
Ideas in the Universe," the first book of which is
titled "Space, Time, and Motion," and it's on the topic
of general relativity. And the second coming out on May 14th, so you should definitely pre-order it, is titled "Quanta and Fields." And that one is on the
topic of quantum mechanics. Sean is a legit, active,
theoretical physicist, and at the same time is one
of the greatest communicators of physics ever. I highly encourage you
listen to his podcast, read his books, and pre-order the new
book to support his work. This was, as always, a big honor and a pleasure for me. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sean Carroll. In book one of the series, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe," called "Space, Time and Motion," you take on classical mechanics, general relativity by
taking on the main equation of general relativity and making it accessible,
easy to understand. So maybe at the high level, what is general relativity? What's a good way to start
to try to explain it? - Probably the best way to start to try to explain it is special relativity, which came first, 1905. It was the culmination of many decades of people putting things together. But it was Einstein in 1905. In fact, it wasn't even Einstein. I should give more credit
to Minkowski in 1907. So Einstein in 1905 figured out that you could get rid of the ether, the idea of a rest frame for the universe, and all the equations of
physics would make sense with the speed of light being a maximum. But then it was Minkowski, who used to be Einstein's
professor in 1907, who realized the most elegant way of thinking about this idea of
Einstein's was to blend space and time together into spacetime to really imagine that there is no hard and fast division of the
four dimensional world in which we live into
space and time separately. Einstein was at first dismissive of this. He thought it was just like, oh, the mathematicians
are overformalizing again. But then he later realized
that if spacetime is a thing, it can have properties and in particular it can have a geometry. It can be curved from place to place. And that was what let him
solve the problem of gravity. He had previously been
trying to fit in what we knew about gravity from Newtonian mechanics, the inverse square law of gravity to his new relativistic theory. It didn't work. So the final leap was to say, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. And that statement is
basically general relativity. - And the tension with Minkowski
was he was a mathematician. - [Sean] Yes. - So it's the tension between
physics and mathematics. In fact, in your lecture
about this equation, one of them, you say that Einstein
is a better physicist than he gets credit for. - Yep. (Sean laughs) - I know that's hard. That's a little bit of
a joke there, right? - [Lex] Yeah. - Because we all give
Einstein a lot of credit. But then we also, partly based on fact but partly to make ourselves feel better, tell ourselves a story about how later in life
Einstein couldn't keep up. There were younger people
doing quantum mechanics and quantum field theory
and particle physics, and he was just sort of unable to really philosophically get
over his objections to that. And I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, like almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein
understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical
objections to it are correct. So he should actually
have been taken much more seriously about that. And what he did, what he achieved in trying to think these problems through, is to really basically understand the idea of quantum entanglement, which is kind of important
these days when it comes to understanding quantum mechanics. Now, it's true that in
the forties and fifties, he placed his efforts in hopes for unifying electricity
and magnetism with gravity. That didn't really work out very well. All of us try things that don't work out. I don't hold that against him. But in terms of IQ points, in terms of trying to be a
clear thinking physicist, he was really, really great. - What does greatness
look like for a physicist? So how difficult is it to take the leap from special relativity to general relativity? How difficult is it to imagine that to consider spacetime together and to imagine that there's a
curvature to this whole thing? - Yeah, that's a great question. I think that if you want to make the case Einstein's greatness, which is not hard to do, there's two things you point at. One is in 1905, his famous miracle year, he writes three different papers on three wildly different subjects, all of which would make you famous just for writing that one paper. Special relativity is one of them. Brownian motion is another one, which is just the little vibrations of tiny little dust specs in the air. But who cares about that? What matters is it proves
the existence of atoms. He explains Brownian motion by imagining there are
molecules in the air and deriving their properties. Brilliant. And then he basically starts the world on the road to quantum
mechanics with his paper on... Which, again, is given a boring label of the photoelectric effect. What it really was is he invented photons. He showed that light should
be thought of as particles, as well as waves. And he did all three of
those very different things in one year. Okay. But the other thing that
gets him genius status is, like you say, general relativity. So this takes 10 years from 1905 to 1915. He wasn't only doing general relativity. He was working on other things. He wrote... He invented refrigerator. He did various interesting things. and he wasn't even the only
one working on the problem. There were other people who suggested relativistic
theories of gravity, but he really applied himself to it. And I think as your question suggests, the solution was not a
matter of turning a crank. It was something fundamentally creative. In his own telling of the story, his greatest moment, his happiest moment was when he realized that if the way that we would
modern, say, in modern terms, if you were in a rocket
ship accelerating at 1 g at one acceleration due to gravity, if the rocket ship were very quiet, you wouldn't be able
to know the difference between being in a rocket ship and being on the surface of the earth. Gravity is sort of not detectable or at least not distinguishable
from acceleration. So number one, that's a pretty clever thing to think. But number two, if you or I had that thought, we would've gone, "Huh? We're pretty clever." Heath reasons from there to say, okay, if gravity is not detectable, then it can't be like an ordinary force. The electromagnetic force is detectable. We can put charge particles around. Positively charged particles and negatively charged
particles respond differently to an electric field
or to a magnetic field. He realizes that what his
thought experiment showed, or at least suggested, is that gravity isn't like that. Everything responds in
the same way to gravity. How could that be the case? And then this other leap he makes is, oh, it's 'cause it's the
curvature of spacetime. It's a feature of spacetime. It's not a force on top of it. And the feature that it is, is curvature. And then finally, he says, "Okay. Clearly, I'm gonna need the
mathematical tools necessary to describe curvature. I don't know them, so I will learn them." And they didn't have MOOCs or
AI helpers back in those days. He had to sit down and
read the math papers, and he taught himself
differential geometry and invented general relativity. - What about the step of including time as just another dimension? So combining space and time. Is that a simple mathematical
leap as Minkowski suggested? - It's certainly not simple, actually. It's a profound insight. That's why I said I think we should give Minkowski more credit than we do. He's the one who really
put the finishing touches on special relativity. Again, many people had talked about how things change when you move
close to the speed of light, what Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism predict and so forth, what their symmetries are. So people like Lorentz, and
FitzGerald, and Lorentz, there's a story that goes there and in the usual telling Einstein sort of puts the capstone on it. He's the one who says all of
this makes much more sense. If there just is no ether, it is undetectable. We don't know how fast
everything is relative, thus, the name relativity. But he didn't take the actual final step, which was to realize that
the underlying structure that he had invented is best thought of as unifying space and time together. I honestly don't know what was going through Minkowski's mind
when he thought that. I'm not sure if he was
so mathematically adept that it was just clear to him, or he was really struggling it and he did trial and error for a while. I'm not sure. - I mean, do you, for him or Einstein, visualize the four dimensional space? Try to play with the idea of
time is just another dimension. - Oh yeah. All the time. I mean, we, of course, make
our lives easy by ignoring two of the dimensions of space. So instead of four dimensional spacetime, we just draw pictures of
one dimension of space, one dimension of time, the so-called spacetime diagram. I mean, maybe this is lurking underneath your question, but even the best physicists
will draw a vertical axis and a horizontal axis and we'll go space, time. But deep down that's wrong because you're sort of
preferring one direction of space and one direction of time. And it's really the whole
two dimensional thing that is spacetime. The more legitimate thing to draw on that picture are rays of light, are light cones from every point. There is a fixed direction
at which the speed of light would represent. And that is actually
inherent in the structure. The division into space and
time is something that's easy for us human beings. - What is the difference between space and time from the perspective
of general relativity? - It's the difference between X and Y when you draw axis on a piece of paper. - [Lex] So there's really no difference. - There's almost no difference. There's one difference
that is kind of important, which is the following. You have a curve in space. I'm gonna draw it horizontally 'cause that's usually what
we do in spacetime diagrams. If you have a curve in space, you've heard the motto before that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If you have a curve in time, which is, by the way, literally all of our lives. We all evolve in time. So you can start with
one event in spacetime and another event in spacetime. What Minkowski points out is that the time you measure
along your trajectory in the universe is precisely analogous to the distance you travel
on a curve through space. And by precisely, I mean, it is also true that the actual distance you travel through depends on your path. You can go a straight line, shortest distance and
curvy line would be longer. The time you measure in spacetime, the literal time that takes off on your clock
also depends on your path, but it depends on it the other way. So that the longest time between two points is a straight line. And if you zig back
and forth in spacetime, you take less and less time to go from point A to point B. - How do we make sense of that? The difference between
the observed reality and the objective reality
are underneath it, or is objective reality a silly notion given general relativity? - I'm a huge believer
in objective reality. I think that objective
reality, objectivity- - [Lex] You're a fan. - Is real. - [Lex] Yeah. - But I do think that people kind of are a little overly
casual about the relationship between what we observe
and objective reality in the following sense. Of course, in order to explain the world, our starting point and our ending point is our observations, our experimental input, the phenomena we experience and see around us in the world. But in between, there's a theory, there's a mathematical formalization of our ideas about what is going on. And if a theory fits the
data and is very simple and makes sense in its own terms, then we say that the theory is right. And that means that we
should attribute some reality to the entities that play an
important role in that theory, at least provisionally until we can come up with a
better theory down the road. - I think a nice way
to test the difference between objective reality and the observed reality
is what happens at the edge of the horizon of a black hole. So, technically, as you
get closer to that horizon, time stands still, - Yes and no. It depends on exactly
how careful we are being. So here is a bunch of
things I think are correct. If you imagine there is
a black hole spacetime, so like the whole solution,
Einstein's equation, and you treat you and me as
what we call test particles. So we don't have any
gravitational fields ourselves. We just move around in
the gravitational field. And that's obviously an approximation. Okay? But let's imagine that. And you stand outside the
black hole and I fall in. And as I'm falling in, I'm waving to you 'cause I'm going into the black hole, you will see me move more and more slowly. And also the light for me is redshift. So I kind of look embarrassed 'cause I'm falling into a black hole. And there is a limit. There's a last moment that
light will be emitted from me from your perspective forever. Okay? Now, you don't literally see it because I'm emitting photons
more and more slowly, right? Because from your point of view. So it's not like I'm equally bright. I basically fade from
view in that picture. Okay? So that's one approximation. The other approximation is I
do have a gravitational field of my own. And therefore as I
approach the black hole, the black hole doesn't just sit there and let me pass through. It kind of moves out to eat me up because its net energy mass
is going to be mine plus its. But roughly speaking, yes, I think so. I don't like to go to
the dramatic extremes because that's where the
approximations break down. But if you see something
falling into a black hole, you see it's clock ticking
more and more slowly. - How do we know it fell in? - We don't. I mean, how would we? Because it's always possible that right at the last minute, it had a change of heart and starts accelerating away. If you don't see it pass in, you don't know. And let's point out that
as smart as Einstein was, he never figured out black holes. And he could have. It's kind of embarrassing. It took decades for people
thinking about general relativity to understand that there are
such things as black holes because, basically, Einstein comes up with general relativity in 1915. Two years later, Schwarzschild, Karl Schwarzschild
derives the solution to Einstein's equation that
represents a black hole, the Schwarzschild solution. No one recognized it for what
it was until the fifties, David Finkelstein and other people. And that's just one of these examples of physicists not being as
clever as they should have been. - Well, that's the singularity, that's the kind of the edge
of the theory, the limit. So it's understandable that it's difficult to imagine the limit of things. - It is absolutely hard to imagine. And a black hole is very different in many ways from what we're used to. I mean, the real reason,
of course, is that between 1915 and 1955, there's a bunch of other things that are really interesting
going on in physics, all of particle physics
and quantum field theory. So many of the greatest
minds were focused on that. But still, if the universe
hands you a solution to general relativity in
terms of curve spacetime, and it's kind of mysterious
certain features of it, I would put some effort in
trying to figure it out. - So how does a black hole work? Put yourself in the shoes of Einstein and take general relativity to its natural conclusion
about these massive things. - It's best to think of a
black hole as not an object so much as a region of spacetime. Okay? It's a region with the property, at least in classical general relativity, quantum mechanics makes everything harder. But let's imagine we're being
classical for the moment. It's a region of spacetime
with the property that if you enter, you can't leave. Literally, the equivalent of escaping a black hole
would be moving faster than the speed of light. They're both precisely equally difficult. You would have to move faster
than the speed of light to escape from the black hole. So once you're in, that's fine. In principle, you don't even notice when you cross the event horizon, as we call it, the event horizon is
that point of no return, where once you're inside, you can't leave. But meanwhile, the spacetime
is sort of collapsing around you to ultimately a
singularity in your future, which means that the gravitational
forces are so strong, they tear your body apart and you will die in a
finite amount of time. The time it takes, if the black hole is
about the mass of the sun to go from the event
horizon to the singularity, takes about 1000000th of a second. - And what happens to you if
you fall into the black hole? If we think of an object as information, that information gets destroyed. - Well, you've raised a
crucially difficult point. So that's why I keep
needing to distinguish between black holes according to Einstein's theory general relativity, which is book one of
