Avi Loeb + Eric Weinstein: NASA into UAPs, Galileo Project update, and Government Competence (234)

one and we are live on youtube welcome it is your fearful host in this residual time of pandemic podcasting joined by two phenomenal intellects two phenomenal friends two phenomenal thinkers that uh inspire me and there's over we're approaching a thousand people right off the bat and it's no surprise they're here to see me no no they're here to see dr eric weinstein professor avi loeb how are you guys today great thank you we're well thanks i last saw you both together in miami at a bitcoin conference where avi you made a stunning announcement you said go all in on dogecoin i cannot believe i followed that advice avi it cost me my pension such as it is no i will never give advice that i personally do not follow [Laughter] very good so uh guys we are here to talk about a variety of topics but i think none as important as um as this recent announcement that we recently heard about from none other than nasa about uh about this phenomenal this decision to actually study the uap phenomenon and and what that might entail for both scientists who are not usually interested in such things but um but uh kind of orthodox sort of speak smaller lowercase o um and so first i want to get uh i want to get interpretation maybe we'll start with avi on this reaction you you have a wonderful link i put a link to your medium post about that's called imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and um i i just like that very much so i want i want to get your take on it what is going on nasa um why do you think that they've suddenly kind of maybe i don't want to say change their tune but but perhaps they have uh what do you guys um well what do you think avi first of all right off the bat what was your reaction well it's relatively simple to understand what happened that bill nelson was very intrigued by unidentified aerial phenomena because as a senator he saw some classified data that is not available to the public and now that he became the head of nasa he said that when the director of national intelligence avery haynes released a report to congress back a year ago he said that scientists should get engaged because he believes it's a serious matter and of course he's the head of nasa but someone has to translate that statement into action and the following morning i contacted the person responsible for science under him thomas zurbuchen and he immediately called me and i told him look i'm here to make your boss happy and i'll be glad to assist you on that and he asked me to send the white paper which i did but i've never heard back from him and now we hear the echo of that exchange that we had and a year later nasa in its very sluggish and political manner uh does something now what is this something there will be a committee that will review the existing data sets and will recommend to nasa whether to fund the research programs that will analyze the existing datasets that are open to the public and perhaps collect new data sets and that recommendation will come in a year or so from now because the committee will need the nine months of pregnancy before delivering a baby and they will start their work only in about a few months from now so all together a year from now there will be a report and then in the best case scenario nasa would say okay that sounds intriguing we'll allocate a few million dollars to this uh research agenda and and then the congress will have to appropriate that fund those funds and approve them and um and then the funding will actually be provided two years from now okay so i'm saying two years from now we already have an ongoing galileo project a scientific research project in two years we will have enough data to perhaps change the charter of this study you know science cannot wait for government to move science if it's funded properly you know operates much faster than that because we are curious you know i'm just like a kid i want to figure out the answer i will not wait for nasa to get its act together so we establish the galileo project we'll find out what's out there the sky is not classified we'll figure it out now you had uh kind of recently celebrated the uh are almost celebrated the the anniversary of the last time we spoke on this podcast but that was in preparation for this uh announcement of the galileo project um and i wonder you know if uh we might think that nasa is somehow you know really influenced by it obviously the the title of your post on medium which i have a link to in the show notes below here below uh and that is uh you know refers to imitation so um we're not talking about the turing test here so when you made up the the idea when you had the idea for the uh for project galileo galileo project was it really to cast as wide a net as possible or was it to focus like a laser using the astronomical tools and cutting-edge technology that we now have in the community rather than having such a wide net that that who knows what would be captured in your in your favorite seashore analogy well there are two approaches that one can imagine one is waiting for the government to declassify that data that bill nelson saw that seems to be very intriguing because not only he spoke about it but former uh cia directors and former directors of national intelligence spoke about it as a serious matter and but that is just like waiting for godot you know like in the in samuel beckett's play we can wait forever a much better approach i mean is to recognize that the government is not releasing the data because it was obtained by a classified sensors it's not so much that the data is the data would have been classified if it be if it indicated activity from china or russia the data is classified since the government cannot figure out what it means and then the sensors used to derive it are classified and that's why the data is not publicly shared so i say forget about it let's just collect new data science is about reproducibility of results if we and a few multi-billionaires showed up at the porch of my home gave me a couple of million dollars you know i decided to allocate it for this project the galileo project and that's what we are using and building new telescope systems you have to understand astronomers look at the sky but they are focused on very distant sources of light if a bird flies above their telescope they ignore it and we want to focus on that bird and say it's a bird and if we see a drone it's a drone but if it's something else not natural or human-made we will say it's not natural or human-made and we want high resolution high quality data so we use the state-of-the-art eq equipment it's not a camera on a jittery cockpit of a fighter jet and it's not eyewitness testimonies you can't write a scientific paper based on what people tell you you know we are not at ancient times now we have to do so the galileo project is basically an attempt to collect new data new evidence using the scientific method without prejudice being agnostic about what we might find in our fishing net we cast a fishing net it's a fishing expedition we don't know what we will find it's probably a mixed bag it will be a collection of natural objects a collection of human-made objects but even if one object happens to come from an extraterrestrial technological origin that would be the most significant discovery of humanity and you know that's very different from the objective of the government which war is about national security and the safety of military personnel so they have to attend to any report irrespective of how good the data is we don't need to care about the fuzzy data you know or eyewitness testimonies we we just want one object that has exceptional data where you can read off the label made on exoplanet y yeah and if you look eric at this uh con first of all i want to give a shout out to eric's mugs because uh last time he had on the standard model uh mexican hat and so forth we drank tequila on cinco de mayo today's got a donut and that's appropriate because this is father's day weekend happy father's day you guys are father figures not only to uh to your children your wonderful children but also to many people around the world ideologically at least but i sent out some dad jokes you know in preparation for this and uh one of them was what did the donut say to his lover he said thanks for making me whole uh eric what is your interest in all of this is it the dream of not the galilean those but the einsteins if not the weinsteins to traverse space and time what is your interest you've been one of the most foremost um scientists that's been looking into this who also plays a very important role in public discourse so why do you care about this for those that might not be aware of it i don't like being lied to and i don't like being lied to in particular about items of national security and i especially don't like it when it's done poorly so one of my chief complaints is is that if you really have a national security threat you don't call up your regular physics corps for an issue of physical interest um it's sort of like everything about this topic is wrong and i don't really like the topic because it's one of two super interesting things to me at this point it's either some [Music] multi-decade nonsense campaign which would explain why we don't have any really good video photograph or artifacts that conclusively end this topic or it's a many-year cover-up of uh an understanding that we've been dealing with something almost beyond comprehension which would explain all the indirect evidence for this and it's also the case that if this is a real phenomenon um of uh craft not manufactured on this earth it's not an issue of technology and i think we've become incredibly confused about life that somehow we're so focused on markets we only think about technology we don't think about the change in the science that would have to explain the new technology so the way i look at this um this is an issue of public trust uh i'm going to slightly disagree with my colleague uh professor loeb not with his conclusion that we have to not wait for the government but we have to pressure the government in part by doing this ourselves because if science is going to be a public good that we cannot commercialize because it falls outside of the intellectual property rules of our country we expect a very high level of support and a very high level of dialogue and the intrusion of um sort of bad tempered ill-bred children in the compact between government and science has been most unwelcome so it's really important to recognize that whatever this is it's important for ris restoring government credibility if there's been a giant lie that's been told for many years we need to understand it scientifically and undo it if it's a question of um there's a real security threat we need our best people on this so i'm just sort of having the sense that the world has gone crazy outside of a small number of people and i wasn't crazy but i was stupid i really just didn't think anything of this topic until two years ago so i'm very very late to this party and in part one of the things that's really important to me is that we not let the people who recognize that this was a real scientific issue early take it on the chin for being early and then immediately turn to the sort of blue chip you know institutional class to prettify this and it's very important to me that we go through a process of restoring scientific credibility to people who've made eye contact with this not not necessarily said it's aliens or it's you know ufos from uh from alpha centauri or whatever but people have said there is something here it is mysterious and i've now gone deep enough into this world to understand that you're in trouble no matter what conclusion you come to either you have to account for why there's no direct evidence that's worth anything or you have to account for why there's so much indirect evidence that would be seemingly almost impossible to assemble if there was no there there and neither of those conclusions is a comfortable one for me and the last thing i want to say is is that you also get into this thing with the government which i don't understand where people reach out they tell you that you're going to be flown out to see some site to see some evidence you're prepared to sign an nda you're prepared to sort of play ball as a good citizen and as part of the scientific core of the united states and and then everything always gets holed off and held up and we're gonna have to where there's a committee meeting and there's some people who need to be placated and this is an in i can't tell you how many times this has now happened with four or five different channels that don't even seem to be aware of each other so there's something very weird about hurry up and wait going on with this particular topic in a way that i've never seen before and i am tired of being run around if if i'm put under some agreement i can keep my mouth shut but i'm gonna be speculating about what this is up until somebody tells me what the hell we we actually know about this very strange phenomena okay i'm i'm a very naive relative to eric um you know i was born on a farm i'm still a farm boy so my my naivety shows up in the following i i do think that the government is incapable of hiding something it knows okay sorry i have you said the government is in cape you believe that the government is not capable of of covering up at this level yeah yeah my i just want to collaborate yeah my guess is the government is incompetent first of all it's split into many different sections that deal with national security and they don't tell each other what they're doing because of national security concerns they don't want too many people to know what each person does in government okay so that already introduces a lot of viscosity to transfer of information okay but on top of that on this topic there is a stigma and people prefer not to talk about it so that they maintain an image of being the adult in the room okay and um so that you combine these two together and it's possible the government came across evidence that once they clarify that it's not china or russia they say okay we don't want to sound crazy uh let's just forget about it since it's not russia or china and they just leave it aside uh i don't think it's a matter of um