"Spacetime and Geometry," which is perfectly classical. And then come the 1970s, we start asking about quantum mechanics and what happens in quantum mechanics. According to classical general relativity, the information that makes up you, when you fall into the black hole is lost to the outside world. It's there, it's inside the black hole, but we can't get it anymore. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking comes along and points out that black holes radiate. They give off photons and other particles to
the universe around them. And as they radiate, they lose mass and eventually, they evaporate, they disappear. So once that happens, I can no longer say the
information about you or a book that I threw in a black hole or whatever is still there. It's hidden behind the black hole 'cause the black hole has gone away. So either that information
is destroyed, like you said, or it is somehow
transferred to the radiation that is coming out to
the Hawking radiation. The large majority of people
who think about this believe that the information is somehow
transferred to the radiation and information is conserved. That is a feature both of
general relativity by itself and of quantum mechanics by itself. So when you put them together, that should still be a feature. We don't know that for sure. There are people who have doubted it, including Stephen Hawking for a long time. But that's what most people think. And so what we're trying
to do now in a topic which has generated many, many hundreds of papers called the black
hole information loss puzzle, is figure out how to get
the information from you or the book into the radiation that is escaping the black hole. - Is there any way to observe
Hawking radiation to a degree where you can start gaining insight? Or is this all just in the
space of theory right now? - Right now, we are nowhere close to observing Hawking radiation. Here's the sad fact. The larger the black hole is, the lower its temperature is. So a small black hole, like a microscopically small black hole might be very visible. It's given off light. But something like the black hole, the center of our galaxy, 3 million times the mass of the sun or something like that, Sagittarius, a star, that is so cold and low temperature that it's radiation will
never be observable. Black holes are hard to make. We don't have any nearby. The ones we have out there in the universe are very, very faint. So there's no immediate hope for detecting Hawking radiation. - Allegedly, we don't have any nearby. - As far as we know, we don't have any nearby. - Could tiny ones be hard to detect at the edges of
the solar system maybe? - So you don't want them to be too tiny or they're exploding, or they're very bright and then they'll be visible. But there's an absolutely a regime where black holes are large
enough not to be visible because the larger ones are fainter, not giving off radiation, but small enough to not been detected through their gravitational effect. Yeah. - Psychologically, just emotionally, how do you feel about black holes? They scare you. - I love them. I love black holes. But the universe weirdly makes it hard to make a black hole because you really need to
squeeze an enormous amount of matter energy into a very,
very small region of space. So we know how to make
stellar black holes, a super massive star can
collapse to make a black hole. We know we also have these
super massive black holes, the center of a galaxies. We're a little unclear
where they came from. I mean, maybe stellar black holes that got together and combined. But that's one of the exciting things about new data from the
James Webb Space Telescope is that quite large black holes seem to exist relatively early in
the history of the universe. So it was already difficult to figure out where they came from. Now, it's an even tougher puzzle. - So these super massive
black holes are formed somewhere early on in the universe. I mean, that's a feature, not a bug, right? That we don't have too many of them. Otherwise, we wouldn't
have the time or the space to form the little pockets of complexity that we'll call humans. - I think that's fair. Yeah. It's always interesting
when something is difficult, but happens anyway. I mean, the probability of making a black hole
could have been zero; it could have been one. But it's this interesting
number in between, which is kind of fun. - Are there more intelligent
alien civilization than there are super massive black holes? - Yeah, I have no idea. But I think your intuition is right, that it would've been easy for there to be lots of civilizations and then we would've noticed
them already and we haven't. So, absolutely, the simplest explanation for why we haven't is
that they're not there. - Yeah. I just think it's so easy
to make them, though. I understand that's the
simplest explanation. but also- - How easy is it to make life or you carry other life
or multicellular life? - It seems like life finds a way. Intelligent alien civilizations, sure, maybe there is
somewhere along that chain, a really, really hard leap. But once you start life, once you get the origin of life, it seems like life just
finds a way everywhere in every condition. It just figures it out. - I mean, I get it. I get exactly what you're thinking, I think is a perfectly
reasonable attitude to have before you confront the data. I would not have expected
earth to be special in any way. I would've expected there to be plenty of very noticeable extraterrestrial
civilizations out there. But even if life finds a way, even if we buy everything you say, how long does it take
for life to find a way? What if it typically takes
a hundred billion years? Then we'd be alone. - So it's a time thing. So to you, really, most likely, there's no alien
civilizations out there. I can't see it. I believe there's a ton of them. And there's another explanation
why we can't see them. - I don't believe that very strongly. Look, I'm not gonna
place a lot of bets here. I'm both pretty up in
the air about whether or not life itself is all over the place. It's possible. When we visit other worlds, other solar systems, there's very tiny
microscopic life ubiquitous, but none of it has
reached some complex form. It's also possible just there isn't any. It's also possible that there
are intelligent civilizations that have better things to
do than knock on our doors. So I think we should be very humble about these things we
know so little about. - And it's also possible
there's a great filter where there's something fundamental about once the civilization develops complex enough technology, that technology is more
statistically likely to destroy everybody versus
to continue being creative. - That is absolutely possible. I'm actually putting less
credence on that one just because you need it to
happen every single time. If even one... I mean, this goes back to
John von Neumann pointed out that you don't need to send
the aliens around the galaxy. You can build self-reproducing probes and send them around the galaxy. And you might think, well,
the galaxy's very big. It's really not. It's some tens of thousands
of light years across and billions of years old. So you don't need to move
at a high fraction the speed of light to fill the galaxy. - So if you were an
intelligent alien civilization, the dictator of one, you would just send out a lot of probes, self-replicating probes- - A hundred percent. - And just spread out. - Yes. And what you should do? So if you want the optimistic spin, here's the optimistic spin. People looking for intelligent
life elsewhere often tune in with their radio telescopes, right? At least we did before our
cebo was decommissioned. That's not a very promising way to find intelligent life elsewhere. Because why in the world would a super intelligent alien
civilization waste all of its energy by beaming
it in random directions into the sky? For one thing, it just passes you by. So if we are here on earth, we've only been listening to radio waves for a hundred or a couple
hundred years, okay? So if intelligent alien
civilization exists for a billion years, they have to pinpoint
exactly the right time to send us this signal. It is much, much more
efficient to send probes and to park to go to
the other solar systems, just sit there and wait for
an intelligent civilization to arise in that solar system. This is kind of the 2001
monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find sort of quiescent alien artifact in
our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from
an intelligence civilization. - So you're a sucker for in-person conversations versus remote. - I just want to integrate over time. A probe can just sit there and wait, whereas a radio wave goes right by you. - Hmm. How hard is it for an alien civilization, again you have the dictator of one, to figure out a probe that is most likely to
find a common language with whatever it finds? - Couldn't I be like
the elected leader of- - Elected leader, democratic leader, elected leader of a democratic
alien civilization, yes. - I think we would figure out that language thing pretty quickly. I mean, maybe not as quickly as we do when different
human tribes find each other because, obviously, there's
a lot of commonalities in humanity. But there is logic in math and there is the physical world. You can point to a rock and go rock. I don't think it would take that long. I know that "Arrival" movie based on a Ted Chiang story
suggested that the way that aliens communicate is going to be fundamentally different, but also they had recognition and other things I don't believe in. So I think that if we
actually find aliens, that will not be our long-term problem. - One of the places you're
affiliated with is Santa Fe, and they approach the question of complexity in many different ways and ask the question
in many different ways of what is life thinking broadly. So to you would be able to find it, you'll think you show up, a probe shows up to a planet, we'll see a thing and be like, "Yeah,
that's a living thing." - Well, again, if it's intelligent and technologically advanced, the more short-term question of if we get some spectroscopic
data from an exoplanet, so we know a little bit about
what is in its atmosphere, how can we judge whether or not that atmosphere
is giving us a signature of life existing? That's a very hard question
the people are debating about. I mean, one very simple-minded, but perhaps interesting
approach is to say, small molecules don't tell you anything because even if life could make them, something else could also make them. But long molecules, that's the kind of thing
that life would produce. - So, signs of complexity. - [Sean] Mm-hmm. - I don't know. I just have this nervous feeling that we won't be able to detect. We'll show up to a planet. They have a bunch of liquid on it. We dip, we take a swim in the liquid, and we won't be able to
see the intelligence in it. But whether that intelligence looks like something like ants, or we'll see movement
perhaps, strange movement, but we won't be able to
see the intelligence in it or communicate with it. I guess if we have nearly
infinite amount of time to play with different ideas, we might be able to. - I mean, I'm in favor
of this kind of humility, this intellectual humility
that we won't know because we should be
prepared for surprises. But I do always keep
coming back to the idea that we all live in the
same physical universe. Well, let's put it this way. The development of our intelligence has
certainly been connected to our ability to manipulate
the physical world around us. And so I would guess without a hundred percent
credence by any means, but my guess would be
that any advanced kind of life would also have that capability. Both dolphins and octopuses are potential
counter examples to that. But I think in the details, there would be enough similarities that we would recognize it. - I don't know how we got on this topic, but I think it was from
super massive black holes. So if we return to black holes and talk about the holographic
principle more broadly. You have a recent paper on the topic. You've been thinking about the topic in terms of rigorous research perspective and just as a popular book writer. So what is the holographic principle? - Well, it goes back to this question that we were talking
about with the information and how it gets out. In quantum mechanics, certainly, arguably, even before
quantum mechanics comes along in classical statistical mechanics, there's a relationship between
information and entropy. Entropy is my favorite
thing to talk about, that I've written books about and we'll continue to write books about. So Hawking tells us that
black holes have entropy and it's a finite amount of entropy. It's not an infinite amount. But the belief is, and now we're already
getting quite speculative, the belief is that the entropy of a black hole is the
largest amount of entropy that you can have in
a region of spacetime. It's sort of the most densely
packed that entropy can be. And what that means is there's
sort of a maximum amount of information that you can
fit into that region of space and you call it a black hole. And interestingly, you
might expect if I have a box and I'm gonna put information in it. and I don't tell you how I'm
gonna put the information in, but I ask, how does the information
I can put in scale with the size of the box? You might think, well, it
goes as the volume of the box because the information
takes up some volume and I can only fit in a certain amount. And that is what you might
guess for the black hole, but it's not what the answer is. The answer is that the maximum information as reflected in the black hole
entropy scales as the area of the black holes event horizon, not the volume inside. So people thought about that in both deep and superficial ways for a long time. And they proposed what we now call the
holographic principle, that the way that spacetime and quantum gravity convey information or hold information is not different bits or qubits for quantum information at every point in spacetime. It is something holographic, which means it's sort of
embedded in or located in, or can be thought of as pertaining to, or one dimension less
of the three dimensions of space that we live in. So in the case of the black hole, the event horizon is
two dimensional embedded in a three dimensional universe. And the holographic
principle would say all of the information contained in the black hole can
be thought of as living on the event horizon rather than in the
interior of the black hole. I need to say one more thing about that, which is that this was an idea. What the idea I just told you was the original holographic
principle put forward by people like Gerard't
Hooft and Leonard Susskind, the super famous physicist. Leonard Susskind was on my
podcast and gave a great talk. He's very, very good at
explaining these things. - Mindscape Podcast. - Mindset Podcast. - Everyone should listen my podcast. - [Sean] That's right, yes. - [Lex] And you don't
just have physicists on . - [Sean] I don't. - [Lex] I love Mindscape. - [Sean] Oh, thank you very much. - [Lex] Curiosity-driven. - [Sean] Yeah, ideas- - Exploration of ideas.
- Ideas from smart people. Yeah. But anyway, what I was
trying to get at was Susskind and also at Hooft, we're a little vague. They were a little hand
wavy about holography and what it meant, where holography, the idea that information
is sort of encoded on a boundary really came into its own was with Juan Maldacena in the 1990s and the AdS/CFT correspondence, which we don't have to get
into that into any detail, but it's a whole full blown theory of... It's two different theories. One theory N dimensions of
spacetime without gravity. And another theory in N+1 dimensions of spacetime with gravity. And the idea is that this N dimensional
theory is casting a hologram into the N+1 dimensional universe to make it look like it has gravity. And that's holography with a vengeance. That's an enormous source of interest for theoretical physicists these days. - How should we picture
what impact that has? The fact that you can
store all the information, you could think of as all the information that goes into a black hole can be stored at the event horizon. - Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. One of the things that quantum field theory
indirectly suggests is that there's not that
much information in you and me compared to the volume
of spacetime we take up. As far as quantum field
theory is concerned, you and I are mostly empty space. And so we are not
information-dense, right? The density of information in us or in a book or a CD or whatever, computer RAM is indeed encoded by volume. There's different bits located
different points in space, but that density of
information is super duper low. Just like the speed of light or just like the big bang, for the information in a black hole, we are far away in our everyday
experience from the regime where these questions become relevant. So it's very far away from our intuition. We don't really know how to
think about these things. We can do the math, but we don't feel it in our bones. - So you can just write off
that weird stuff happens in a black hole.