you know anything beyond it's just that the government is not a scientific organization now so it's not malice it's it's incompetence yeah yeah and for me and and it's all related to the fact that sensors that are used for national security like for example missile warning system that need to know about ballistic missile heading towards the us you know if they see something that looks not like a ballistic missile they don't you know it's not abolishing they don't care about if it came from another planet as long as it's not threatening the life of people in the us and uh so my point is that um government is not a scientific organization it's motivated by national security uh considerations and things that fall outside of that are often dismissed especially if there is a stigma on them so now the question is uh we we hear those reports we hear the echoes it's sort of like being outside the room where the adults are speaking with each other you hear some noises and it looks like the adults are really discussing it very seriously so you say okay there is something there that they are discussing why are they spending so much time discussing it you know i'm just like a kid i hear that that's discussing something i want to figure out what it is and the adults don't tell me what it is and so i just say okay well the the sky is not classified let's just figure it out ourselves you know why why do we need to wait and listen and i don't have an issue with government they can do whatever they want but as a scientist you know for millions of dollars i can build equipment that will give me the answer so it's ridiculous for me to ask the adults to give me the answer when i can figure it out myself yeah and uh i mean obviously this drew a lot of kind of controversial remarks and not the you know the requisite amount of snarkiness uh even from you know colleagues and folks but but especially those looking at the budget for this new nasa program i put the link to a piece in axios written by a woman miriam cramer who i don't know but i know her bio says it's not aliens it's never aliens uh she i don't know if she reached out to you avi or eric but yeah i spoke with her a lot in the past but yeah go ahead this this is talking about the riskiness of this nasa program both reputationally um you know for the for the normally stayed and and very impressive organization government organization that is nasa but also to the reputation of astronomers uh katie mack who's a uh prolific uh denizen of astronomy and and all things related to public outreach uh she said something to the effect of uh you know we shouldn't connect ufos to astrobiology or any other thing other than a sort of aliens of the gaps argument where people assume that if they don't have an explanation it might be aliens how do you react to such a statement well i should say i'm most surprised by people that work on seti because many of them objected to any scientific study of this and also resisted allowing in conferences lectures on this subject it was banned and now i say okay the government really wants to know the answer how can the scientific community shy away from it it's very often said that we shouldn't waste taxpayers money well guess what the government and the public that pays the taxes are very curious about this so how can scientists say no this is too speculative we don't want to deal with it obviously this should be in the mainstream of science and what what you see very often are people that blog and or or have presence on social media like the ones you mentioned and they are just figuring out where the wind blows they want to be popular they want to get as many likes as possible i will not mention names but they basically say what they think people would like to hear okay and i bet you that once the wind will change direction they will change direction and to me that's not the way scientists should work it's not a popularity contest we need to figure out the truth and we need to investigate the subjects that are of interest to government and the public and irrespective of where the wind is blowing at this moment in time because the wind will change direction in the future i've seen it many times in the context of the planets that were ridiculed when i started astrophysics uh gravitational wave astrophysics was ridiculed you know it's very often that the wind is blowing in the wrong direction because it's blowing in the direction of so-called experts people that worked on things for a long while and want to maintain the landscape of research the same as they are familiar with and that's counteracting innovation in science so yeah we should ignore that yeah when you look eric at the you know the transition since you and i first started talking about this over two years ago at the beginning of my pandemic excursions into podcasting would you have expected that nasa would provide a six-figure budget it's rumored that the budget for the nasa program is a hundred thousand or so which is only one you know 11th of the galileo project budget i should say that eric you are a member of the external advisory committee for project galileo i believe i used to be but i have since stepped down due to other uh requirements but uh eric um is that are you still involved in galileo project as an external uh kind of no not external he's in the research oh he's in the research okay sorry i i didn't i i didn't recall i was confused completing myself with eric roger and i'm interested in yeah i mean look there are a lot of people who don't belong in science and we sold science as science is fun and science is a good time and it's not really true science is a calling and it's grueling and it's dangerous and all these things we need the people who are trying to spread shame and fear to go back under their comforters and and and duvets and hide there until this gets sorted out nobody knows what this is it may be a propaganda campaign on behalf of the government whatever it is it's a something and the idea that putting investigating it puts you at risk reputation i'm just going to pass over this in silence it's embarrassing that we have such people in science there's not much we can do um this isn't a question of uh you know studying astrology there's a claim that their data exists there's a tremendous amount of first-hand encounters that are had with pretty reputable people and one of the things i've been just shocked by is the number of completely sober individuals who once or twice in their life uh appeared to have had some sort of uap ufo experience that was effectively impossible to dismiss as swamp gas or a mylar balloon and whatever this is it deserves investigation even if what we find out is that you know that there's some mineral in the water that can induce hallucinations that look like cigar-shaped objects whatever it is doesn't matter but the most important thing is just to drive the shamers and haters out of serious scientific discourse because science is based on a certain level of trust and a certain level of professional ethics and we can't afford such people trying to steal other people's grants or trying to ding other people's reputations just to play the cutthroat academic version of the hunger games or the blogging sphere so i think it's really it's really important just to recognize what we're talking about is the scientific equivalent of a mean girls lunch table in middle school and it's very important just to drive them underground and to return fire like let's not take this as shame i'm certainly not saying that we're being visited by aliens i'm saying something is going on and whether it's a government disinformation campaign uh or we've been in contact with little green men for years i can't tell you what i can tell you is something is going on and science investigates the something and we apologize to no one and with all due respect and with all the love from science if you're not down with that get the hell out of our way and so um so um it's very often said to me extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence which is a quote from carl sagan but you know as much as he was a member of my department many decades ago i completely disagree with him because extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding you know we invested 10 billion dollars to confirm the higgs boson through the large hadron collider now you could have said well it's an extraordinary claim we don't have evidence for it the higgs boson doesn't exist that's not the way science is done if there is a question that is worthwhile either because we have good reasons to believe that something exists or because there are reports of anomalous phenomena in this case from the government from other sources then we should examine it and unless you put funds towards it it's just like sitting at home and saying i don't have neighbors well guess what you have to look through your windows to find your neighbors and you better use a telescope so it's completely unprofessional i think it reflects more on the quality of those scientists who make these statements uh more than on the subject itself and the stigma should go the other way and uh thinking about the culture and not being able to dissociate it my comment for you guys is you know your crosstown rival mit david kaiser he makes a uh a point in his recent book quantum legacies you know that the alien kind of phenomena first percolated into the american consciousness around the same time as the nuclear age the quantum revolution the electronics digital revolution um what about this current epoch i mean i can't escape the fact that you guys were at this bitcoin conference where i lost you know all my money on on dogecoin no no i'm just kidding but we are going to talk about an nft project that is uh close to both uh at least avi and what i'm interested in with my recent translation of galileo's dialogue for the first time and not translation but audiobook um and an nft associated with it but is there anything about the zeitgeist the spirit of the times now that is causing this where you have senators and and not the kooky one legitimate senators uh you know looking at this phenomenon you have military is there anything in the in the air so to speak that is commensurate maybe to a lesser degree than in the 1940s and 50s when this first surfaced from roswell onward well i think the data gathering capabilities that we have are so much better now and so while in the past you could have said oh it's probably just a malfunction of the detector or whatever nowadays you cannot ignore it because we have much better sensors and uh if you want to ask why now you know i i i think it's the accumulation of data it's the fact that perhaps you know we are developing these ai systems you may ask why is there activity you know if we are getting close to creating um a conscious ai system or an ai system that is indistinguishable from the human mind that would be of interest to extraterrestrials you know for us to have a nuclear reactor you know it's not such a great accomplishment because they're much bigger nuclear reactors in the form of stars out there in nature but there is nothing like an artificial intelligence system that comes along naturally and that's a milestone that once we have a system of that nature could attract attention i feel slightly differently about it i guess i think that it may be that when you fuse nuclei you send a signal that you're pretty close to the end of the basic rules of physics and that's controversial because people like the idea that physics is an infinite process not like finding all continental land masses where at some point you add the last one and you're done i'm concerned that we just don't have a scientific method extended one of the things that avi and i talk about is the extension of the scientific method um to novel circumstances for example it's very rare that humans ever study something more intelligent than themselves um speak for yourself speak for yourself eric well i i'm married as well so um i i do study my wife's behavior but that's not what i was getting at thank you for bringing that up good good what we have is a situation in which what if you're the rat in a psychologist's maze and you're trying to figure out when the psychologist provides you with sugar water or cheese [Music] everything reverses it's also the case that when we capture technology if we capture it from the wild we're usually talking about a chimpanzee has figured out how to fish ants with a stick it's not usually the case that we come across something like a computer or a spaceship that has capabilities that we lack i mean an example of this would be like the antique theory mechanism which was discovered in a shipwreck dive where it was a human civilization but one far more advanced uh than any we had known about like a thousand years ago so the scientific method has to be extended one of the reasons i'm interested in the galileo project is the discussion about how what's what is the responsible extension of the scientific method it's also the case for example if you look at cuttlefish skin it's probably the most advanced camouflage system found in nature what if somebody so in the ufo uap world that would be called signature management and what would the what would it be like to study something that doesn't want to be studied is more advanced than you are is studying you while you are studying id uh and knows physical laws that you know nothing of i just spent um several days at two physics conferences at ucla that zv byrne was was organizing and in the first one um nima arkani hamed from the institute for advanced study brought up one of his favorite points which is the demise of space-time that space-time is doomed and it is only going to be seen in the future as an emergent mathematical structure a map which is not the territory the interesting thing about that though is if you take the point of view that space-time is merely an effective theory then you have to ask yourself the question does the theory that renders space-time and effective theory that contains space-time does that have new degrees of freedom that something else can get access to and that we're trapped in this much lower dimensional more compressed effective theory while something else is aware of a of a more fundamental theory and in that paradigm um there is the scientific method is relatively mute on