- Well, we'd like to do better, but we're trying. I mean, that's why we have
a information loss puzzle because we haven't completely solved it. So here, just one thing to keep in mind. Once spacetime becomes flexible, which it does according
to general relativity and you have quantum mechanics which has fluctuations
in virtual particles and things like that, the very idea of a location in spacetime becomes a little bit fuzzy 'cause it's flexible and quantum mechanic says
you can't even pin it down. So information can propagate in ways that you might not have expected. And that's easy to say and it's true, but we haven't yet come up with the right way to talk about it that is perfectly rigorous. - But it's crazy how dense with
information a black hole is, and then plus like
quantum mechanics starts to come into play. So you almost want to romanticize the kind of interesting computation type things that are going on inside the black hole. - You do, you do. I'll point out one other thing. It's information-dense, but it's also very, very high entropy. So a black hole is kind of like a very, very, very
specific random number. It takes a lot of digits to specify it, but the digits don't tell you anything. They don't give you
anything useful to work on. So it takes a lot of information, but it's not of a form that
we can learn a lot from. - But hypothetically, I guess as you mentioned, the information might be preserved, the information that
goes into a black hole, it doesn't get destroyed. So what does that mean when the entropy is really high? - Well, the black hole... I said that the black hole
is the highest density of information, but it's not the highest
amount of information because the black hole can evaporate. And when it evaporates and people have done
the equations for this, when it evaporates, the entropy that it turns
into is actually higher than the entropy of the black hole was, which is good because entropy is supposed to go up, but it's much more dilute. It's spread across a
huge volume of spacetime. So in principle, all that you made the black hole out of, the information that it took
is still there, we think, in that information, but it's scattered to the four winds. - We just talked about the
event horizon of black hole. What's on the inside? What's at the center of it? - No one's been there. - [Lex] It came back to tell. - Again, this is a theoretical prediction, But I'll say one super crucial feature of the black holes that we know and love, that the kind that short
shield first invented, there's a singularity, but it's not at the
middle of the black hole. Remember space and time or parts of one unified spacetime. The location of the singularity in the black hole is
not the middle of space, but our future. It is a moment of time. It is like a Big Crunch. The Big Bang was an
expansion from a singularity in the past. Big Crunch probably doesn't exist, but if it did, it would be a collapse to a
singularity in the future. That's what the interiors
of black holes are like. You can be fine in the interior, but things are becoming
more and more crowded. Spacetime is becoming more and more warped and eventually you hit a limit and that's the singularity in your future. - I wonder what time is like
on the inside of a black hole. - Time always ticks by
at one second per second. That's all it can ever do. Time can tick by differently
for different people. And so you have things
like the twin paradox where two people initially
are the same age, one goes off, the speed of light and comes back, now they're not. You can even work out
that the one who goes out and comes back will be younger because they did not take
the shortest distance path. But locally, as far as you and your wristwatch are concerned, time is not funny. Your neurological signals in your brain, and your heartbeat, and your wristwatch, whatever's happening to them is happening to all of them at the same time. So time always seems to be
ticking along at the same rate. - Well, if you fall into a black hole and then I'm an observer just watching it, and then you come out once it evaporates a million years later, I guess you'd be exactly the same age. Have you aged at all? - You would be converted into photons. You would not be you anymore. - Right. So it's not at all possible that information is preserved
exactly as it went in. - It depends on what
you mean by preserved. It's there in the microscopic
configuration of the universe. It's exactly as if I took a regular book, made a paper and I burned it. The laws of physics say that all the information
in the book is still there in the heat, and light, and ashes. You're never going to get it. It's a matter of practice, but in principle it's still there. - But what about the age of things from the observer perspective from outside the black hole? - From outside the black
hole doesn't matter because they're inside the black hole. - No. Okay, there's no way to
escape the black hole except to let it evaporate, to let it evaporate. - But also, by the way, just in relativity, special relativity, forget about general relativity, it's enormously tempting to say, okay, here's what's happening to me right now. I wanna know what's
happening far away right now. The whole point of relativity is to say there's no such thing as right now when you're far away. And that is doubly true for
what's inside a black hole. So you're tempted to say, well, how fast is their clock ticking? Or how old are they now? Not allowed to say that
according to relativity. - 'Cause space and time
is treated the same and so it doesn't even make sense. What happens to Tom in
the holographic principle? - As far as we know, nothing dramatic happens. We're not anywhere
close to being confident that we know what's going on here yet. So there are good unanswered questions about whether time is fundamental, whether time is emergent, whether it has something to
do with quantum entanglement, whether time really exists at all, different theories, different proponents of different things. But there's nothing
specifically about holography that would make us change
our opinions about time, whatever they happen to be. - But holography is fundamentally about... It's a question of space. - It really is, yeah. - Okay. So time is just like a- - Time just goes along for
the ride as far as we know. Yeah. - So all the questions about time is just almost
like separate questions, whether it's emergent and
all that kind of stuff. - Yeah, I mean that might be a reflection of our ignorance right now, but yes. - If we figure out a lot millions of years from now about black holes, how surprised would you be? If they traveled back in time and told you everything you
wanna know about black holes, how much do you think
there is still to know and how mind blowing would it be? - Mm. It does depend on what they would say. I think that there are colleagues of mine who think that we're pretty
close to figuring out how information gets out of black holes, how to quantize gravity, things like that. I'm more skeptical that
we are pretty close. I think that there's room for
a bunch of surprises to come. So in that sense, I suspect I would be surprised. The biggest and most interesting
surprise to me would be if quantum mechanics itself
were somehow superseded by something better. As far as I know, there's no empirical
evidence-based reason to think that quantum mechanics is not
a hundred percent correct, but it might not be. That's always possible. And there are again
respectable friends of mine who speculate about it. That's the first thing I'd wanna know. - Oh, so like the black hole would be the most clear illustration- - [Sean] Yeah, that's
where it would show up. - If there's something
it would show up there. - So, I mean, maybe the point is that black holes are
mysterious for various reasons. So, yeah, if our best theory
of the universe is wrong, that might help explain why. - But do you think it's possible we'll find something interesting, like black holes sometimes
create new universes or black holes are a kind
of portal through spacetime to another place or something like this? And then our whole conception of what is the fabric of
spacetime changes completely 'cause black holes, it's like Swiss cheese type of situation. - Yeah, that would be
less surprising to me 'cause I've already
written papers about that. We don't have, again,
strong reason to think that the interior of black
hole leads to another universe. But it is possible and it's also very possible that that's true for some black
holes and not others. This is stuff we don't know. It's easy to ask questions
we don't know the answer to. The problem is, the questions that are easy to ask that we don't know the answer to, are super hard to answer. - Because these objects are very difficult to test and to explore for us. - The regimes are just very far away. So either literally far away in space, but also in energy, or
mass, or time or whatever. - You've published a paper
on the holographic principle or that involves the
holographic principle, but can you explain the details of that? - Yeah, I'm always interested in, since my first published paper, taking these wild speculative ideas and trying to test them against data. And the problem is, when you're dealing with
wild speculative ideas, they're usually not well-defined enough to make a prediction. I know it's gonna happen in some cases. I don't know what's gonna
happen in other cases. So we did the following thing. As I've already mentioned, the holographic principle, which is meant to reflect
the information contained in black holes seems to be
telling us that information. There's less information, less stuff that can go on
than you might naively expect. So let's upgrade, naively expect to predict
using quantum field theory. Quantum field theory is our best theory of fundamental physics right now. Unlike this holographic black hole stuff, quantum field theory is entirely local. In every point of space, something can go on. And then you add up all the
different points in space. Okay, not holographic at all. So there's a mismatch
between the expectation for what is happening even in empty space in
quantum field theory versus what the holographic
principle would predict. How do you reconcile these two things? So there's one way of doing it that had been suggested pre previously, which is to say that in the quantum field
theory way of talking, it implies there's a
whole bunch more states, a whole bunch more ways
the system could be than there really are. I'll do a little bit of math just 'cause there might be some
people in the audience who like the math. If I draw two axes on a
two dimensional geometry, like the surface of the table, you know that the whole point of it being two dimensional
is I can draw two vectors that are perpendicular to each other. I can't draw three vectors that are all perpendicular to each other. They need to overlap a little bit. That's true for any numbers of dimensions. But I can ask, okay, how much do they have to overlap? If I try to put more
vectors into a vector space, then the dimensionality
of the vector space, can I make them almost
perpendicular to each other? And the mathematical answer is, as the number of dimensions
gets very, very large, you can fit a huge extra
number of vectors in that are almost
perpendicular to each other. So in this case, what we're suggesting is, the number of things that
can happen in a region of space is correctly
described by holography. It is somewhat over counted
by quantum field theory, but that's because the quantum
field theory states are not exactly perpendicular to each other. I should have mentioned
that in quantum mechanics, states are given by vectors in some huge dimensional vector space, very, very, very, very large
dimensional vector space. So maybe the quantum
field theory states are not quite perpendicular to each other. If that is true, that's a speculation already. But if that's true, how would you know? What is the experimental deviation? And it would've been
completely respectable if we had gone through
and made some guesses and found that there is no noticeable experimental difference because, again, these things are in regimes very, very far away. We stuck our necks out. We made some very, very specific guesses as to how this weird overlap of states would show up
in the equations of motion for particles like neutrinos. And then we made predictions on how the neutrinos
would behave on the basis of those wild guesses. And then we compared them with data. And what we found is, we're pretty close, but haven't yet reached the detectability of the effect that we are predicting. In other words, well, basically, one way of
saying what we predict is if a neutrino, and there's reasons why it's neutrinos, we can go into if you want, but it's not that interesting. If a neutrino comes to us
from across the universe, from some galaxy very, very far away, there is a probability as it's traveling that it will dissolve into other neutrinos because they're not really
perpendicular to each other as vectors as they would ordinarily be in quantum field theory. And that means that if you look at neutrinos
coming from far enough away with high enough energies, they should disappear. Like if you see a whole
bunch of nearby neutrinos, but then further away, you should see fewer. And there is an experiment called IceCube, which is this amazing
testament to the ingenuity of human beings where
they go to Antarctica. And they drill holes and they put photo detectors on a string, a mile deep in these holes. And they basically use
all of the ice in a cube. I don't know whether it's a a mile or not, but it's like a kilometer
or something like that, some big region. That much ice is their detector. And they're looking for
flashes when a cosmic ray or a neutrino or whatever
hits ice molecule, water molecule in the ice. - Makes it with flashes in the ice. They're looking for- - They're looking for flashes in the ice. - But isn't there some crazy... I mean, what does the
detector of that look like? - It's a bunch of strings, many, many, many strings with
360 degree photo detectors. - Yeah. - And you'll- - That's really cool. - It's extremely cool. And they've done amazing work. And they find neutrinos. - They're looking for neutrinos. - Yeah, so the whole point is most cosmic rays are protons because why? Because protons exist and they're massive enough that you can accelerate them to very high energies. So high energy cosmic
rays tend to be protons. They also tend to hit
the earth's atmosphere and decay into other particles. So neutrinos, on the other hand, punch right through, at least usually to a great extent. So not just Antarctica, but the whole earth. Occasionally, a neutrino will interact with a particle here on earth and his neutrino is going
through your body all the time from the sun, from the
universe, et cetera. And so if you're patient enough and you have a big enough part
of the Antarctic ice sheet to look at, the nice thing about
ice is it's transparent. So you've built yourself, nature has built you a neutrino detector. IceCube does. - So why ice? So is it just because of the low noise and you get to watch this thing and it's- - It's much more dense than air, but it's transparent. - So yeah, much more dense. So higher probability and then it's transparency and then it's also in
the middle of nowhere so you can... Humans are great.
- No, that's all you need. There's not that much ice, right? - Yeah. - So humans take the best.