most of these topics so we we tend to believe that we're in general position we're smarter than what we're studying we can repeat it many times at will and all of these things have to be adjusted and we've met that a little bit with respect to things like the big bang and the surface of last scattering you know and i think avi made a really brilliant point although he made it in a way that i might slightly disagree with but the point is much better than my disagreement the point is is that intelligence may be much rarer than fusion which i totally agree with and i think that that's a really interesting thing but it may be also that the reason that we have summoned something to our shores is that we've indicated something that we do not know we may think physics is going to go on forever and whatever it is that may be watching us may know exactly how close we are to parody with it so rather than it being tens of millions of years more advanced than ourselves which is very much in keeping with the zeitgeist of today the zeitgeist of today is against individual achievement it's against the triumph of human intelligence it's against the idea of power laws where certain people are much more productive than teams of others etc etc this thing may know that we are much farther along and much more of a threat to it than we know we are if you think about it what if you suddenly found that orcas had developed opposable flippers and were just miles ahead of what we thought you know large dolphins could do in the sea it would give us a huge shock [Music] what i think is is that it is entirely possible that whatever the success or the space time is allows for things that we can't yet think about and that it may be that we're a lot farther towards learning our fundamental truth than we know and that that may be uh of interest to something watching us yeah if i may add to what eric just said um you know the one thing that marks the current time is the development of um ai artificial intelligence systems that may be uh eventually similar to the human mind and um you just if you ever push the baby on in a stroller on the street you would recognize that the baby when it passes by other babies uh finds them much more interesting than yourself um and then therefore you know if we are dealing with ai astronauts my baby likes the toaster oven better than me it's not saying much but uh my but my point is simple that you know we are used to darwinian evolution here on earth where random processes select the fitest the the survival of the fittest um and then in fact the extension of that once we started developing technologies technological selection not natural selection but technological selection in interstellar space it's those gadgets that are autonomous don't need guidance from their senders then their senders may be dead by now these are ai astronauts and they may be also our destiny our future if we send out those monuments of sentient ai systems to space there might i can guarantee that to you that they are much better than the monuments you find uh in for example harvard square uh harvard yard uh which are monuments of past presidents and deans that try to preserve their physical image these are static sculptures and when kids pass by them they usually yawn and my point is that sending ai astronauts is our future and it may have been the future of other civilizations because you know most of the sun-like stars from billions of years before the sun so they were just ahead of us and one thing i wanted to ask you i've been working on it in my mind uh since you and i had a chance to talk over a year ago when you launched the uh galileo project and gave me that scoop uh that i appreciate so much and that was uh with reference to the fact that we don't seem to see aliens in our solar system and the reason i think that's significant in the you know context of what fred hoyle and others called panspermia uh seems to be at least at some level capable of establishing you know an upper limit on evolutionary facility or in some way in other words we've had life on earth for how long have you four billion year three billion years something like that yeah hundreds of millions of years it started hundreds of millions of years after the earth cooled so yeah it was really quick billions and and it's efficient once it gets started and and replication occurs and information storage obeys now we haven't searched everywhere and and your friend carl sagan that we spoke about i have a finger puppet of him here you know he said absence of evidence is an evidence of absence he said all sorts of things like fine men i love when people quote feynman you know he'll say something like um uh you know if you can't explain it to your grandmother you don't understand it and then he'll say if i could explain it to you a newspaper reporter it isn't worth a nobel prize so i don't want to make too much of these great you know people in the pantheon of science um in history but the fact that we don't see any life on any elsewhere else in the in the unit in the solar system even can that be used to set some kind of a limit on the ability for us to you know place bayesian priors on the likelihood of finding life outside the solar system let alone technological life or am i just way off here no i mean it's life can be very subtle for example it can be under the ice of enceladus or europa uh and we haven't drilled the ice yet to find out if there is any fish in the ocean under it uh there were some astronomers suggesting last year that perhaps uh in the there is life in the clouds of venus you know so these are very exotic environments and the life would be quite different than we find here on earth but um i i think we are really at the infancy of searching and and it may be different from earth for sure because the physical conditions there are different so it's sort of like going on a date without knowing what what your date would look like and so you're looking around the room and it doesn't look like it's a you there is a human like yourself out there but that doesn't mean that your date is not next to you in some different form you know yeah um so uh eric when we think about the kind of motivation perhaps of uh journalists or other non-government organizations um how do you actually assess this you've been very vocal about the need as you just articulated to not humiliate people it's not part of science but journalists aren't scientists right they're the first to admit that hopefully um what standards of journalism do you think there need to be if any to report on such things without you know encouraging ridicule and the prosthetic forehead problem of you know uh of uh that is worthy of ridicule at some level what do you think can be done about this in the public social media sphere etc i i don't know where good journalism is still being done i mean i sometimes look at quanta and think highly of what's written there but in general i've sort of just become aghast at what twitter has done to journalists where we we now have basically activists uh recruited as journalists because it can sell legacy media um obviously the right thing is uh is professional standards which are tacit understandings of what you cannot do and i i'm concerned that there's something about our phones that um tens everything makes everything tend in the direction of interpersonal drama and uh in order to get funding in order to get coverage this has to become uh about you know so-and-so's reputation on the rocks tune in next week when we'll hear and and this is nonsense it's completely antithetical to what science is when i look at the g minus two uh muon anomaly in the discussion i was just listening to for several days you have these collegial groups that are you know sort of at each other's throats but everything is extraordinarily professional and careful and the whatever rivalries there are are not at this lunch table level so i think that the basic issue is we've just got to get rid of people who the emphasis on people who go after other people because they can't do their job either as scientists or as journalists covering science and we need to replace them with better paid people in trusted positions who weigh things and it's also i just wanted to say that there's one other community that i'm going to call out i don't want to get into specifics but the debunking community is really disappointing because what it's doing is it's crowding out critique and critique really matters and snark and debunking and dragging and and uh all of this dunking on stuff is some sort of abomination that we need to get rid of what i'm curious about right now is what is our best data who holds it who may see it i applaud avi's attempt to say we should get our own data but it's also completely ridiculous that a small number of government physicists determined by their security clearances rather than by their facility with equations seems to be in charge of this as their portfolio and what i would say is that it's really important for really prominent names in the in the theory community to start calling for an unsealing of this stuff and i have to say that i'm very suspicious of a government trying to keep a secret and a legion of um journalists who seem to be helping them by stigmatizing anyone who asks for the secret so i just want to take a couple of other things that are really interesting peter dazek was clearly doing something in wuhan with this virus we haven't held hearings we haven't figured it out jeffrey epstein was doing something trafficking children under everybody's noses no journalist has called for even the bare minimum examination of documents related to what is probably a fictional hedge fund and whether or not he was tied to the intelligence community the fire bombing of the federal courthouse in portland was not covered in real time in a meaningful way given the level of violence being done to a federal building in all of these circumstances whether it's hunter biden's laptop we've seen something really interesting which is the the appearance of anti-interesting stories stories that are professional legacy media refuses to cover no matter how much interest is expressed by the population and which is later found that whatever the attempt to stigmatize the story there was far more there in all of these cases than anyone had imagined so i think we now have to look at the ufo uap story in light of all of these other stories i am absolutely positive that people were trying to firebomb the federal courthouse in portland and that for some reason msnbc was not keen to cover it just the way they weren't keen to cover andrew yang's presidential run something is happening in our journalistic layer which is causing stories to be anti-interesting and there's nothing more anti-interesting than jeffrey epstein in ufo uap when i think about that okay go ahead um because moving away from politics into science and academia okay and the same approach that eric is worried about in the context of politics and and the media you can find among mainstream scientists so on the one hand uh ridiculing the study of uap even though there is data and evidence and science is all about collecting more evidence if some evidence looks intriguing that's all that science is about evidence whereas while ridiculing that maintaining a mainstream that is focused on extra dimensions for which we have no evidence focused on some notions of space and time that were never validated by any experiment that never made a prediction that was confirmed and yet awards and honors are given to mainstream scientists just for proposing them and then to other mainstream scientists just for invalidating them experimentally and one example was the large extra dimensions you know the the person who proposed it got a prize and the person who did an experiment later to show that it's there cannot be a large extra dimension got the price in so i said we went full circle here and we proven that an idea is not correct so why why was it in the mainstream to start with and what you find is a lot of the activity in theoretical astrophysics theoretical physics is rooted in ideas that were never tested never validated so i said that's perfectly fine you know we can think about possibilities that's perfectly fine but at the same time when there is intriguing evidence to dismiss it and ridicule it that's inappropriate this is a culture that prefers to live in a virtual reality basically ideas that bring you pleasure it's just like putting goggles on your head and living in the metaverse where you are the smartest scientist in the world but that's not the way science should be done you should be wrong every now and then by comparing your ideas to data and that's you know you should be bruised sometimes because you propose something that turns out to be wrong and the only way to allow that is to follow data to look for evidence and and the strange thing is that not accepting that rule and basically asking how many angels can sit on the tip of a dance on the tip of a pin that's an ex especially in extra dimensions that's a completely acceptable in mathematical intellectual gymnastics exercise that a lot of communities can agree on and give each other but when you ask yourself how can that replace this seeking experimental tests that looks to me very much you know the science is supposed to teach the public and government how to do how to deal with evidence so scientists very often say oh the government doesn't pay attention to evidence doesn't pay attention to data but if you look at the academic community it's actually worse and i ask myself how is that possible we're supposed to set an example by which we follow evidence if there are uap that look intriguing we say okay that's interesting let's figure it out you know that's the way scientists should approach it but instead no the data is uninteresting it's not real forget about it let's just work on extra dimensions like i say that's completely opposite to what scientists should do well i don't know if the i mean i push back with respect as you know uh and and i do feel like it's a little bit of a strawman to suggest that somebody could pivot from extra dimensions to doing the type of astronomy that even you don't do avi i mean you're not actually sitting in a telescope every night i mean you're a theoretical astrophysicist of the highest order and you've written