- There's more ice in Arctic than anywhere else. So anyway, you can go and you can get a plot from
the IceCube experiment. How many neutrinos there
are that they've detected with very high energies? And we predict in our weird
little holographic guessing game that there should be a cutoff. You should see neutrinos as you get to higher and higher energies and then they should disappear. If you look at the data, their data gives out
exactly where our cutoff is. That doesn't mean that
our cutoff is right. It means they lose the
ability to do the experiment exactly where we predict
the cutoff should be. - Oh boy, okay. But why is there a limit? - Oh, just because there are fewer, fewer high energy neutrinos. So there's a spectrum and it goes down, but that what we're
plotting here is got number of neutrinos versus energy. It's fading away and they just get very, very few. - And you need the high energy neutrinos for your prediction. - Our effect is a little bit
bigger for higher energies. Yeah. - Got it. And that effect has to do with this almost perpendicular thing. - And let me just mention
the name of Oliver Friedrich, who was a postdoc who led this. He deserves the credit for doing this. I was a co-author and a collaborator. I did some work, but he really gets the lion's share. - Thank you, Oliver. Thank you for pushing
this wild science forward. Just to speak to the meta process of it. How do you approach
asking these big questions and trying to formulate as a paper, as an experiment to that
could make a prediction, all that kind of stuff? What's your process? - There's a very interesting things that happens once you're
a theoretical physicist. Once you become trained, you're a graduate student, you've written some papers and whatever, suddenly you are the world's expert in a really infinitesimally
tiny area of knowledge and you know not that
much about other areas. There's an overwhelming temptation to just drill deep. Just keep doing basically the
thing that you started doing. But maybe that thing
you started doing is not the most interesting thing to the world or to you or whatever. So you need to separately
develop the capability of stepping back and going, okay, now that I can write papers in that area, now that I'm sort of trained enough in the general procedure, what is the best match between
my interests, my abilities, and what is actually interesting? And honestly, I've not
been very good at that over my career. My process traditionally was I was working in this general area of
particle physics, field theory, general relativity, cosmology. And I would sort of try to take things other
people were talking about and ask myself whether or
not it really fit together. So I guess I have three
papers that I've ever written that have done super well in terms of getting cited
and things like that. One was my first ever paper that I get very little credit for. That was my advisor and his collaborator set that up. The other two were basically my idea,. One was right after we discovered that the universe was accelerating. So in 1998, observation showed that not
only is the universe expanding, but it's expanding faster and faster. So that's attributed to either Einstein's cosmological constant or some more complicated
form of dark energy, some mysterious thing
that fills the universe. And people were throwing around ideas about this dark energy stuff, what could it be and so forth. Most of the people throwing around these ideas were cosmologists. They work on cosmology. They think about the universe all at once. Since I like to talk to
people in different areas, I was sort of more familiar than average with what a respectable working
particle physicist would think about these things. And what I immediately thought was you guys are throwing
around these theories. These theories are wildly unnatural. They're super finely tuned. Like any particle physicist
would just be embarrassed to be talking about this. But rather than just scoffing at them, I sat down and asked myself, okay, is there a respectable version? Is there a way to keep the
particle physicist happy, but also make the universe accelerate? And I realized that there
is some very specific set of models that is relatively natural. And guess what? You can make a new experimental prediction on the basis of those. And so I did that. People were very happy about that. - What was the thing that
would make physicists happy that would make sense
of this fragile thing that the people call dark energy? - So the fact that dark energy
pervades the whole universe and is slowly changing, that should immediately
set off alarm bells because particle physics
is a story of length scales and time scales that are
generally, guess what, small. Particles are small. They vibrate quickly. And you're telling me
now I have a new field and its typical rate of change is once every billion years. Like that's just not natural. And indeed, you can formalize that and say, look, even if
you wrote down a particle that evolved slowly
over billions of years, if you let it interact with
other particles at all, that would make it move faster as dynamics would be faster as mass would be higher,
et cetera, et cetera. So there's a whole story. Things need to be robust, and they all talk to each
other in quantum field theory. So how do you stop that from happening? And the answer is symmetry. You can impose a symmetry that protects your new field from talking to any other fields. Okay? And this is good for two reasons. Number one, it can keep the dynamics slow. You can't tell me why it's slow. You just made that up. But at least it can
protect it from speeding up because it's not talking
to any other particles. And the other is, it makes it harder to detect. Naively, experiments
looking for fifth forces or time changes of fundamental
constants of nature, like the charge of the electron, these experiments should have been able to detect these dark energy fields. And I was able to propose a way
to stop that from happening. - The detection. - The detection, yeah. Because a symmetry could stop it from interacting with
all these other fields and therefore it makes
it harder to detect. And just by luck, I realized, 'cause it was actually based
on my first ever paper, there's one loophole. If you impose these symmetries, so you protect the dark energy field from interacting with any other fields, there's one interaction that is still allowed
that you can't rule out. And it is a very specific interaction between your dark energy
field and photons, which are very common, and it has the following effect. As a photon travels
through the dark energy, the photon has a polarization
up, down, left, right, whatever it happens to be. And as it travels through the dark energy, that photon will rotate its polarization. This is called birefringence. And you can kind of run the numbers and say you can't make a
very precise prediction because we're just making up this model. But if you want to roughly fit the data, you can predict how much polarization, rotation there should be, a couple of degrees. Okay? Not that much. So that's very hard to detect. People have been trying to do it. Right now, literally, we are on the edge of either
being able to detect it or rule it out using the
cosmic microwave background. And there is just truth in advertising. There is a claim on the market that it's been detected that it's there. It's not very statistically significant. If I were to bet, I think it would probably go away. It's very hard thing to observe. But maybe as you get
better and better data, cleaner and cleaner analysis, it will persist and we will have directly
detected the dark energy. - So if we just take this
tangent of dark energy, people will sometimes bring up dark energy and dark matter as an example
why physicists have lost it, lost their mind. We're just going to say
that there's this field that permeates everything. It's unlike any other
field and it's invisible, and it helps us work out some of the math. How do you respond to that? Those kinds of suggestions. - Well, two ways. One way is those people would've had to say the same thing when we
discovered the planet Neptune because it's exactly analogous where we have a very good theory. In that case, Newtonian gravity in the solar system. We made predictions. The predictions were
slightly off for the motion of the outer planets. You found that you could
explain that motion by positing something very simple, one more planet in a very,
very particular place. And you went and looked for it and there it was. That was the first successful example of finding dark matter in the universe. - It's a matter. though we can't see. - A dune was dark. - Yeah. - There's a difference between
dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter, as far as
we are hypothesizing it, is a particle of some sort. It's just a particle that
interacts with us very weekly. So we know how much of it there is. We know more or less where it is. We know some of its properties. We don't know specifically what it is. It's not anything
fundamentally mysterious. It's a particle. Dark energy is a different story. So dark energy is, indeed,
uniformly spread throughout space and has this very weird
property that it doesn't seem to evolve as far as we can tell. It's the same amount of energy in every cubic centimeter of space from moment to moment in time. That's why far and away, the leading candidate for dark energy is Einstein's
cosmological constant. The cosmological constant
is strictly constant, a hundred percent constant. The data say it had better
be 98% constant or better. So a hundred percent
constant works, right? And it's also very robust. It's just there. It's not doing anything. It doesn't interact with
any other particles. It makes perfect sense. Probably the dark energy is
the cosmological constant. The dark matter, super
important to emphasize here. it was hypothesized at first in the seventies and eighties, mostly to explain the
rotation of galaxies. Today, the evidence for dark
matter is both much better than it was in the 1980s
and from different sources. It is mostly from observations of the cosmic background radiation or of large scale structure. So we have multiple
independent lines of evidence, also gravitational lensing
and things like that. Many, many pieces of evidence that say that dark matter is there and also that say that the effects of dark matter are different
than if we modified gravity. So that was my first
answer to your question is, dark matter we have a lot of evidence for. But the other one is, of course, we would love it if it
weren't dark matter. Our vested interest is a
hundred percent aligned with it being something more cool and interesting than dark matter because dark matter's just a particle. That's the most boring thing in the world. - And it's non-uniformly
distributed to space, dark matter. - Absolutely. Yeah. You can even see maps of it that we've constructed
from gravitational lensing. - So verifiable sort of clumps
of dark matter in the galaxy that explains stuff. - Bigger than the galaxy, sadly. We think that in the galaxy, dark matter is lumpy, but it's weaker. It's effects are weaker. But of the scale of large scale structure and clusters of galaxies
and things like that, yes, we can show you
where the dark matter is. - Could there be a super cool
explanation for dark matter that would be interesting as opposed to just another particle that
that sits there and clumps? - The super cool explanation
would be modifying gravity rather than inventing a new particle. Sadly, that doesn't really work. We've tried, I've tried. That's my third paper
that was very successful. I tried to unify dark matter and dark energy together. That was my idea. That was my aspiration, not even idea. I tried to do it. It failed even before we wrote the paper. I realized that my idea did not help. It helps... It could possibly explain
away the dark energy, but it would not explain
away the dark matter. And so I thought it was not
that interesting, actually. And then two different
collaborators of mine said, "Has anyone thought of this idea?" Like they thought of exactly the same idea completely independently of me. I said, "Well, if three
different people found the same idea, maybe it is interesting," and so we wrote the paper And yeah, it was very interesting. People are very interested in it. - Can you describe this
paper a little bit? It's fascinating how much of a thing there is dark
energy and dark matter and we don't quite understand it. So what was your dive into
exploring how to unify the two? - So here is what we know about
dark matter and dark energy. They become important in regimes where gravity is very, very, very weak. That's kind of the opposite from what you would expect if you actually were modifying gravity. There's a rule of thumb in
quantum field theory, et cetera. That new effects show up when the effects are strong. We understand weak fields. We don't understand strong fields. But okay, maybe this is different, right? So what do I mean by when gravity is weak? The dark energy shows up late in the history of the universe. Early in the history of the universe, the dark energy is irrelevant. But remember the density of
dark energy stays constant. The density of matter
and radiation go down. So at early times, the dark energy was completely irrelevant compared to matter and radiation. At late times, it becomes important. That's also when the universe is dilute and gravity is relatively weak. Now, think about galaxies. Okay? A galaxy is more dense in the middle, less dense on the outside. And there is a phenomenological
fact about galaxies that in the interior of galaxies, you don't need dark matter. That's not so surprising 'cause the density of stars
and gas is very high there and the dark matter is just subdominant. But then there's generally a radius inside of which you don't need dark
matter to fit the data outside of which you do need dark
matter with the data. So that's, again, when
gravity is weak, right? So I asked myself, of course, we know in field theory, new effects should show up when
fields are strong, not weak, but let's throw that out of the window. Can I write down a theory where gravity alters when it is weak? And we've already said what gravity is. What is gravity? It's the curvature of spacetime. So there are mathematical that measure the curvature of spacetime. And generally, you would say like, I have an understanding
Einstein's equation, which I explained to
the readers in the book, relates the curvature of
spacetime to matter and energy. The more matter and energy, the more curvature. So I'm saying what if you
add a new term in there that says the less matter and energy, the more curvature. No reason to do that except to fit the data. So I tried to unify the
need for dark matter and the need for dark. - That would be really
cool if that was the case. - Super cool, right? It'd be the best. It'd be great. Well, it didn't work. - It'd be really interesting
if gravity did something funky when there's not much of it. Like almost like at the edges of it, it gets noisy. - That was exactly the hope. But the great thing about
physics is there are equations. I mean, you can come up with words and you can wave your hands, but then you gotta write
down the equations and I did. And I figured out that it could help with the dark energy. The acceleration of the universe, it doesn't help with dark matter at all. - Yeah. It just sucks that the scale of galaxies and scale of solar systems, the physics is kind of boring. - Yeah, it does. I agree. And again, that's why
it is a little bit... I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists think, accuse physicists, like you say, of sort of losing the plot because they need dark
matter and dark energy. I don't want dark matter and dark energy. I want something much cooler than that. I've tried. But you gotta listen to the
equations and to the data. - You mentioned three papers, your first ever, your first awesome paper ever and your second awesome paper ever. Of course, you wrote many papers. You're being very harsh on the others. - Well, by the way,
this is not awesomeness. This is impact, right?
- Impact. Sure. - There's no correlation
between awesomeness and impact. Some of my best papers
fell without a stone- - [Lex] Tree falls, the force. Yeah. The first paper was called
"Limits on a Lorentz and Parity Violating Modification of Electromagnetism or Electrodynamics." So we figured out how to
violate Lorentz variants, which is the symmetry
underlying relativity. And the important thing is
we figured out a way to do it that didn't violate anything else and was experimentally testable. So people love that. The second paper was called "Quintessence and the Rest of the World." So quintessence is this
dynamical dark energy field. The rest of the world is because I was talking about how the quintessence field would interact with other particles and fields and how to avoid the
interactions you don't want. And the third paper was called "Is Cosmic Speed Up Due
to Gravitational Physics?" Something like that. So you see the common theme, I'm taking what we know, the standard model of particle
physics, general relativity, tweaking them in some way and then trying to fit the data. - And trying to make it so it's experimentally validated. - Ideally, yes, that's right. That's the goal. - You wrote the book
"Something Deeply Hidden on the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics" and a new book coming
out soon, part of that, "Biggest Ideas in the
Universe" series we mentioned called "Quanta and Fields." So that's focusing on quantum mechanics. Big question first, biggest ideas in the universe. What to you is most beautiful or perhaps most mysterious
about quantum mechanics? - Quantum mechanics is a harder one. I wrote a textbook on general relativity and I started it by saying, general relativity is most
beautiful physical theory ever invented. And I will stand by that. It is less fundamental
than quantum mechanics, but quantum mechanics is
a little more mysterious. It's a little bit kludgy right now. If you think about how we
teach quantum mechanics to our students, the
Copenhagen interpretation, it's a god awful mess. No one's gonna accuse that
of being very beautiful. I'm a fan of the many
world's interpretation of quantum mechanics and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover
everything in the world. It depends what you mean by beauty. But I think that the
answer to your question is, quantum mechanics can start with extraordinarily
austere tiny ingredients and in principle lead to the world. That boggles my mind. It's like much more comprehensive
general relativity is about gravity and that's great, quantum mechanics about everything and seems to be up to the task. And so I don't know, is that beauty or not? But it's certainly impressive. - So both for the theory, the predictive power of the theory and the fact that the theory
describes tiny things, creating everything we see around us. - It's a monist theory
in classical mechanics. I have a particle here, particle there. I describe them separately. I can tell you what this particle's doing, what that particle's doing. In quantum mechanics, we have entanglement, as Einstein pointed out to us in 1935. And what that means is, there is a single state
for these two particles. There's not one state for this particle, one state for the other particle. And indeed, there's a single state for the whole universe
called the wave function of the universe, if you wanna call it that. And it obeys one equation and is our job then to sort of chop it up, to carve it up, to figure out how to get tables and chairs and things like that out of it. - You mentioned the many
world's interpretation and it is, in fact, beautiful, but it's one of your
more controversial things you stand behind. You've probably gotten
a bunch of flack for it. - I'm a big boy. I can take it. - Well, can you first explain it and then maybe speak the
flag you may have gotten? - Sure. The classic experiment to explain quantum mechanics to people is called the
Stern-Gerlach experiment. You're measuring the spin of a particle. Okay? And in quantum mechanics, the spin is just a spin. It's the rate at which
something is rotating around in a very down to earth sense. The difference being
is that it's quantized. So for something like a single electron or a single neutron, it's either spinning
clockwise or counterclockwise. Those are the only two, let's put it this way. Those are the only two
measurement outcomes you will ever get. There's no it's spinning faster or slower, is either spinning one
direction or the other. That's it. Two choices. Okay? According to the rules
of quantum mechanics, I can set up an electron, let's say, in a state where it is
neither purely clockwise or counterclockwise, but a super position of both. And that's not just because we don't know the answer. It's because it truly is
both until we measure it. And then when we measure it, we see one or the other. So this is the fundamental
mystery of quantum mechanics, is that how we describe the system when we're not looking at it, is different from what we
see when we look at it. So we teach our students
in the Copenhagen way of thinking is that the
act of measuring the spin of the electron causes a radical change in the physical state. It spontaneously collapses
from being a super position of clockwise and counterclockwise to being one or the other. And you can tell me the
probability that that happens, but that's all you can tell me. And I can't be very specific
about when it happens, what caused it to happen, why it's happening, none of that. That's all called the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. So many worlds just says, look, I just told you a minute ago that there's only one way
function for the whole universe. And that means that you
can't take too seriously just describing the electron. You have to include everything
else in the universe. In particular, you clearly have to
interact with the electron in order to measure it. So whatever is interacting with the electron should be
included in the wave function that you're describing. And look, maybe it's just you, maybe your eyeballs are
able to perceive it. But, okay, I'm gonna include
you in the wave function. And if you do that, since you have a very
sophisticated listenership, I'll be a little bit more
careful than average. What does it mean to measure
the spin of the electron? We don't need to go into details, but we want the following
thing to be true. If the electron were in a state that was a hundred percent
spinning clockwise, then we want the measurement to tell us it was spinning clockwise. We want your brain to go, yes, the electron was spinning clockwise. Likewise, if it was a hundred
percent counterclockwise, we want to to see that, to measure that. The rules of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics is a
hundred percent clear that if you to measure it clockwise
when it's clockwise and measure it counterclockwise
when it's counterclockwise, then when it starts out
in a super position, what will happen is that you and the electron will
entangle with each other. And by that, I mean that the state
of the universe evolves into part saying the electron
was spinning clockwise and I saw it clockwise. And part of the state is
it's in a super position with the part that says the electron was
spinning counterclockwise, and I saw it counterclockwise. Everyone agrees with this. Entirely uncontroversial, straightforward consequence
of the Schrödinger equation. And then Niels Bohr would say, and then part of that
wave function disappears, and we're in the other part. And you can't predict which part it'll be, only the probability. Hugh Everett, who was a
graduate student in the 1950s, was thinking about this, says, "I have a better idea. Part of the wave function
does not magically disappear. It stays there." The reason why that idea, Everett's idea that
the whole wave function always sticks around and just obeys the Schrödinger
equation was not thought of years before, is because naively, you look at it and you go, okay, this is predicting that I will be in a super position, that I will be in a super position of having seen the electron be clockwise and having seen it be counterclockwise. No experimenter has
ever felt like they were in a super position. You always see an outcome. Okay. Everett's move, which was kind of genius, was to say the problem is
not the Schrödinger equation. The problem is you have
misidentified yourself in the Schrödinger equation. You have said, oh look, there's a person who saw counterclockwise, there's a person who saw clockwise. I should be that super position of both and Everett says, no, no, no, you're not. Because the part of the wave function in which the spin was clockwise, once that exists, it is completely unaffected by the part of the wave function that says the spin was counterclockwise. They are apart from each other. They're uninteracting. They have no influence. What happens in one part has
no influence in the other part. So Everett says the simple resolution is to identify yourself as either the one who saw spin clockwise or the one who saw spin counterclockwise. There are now two people. Once you've done that experiment, the Schrödinger equation
doesn't have to be messed with. All you have to do is
locate yourself correctly in the wave function. That's many worlds. - The number of worlds is- - [Sean] Very big. - [Lex] Very, very, very big. Where do those worlds fit? Where they go? - The short answer is, the worlds don't exist in space. Space exists separately in each world. So, I mean, there's a technical
answer to your question, which is Hilbert space, the space of all possible
quantum mechanical states. But physically, we want to put these worlds somewhere. That's just a wrong
intuition that we have. There is no such thing as
the physical spatial location of the worlds 'cause space is inside the worlds. - One of the properties of this interpretation
is that you can't travel from one world to the other- - [Sean] That's right. - [Lex] Which kind of makes you feel that they're existing separately. - They are existing
separately and simultaneously. - [Lex] And simultaneously. - Without locations in space. - Without locations in space. How is it possible to visualize them existing
without a location in space? - The real answer to that, the honest answer is
the equations predicted. - [Lex] Yeah, yeah. - If you can't visualize it, so much worse for you, the equations are crystal clear about what they're predicting. - Is there a way to get to
the closer to understanding and visualizing the weirdness
of the implications of this? - I don't think it's that hard. It wasn't that hard for me. I don't mind the idea that when I make a quantum
mechanical measurement, there is later on in the universe, multiple descendants of my present self who got different answers
for that measurement. I can't interact with them. Hilbert space, the space ball, quantum wave functions
was always big enough to include all of them. I'm gonna worry about the parts of the universe I can observe. So let's put it this way. Many worlds comes about by taking the Schrödinger
equation seriously. The Schrödinger equation was
invented to fit the data, to fit the spectrum of different atoms and different emission and
absorption experiments. And it's perfectly legitimate to say, well, okay, you're
taking the Schrödinger equation, you're extrapolating
it, you're trusting it, believing it beyond what we can observe. I don't wanna do that, right? That's perfectly legit. Except, okay, then what do you believe? Come up with a better theory. You're saying you don't believe
the Schrödinger equation. Tell me the equation that you believe in. And people have done that. Turns out it's super hard to do that in a legitimate
way that fits the data. - And many worlds is a really clean. - Absolutely, the most austere, clean, no extra baggage theory
of quantum mechanics. - If it in fact is correct, isn't this the weirdest
thing of anything we know? - Yes. Let me put it this way. The single best reason in my mind to be skeptical about many worlds is not because it doesn't make sense or it doesn't fit the data, or I don't know where the
worlds are going or whatever. It's because to make that extrapolation, to take seriously the equation that we know is correct in other regimes requires new philosophy, requires a new way of
thinking about identity, about probability, about prediction, a whole bunch of things. It's work to do that philosophy and I've been doing it and others have done it. And I think it's very, very doable. But it's not straightforward. It's not a simple extrapolation from what we already know. It's a grand extrapolation very far away. And if you just wanted to be sort of methodologically conservative and say that's a step too far, I don't wanna buy it, I'm sympathetic to that. I think that you're just wimping out. I think that you should have more courage. But I get the impulse. - And there is, under many worlds, an arrow of time where
if you rewind it back, there's going to be one initial state. - That's right. All of quantum mechanics, all different versions require
a kind of arrow of time. It might be different in every kind. But the quantum measurement
process is irreversible. You can measure something, it collapses. You can't go backwards. If someone tells you the outcome, if I say I've measured an electron, spin is clockwise and they say, what was it before I measured it? There was some part of
it that was clockwise, but you don't know how much. And many worlds is no different. But the nice thing is, that the kind of arrow of time you need in many worlds is
exactly the kind of arrow of time you need anyway for entropy and thermodynamics and so forth. You need a simple, low
entropy initial state. That's what you need in both cases. - So if you actually
look at under many worlds into the entire history of the universe, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks very deterministic. - Yes. - In each moment, does the moment contain the memory of the entire history of the universe? To you, does the moment contain the memory of everything that preceded it? - As far as we know, so according to many worlds, the way function of the universe, all the branches of the universe at once, all the worlds does contain
all the information. Calling it a memory is
a little bit dangerous 'cause it's not the same
kind of memory that you and I have in our brains because our memories rely
on the arrow of time. And the whole point of the Schrödinger equation
or Newton's laws is they don't have an arrow of time built in. They're reversible. The state of the universe
not only remembers where it came from, but also determines where it's going to go in a way that our memories don't do that. - But our memories, we can do replay. Can you do this? - We can, but the act of forming a
memory increases the entropy of the universe. It is an irreversible process also. You can walk on a beach and
leave your footprints there. That's a record of your passing. It will eventually be erased by the ever increasing
entropy of the universe. Well, but you can imperfectly replay it. I guess, can we return travel
back in time imperfectly? - Oh, it depends on the level of precision you're trying
to ask that question. The universe contains the information about where the universe was, but you and I don't, we're nowhere close. - And it's what computationally
very costly to try to consult the universe. - Well, it depends on, again, exactly what you're asking. Like there are some simple questions. What was the temperature
of the universe 30 seconds after the Big Bang? We can answer that. That's kind of amazing
that we can answer that to pretty high precision. But if you wanna know
where every atom was, then no. - What to you is the Big Bang? Why? why did it happen? - We have no idea. I think that's a super important question that I can imagine making progress on. But right now, I'm more or less maximally uncertain about what the answer is. - You think black holes will help? - No, potentially. Not that much. Quantum gravity will help and maybe black holes
will help us figure out quantum gravity so indirectly, yes. But we have this situation
where general relativity, Einstein's theory unambiguously predicts there was a singularity in the past. There was a moment of time when the universe had infinite
curvature, infinite energy, infinite expansion rate, the whole bit. That's just a fancy way of
saying the theory has broken down and classical general
relativity is not up to the task of what's saying what really
happened at that moment. So it is completely possible. There was in some sense a moment of time before which there were no other moments. And that would be the Big Bang. Even if it's not a
classical general relativity kind of thing, even if quantum mechanics is involved, maybe that's what happened. It's also completely possible. There was time before that space and time and they evolved into our hot
Big Bang by some procedure that we don't really understand. - And if time and space are emergent, then the before even
starts getting real weird. - Well, I think that if there
is a first moment of time, that would be very good evidence or that would fit hand in glove with the idea that time is emergent. If time is fundamental, then it tends to go forever because it's fundamental. - Well, yeah, I mean,
the general formulation of this question is what's outside of it. Well, what's outside of our universe? So in time and in space. I know it's a pothead question, Sean. I understand. (Sean laughs) - I apologize.
- That's my life. My life is asking pothead questions. - [Lex] Okay. - Some of them, the answer is that's not the
right way to think about it. - Okay. But is it possible to think at all about what's outside our universe? - It's absolutely legit to ask questions, but you have to be comfortable
with the possibility that the answer is there's no such thing as outside our universe. That's absolutely on the table. In fact, that is the simplest, most likely to be correct
answer that we know of. - But it's the only thing in the universe that wouldn't have an outside. - Yeah. If the universe is the
totality of everything, it would not have an outside. - That's so weird to think
that there's not an outside. We want there to be sort
of a a creative force that led to this and an
outside like this is our town, and then there's a bigger world and there's always a bigger world- - Because that is our experience, that's the world we grew up in, right? The universe doesn't
need to obey those rules. - Such a weird thing. - When I was a kid, that used to keep me up at night, like, what if the
universe had not existed? - Right. And it feels like a lot of pressure that if this is the only
universe and we're here, one of the few intelligent civilizations, maybe the only one, it's the old theories that
we're the center of everything. It just feels suspicious. That's why many worlds
is kind of exciting to me because it's humbling in
all the right kinds of ways. It feels like infinity is the
way this whole thing runs. - There's one pitfall
that I'll just mention because there's a move that is made in these
theoretical edges of cosmology that I think is a little bit mistaken, which is to say, I'm going to think about
the universe on the basis of imagining that I am a typical observer. This is called the
principle of typicality, or the principle of mediocrity, or even the Copernican principle. Nothing special about me. I'm just typical in the universe. But then you draw some
conclusions from this and what you end up realizing is you've been hilariously presumptuous because by saying I'm a typical
observer in the universe, you're saying typical observers in the universe are like me. And that is completely
unjustified by anything. So I'm not telling you what
the right way to do it is, but these kinds of questions that are not quite grounded
in experimental verification or falsification are ones you
have to be very careful about. - That to me is one of the
most interesting questions. There's different ways to approach it, but like what's outside of this? How did the big mess start? How do we get something from nothing? That's always the thing
you're sneaking up to when you're studying
all of these questions. You're always sneaking. That's where the black
hole and the unifying, getting quantum gravity, all this kind of stuff. You're always sneaking
up to that question, where did all of this come from? And I think that's probably
an answerable question, right? - No. - It doesn't have to be. So you think there could
be a turtle at the bottom of this that refuses
to reveal its identity. - Yes. Specifically, the question, why is there something
rather than nothing? - [Lex] Yeah. - Does not have the kind of answer that we would ordinarily
attribute to why questions. Because the typical why
questions are embedded in the universe. And when we answer them, we take advantage of the features of the universe that we know and love. But the universe itself,
as far as we know, is not embedded in
anything bigger or stronger and therefore it can just be. - Do you think it's possible
this whole place is simulated? - [Sean] Sure. - It's a really interesting
dark twisted video game we're all existing in. - My own podcast listeners, Mindscape listeners tease me because they know from my MA episodes that if you ever start
a question by asking, do you think it's possible that... The answer's gonna be yes. That might not be the
answer that you care about, but it's possible, sure, as long as you're not adding
two even numbers together and getting an odd number. - When you say it's possible, there's a mathematically yes and then there's more of like intuitive. - Yeah. You wanna know whether it's plausible. You wanna know, is there reasonable non-zero
credence to attach to this? I don't think that there's any philosophical
knockout objection to the simulation hypothesis. I also think that there's
absolutely no reason to take it seriously. - Do you think humans
will try to create one? I guess that's how I
always think about it. I've spent quite a bit of
time over the past few years and a lot more recently in virtual worlds and just am always
captivated by the possibility of creating higher and
higher resolution worlds. And as we'll talk a little bit about artificial intelligence, sort of the advancement on the SOA front, that you can automatically
generate those worlds and the possibility of existing in those automatically generated
worlds is pretty exciting as long as there's a consistent
physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity that governs the
generation of those worlds. - [Sean] Yep. - So it just seems like
humans will, for sure, try to create this. - Yeah, I think they will create better and better simulations. I think the philosopher
David Chalmers has done what I consider to be
a good job of arguing that we should treat things
that happen in virtual reality and in simulated realities as just as real as the reality that we experience. I also think that as a practical matter, people will realize how much harder it is to simulate a realistic
than we naively believe. So this is not a my
lifetime kind of worry. - Yeah. The practical matter of going
from a sort of a prototype that's impressive to a thing
that governs everything. Similar question on this front is in AGI. You said that we're
very far away from AGI. - I want to eliminate the phrase AGI. - So, basically, when you're
analyzing large language models and seeing how far are
they from whatever AGI is, and we can talk about
different right notions of intelligence that we're not as close as kind of some people in