on this and you know the astronomical technology depression is not what i do the question is what do i value okay and i value evidence and when there is intriguing evidence i will not ridicule the evidence just on some hypothetical idea so the real issue is that some people within our community prefer to work on theoretical ideas just because they flatter their ego and they prefer to shy away from data i'm not talking about one year two years i'm talking about four decades we're talking about the career of many scientists yeah okay the funny problem that we have here is that we poke holes for certain conspiracies certain outlandish ideas and not others right so there are various outlandish ideas that you're allowed to discuss in public including conspiracies like that russia is running the united states through donald trump that was an allowable conspiracy that he was a foot soldier of putin but then there are conspiracies that you're not allowed to now the same thing is true for scientific theories there are outlandish scientific theories that have somehow diplomatic immunity from the regular scientific process and others that do not and so we have hyper scrutiny for some and extremely lacks relaxation of the rules for others and this is in part a mystery that there is no real scientific method that's generating this concept of the mainstream if leading people want to work on something outlandish that become that outlandish thing becomes the mainstream and if certain people want to take a look at evidence and go through absolutely normal scientific channels to look at something that people don't want discussed that becomes aberrant fringe weird cranky behavior now the fact is that that doesn't really have a lot to do with any objective standard it has to do with the fact that there is an overton window in science just the way there is in political discourse and you know if you wanted to study uh what causes ulcers and you didn't believe it was stress um you had to experiment on yourself at some point because that was so much a part of the orthodoxy in all of these situations where you've seen something fall something outlandish we saw this with the asymmetry of the weak force the evidence was accumulating but it was just this thing where nobody wanted to say the weak force has no clothes you know it was an emperor that we dare not question and so in a certain sense it's not really about extra dimensions or ufo uap the question is are we as scientists allowed to say hey why is string theory allowed to go on this way or large extra dimensions or loop quantum gravity but not uap ufo even to gather data to dismiss it by saying we had sensors up and we found nothing so i think oh sorry go ahead just to close it out i think that the real issue is it's a little disturbing to many of us that there are allowable relaxations of the scientific uh method and there are extremely harsh harsh applications of scientific standards that are wielded selectively like a cop in a town you know penalizing people who look a certain way and enforcing the speed limit extremely aggressively and letting other people speed through at 100 miles an hour and doffing their cap to them encouraging them on their way that's a real problem that we haven't addressed and nobody really wants to take up so i want to ask avi um you know as a professional professional courtesy what what do you mean by data i mean i have here i'm in my office that used to be belong to jeff and margaret burbidge towering titans of astronomy and physics of the past hundred years here's a plate she took on uh at lick observatory it's a it's a it's a galaxy she eventually did a rotation curve here's the spectrum of it uh on one hand you know these are smudges on on pieces of glass that are very fragile the other hand they're pretty pictures and on the other hand they're data and i want to ask you when i hear colleagues say we need data and the data need to be public and god damn it the hubble space telescope was built by nasa and i own it what is data i mean the hubble deep field is a pretty picture there's very little science correct me if i'm wrong obvi i'll defer to you uh you know if i'm wrong but you know it's a pretty picture there is data there is evidence that can be extracted to to look at distributions and and and number counts and colored magnitude diagrams you can do all sorts of things with it but if you don't have the calibration the flat field the the dark current if you don't have all the stuff that goes into it so i want to ask you what data are you are we really talking about i mean is it cell phone camera videos is it like eyewitness reports what what is it exactly avi uh and then i'd like to hear eric's uh taking this so what i mean by data is uh the accumulation of quantitative signals that are collected and documented by instruments that you have full control over and whose background you understand okay so it cannot be a camera in a jittery cockpit of a fighter jet it cannot be the pilot because people are not instruments they have hallucinations they have wishful thinking so you cannot write a scientific paper saying this person told me that i'm sorry i mean even if the person is sincere that cannot be used in a scientific peer-reviewed journal okay so what i mean by data is first of all you build instruments that you fully understand in terms of what is the background noise in the instrument so that you can detect a signal and then you let the instrument do its job and report back the numbers that it measured and then you interpret those and that's what the galileo project is trying to do we are we were asked why aren't we uh crowdsourcing or crowd you know providing people an app that they will put on their iphone so that they will give us data this is low quality data that we have no control over we would rather build instruments that we fully understand under conditions that are fully under our control and then interpret the data that they collect because then we can say look this instrument saw an object let's say in the infrared another instrument detected the same object in the optical the object was moving along the same trajectory in both instruments it cannot be malfunctioned of the instrument and we know the acceleration cannot be produced by human-made vehicles and it cannot definitely be representative of a bird because we know the distance to this object so these are the kinds of measurements that will tell us it's something else or if we have a high resolution image where we can see the bolts and the screws on the surface of the object so it cannot be natural a rock doesn't have bolts and screws on it or if we go and do an expedition to papua new guinea where we collect the fragments from the first interstellar meteor that landed there in 2014 and then we find that the composition of those fragments is some alloy that is completely artificial that you don't find in nature then it's something else so what i'm talking about are uh you know collection of quantitative measurements that indicate that it's something quite unusual now we did have partial evidence of that type on omuamua the first interstellar object reported uh we have some partial information about this meteor that i mentioned from 2014 four years before umuah that my student amir siraj and i discovered and the government confirmed a couple of months ago and we know that this meteor was denser or tougher than iron because it burned only 20 kilometers above ocean level where the stress is above well above uh the yield stress of iron so so we know that it was unusual but we don't know for sure what its origin was and we know that it came from outside the solar system so right now we have intriguing evidence the same as for uap we we don't have a conclusive argument at the moment but that's why we should be motivated to find more data and it always reminds me of my colleague that after a lecture at harvard about omua mua this colleague of mine focused on studying rocks for decades so when he left the auditorium he said to me omoamoa is so weird i wish it never existed and that is completely the opposite to what a scientist a true scientist should say obviously an expert would like to interpret everything based on his or her past knowledge but if you are a real scientist you should say this object is so intriguing i would like to get more data on it it's really exciting lenin reportedly said you might not be interested in war but war is interested in you you might not be interested in aliens uh but uh but eric what extent should you know you and i have talked extensively about the general demarcation paparian ideas but at what level would you say to avi give it up man omo it's like in other words what would it take for for you and me or maybe to convince avi and then avi want to ask what would you be convinced by that omumua is not as your book of the same name phenomenal book best seller smash hit extraterrestrial what would convince you avi but first i want to ask eric is that a good question even to ask you know more or less my experience with avi is that when avi gets something wrong he's eager to say that he's got it wrong and that shouldn't be a remarkable characteristic of a scientist i'm sorry to say but you know just the willingness to entertain being wrong um it's contagious and it's immediately recognizable so my feeling is i don't really need to tell it's not like avi is under some kind of a watch and we have to say like maybe he's gone around the bend on a muah i think what he's doing is is that he's trying to show conviction and might avi be wrong yes it does not shock avi that i think he might be wrong and nor does it threaten our relationship i think that this just we've got to take the mtv uh out of science in order to recognize that being wrong and making bold conjectures is normal and if you don't if everything you've ever said is true and is right and works you're probably not really pushing the cutting edge um i think that in terms of data uh one of the great problems that we have here is that every time [Music] you try to take the perspective of somebody on the outside saying well maybe it's bs maybe there's something there i don't know and you're talking to these people who are ex-government or aerospace contractors or in government there's this very awkward moment where they get so frustrated with this they say i just wish i could show you what we have because it would end this conversation instantly so the claim is made repeatedly by different people that what is held in terms of like i don't know satellites that have tracked objects coming in from you know outside of earth orbit at incredible speeds and non-ballistic trajectories you know the claim is we have all sorts of crazy data that may not be very visual in the sense of oh look a floating tic tac but are scientifically much more interesting because let's say you have you know five different sensors on the same object and you're absolutely convinced that it would be incredible to spoof all of them or it would have to be a conspiracy or something so the claim that is made repeatedly by people in positions [Music] with security clearances and the like is that the data is completely clear that we're dealing with a real uh phenomena and that's really tough on me because i haven't seen anything that looks remotely like that in other words i'm so bored of these three tantalizing videos that got released and all of the cool stuff that shot on people's iphones you know the other week i saw a supposed uap video shot out of a a plane in which a giant whale broke through the clouds and splashed back into the clouds as if they were the you know the surface of the ocean and i thought well that's much higher quality than most of the ufo videos i've ever seen um so in a weird sense the video stuff as data you know to obvious point is completely clear that it's not very helpful what is claimed is is that there is extremely high quality data that completely settles the question of whether we're looking at something real or not i've never seen this data i've heard it discussed many times people have threatened to show it to me people have threatened to fly me to a location there's something that has happened every single time so i now expect that i'm going to get some phone calls from people who claim to have this data who claim that this is going to happen and then it doesn't happen and it's not just me that this has happened to it's repeatedly with various people so i think that in part whatever is going on here um it's a dime that was flipped and has landed on its side for like 75 years and since a dime is not going to stay in an unstable equilibrium on its side you have to ask the question is that in fact a new piece of data what does one make of the fact that a dime could land on its side for you know 70 years without clear data getting into the public's hands so that anybody with a you know a competency can look at it and say this is not consistent with anything known to man and avia uh well let me just first re reset the stage here um talking with my friends dr eric weinstein proprietor of the portal podcast and um general racontour impresario uh advisor friend and uh mentor to many uh graduate of harvard which we'll get into in just a bit and uh the frank baird professor uh at harvard former longest-serving chair from that wrong of harvard's uh uh renowned astronomy department author of number one best-selling book extraterrestrial professor avi loeb of harvard and i am your humble podcast host brian keating proprietor of the into the impossible podcast where i make videos in short form and long form interviews like this but also short form explainers i've yet to do one about you know how we would actually collect data from this but avi i wanted to ask you first of all do you want to respond to the to the outrageous accusation that i made i mean could you be proven wrong could um is there anything conceivable that i could how how and how would i do it how would i do it more importantly i'm really surprised that you're asking this because remember this image from osiris-rex this mission that landed on the asteroid bennu okay then it will bring a sample of the material that this asteroid was made of to earth next year yeah so it was clear from the image when it landed that it's a rock it was obvious okay and i would never argue that this is not a rock because