public view are talking about. So what's your intuition behind that? - My intuition is basically that artificial intelligence is different than human intelligence. And so the mistake that is
being made by focusing on a GI among those who do is an artificial agent that as we can make them now or in the near future might be
way better than human beings at some things, way worse than human
beings at other things. And rather than trying
to ask how close is it to being a human-like intelligent, we should appreciate it for
what its capabilities are and that will both be more accurate and help us put it to work and protect us from the dangers better rather than always anthropomorphizing it. - I think the underlying idea
there under the definition of AGI is that the capabilities
are extremely impressive. That's not a precise statement, but meaning-
- Sure. No, I get that. I completely agree . - And then the underlying question where a lot of the debate is, is how impressive is it? What are the limits of
large language models? Can they really do things
like common sense reasoning? How much do they really
understand about the world? Or are they just fancy mimicry machines? Where do you fall on that as to the limits of large language models? - I don't think that there
are many limits in principle. I'm a physicalist about consciousness and awareness and things like that. I see no obstacle in principle building
an artificial machine that is indistinguishable in thought and cognition from a human being. But we're not trying to do that, right? What a large language model is trying to do is to predict text. That's what it does. And it is leveraging the
fact that we human beings for very good evolutionary
biology reasons, attribute intentionality and intelligence and agency to things that
act like human beings. As I was driving here to
get to this podcast space, I was using Google Maps and Google Maps was talking to me, but I wanted to stop
to get a cup of coffee. So I didn't do what
Google Maps told me to do. I went around a block that it didn't like. And so it gets annoyed. It says like, no, why are you doing it? It doesn't say exactly in this, but you know what I mean. It's like no turn left, turn left, and you turn right. It is impossible as a human being not to feel a little bit sad that Google Maps is getting mad at you. It's not even trying to. It's not a large language model. No aspirations to intentionality, but we attribute that all the time. Dan Dennett, the philosopher, wrote a very influential paper,
"The Intentional Stance," the fact that it's the most
natural thing in the world for we human beings to
attribute more intentionality to artificial things
than are really there, which is not to say it
can't be really there. But if you're trying to be rational and clear thinking about this, the first step is to
recognize our huge bias towards attributing
things below the surface to systems that are able to, at the surface level, act human. - So if that huge bias of intentionality is there in
the data and the human data and the vast landscape of human data that AI models, large language models, and video models in the
future are trained on, don't you think that that
intentionality will emerge as fundamental to the behavior
of these systems naturally? - Well, I don't think it
will happen naturally. I think it could happen again. I'm not against the principle. But, again, the way that large
language models came to be and what they're optimized
for is wildly different than the way that human beings came to be and what they're optimized for. So I think we're missing a chance to be much more clearheaded about what large language models are by judging them against human beings, again, both in positive
ways and negative ways. - Well, I think it sort of to push back on what they're optimized
for is different to describe how they're trained versus
what they're optimized for. So they're trained is very trivial way of predicting text tokens, but you can describe what
they're optimized for and what the actual task in hand is, is to construct a world model, meaning an understanding of the world. And that's where it starts getting closer to what humans are kind of doing, or just in the case of
large language models, know how the sausage is made and we don't know how
it's made for us humans. - But they're not optimized for that. They're optimized to sound human. - That's the fine-tuning. But the actual training is
optimized for understanding, creating a compressed representation of all the stuff that humans
have created on the internet. And the hope is that that gives you a deep
understanding of the world. - Yeah. So that's why I think that there's a set of interesting questions to be asked about the ways in which large language models actually do represent the world because what is clear is that they're very good at acting human. The open question in my mind is, is the easiest, most efficient, best way to act human
to do the same things that human beings do? Or are there other ways? And I think that's an open question. I just heard a talk by Melanie Mitchell at Santa Fe Institute, an artificial intelligence researcher. And she told two stories
about two different papers. One that someone else wrote and one that her group is following up on. And they were modeling Othello. Othello the game with a
little rectangular board, white and black squares. So the experiment was the following. They fed a neural network, the moves that were being made
in the most symbolic form. Like E5 just means that, okay, you put a token down E5, so it gives a long string. It does this for millions of games, real legitimate games. And then it asks the question, the paper asks the question, okay, you you've trained it to tell what would be
a legitimate next move from not a legitimate next move. Did it in its brain and it's a little large
language model brain. I don't even know if it's technically a
large language model, but a deep learning network. Did it come up with a
representation of the Othello board? Well, how do you know? And so they construct
a little probe network that they insert and ask it what is it doing
right at this moment, right? The little probe network can ask, would this be legitimate or is this token white
or black or whatever? Things that in practice would amount to... It's invented the Othello board. And it found that the
probe got the right answer, not a hundred percent of the time, but more than by chance, substantially more than by chance. So they said there's
some tentative evidence that this neural network has
discovered the Othello board just out of data, raw data. But then Melanie's group
asked the question, okay, are you sure that that understanding of the Othello board wasn't
built into your probe? And what they found was like at least half of the improvement was
built into the probe. Not all of it. And look, a Othello board is
way simpler than the world. I just think it's an open question, whether or not the... I mean, it would be remarkable either way to learn that large language models that are good at doing what
we train them to do are good because they've built the same
kind of model of the world that we have in our minds, or that they're good despite
not having that model. Either one of these is an amazing thing. I just don't think the data
are clear on which one is true. - I think I have some sort of intellectual humility
about the whole thing because I was humbled by several stages in the machine learning
development over the past 20 years. And I was just would never have predicted that LLMs the way they're trained on the scale of data they're
trained would be as impressive as they are. And there, that's where
intellectual humility steps in where my intuition would say
something like with Melanie, where you need to be
able to have very sort of concrete common sense reasoning, symbolic reasoning type things in a system in order for it to be very intelligent. But here, I'm so impressed
by what it's capable to do, train on the next token
prediction essentially. My conception of the nature of intelligence is just completely, not completely but humbled, I should say. - Look, and I think that's perfectly fair. I also was, I will say pleasantly, but I don't know whether it's
pleasantly or unpleasantly, but factually surprised by
the recent rate of progress. Clearly, some kind of phase transition
percolation has happened and the improvement has been remarkable. Absolutely amazing, that I have no arguments with. That doesn't yet tell me the mechanism by which that improvement happened. Constructing a model, much like a human being
would have is clearly one possible mechanism, but part of the intellectual humility is to say maybe there are others. - I was chatting with the CEO
of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, so behind (indistinct) and that company. But a lot of the AI
companies are really focused on expanding the scale of compute, sort of if we assume that
AI is not data-limited but is compute-limited, you can make the system
much more intelligence by using more compute. So let me ask you on almost
on the physics level. Do you think physics can help
expand the scale of compute and maybe the scale of energy required to make that compute happen? - Yeah, a hundred percent. I think this is like one of the biggest things that
physics can help with. And it's an obvious kind of
low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation,
the inefficiency, the waste of existing
high level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It's hilariously worse. And we kind of haven't tried to optimize that hard on that frontier. I mean, your laptop heats up when you're sitting on your lap, right? It doesn't need to. Your brain doesn't heat up like that. So, clearly, there exists
in the world of physics, the capability of doing these computations with much less waste heat being generated. And I look forward to people doing that. Yeah. - Are you excited for the
possibility of a nuclear fusion? - I am cautiously optimistic. Excited it'll be too strong. I mean, it'd be great. But if we really tried solar power, it would also be great. (Lex laughs) - I think Ilya Sutskever said this, that the future of humanity on earth will be just, the entire surface of earth is covered in solar
panels and data centers. - Why would you waste the surface of the earth with solar panels? Put them in space. - Sure, you can go in space. Yeah. - Space is bigger than the earth. - Yeah. Just solar panels everywhere. - [Sean] Yeah. I like it. - We already have fusion. It's called the sun. - [Lex] Yeah, that's true. And there's probably more
and more efficient ways of catching that energy. - Sending it down is the
hard part, absolutely. But that's an engineering problem. Yeah. - So I just wonder where the data centers, the compute centers can expand to. If that's the future, if AI is as effective
as it possibly could be, then it's the scale of
computation will keep increasing, but perhaps it's a race
between efficiency and scale. - There are constraints. - [Lex] Yeah. - There's a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of damage
we can do to the environment before it does not worth it anymore. So, yeah, I think that's a new question. In fact, it's kind of frustrating because we get better and better at doing things efficiently, but we invent more
things we wanna do faster than we get good at
doing them efficiently. So we're continuing to make
things worse in various ways. - I mean, that's the dance of humanity. We're constantly creating better, better, better technologies that
are potentially causing a lot more harm. And that includes for weapons. It includes AI used as weapons. That includes nuclear weapons, of course. Which is surprising to me that we haven't destroyed
human civilization yet given how many nuclear
warheads are out there. - Look, I'm with you. Between nuclear and bio weapons, it is a little bit surprising that we haven't caused
enormous devastation. Of course, we did drop
two atomic bombs on Japan, but compared to what could have happened or could happen tomorrow, it could be much worse. - Yeah. It does seem like there's a underlying, speaking of quantum fields, there's like a field of goodness within the human heart that like in some kind
of game theoretic way, we create really powerful things that could destroy each other. And there's greed and ego and all this kind power hungry dictators that are at play here in all
the geopolitical landscape, but we somehow always,
like, don't go too far. - Yeah. But that's exactly what
you would say right before we went too far. - Right before we went too far. And that's why we don't see aliens. So you're, like I mentioned, associated with Santa Fe Institute. I just would love to take
a stroll down the landscape of ideas explored there. So they look at complexity
in all kinds of ways. What do you think about the emergence of complexity from simple
things interacting simply? - I think it's a fascinating topic. I mean, that's why I'm thinking about these things these
days rather than the papers that I was describing to you before. All of those papers I described
to you before are guesses. What if the laws of physics are different in the following way and then you can work
out the consequences? At some point in my life, I said like, what is the
chance I'm gonna guess right? Einstein guessed right. Steven Weinberg guessed right. But there's a very small number of times that people guess right. Whereas with this emergence
of complexity from simplicity, I really do think that we haven't understood the basics yet. I think we're still kind of paradigmatic. There've been some
spectacular discoveries. People like Geoffrey West at Santa Fe and others have really
given us true insights into important systems. But still there's a lot
of the basics, I think, are not understood. And so searching for the general principles
is what I like to do. And I think it's
absolutely possible that... I mean, to be a little bit
more substantive than that. I think this is kind of a cliché. I think the key is information. And I think that what we
see through the history of the universe as you go from simple to more and more complex
is really subsystems of the universe figuring
out how to use information to do whatever to survive or
to thrive or to reproduce. I mean, that's the sort
of fuel, the leverage, the resource that we have for a while anyway until the heat death. But that's where the
complexity is really driven by. - But the mechanism of it. I mean, you mentioned Geoffrey West. What are interesting inklings
of progress in this realm? And what are systems that interest you in terms of information? So, I mean, for me, just as a fan of complexity, just even looking at simple
cellular automata is always just fascinating way to
illustrate the emergence of complexity. - So for those of the listeners
who don't know, viewers, cellular automata come from imagining a very
simple configuration, for example, a set of ones
and zeros along a line. And then you met a rule that says, okay, I'm gonna evolve this in time. And generally, the simplest ones start with just each block of three
ones and zeros have a rule that they will determine
go to either one or a zero. And you can actually classify all the different possibilities, a small number of possible
cellular automata of that form. And what was discovered by various people, including Stephen Wolfram, is some of these cellular
automata have the feature that you start from almost nothing, like 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0,
0, 0 and you let it rip, and it becomes wildly complex. Okay? So this is very provocative,
very interesting. It's also not how physics works at all because, as we said, physics conserves information. You can go forward or backwards. The cellular automata do not. They're not reversible in any sense. You've built in an arrow of time. You have a starting point
and then you evolve. So what I'm interested in is seeing how in the real world with
the real laws of physics and underlying reversibility, but macroscopic
irreversibility from entropy in the arrow time, et cetera, how does that lead to complexity? I think that that's an
answerable question. I don't think that cellular
automata are really helping us in that one. - What is the landscape of entropy in the universe look like? - Well, entropy is hard to localize. It's a property of systems, not of parts of systems. Having said that, we can do approximate
answers to the question. The answer is black holes
are huge in entropy. Let's put it this way. The whole observable universe that we are in had a
certain amount of entropy before stars and planets and
black holes started to form. 10 to the 88th, I can even tell you the number. Okay? The single black hole, the center of our galaxy has entropy. 10 to the 90. Single black hole center of our galaxy is more entropy than the whole universe used
to have not too long ago. So most of the entropy
in the universe today is in the form of black holes. - Okay. That's fascinating, first of all. But second of all, if we take black holes away, what are the different
interesting perturbations in entropy across space? Where do we earth links fit into that? - The interesting thing
to me is that if you start with a system that is isolated from the rest of the universe and you start it at low entropy, there's almost a theorem that says if you're very,
very, very low entropy, then the system looks pretty simple 'cause there's low entropy means there's only a small number of ways that you can rearrange
the parts to look like that. So there's if there's not that many ways, the answer's gonna look simple. But there's also almost a theorem that says when you're at maximum entropy, the system is gonna look simple because it's all smeared out. If it had like interesting structure, then it would be complicated. So entropy in this isolated
system only goes up. That's the second law of thermodynamics. But complexity starts low, goes up, and then goes down again. Sometimes people mistakenly
think that complexity or life or whatever is fighting
against the second law of thermodynamics, fighting against the increase of entropy. That is precisely the wrong
way to think about it. We are surfers riding the
wave of increasing entropy. We rely on increasing entropy to survive. That is part of what makes us special. This table maintains its
stability mechanically, which, I mean, there's molecules, there have forces on each other, and it holds up. You and I aren't like that. We maintain our stability dynamically by ingesting food, fuel, food, and water, and air and so forth, burning it, increasing its entropy. We are non-equilibrium
quasi study state systems. We are using the fuel the
universe gives us in the form of low entropy energy to
maintain our stability. - I just wonder what that
mechanism of surfing looks like. First of all, I mean, one question to ask, do you think it's possible
to have a kind of size of complexity where you
have very precise ways or clearly defined ways
of measuring complexity? - I think it is and I think we don't. It's possible to have it. I don't think we yet have it in part because complexity
is not a univalent thing. There's different ideas that go under the rubric of complexity. One version is just Kolmogorov complexity. If you have a configuration or a string of numbers or whatever, can you compress it so that you have a small
program that will output that? That's Kolmogorov complexity. But that's the complexity
of a string of numbers. Okay? It's not like the complexity of a problem. Computational complexity, the traveling salesman problem or factoring large numbers. That's a whole different kind of question that is also about complexity. So we don't have a sort
of unified view of it. - So you think it's possible
to have a complexity of a physical system- - Yeah, absolutely.