it looks like a rock now what did my colleagues suggest for omua moa they suggested it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before because the rock of the type that we had seen before cannot explain all the anomalies okay so they suggested maybe it's a hydrogen iceberg a chunk of frozen hydrogen this is and then they suggested maybe homo is a frozen hydrogen and then we don't see the cometary tail because hydrogen is transparent and and i did a calculation that was published where we showed that actually it would get evaporated very quickly through interstellar space so it cannot be a hydrogen but let's imagine it is okay then the suggestion was okay well it's not a hydrogen iceberg maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg that was chipped off a planet like pluto and the problem is there is not enough solid nitrogen but let's leave that aside there is not enough solid nitrogen to explain the population of this magnitude but let's just say okay maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg again something we've never seen before and the third possibility was a dust bunny a a cloud of dust particles a hundred times less dense than air so that it gets pushed by reflecting sunlight without any cometary tail and i say these are the the leading possibilities that the mainstream of astronomers suggested and you asked me to say you know what would convince me that it's very simple you send something like osiris-rex if it flies through the object then it's a dust bunny because a cloud of dust particles a hundred times less dense in air is so fluffy you can pass through it now if it's a hydrogen iceberg or nitrogen iceberg when you land on it it's obvious i can i i'm willing uh to bet that it's neither of these three okay now you ask me what could it be i say i don't know but maybe it is artificial in origin that's all i'm saying maybe it's a leaflet leaflet from another civilization that was thin and straight and there is a message on it i don't know what it is we can only imagine but maybe but then you know again my point is we can find out easily by going there okay that's my point so all right my objective is to find out the answer and i don't care if i'm wrong or not what i care about is people saying it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before case clause forget about it discussion clause and ridiculing the other option when it's not ruled out brian let me ask you a question why drag this discussion to have us constantly talk about this group of people that we shouldn't really be letting guide the discussion in other words you're sort of saying ah just to give you the chance to respond my feeling is when did these people get the credibility to tell not these people hold on hold on hold on it's not these people it's me so when avi was on the podcast to discuss um in january 2021 i said to him avi you know you know some billionaires and i didn't know about galileo project at that point now i know he knows more billionaires and so i'm going to be extra nice in my uh in my gift basket to you this this coming fall but i said avi put your money where your mouth is have your friend who sponsored the breakthrough pros have him uh yuri uh milner have him instead of directing cell phone cameras to proxima centauri b send those sensors to omumua or something equivalent to it and you said to me hold on hold on eric hold on hold on obvio said to me no it's okay because vera rubin observatory which i agree will have the capability we should see hundreds of these things but i said avi there are things that in sciences we know that are three sigma four sigma so they should only occur by fluke one out of every five million times and we know they happen much more often than what if a moomoo is kind of the opposite of that what if it's a one the one chunk of interstellar message in a bottle we can oh miss it if you don't apply funding and rockets and so forth to it so i want to give you a chance to respond but the amazing thing is that we do have funding so these multi-billionaires came to the porch of my home funded the galileo project just a week ago i said we need funding for the expedition to papua new guinea i just said that we need the funding within a week i got half a million dollars now i tell you as department chair of the astronomy department at harvard you know we've been trying for a decade to raise similar funds to the giant magellan telescope right okay and here i didn't do any fundraising people came to me and said that's inspiring we like the vision we enjoyed your book so i'm telling you the public cares about it the government cares about it wealthy individuals care about it i did not entice them they came to me and said here is the money no strings attached how can you explain that many of my colleagues work extremely hard to break those funds or get committees in tennessee for nasa give them even a small fraction of those funds they just come to me over the past decade i was fully funded by the private sector and that allows me to be free in my thinking and i think that is the way of the future because but what happens in federal funding agencies very often is that they follow the advice of committees that are populated by mainstream scientists those colleagues that ridicule deviations from the beaten path and as a result you don't get people going in directions that are not not conservative so i think that the current funding system is flowed brian let me just try to get back to what i said that started this avi is in a very enviable position as one of the most visible and successful scientists in this area he's sitting at harvard he's got an enormous number of publications very high h index et cetera et cetera chaired professor and what if somebody came out of the university of kentucky and said the same sorts of things that avi was saying and you said well if you're so sure of that why don't you send a probe you know and this gets really tiresome and really irritating the problem has to do with i don't want to base these discussions any longer on an anchor of this backbiting hating community where we have to answer these questions well how would you answer this and how would you answer that the polite answer is the adults are talking and you're not running the conversation so we have to get back to an understanding that avi may be fully funded and avi may be in a position to be fully funded and i think that that's great but pushing everybody to release an nft or cozy up to a billionaire is not practical for science in general and i'm going to stand up for the portion of us that said we had a relationship with the federal government or the federal government more or less knew when to leave us alone and it knew how to protect people for their careers our private universities are not private they're all federally funded they may claim to be private but they're all getting huge amounts of money through overhead and indirect recovery etc etc we have a relationship to defend because we produce a public good that is inexhaustible and inexcludable and quite honestly i'm not giving up on the government just because we've had an explosion of kind of centrist popularity contest thinking in science we need to get back to the point where somebody with a good idea from the university of kentucky who knows no billionaires has a very good chance of getting funded if it flies straight in the face of somebody at princeton and whether or not the faculty at stanford or the university of chicago is upset by this is irrelevant the key question is where there are good ideas do we have smart people with slush funds who can throw money that is not directed by consensus or peer review or popularity contests or reputational concerns what i'm asking you from the into the impossible podcast is can we allow the journalistic groups that say is nasa putting its reputation at stake question mark can we give them the week the year the decade off and actually conduct scientific discussions amongst ourselves without constantly being referenced to these people because this is a pretty serious issue and i'm perfectly happy to find out that there's not a single shred of evidence of any extraterrestrial visitation but that there's been an enormous campaign to hide our spy planes and our stealth technology which took on this form well that's kind of whatever it is whatever it is the plea is can you stop asking questions of the form how would you respond to the person who just wrote an article who said the following thing and the answer is f off that's how i'd respond science is being done and we can't constantly reference ourselves to some journalist who didn't know what they were talking about on deadline who actually can't solve a partial differential error it's not just that navi will you know certainly reciprocate this sentiment it's not just the journalist it's it's the seti community it's the it's the other scientists it's authors of books about you know from scientific perspective that have interviewed avi astrobiologist who should who who would be left we've created a world where everyone has to guard her or his reputation constantly in order to stay one more year in the good graces of this communalist system that figures out who can breathe and whose oxygen gets shut off so the point is is that those colleagues are worth much less than colleagues of 60 years ago and the fact is that in the hunger games that we've created i'm much less interested what the person down the hall thinks about this work or that work what i'm most interested in is which scientists have the ability to say i may have screwed up i'm not 100 sure here are the things that would change my mind and i'm least interested in the scientists who say oh that's out there that's spicy that's weird those people need to be ejected and what i'm going to say is is that inclusion has been much trumpeted but exclusion is just as important who we exclude from the conversation is critical to the progress of science and i'm trying to say that there are people there are voices sneaking into this q a that i'm eager to exclude not because i believe that their dissident voices who must be heard and that i want to step on them what i'm instead suggesting is that trying to murder ideas in their inco at infancy is absolutely antithetical to science and what we need to be doing is making sure that we i'm here to level the playing field in part and we need to step up and say that certain people myself not included were early on this certain people myself included got some bad information went after people not understanding what the current situation was and as somebody who got this topic completely wrong it's important that we talk to people who switch their minds and who can say i screwed up rather than people who seem to always have their finger in in the air and always seem to know exactly what the current prevailing ideas are and and that's what i'm suggesting i don't think that our colleagues are as important now as they used to be because they're all on life support and it can be turned off and we all know it and they all know it well eric you know i have to respond just because you are you know kind of painting me as and from the perspective of you know someone who's attacking without actually capturing what i'm doing what i'm doing is a process that we call annealing that your friend nicholas tele would call anti-fragility right the more scientific scrutiny that avi's claims are my claims in science or your claims withstand the better it actually no makes makes no no no no no no it hinges on the word scrutiny and critique what i'm trying to say is is that we have to jealously defend the gatekeeping of what constitutes critique and what i'm claiming is absolutely avi needs to be critiqued but i go back to paul durock paul durock made it a very clear point which is you have to make sure that ideas are not subject to you know the most rigorous um experiment uh agreement with experiment criteria too early and in part i it's like infant industries we have to protect new ideas like maybe this is an artificial entrant not because uh that's a great idea i have no opinion avi could be completely wrong about amumu i've got zero zero dogs in that fight what i am saying is is that it takes incredible courage right now to say something like that and to pretend that the okay but to to then claim that the the critiques uh are something that you need to subject this isn't anti-fragility it's like saying we don't need a bi-lipid layer for the cell because all the organelles should uh you know withstand full contact with the environment what you need is is a bi-lipid layer with some very careful gates to regulate what gets in and what gets out and i don't want to give the community that is taking an easy pot shot here or there the same status as the careful community who says i think you blew something in equation seven right let me let avi yeah go ahead you studied the galileo right yesterday yes do you think he would have been so wouldn't you agree that he would have been canceled on social media today he would have been cancelled many times and he would have been canceled for his scientific ideas in part but also his political ideas right he got a lot of things wrong as well as being brilliant right as all scientists do but but my point is we can't let uh society control the ideas we have we should allow evidence to guide us and some people are wrong and it's a learning experience so my point is it's not about it's not a personal context you know it's not showing that we are smart nature is smarter than all of us that's why i think if we ever find clear evidence for a smarter kid on the block it would bring us to our senses because we keep competing with each other just like kids in the kindergarten you know playing in the sandbox and then suppose the kids look away and there is a car passing by you know it shows them the world is much bigger yet there is something much more sophisticated going out there and why would we fight with each other about who is slightly more intelligent who pushed the problem in extra dimensions that we don't know exist rather than just look around and pay attention to the evidence that looks intriguing you know that is the natural thing to do and for some reason it's being abandoned these days abandoned because people prefer virtual realities it's sort of like being high on drugs and preferring a reality that gives you pleasure on a reality that is the actual one that we share yeah well science is a painstaking process you don't get the instantaneous dopamine hits of thumbs up and oh sick burn and this is you know avi got taken down in front of this crowd and eric said this to brian and defenestrated him uh but but the the point is i wouldn't be having this conversation if i wasn't deeply interested and and putting my scientific bona fides you know in in your service as i did for the past year with my miniscule and and very minor contributions whatever i did but the point is you know when when i think about collecting data and the process of it i i hear it said that you know everything should be made you know public we should foia the hell out of the government um but on the other hand i also think like people if you can't get scientists to do it it may mean that that they're not interested and they're not truly curious the way galileo or einstein was but it may be that they have used whatever scientific you know acumen they have to triage the problems that they're going to be involved in and this one doesn't rise to the threshold of being interested and that's not a criticism i'm just saying that's an explanation okay i'm a scientist and i'm interested in it yep okay so let you know i prefer to go in a path that was not taken the way robert frost phrased it in his poem uh for him it was the thing that you know uh made made a difference for in his life for me it's the ability as a physicist to find low-hanging fruit because nobody walked that path and there might be something really obvious that we will find so my point is i'm a scientist i'm and why would that be an issue to someone if the garlow project is funded by the private sector following it why would that even raise an eyebrow that everyone should be happy about it but eric's not saying that eric's saying it shouldn't have to be it should be funded by the public which i agree with it should be publicly funded but i also think that eric's saying maybe something i don't agree with was that it shouldn't be privately funded or we shouldn't have to rely on pride and you in fact are relying perhaps on this nft um scenario and i would like to hear that because it is the first time i think it's been tried at eric you're mocking me i don't like that what is the smirk for eric no no it's not it's not look what we're talking about here has a history and the history for example in gravitation there was a prize offered by what appeared to be lunatic named babson and the gravity research foundation for a fair amount of money back in the day for a prize critiquing gravity and nobody in the physics community wanted to touch it up until bryce dewitt wrote an essay won the money and suddenly everybody wanted the money because bryce dewitt had crossed the threshold so the question of whether people find this interesting or not interesting you only get to ask that once money is available to actually look at the project and no reputational damage is available and i guarantee you brian that if ridiculous amounts of money and wonderful conferences and flying people first class was available and all the top people at the institute for advanced study piled in and de-risked it in terms of reputation i guarantee you this topic would find a huge number of scientists who say i think this is the most interesting problem in the world who right now would say yeah little green men hard pass no thanks so what i am trying to say is we all know we the gravity research prize is a perfect example of how human scientists are when it comes to their reputations because reputation is survival and to pretend like that's not going on just to say well your colleagues don't necessarily agree with you it's like well let's find out whether the colleagues agree if we put a large amount of money and we de-stigmatize it i will make you a bet that an enormous number of colleagues suddenly find this incredibly fascinating how could we do that avi i mean eric and i have talked and i don't expect you to have listened to every single episode of the podcast in the past eric and i have talked about you know this this this true truth that society owes physicists they owe us a lot we created a transistor we created a laser we created trillions of dollars the internet and so but how do you monetize that xposed facto it's not so easy as when you have the escrow account you know and you're waiting for your deposit to clear right so how do we do something you know ahead of time to fund science like this especially specula actually let's step away let me let me just ask you a question abby stepping away from aliens anything to do with it let's just say we want to fund basic research which you and i do eric does how do we do that use leveraging before the fact contract with the with the government or with some other public sector funds so that we don't get hosed again like we did with the transistor the laser the major the the the internet and and also telecommunication how do we do that well there is a there is a path and it involves a shortcut so in other words if you uh discover something that people have passion for that people care about and that could make could be revolutionary then it will turn minds of a lot of people at once and in the context of what we were discussing before if i go on an expedition to papua new guinea and i scoop the ocean floor with a sled and a magnet and i bring up a piece of equipment that looks like iphone 100 okay and what i mean by that is something that you cannot really reverse engineer but it does miracles in your hands when you press some buttons okay suppose it happens you know just a futuristic i don't like science fiction but i'm giving you an example of something that could happen because we are going to the ocean and are going to to scoop the the fragment so suppose we happen to find it you know whether it exists or not is part of reality and um we it's just a fishing expedition and we don't know what fish we will find so this is an example where you do the experiment and if you find it it changes everything then everyone in the world will talk about it fund it the scientific community will jump up and down and say of course we knew that we always said that in the 60s someone wrote a paper about something like that it's actually not new and this person was you know just a fisherman that found it it's not important uh that this person found it it was discussed in the 60s and of course we all now the reason i say that is there was a congressman that made anti-gay statements for many years and then when he left congress he confessed that he was gay and could never see that's a clear illustration of human nature where people that really want uh to discuss the subject they can ridicule it just by looking around and seeing that other people are ridiculing it uh and unfortunately you know in academia it's very prevalent so the way to change that is to find something that will be obvious and change everything and of course it's not easy you know we would mostly most likely find fragments of an iron meteorite not of a but at any event you should try and the only way not to find it is by not searching and that's my fundamental point that if you have a prejudice and you say this is too speculative i don't want to even deal with it you will never discover something that you didn't expect even if it lies on the ocean floor there is this gadget there you will never go and search for it and you will feel your life it's a self-fulfilling prophecy to remain ignorant so let me ask you avi assume that you go to papua new guinea you get huge funding from all of these billionaires who are crowding your point i'm very worried about your billionaire problem on your porch i have another one tomorrow tomorrow fantastic i will send orkin sounds like you have an infestation so the question is assume you find nothing or in fact what you find is so boring and uninteresting as to tell you that you completely screwed up and that there was nothing to be found how do you feel the day after oh no it's um you know if you think about life we spend so much effort in directions that do not prove fruit for even if you are trying suppose you want to marry someone a spouse you have to go through many blind dates that turn out quite badly okay and if you look at scientific scientific record of very accomplished scientists most of the time you know they write papers that are not very consequential and so you're just trying to find the one case that will make a huge difference and it's it's difficult life is difficult if it was easy then everyone would have it so the point is without trying without going on dates you will obviously not marry anyone okay and you have to give yourself a chance to be wrong and the way to do it is just like a kid it's a learning experience we should behave like kids scientists should be open-minded curious rather than protecting their ego protecting their image so that they can because it's not about prizes think about it all these awards and prizes and uh you know that that we get are completely meaningless what matters is the intellectual content of what we find and i would much rather find this iphone 100 than win the nobel prize for some for the fact that the expansion of the universe is accelerating uh because of the intellectual content of the meaning that it will have to humanity okay and assume for the moment just to take your data analogy that you go on a blind date and you're not really connecting and you find out the person is into the occult and uh not not the right person for you do you immediately demand all your money back or do you say look if i'm going to go on a few dates i expect that i'm going to pay for a lot of dinners that lead nowhere well yeah that's exactly what happened with the large hadron collider aside from the higgs the mission was to find supersymmetry in the natural parameter space that everyone recommended we haven't found supersymmetry did anyone commit suicide as a result no we just said okay well maybe it's around the corner maybe it's at home or maybe isn't it great that we found that low energy supersymmetry isn't present because we could have written an endless number of articles on low energy supersymmetry at the electroweak scale and without actually having an accelerate we wouldn't know i mean i was just at this conference where the person said here are all the models we've ruled out here's the one model that remains and it was amazing to look at parameter space and right you know at a certain level um if you keep hearing about some gal that you should really go on a date with because she's looking for the same things you are and you find out that in fact it's not a workable situation you've paid for dinner but you've learned something valuable you don't have to keep listening hey you really you really need to find out what's going on with susan these days exactly you learn no matter what we gain knowledge as a result of getting more evidence the only way not to gain knowledge is to behave like experts because they say our past knowledge is all that we need there is nothing else if we studied rocks in the past everything in the sky is rocks that's it must be natural and then the last question avi just to to do this what do you think the most persuasive scientific critiques that you're worrying about of your own projects and your own theories are as opposed to which ones play well or seem to be damning like in other words what is it that gets through to you with that you're worrying about at night because i really want people to understand that trying to get rid of silliness isn't trying to get rid of critique it's a question of you really have to focus on what is germane what's collegial and what is constructive so what is it that you're worried about with extraterrestrial technology and probes and visitors that you might have most wrong here yeah so i'll give you a specific example in the case of a muammua the most unusual anomaly was that apparently there was it exhibited an excess acceleration away from the sun excess push away from the sun by such some mysterious force because we didn't see it evaporating there was no rocket effect and what worried me the most is that the measurement of the trajectory was wrong was off and so together with my postdoc john forbes we really looked really carefully into the data what could be errors that they didn't account for and i was and that was after we wrote the paper with shmuel bialy where we suggested maybe it's an artificial object a very thin object pushed by reflecting sunlight so what worried me is that the measurement is wrong and we went through this with my postdoc for several months to check that there the conclusions that were drawn from the data uh were correct and we confirmed it but this is an example where a situation where you know there seemed to be an anomaly but it's actually in the way the data was analyzed and not you know in in in the properties of the objects and i constantly worry about this and i could be wrong you know i was wrong in in some other cases in my scientific career and but that's part of my learning experience i'm i'm not afraid of being wrong and i think if you don't dare to collect more data you will never figure out what's behind anomalies my biggest fear is that i'm being propagandized by a disinformation campaign that was constructed by the government to keep certain things secret and i have no hard data but i have mountains of indirect evidence and so i'm very i'm worried that in fact there is no there there at a scientific level but there will be there there at a government trust and disinformation level so that's like one of my biggest concerns yeah but also actually i'm talking about objects that were discovered by astronomers no no no you were talking about a different issue i i'm just saying but i've never said anything one way or the other about a muammar or anything like that right but one thing i should advise you eric is um don't don't worry too much about government here we're dealing with nature okay so government is completely secondary they cannot change what nature gives us okay and i give much more respect to nature than to government because nature obeys according to physics a universal set of laws government does not so guys i want to pivot and the remaining