- In the same way we do entropy. - Yeah. - You think that's a Sean
Carroll paper or what? - We are working on various things. The glib thing that I'm
trying to work on right now with a student is complex agenesis. How does complexity come to be if all the universes doing is moving from low entropy to high entropy? - It's sexy name. - It's a good name. Yeah, I like the name. I just gotta write the paper. - Sometimes a name
arose by any other name. In which context the birth of complexity are you most interested in? - Well, I think it comes in stages. So I think that if you go from the... I'm, again, a physicist. So biologists studying evolution will talk about how complexity evolves all the time, the complexity of the genome, the complexity of our physiology. But they take for granted
that life already existed and entropy is increasing and so forth. I wanna go back to the beginning and say the early universe
was simple and low entropy and entropy increases with time. And the universe sort of differentiates and becomes more complex. But that statement, which is indisputably true, has different meanings. 'cause complexity has different meanings. So sort of the most basic primal version of complexity is what you might think of as configurational complexity. That's what Kolmogorov gets at. How much information do you need to specify the
configuration of the system? Then there's a whole another
step where subsystems of the universe start burning fuel. So in many ways, a planet and a star are not that different in
configurational complexity. They're both spheres with density, high at the middle and
getting less as you go out. But there's something
fundamentally different because the star only survives as long as it has fuel. I mean, then it turns into a brown dwarf for a white dwarf for whatever. But as a star, as a main sequence star, it is an out of equilibrium system, but it's more or less static. Like if I spill the coffee mug and it falls in the process of falling, it's out of equilibrium, but it's also changing all the time. A specific kind of system
is where it's looks sort of macroscopically
stationary, like a star, but underneath the hood, it's burning fuel to beat the band in order to maintain that stability. So as stars form that, that's a different kind of
complexity that comes to be. Then there's another kind of
complexity that comes to be roughly speaking at the origin of life because that's where you have information really being gathered and utilized by subsystems of the universe. And then, arguably, there's any number of stages past that. I mean, one of the most obvious ones to me is we talk about simulation theory, but you and I run
simulations in our heads. They're just not that good. But we imagine different
hypothetical futures. Bacteria don't do that. So that's the kind of
information processing that is a form of complexity. And so I would like to
understand all these stages and how they fit together. - Yeah, imagination. - Yep. Mental time travel. - Yeah. The things going on in my head when I'm imagining worlds
are super compressed representations of those worlds. But to get to the essence of them, and maybe it's possible with non-human computing type devices to do those kinds of simulations in more and more compressed ways. - There's an argument to be made that literally what separates human beings from other species on earth is our ability to imagine counterfactual, hypothetical features. - Yeah. I mean, that's one of the big features. I don't know if- - Everyone has their own
favorite little feature. That's why I said there's
an argument to be made. I did a podcast episode
on it with Adam Bulley. It developed slowly. I did different podcast. Sorry to keep mentioning
podcast episodes I did. But Malcolm Mciver, who is an engineer at Northwestern, has a theory about one of the major stages in evolution is when fish
first climbed on the land. I mean, of course, that is a major stage in evolution, but in particular, there's a cognitive shift. Because when you're a fish
swimming under the water, the attenuation length of light
in water is not that long. You can't see kilometers away. You can see meters away, and you're moving at meters per second. So all of the evolutionary
optimization is make all of your decisions on a
timescale of less than a second. When you see something new, you have to make a rapid fire
decision what to do about it. As soon as you climb onto land, you can essentially see forever. You can see stars in the sky. So now a whole new mode
of reasoning opens up where you see something far away. And rather than saying, lookup table, I see this, I react. You can say, okay, I see that thing. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I did something different? And that's the birth of
imagination, eventually - You've been critical on panpsychism. - [Sean] Yes, you've noticed that, right. - Can you make the case for
panpsychism and against it? So panpsychism is the idea that consciousness permeates all matter. Maybe it's the fundamental force or a physics of the way of
the fabric of the universe. - And psychism taught everywhere, consciousness everywhere, right? - to a point of entertainment, the idea frustrates you, which sort of as a fan
is wonderful to watch. And you've had great
episodes with panpsychism That's right on your
podcast where you go at it. - I had David Chalmers, who's one of the world's
great philosophers. And he is panpsychism curious. He doesn't commit to anything, but he's certainly
willing to entertain it. Philip Goff, who I've had, who's a great guy, but he's devoted to panpsych. In fact, he's almost
single handedly responsible for the upsurge of interest in panpsychism in the popular imagination. And the argument for it is supposed to be that there is something
fundamentally uncapturable about conscious awareness
by physical behavior of atoms and molecules. So the panpsychism will say, look, you can tell me maybe
someday through advances of neuroscience and what have you, exactly what happens in your brain and how that translates into thought, and speech, and action. What you can't tell me is
what it is like to be me. You can't tell me what I am experiencing when I see something that is red or that taste something that is sweet. You can tell me what neurons fire, but you can't tell me
what I'm experiencing. That first person, inner subjective experience
is simply not capturable by physics. And therefore, this is an
old argument, of course, but then therefore is supposed
to be I need something that is not contained within physics to account for that. And I'm just gonna call it mind. We don't know what it is yet. We're gonna call it mind. And it has to be separate from physics. And then there's two ways to go. If you buy that much, you can either say, okay,
I'm gonna a dualist, I'm gonna believe that
there's matter and mind and they're separate from each other and they're interacting somehow. Or that's a little bit complicated and sketchy as far as physics is gonna go. So I'm gonna believe in mind, but I'm gonna put it prior to matter. I'm gonna believe that mind comes first and that consciousness is the
fundamental aspect of reality and everything else, including matter and
physics comes from it. That would be at least as
simple as physics comes first. Now, the physicalist,
such as myself will say, I don't have any problem
explaining what it's like to be you or what you experience when you see red. It's a certain way of
talking about the atoms and the neurons, et cetera, that make up you. Just like the hardness or
the brownness of this table, these are words that we attach to certain underlying configurations of ordinary physical matter. Likewise, sadness and redness or whatever are words
that we attach to you to describe what you're doing. And when it comes to
consciousness in general, I'm very quick to say, I do not claim to have any special insight on how consciousness works
other than I see no reason to change the laws of
physics to account for it. - If you don't have to
change the laws of physics, where do you think it emerges from? Is consciousness an illusion that's almost like a
shorthand that we humans used to describe a certain kind of feeling we have when
interacting with the world? Or is there some big leap that happens at some stage? - I almost never use the word illusion. Illusion means that there's something that you think you're perceiving
that is actually not there. Like an oasis in the
desert is an illusion. It has no causal efficacy. If you walk up to where the
oasis is supposed to be, you'll say you were wrong
about it being there. That's different than
something being emergent or non-fundamental, but also real. This table is real, even though I know it's made of atoms. That doesn't remove the
realness from the table. I think the consciousness and free will and things like that are just
as real in tables and chairs. - Oasis in the desert
does have causal efficacy and that you're thirsty-
- Incorrect causal efficacy. - [Lex] Well, you mean- - At least you draw incorrect conclusions about the world. - Sure. But imagining a thing
can sometimes bring it to reality as we've seen. And that has a kind of a causal efficacy. - Sure. But your understanding
of the world in a way that gives you power over it and influence over it is
decreased rather than increased by believing in that
oasis that is not true about consciousness or this table. - You don't think it
can increase the chance of a thing existing by
imagining it existing? - Unless you build it or make it. - No, that's what I mean. Like imagining humans can fly if you have the right brothers. - That's better to imagine
that humans are flying. - [Lex] Right. - In terms of counterfactuals
in the future, absolutely. Imagination is crucially important, but that's not an illusion. That's just a- - Oh, okay.
- Imagination. - So the possibility of the
future versus what reality is. I mean, the future is a concept so you can... Time. Time is just a concept so you can play with that. But yes, reality. So to you, so, for example, I'll ask is this, so Donald Hoffman thinks that the entirety of the conversation we've been having about spacetime is an illusion. Is it possible for you to
steel man the case for that? Can you make the case
for and against reality as I think he writes
that the laws of physics, as we know them was based on, is a kind of interface
to a much deeper thing that we don't at all understand and that we're fooling ourselves
by constructing this world? - Well, I think there's
like part of that idea that is perfectly respectable and part of it that is
perfectly nonsensical. And I'm not even gonna try to steel man, the nonsensical part. The real part to me is what
is called structural realism. So we don't know what the world is at a deep fundamental level. Let's put ourselves in the minds of people living 200 years ago. They didn't know about quantum mechanics. They didn't know about relativity. That doesn't mean they were
wrong about the universe, that they understood. They had Newton's laws, right? They could predict what time the sun was
gonna rise perfectly well. In the progress of science, the words that would be used to give the most fundamental description of how you were predicting
the sun would rise changed because now you have curved spacetime and things like that, right? And you didn't have any of
those words 200 years ago, but the prediction is the same. Why? Because that prediction, independent of what we thought
the fundamental ontology was, the prediction pointed to something true about our understanding of reality. To call it an illusion
is just wrong, I think. We might not know what the best, most comprehensive way of stating it is, but it's still true. - Is it true in the way, for
example, belief in God is true? Because for most of human history, people have believed in
a God or multiple gods and that seemed very true to them as an explanation for
the way the world is. Some of the deeper
questions about life itself with the human condition and why certain things happen, that was a good explainer. So to you, that's not an illusion. - No, I think that was
completely an illusion. I think it was a very, very
reasonable illusion to be under. There are illusions. There are substantive
claims about the world that go beyond predictions
that we can make and verify, which later are found to be wrong. And the existence of God was one of them. If those people at that time had abandoned
their belief in God and replaced it with a
mechanistic universe, they would've done just as
well at understanding things. Again, because there are so many things they didn't understand, it was very reasonable for
them to have that belief. It wasn't that they were
dummies or anything like that. But that is, as we understand the
universe better and better, some things stick with us, some things get replaced. - So like you said, you're a believer of the
mechanistic universe. You're a naturalist and as you've described, a poetic naturalist. - [Sean] That's right. - What's the word poetic? What is naturalism and
what is poetic naturalism? - Naturalism is just the idea that all that exists is the natural world. There's no supernatural world. You can have arguments
about what that means, but I would claim that
the argument should be about what the word supernatural means, not the word natural. The natural world is
the world that we learn about by doing science. The poetic part means
that you shouldn't be too, I wanna say, fundamentalist about what the natural world is. As we went from Newtonian spacetime to Einsteinian spacetime, something is maintained there. There is a different story that
we can tell about the world. And that story in the Newtonian regime, if you wanna fly a rocket to the moon, you don't use general relativity, you use Newtonian mechanics. That story works perfectly well. The poetic aspect of the story
is that there are many ways of talking about the natural world. And as long as those ways
latch onto something real and causally efficacious about the functioning of the world, then we attribute some
reality and truth to them. - So the poetic really looks at the, let's say, the
pothead questions at the edge of science is more open to them. It's doing double duty a little bit, so that's why it's confusing. The more obvious
respectable duty is doing is that tables are real. Even though you know that it's really a quantum
field theory wave function, tables are still real. They're a different way of talking about the underlying deeper reality of it. The other duty is doing is that we move beyond purely descriptive vocabularies for discussing the universe
onto normative and prescriptive and judgmental ways of
talking about the universe. This painting is beautiful. That one is ugly. This action is morally right, that one is morally wrong. These are also ways of about the universe. They are not fixed by the phenomena. They're not determined
by our observations. They cannot be ruled out
by a crucial experiment. But they're still valid. They might not be universal, they might be subjective, but they're not arbitrary. And they do have a role in
describing how the world works. - So you don't think it's
possible to construct experiments that explore the realms of
morality and even meaning. So those are subjective. - Yeah. They're human. They're personal. - But do you think that's just because we don't have the tools of science have not expanded enough to incorporate the human experience? - No, I don't think that's what it is. I think that what we mean by aesthetics or morality are we're
attaching categories, properties to things that
happen in the physical world. And there is always gonna
be some subjectivity to our attachment and how we do that. And that's okay. And the faster we recognize
that and deal with it, the better off we'll be. - But if we deeply and fully
understand the functioning of the human mind, won't be able to incorporate that? - No, that will absolutely be helpful in explaining why certain people
have certain moral beliefs. It won't justify those
beliefs that's right or wrong. - Do you think it's possible to have a kind of general relativity, but that includes the observer effect where the human mind is the observer? - [Sean] Sure. - So sort of like how we morph in the same way gravity morphs spacetime. How does the human mind morph reality and have a very thorough theory of how that morphing actually happens? - That's a very pothead question, Lex. - I'm sorry. (Sean laughs) Well, you think it's possible. (Lex laughs) - The answer is yes. I think that there's no... I think that we are part
of the physical world and the natural world. Physicalism would've
been just as good a word to use as naturalism, maybe even a more accurate word. But it's a little bit more off-putting. So I do wanna snap your
more attractive label than physicalism. - Are there limits to science? - Sure. We just talked about one, right? Science can tell you right from wrong. You need science to implement your ideas
about right and wrong. If you are functioning on the basis of an incorrect
view of how the world works, you might very well
think you're doing right, but actually be doing wrong. But all the science in
the world won't tell you which action is right and
which action is wrong. - Dictators and people in
power sometimes use science as an authority to convince
you what's right and wrong. Studying Nazi science is fascinating. - Yeah. But there's an instrumentalist view here. You have to first decide