time we all have hopefully uh to another subject with your permission and that's um that's an issue that avi has written very uh poetically and lovingly about uh and it involves academic um academia but specifically scientific family i i want to refer people to the in the show notes down there when you when you go down there and you take out your thumb and you click the like button uh if you want to see these guys back on this podcast or people like that in this conversation when you're down there you'll see a link to avi's second medium post and it's about academia and it's the joys of an academic family avi what what prompted you to write this this lovely touching article and uh i wanna eric hasn't seen it perhaps but uh i wanna discuss on what academia could be what it hasn't been maybe for the past decades and and where it could be with things like we've talked about with nfts with uh daos with uh ai and other acronyms so avi take it away what was this article's intention well uh last week my former students and postdocs about 60 of them organized the conference to celebrate my 60th birthday it was a scientific conference but during the coffee breaks and at the banquet many of them came over to me to tell me for the first time that i made a big impact on their lives and that was a big revelation and the the biggest reward that i ever received uh or you can say call it an award uh in a sense because i always try to help young people people and and when i was department chair i was always on the side of the faculty if there was an issue with the higher administration i fought for the faculty and the same deal with students and and postdocs that were mine i always sided with them and tried to help them because i i very much sympathize with their vulnerability and and so during the banquet for example last week many of them stood up and and mentioned stories and you know some of these brought tears to my eyes i simply forgot how much i helped some of them and they brought it up and it was very moving to me now we also had a soccer match between the postdocs and the faculty and i should say the faculty one and two zero and i i was fortunate to score one of the goals but uh the good news is that the postdocs will become faculty in the coming years um and all together people told me after this conference that it was one of the most unusual conferences they ever attended because it did feel like an academic family where like-minded people my students and postdocs that think you know just like me since i sort of trained them in this way they are curious about a wide range of topics and they never spoke to each other each of them knew me from the interaction with me and not they did not interact among themselves so for them it was really the first family meeting and you know in a way if something bad happens to me in my morning jog if a car runs over me every every morning when i i jog at 5 00 a.m so that there isn't much risk but it's possible that the car would run over me now i have the sort of peace of mind that my academic dna will be preserved in this very uh how should i say uh vibrant uh group of of innovative scholars that are sort of my academic children and there is a lot of joy in recognizing that some bliss i would say and being in martha's vineyard all of last week in their company was probably the best week of my life uh and it's very different you have to understand it's very different from conferences where you know that are specialized on a specific topic here it was more the theme of the way i do my science that was translated into the careers of so many people that have a common thread which is let's be driven by curiosity let's forget about the nonsense of trying to prove that we are smart and everyone was conversing in a very collegial fashion so you know that was and i mentioned that in my uh medium essay that anyone is interested yeah so linked down below eric you and i have talked before about academia and in particular harvard and i don't think that it's a secret that harvard kind of has an outsized impact on the culture of academia it's our oldest institution i believe um next to the second best ivy league uh which is brown university where i got my picture but uh but avi when we look at it we think about what these institutions mean you and i do the same thing and i'm convinced eric should have done this but he decided to to go off in a different direction but as professors we stand in front of a piece of rock and we scrape on it with another piece of rock called chalk and we basically are just up there this age on the stage in front of in front of people for the first time in i think history as far as i know i taught a cosmology class this quarter that i used uh demonstrations and experiments in i did experiments in thermodynamics i did experiments in acoustic waves teach cmb acoustic oscillations i did spectroscopy i did all sorts of fun stuff geiger counter heavy water but even that you know i can't really hurt my arm patting myself on the back so it wasn't that way what can we do about academia eric especially i want to get from your opinion you have you have reached millions of people with very vivid displays and i put a link to the portal and your web page down below how can we reform education how can we cancel not cancel harvard but how can we reform this this institution is a thousand years old since the first university in bologna italy we've basically not changed at all and and i i think it's it's overdue for a change eric first you then avi um more or less i think we had things pretty well in hand until we lost our discipline hope and funding so my my feeling about this is that in order to restore this we're going to have to have some huge wins that come from people who cannot be subsumed in this sort of sweeping critique that has crashed over academics that somehow academics is the most bigoted uh exclusive um [Music] you know toxically male environment lots of these things have have some truth to them but there was also a lot of things that um that happened that were miraculous wonderful cultures like isidore robbie's lab at columbia that allowed people who were barred from universities at that level to come and do scientific work where more or less there has to be a scientific underground an underground railroad to smuggle good ideas good people the money they need the support they need you know i i heard about avi's conference celebrating his 60th birthday happy birthday professor loeb um but the thing that really made me sad was that as an orphan as a guy who did not have an advisor um [Music] i can tell you that there's a different romance towards being on your own and there's a romance towards being part of a world view and i think that the people like avi who try to make sure that their students survive who are no nonsense when it comes to the research who make sure that they have a legacy are really important and i think harvard in particular is the pivot point harvard is both the best and worst place in the entire academic universe it gets incredible people it gets it's incredibly tolerant of all sorts of crazy ideas and it's incredibly brutal backstabbing behind the scenes back of house nonsense at the same time and so in a certain sense what we have to do is to recognize that the most important part of academics is to restore some concept of professional ethics so that people have the freedom to share their ideas that they know that they're going to have an ability to feed their family the next day that they have to uphold professional ethics or they're out because we cannot afford an even small number of relatively smart people to destroy the entire thing by infecting it with with snark and twitter culture as as we've seen with journalism so i think that roughly speaking we need to have some huge wins the huge winds need to come from individuals not groups those individuals need to be communally minded they need to say very clearly that we need more resources we need to shut down weaker phd programs we need to focus on research and not teaching because it's very in vogue to think that a university is primarily focused on teaching a research university is focused primarily on research and allows for teaching to happen and there's a reason if you want to go to a college you need to go to a college but part of the problem is that a lot of things that made our great research universities fantastic institutions don't play well to 20 22 years and those of us who believe in the mission of a university and its own diversity equity and inclusion program called merit need to stand up vocally and say certain people need to leave certain programs need to be shut down more money needs to be found we need to stop lying that everything has to do with groups and not individuals power laws are everywhere and we've got to be more courageous standing up for ourselves and not wilt every time somebody calls you a white supremacist for just saying the obvious truth um if i may bring up several other aspects that need improvement there is a lot of room for improvement i must say coming from within academia um harvard's president bakao announced that he will step down a year from now and i was asked by the crimson what do i think is a good future for harvard then i thought i said that it has been 70 years since james conant was the last scientist who served as harvard's president and that shows and nowadays society is very much driven by science and technology and my point is it doesn't mean that we should abandon the humanities in fact there is a huge role for the humanities to be playing in the modern technological age for example lots of ethical questions that ai systems social media bring to the front and philosophers and ethicists have a very important role in shaping the future of society but it needs to be about the future not about the past i mean of course we can study what ancient greeks said but they never had the gadgets that we have so we need to bring up new philosophical ideas to bear with the new reality that we live through and so that's the future that the university should aspire to promote and and therefore it the next president needs to be a scientist now i don't think they would listen to my advice they haven't listened last time around but that is my sincere hope that you know science and technologies will lead the way and the basic message of science is sharing of knowledge and cooperation and science does not adhere to national borders and we are all part of the human species and the knowledge that we acquire through science should be shared and these are very noble ideas in this age of isolation and separation and fighting each other and wars and so forth you know the message the science brings like let's work together and make a better future for ourselves just to give give you another example um ezra klein on his new york times podcast a few days ago wa spent 15 minutes trying to answer a question the following question uh should i decide not to have children uh because of the implications to climate change that was the question and to me the answer you know it would have taken me a few seconds to answer that question that he spent 15 minutes and here is my answer you know the future is within the realm of our scientific accomplishments we can this make policy based on our scientific understanding we can decide how to live our planet and go to space uh and not risk the future of humanity by a single point catastrophe here on earth based on science and technology and so my point is we should have as many kids as we want as the more the better and then let them shape a better future using science you know and this could be our biological kids or they could be our technological kids you know using uh ai systems to help us because they will become smarter than us in the future so i'm much more in favor of the replacement replacing darwin's principle of survival of the fittest with survival of the optimist you know you have to be an optimist so that the future will be much more promising if you decide not to have kids is as if you decided uh you prefer death over life right you know and and you know albert camus in his essay uh the myth of sisypus the first sentence there says the biggest question in philosophy is whether life is worth living or we commit suicide you know and that's the biggest question in philosophy i say if you expand expand that to humanity as a whole to our civilization the biggest question is whether humanity is worth longevity you know surviving longer forever and this is the most important question in the context of science not in the context of philosophy but not on the brain actually i think it's even deeper than that and and just to point out you know there's a saying the optimist builds the plane but the pessimist builds the parachute uh it's appropriate to talk about this on the eve of the eve of father's day of course and it doesn't take as you said it doesn't take children we don't all have to be fathers or mothers or parental units of unspecified gender uh we could also be ideological and and and uh thought leaders thought mentors men and women to children but i want to ask you something obvi that eric and i have spoken a lot about is the lack of diversification of the portfolio of those that speak about like elon musk who we we both have affection for and admiration for in a lot of ways but but see criticism as well uh but eric you know uh one of the listeners asking a question on my uh where i take questions on my community page my youtube channel is you know why why are we so kind of all in one basket putting our eggs in all in one basket how do you react to elon musk's approach to you know let's become interplanetary let's go to one other planet let's double our planets and our portfolio management what do you think about elon musk i've never asked you avi what's your uh uh you know uh analysis of history i wanted to say that another thing missing in academia that i didn't have a chance to mention is diversity of ideas okay and we touched about it before but basically the idea of tenure is all about allowing people to have job security so that they can promote ideas that are not along the beaten path okay and unfortunately it's not being used when people get tenure they become lazy and they don't do much they become dead wood very often so it's being abused this privilege is really an amazing privilege i mean we don't get paid a lot in academia but we do have the privilege of job security and we should take advantage of it we should explore ideas that are not conventional and that's another thing that needs to change in academia now coming back to elon musk of course you know there are major hurdles for example if you go to the surface of mars you will be bombarded by cosmic rays and your body would not survive for more than a year or a few years uh you that needs to be solved and one way is to go down underground you know in a cave and they live there or there needs to be special uh infrastructure built to protect the people over there and also people on on travel there uh you don't want i mean you don't want to send people to the death and and so that those practical concerns were not attended to in a very public way in a very science oriented so i i really think we should solve the health uh risks that the people will face when going long term to mars otherwise i think by the way um i don't think humans are really the future of humanity okay i think the future of humanity is some very advanced form of autonomous robots with artificial intelligence i do believe that and i'm proud of our technological kids because you know they will be able to survive much better you know why would some random processes of on the surface of earth in a soup of chemicals make the best possible uh outcome you know that to me it sounds like well we got uh to this point but we have a lot of faults you know if you look at human history uh clearly humans have a lot of faults and perhaps we can build a system that will be better than humans and i'm looking forward for the first ai uh scientists you know because they will not be driven by their ego if they see an object that looks like a rocket booster they will not call it a rock i want to ask you about that avi i'm sorry to interrupt eric i'm going to give you a chance i'm going to give you a requisite 30 seconds to respond but uh but avi i i i want to push back with love and kavod and respect okay so this guy here do you know what his what what he said his happiest thought was ava you know i'm sure you know what he said as happy as thought was right that he in free fall you experience no gravitational field now let's let's unpack an ai einstein a e a i e e a e um how does such a thing know about free fall like what does that even mean and second of all what does happiness mean to such in other words are you really serious do you think ai physicists are around the corner or is that kind of wishful thinking oh no no i i give no you can imagine a system that will uh basically digest data provided to it by instruments directly so the instruments will send the data to the ai system that will analyze it and try to figure out what's going on and it's the job of a scientist right now it looks like you know a miracle but in principle you know it could be done by a machine i don't think humans are necessarily designed for that purpose you know we were gatherers and hunters we were not scientists to start with so our brain is not necessarily optimized for the purpose of being a scientist and i have no problem getting pride uh from a system that outperforms us i don't have a you know that doesn't but uh you know give a blow to to my ego in any way i in fact i would be extremely happy if i knew that we can build a system that corrects the faults of humans okay so eric um stepping back from the ai stuff to the to uh any any of the topics that i rudely interrupted you over no no no no by the way three jews on a podcast i'm surprised that i'm the only one interrupting either one of the two of you so you guys are clearly much better bred and uh influenced by our just imagine that the number of opinions that we have right now and it is getting close to shabbat i don't want to interfere with avi's uh shabbat but uh i do want to thank you guys uh wait wait i didn't say anything no i know but go on okay go on but by the way you know if three jews are on an island you know how many synagogues you need for that for them four you need four yeah because you need one that their foot would never step in [Music] eric um okay so where were we the ai physicists um look i'm partial to humans and i'm actually partial to egos i mean all sorts of things that i like everybody has decided are terrible um i like humans i like egos i'm glad i agree with both of you that we should have children um and that ezra should probably remove himself and leave the rest of us alone in the gene pool um look we're in dire circumstances and this what we're looking for is an analog of the neutron and the neutron changed everything because it allowed chain reactions and that ushered in the atomic age or the semiconductor changed everything or the world wide web that came out of cern these are things that changed everything whether it's you know radio frequency communications we're looking for something that obviates the needs for rockets rockets are sort of embarrassing in 2022 because there's not that much that can be reached so you know it's like buying a huge boat um for a small lake there's just not that many places you can go um so my feeling about this is we have to reacquaint ourselves with the possible we've been living so long under einstein and boar that we've forgotten that their limitations may not be our limitations if we can crack a puzzle and the neutron was 1932 so it's within living memory what we need to do is to reacquaint ourselves with the idea that finding a single new field or new way of looking at space-time or some adjustment to this order that has settled in is now almost 50 years old is necessary for us to dream again and we nobody dreams about finding you know gilligan's island was about an uncharted desert isle it would be very weird to think about an uncharted desert isle in 2022 um because we've mapped the earth but we haven't mapped the heavens so i think it's really important to recognize that i fully support my friend avi on his quest for the ai intelligences and the post-human discoverers but i'm actually really optimistic that the next theories might have new possibilities for us humans laden with ego though we may be for us to survive each other and i i really believe that at some point elon is going to get past his fascination with spacex rockets and using mars as the sales job and recognize that he stumbled onto a very correct paradigm which is that we are in dire straits if we don't get diversification those humans are never going to build avi's next level ai scientists and i would really like to see ego come back in people to be hyper motivated to put in 100 hour weeks chasing dreams and to try to acquaint us with the cosmos that we may be able to visit and people part of the problem is the instant you talk like this the conversation has been pre-hijacked people immediately think you mean mars because elon has said that we're going to survive because we're going to decamp to mars which is not really a realistic proposition via rockets and then the next part of it is oh you must be talking about faster than light travel alcubiary warp drives or wormholes because those are the only things that einstein would allow you to use to dream about the cosmos the idea of saying post-einstein that i accept einstein for who he is and what he did but he is not the last word and there would probably not be a schwarzschild singularity nor a friedman robertson walker singularity if his theory was complete it's probably merely effective and that is the challenge of our times to get out of the straight jacket so the thing that really attracts me to avi's program in part is if there's a one in ten thousand chance that we might find a technology that makes use of science that we don't know yet um that's really worth doing because it's not a paradigm that has ever occurred to us to get a technology beyond human the only analog of this is biology where you have a blind watchmaker and the theory of selection means that there are pathways and pathways beyond pathways in a cell that do things that we don't understand so that the principle of natural selection has done a marvelous job engineering technologies we can only dream about but the idea that something might have engineered probes and vehicles to visit us is an enticement to thinking about a cosmos that can be visited and certainly not by rockets for those of us with humans families and egos who i'm huge fans of and remain so to this day yeah and i i completely agree with eric that albert einstein was not the smartest scientist that ever lived since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago there must have been a smarter scientist on an exoplanet a billion years ago and the civilization that benefited from the wisdom of that scientist must have launched probes that would have reached us by now yeah well guys i am grateful for you giant enormous intellect for a weinstein if not an einstein and for a lobe uh that is a cranial lobe uh and a loeb that i love uh speaking to guys i got into this podcasting because you know my day-to-day job i'm building experiments i'm i'm looking not for interstellar meteorites but i'm trying to remove the imprint of cosmic dust from my cmb experiments uh before we depart for this particular occasion i want to ask each of you if you have anything that you want to mention advertise besides uh your bitcoin rig eric or but avi where can people find you what are you most interested in is there anything else that we should discuss on this particular episode well i have a listing of my opinion essays that you can find on my website at harvard university and the every few days i write a new one and you can follow up on the latest developments and with me whatever what that what you see is what you get so just trust me and if we find something exciting uh you wouldn't know about it eric how about you everyone's uh everyone's curious what you're up to well i mean i've been to some extent very much focused on on physics recently talking to colleagues and going to meetings and things what i'm most alarmed by is that we get in touch with the desperation of the current moment with putin in ukraine recognize that we're no longer kidding around and that it's not safe to continue in this idiom even if we probably survive this particular misadventure it's really important that we drive more people towards science and make sure that when they get there they've got great lives ahead of them as opposed to this madness of having them eke out a living and constantly apologizing for everything interesting so that they can stay in the good graces i i would look um at a two 2014 article that i wrote called uh m theory string theory is the only game in town to the question of what scientific idea is ready for retirement and there's also an article about einstein's revenge which had to do with the idea that people who wanted to quantize gravity ended up instead geometrizing the quantum and after listening to what is now currently considered cutting edge physics theory i want to just point out that a lot of people are leaving for quantum computation trying to do quantum computers trying to do machine learning we've got to keep the excitement going uh a generation or two has failed at theoretical physics and it's time for voices that we haven't heard and new people entering the field to be given free reign in particularly not constantly dogged by the quantum field theory crowd i've come to the conclusion that quantum field theory is maybe our most powerful theory but we don't understand it well enough to allow it to select for good new ideas and i think what we have to do is we have to recognize that we are in a desperate search for new ideas beyond einstein they will ultimately have to conform to experiment and make sense of quantum field theory which works very well but we're going to have to look to make physics in particular exciting and we can't back off it not everything is equally exciting fundamental physics is the only thing that i know of that is a reasonable hope of getting us out of the problem that fundamental physics originally got us into so i think that this alien stuff is really important even if i think it's relatively unlikely that it's going to do what i hope it could do for us we're going to have to find every possible way of breaking out of einstein's prison so organizing an einsteinian prison break i think should be all of our top priorities at the moment because we're in pretty dire straits but we're definitely a group worth saving so that's where i am that's where i'm at let's put them in jail behind bars made of omumua skin um guys uh this has been a treat we've had over 2 000 people uh in the room at one time and um but really what you guys uh mean in your openness in your articulation of some of the most complex topics that can exist and some of the most perilous politically and otherwise i think it's really important avi i just want to say one thing you said maybe the next president should be a scientist and i was thinking halawa it should be for the president of the united states as well wouldn't that be nice or it could be a disaster who knows i mean those movies that you've seen you know with the pr anyway um so uh for me i want to express my gratitude i'm brian keating host of the into the impossible podcast as well as dr brian keating on youtube where i do videos from an experimental perspective because these brainiacs like eric like avi and like many of the colleagues i've had on um are theoreticians and i think they're incredibly brilliant but i think the experimentalists need to get a little bit of attention every now and then so yeah that's my unique angle boys it's been fun avi yomole shabbat shalom and eric it's so good to see you as it always is and i hope you guys will come back maybe at the end of the summer we'll get some clarity uh what's going on with these with these government panels and so forth and we'll be able to discuss the real scientific issues

Channel: Dr Brian Keating

Views: 417,501

Keywords: eric weinstein, avi loeb lex fridman, avi loeb joe, aliens, extraterrestrial life, exoplanets, galileo project, eric wienstein, project galileo, alien life, alien, ufo, uap, nasa, lue elizando, ufos, uaps, aatip, tic-tac, david fravor

Id: fdwuhU_zu8Y

Length: 124min 57sec (7497 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022