what your goals are and then science can help
you achieve those goals. If your goals are horrible, science has no problem
helping you achieve them. Science is happy to help out. - Let me ask you about the method behind the madness on
several aspects of your life. So you mentioned that your
approach to writing for research and writing popular books. How do you find the time of the day? What's the day in the
life of Sean Carroll? (indistinct) - So you don't have a
thing where in the morning, you try to fight for two hours somewhere? - I'm really terrible at that. My strategy for finding time is just to ignore interruptions and emails. But it's a different time every day. Some days it never happens. Some weeks it never happens. - You're able to pull it off 'cause you're extremely prolific. So like you're able to have days where you don't write- - Oh my God. - And still write the next day. - Right. - Oh wow. That's a rare thing. A lot of prolific writers will- - [Sean] Yes, it's true. - Carve out two hours because otherwise it just disappears. - Right. No, I get that. Yeah, I do. And yeah, it's just like I... Everyone is has their foibles or whatever, so I'm not able to do that, therefore I have to just
figure it out on the fly. - And what's the actual process look like when you're writing popular stuff? You get behind a computer? - Yeah, get behind a computer. And my way of doing it... So my wife Jennifer is a science writer. But it's interesting 'cause our techniques
are entirely different. She will think about something, but then she'll free write. She'll just sit at a computer and write, like, yeah, I think this, I think this, something. And then that will be
vastly compressed, edited, and rewritten or whatever until the final thing happens. I will just like sit
there silently thinking for a very long time. And then I'll write what
is almost the final draft. So a lot of it happens. There might be some
scribbles for an outline or something like that, but a lot of it is in my
brain before it's on the page. - So that's the case for "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe," the "Quantum" book and the
"Space, Time, and Motion" book. - Yeah, "Quanta and Fields," which is actually mostly
about quantum field theory and particle physics. That's coming out in May. I'm letting people in on things that no other book lets them in on. So I hope it's worth it. It's a challenge 'cause there's a lot of equations. - I mean, you did the same thing with "Space, Time, and Motion." You did something quite interesting, which is like you made the
equation the centerpiece of a book. - Right. There's a lot of equations. Book two goes further in those directions than book one did. So it's more cool stuff. It's also more mind-bending. It's more of a challenge. Book three that I'm
writing right now is called "Complexity and Emergence." - [Lex] Oh wow. - And that'll be the
final part of the trilogy. - Oh, that's fascinating. So there's a lot of probably
ideas that are there. I mean, that's a real cutting edge. - Well, but you know, I'm not
trying to be cutting edge. In other words, I'm not trying to
speculate in these books. Obviously, in other books, I've been very free about speculating. The point of these books is to say things that 500 years from
now will still be true. And so there are some things we know about complexity immersions, and I wanna focus on those. And I will mention, I'm happy to say this
is something that needs to be speculated about, but I won't pretend to be telling you what one is the right one. - You somehow found the
balance between the rigor of mathematics and still accessible, which is interesting. - I try. I mean, look, these three books, the biggest ideas books are
absolutely an experiment. They're gonna appeal to a smaller audience
than other books will. But that audience should love them. Like my 16-year-old self
would've been so happy to get these books. I can't tell you. - Yeah. In terms of looking back in history, those are books, the trilogy would be
truly special in that way. - Work for "Lord of the Rings." So I figured why not me? - You and Token are just different styles, different topics. - Same ultimate reality. - Like we mentioned, Mindscape Podcast, I love it. You interview a huge variety of experts from all kinds of fields. So just several questions I want to ask. How do you prepare? How do you prepare to
have a good conversation? How do you prepare in
a way that satisfies, makes your own curious mind happy, all that kind of stuff? - Yeah, no, these are great questions. And I've sort of struggled and changed my techniques over the years. It's over 5-year-old podcast, might be approaching six years old now. I started out overpreparing
when I first started. Like I had a journey
that I was gonna go down. Many of the people I
talked to are academics or thinkers who write books, so they have a story to tell. I could just say, okay,
give me your lecture and then an hour later, stop. So the mistake is to sort of anticipate what the lecture would be and to ask the leading questions that would pull it out of them. What I do now is much more, here are the points, here are like the big questions
that I am interested in and so I have a much
sketchier outline to start, and then try to make it
more of a real conversation. I'm helped by the fact
that it is not my day job. So I strictly limit myself to one day of my life per podcast episode on average. Some days take more. And that includes not
just doing the research, but inviting the guest, recording it, editing it, publishing it. So I need to be very,
very efficient at that. Yeah. - You enforce constraints for yourself in which creativity can emerge. - That's right. That's right. - And you know, look, sometimes if I'm interviewing
a theoretical physicist, I can just go in and where interviewing an
economist or a historian, I have to do a lot of work. - Do you ever find yourself
getting lost in rabbit holes that serve no purpose except
satisfying your own curiosity and then potentially expanding
the range of things you know that can help your actual work and research and writing? - Yes, on both counts. Some people have so many
things to talk about that you don't know
where to start or finish. Others have a message. One of the thing I
discovered over the course of these years is the
correlation with age. There are brilliant people. And I try very hard on the podcast to sort of get all sorts of people, different ages and things like that. And bless their hearts, the most brilliant young people are not as practiced at wandering
past their literal research. They are less mastery
over the field as a whole, much less how to talk about it. Whereas certain older people just like have their patent answers and that's kind of boring. So you want somewhere in between, the ideal person who has
a broad enough of a scope that they can wander outside their specific
papers they've written, but they're not overly practiced so they're just giving
you their canned answers. - I feel like there's like
a connection to the metaphor of entropy and complexity,
as you said, there. - Edge of chaos. Yeah. - You also do incredible AMAs and people should sign up to your Patreon 'cause you can get to ask
questions Sean Carroll. Well, for several hours, you just answer in fascinating ways some really interesting questions. Is there something you
could say about the process of finding the answers to those? - That's a great one. Again, it's evolved over time. So the Ask Me Anything
episodes were first, when I started doing them, they were only for Patreon
subscribers to both listen to and to ask the questions. But then I actually asked
my Patreon subscribers, would you like me to
release them publicly? And they overwhelmingly voted yes, so I do that. So the Patreon supporters
ask the questions, everyone can listen. And also at some point, I really used to try to
answer every question, but now there's just too many. So I have to pick and that's fraught with peril. And my personal standard for picking questions to answer is, what are the ones I think I have interesting answers to give for? So that both means if it's kind of the same old question
about special relativity that I've gotten a hundred times before, I'm not gonna answer it because you can just Google that. It's easier. There are some very clear attempts to ask an interesting question that honestly just I
don't have an answer to. Like, I read this science fiction novel, what do you think about it? I'm like, "Well, I haven't read it so I can't help you there." What's your favorite color? I could tell you what it is, but it is not that interesting. I try to make it a mix. It's not all physics questions, not all philosophy questions. I will talk about food,
or movies, or politics, or religion if that's what people want. I keep suggesting that people ask me for relationship advice, but they never do. Yeah. I don't think I've heard, I don't think I've heard one. - I'm willing to do it, but I'm a little reluctant 'cause I don't actually
like giving advice. But I'm happy to talk about those topics. I want to give several hours of talking, and I wanna try to say things
that I haven't said before and keep it interesting, keep it rolling. If you don't like this question, wait for the next one. - What are some of the harder
questions you've gotten? Do you remember? What kinds of questions
are difficult for you? - Rarely, but occasionally, people will ask me a super
insightful philosophy question. Like I hadn't thought of it, things in exactly that way. I try to recognize that a lot of times, it is the opposite where it's like, okay, you're clearly confused and I'm gonna try to explain the question
you should have asked. - Well, I love those. Yeah, why that's the wrong
question or that kind of stuff. - Right.
- That's great. - Right. - [Lex] That's great. - But the hard questions, I don't know, I don't actually answer
personal questions very much. The most personal I will
get are questions, like, what do you think of Baltimore? That much I can talk about are, how are your cats doing? Happy to talk about the
cats in infinite detail, but very personal
questions I don't get into, - But you even touched like
politics and stuff like this. - Yeah, no, very happy
to talk about politics. I try to be clear on what
is professional expertise, what is just me babbling, what is my level of
credence in different things where you're allowed to disagree, whether if you would disagree, you're just wrong. And people can disagree with that also. I'm happy to go out on
a limb a little bit. I'm happy to say, look, I don't know, but here's my guess. I just did a whole solo podcast, which was exactly that. And it's interesting, like some people are like,
"Oh, this was great." And there's a whole
bunch of people are like, "Why are you talking about this thing that you are not the world's expert in?" - Well, I love the actual
dance between humility and having a strong opinion on stuff, which is a great. It's a fascinating dance to pull off. And I guess the way to do that is to just expand into all kinds
of topics and play with ideas and then change your mind
and all that kind of stuff. - Yeah, it's interesting because when people react against you by saying you are being
arrogant about this, 99.999% of the time, all they mean is I disagree. That's all they really mean, right? - [Lex] Yeah. - Like at a very basic level, people will accuse
atheists of being arrogant. And I'm like, "You think
God exists and loves you? And you're telling me that I'm arrogant?" I think that all all of
this is to say just advice. When you disagree with somebody, try to specify the
substantive disagreement. Try not to psychologize them. You know, trying to say, oh, you're saying this because of this. Maybe it's true, maybe you're right. But if you had an actual response to what they were saying, that would be much more interesting. - Yeah. I wonder why it's difficult
for people to say or to imply, I respect you, I like you, but I disagree on this and here's why I disagree. I wonder they go to this place of, like, well, you're an idiot, or you're egoistical, or you're confused, or you're naive, all the kinds of words as opposed to, like, I respect you as a fellow human being, exploring the world of
mysteries all around us and I disagree. - I will complicate the question even more because there's some people
I don't respect or like. And I once wrote a blog post, I think it was called
"The Grid of Disputation." And I had a two by two grid and it's, are you someone I
agree with or disagree with? Are you someone who I respect or don't? And all four quadrants are very populated. So what that means is there
are people who I'd like and I disagree with, and there are people who agree with me. And I have no respect for at all the embarrassing allies quadrant. That was everyone's favorite. And I just think that's
great being honest, right? Like trying to be honest
about where people are. But if you actually want to
move a conversation forward, forget about whether you
like or don't like somebody. Explain the disagreement, explain the agreement. But you're absolutely right. I completely agree. Like as a society, we are not very good at disagreeing. We instantly go to the insults. - Yeah. And I mean, even on a deeper level, I think at some deep level, I respect and love the
humanity and the other person. - Yep. - You said that general relativity is the
most beautiful theory ever. - So far. - [Lex] What do you
find beautiful about it? - Let's put it this way. When I teach courses, there's no more satisfying subject to teach than general relativity. And the reason why is because it starts from very clear, precisely articulated assumptions, and it goes so far. When I give my talk, you can find it online. I'm probably not gonna give it again. The book one of The Biggest Ideas talk was building up from you don't know any math or physics; an hour later, Einstein's equation
for general relativity. And the punchline is the
equation is much smarter than Albert Einstein because Albert Einstein did
not know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about gravitational waves; he didn't know about black holes; but his equation did. I mean, that's a miraculous aspect of science more generally, but general relativity is
where it manifests itself in the most absolutely obvious way. - A human question, what do you think of the fact that Einstein didn't get the Nobel Prize for general relativity - Tragedy. He should have gotten maybe
four Nobel prizes, honestly. That certainly should have got... The photoelectric effect
was a hundred percent worth the Nobel Prize because... And people don't quite get this. Who cares about the photoelectric effect? That's like this very minor effect. The point is his explanation for the photoelectric
effect invented something called the photon. That's worth the Nobel Prize. Max Planck gets credit for this in 1900, explaining black body radiation by saying that when a
little electron is jiggling and object at some temperature
gives off radiation in discrete chunks
rather than continuously. He didn't quite say that's because radiation
is discrete chunks. It's like having a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time. It doesn't mean that liquid
comes in one cup quanta. Just that you are dispensing it like that. It was Einstein in 1905
who said light is quanta and that was a radical thing. So that, clearly, that was not a mistake. But also special
relativity clearly deserved the Nobel Prize. And general relativity clearly
deserved the Nobel Prize. Not only were they brilliant, but they were experimentally verified like everything you want. - So separately, you think. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. - Oh humans, yeah. Whatever the explanation there. - Edwin Hubble never won the Nobel Prize for finding this universe was expanding. - Yeah. And even the fact that we give prizes is
almost kind of silly, and we limit the number of people that get the prize and all that. - I think that Nobel Prize
has enormous problems. I think it's probably a
net good for the world because it brings
attention to good science. I think it's probably negative for science because it makes people
wanna win the Nobel Prize. - Yeah. There's a lot of fascinating human stories underneath it all. Science is its own thing, but it's also a collection of humans and it's a beautiful collection. There's tension. There's competition. There's jealousy. But there's also great collaborations and all that kind of stuff. Danielle Kahneman, who recently passed is, is one of the great stories
of collaboration in science. So all of it, all of it, that's what humans do. And, Sean, thank you for being the person that makes us celebrate science and fall in love with all of these
beautiful ideas in science for writing amazing books, for being legit and still
pushing forward the research, science side of it, and for allowing me and
these pothead questions and also for educating everybody
through your own podcast. Everybody should stop
everything and subscribe and listen to every single
episode of Mindscape. So thank you. I've been a huge fan forever. I'm really honored that you would speak with me in the early days when I was still starting this podcast and means of the world. - I appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me on. Now that you're a big deal, still having me on. - Thank you, Sean. Thanks for listening to this
conversation with Sean Carroll. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.