Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Arthur C. Clarke - God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988)

tonight the time before time began the universe black holes God and the laws of science professor Stephen Hawking dr. Carl Sagan and arthur c clarke disgusts the mysteries man faces as he starts to explore the Stars dreadful disabilities prevent Stephen Hawking from speaking a word but he's risen above them to become a brilliant mathematician and teacher using a computer-driven voice synthesizer he's told the world how the universe began and now he's seeking the ultimate theory of how it works arthur c clarke invented the communication satellite long before the technology existed to launch one that vision of the future fathered the global village his novels and stories including 2001 a Space Odyssey have inspired a generation of real-life astronauts Carl Sagan sent man's first messages to the stars aboard NASA space probes he sure were not alone in the cosmic wilderness dr. Sagan joined our discussion from Cornell University in New York State so I checked whether he could hear us over one of Arthur's satellites yes communications satellite technology is working very well thank you Arthur can you hear all right I can hear fine and professor Hawking are you in touch with Carl Sagan yes professor Hawking in fact has just made publishing history by writing a book about hard theoretical science which is outsold even Michael Jackson in the bestseller lists it's called a brief history of time and we'll be talking about the concepts that are in it now Stephen Hawking is engaged in a search for the ultimate answer a grand unified theory that would explain everything Stephen Hawking that is quite an agenda how are you getting on with it let me just explain that what happens when professor Hawking wishes to speak he lost his voice a couple of years ago and now has to use a voice synthesizer and he can control a squeeze box in his hand and on the video screen on the arm his chair he's got a vocabulary which Scrolls through and he can pick out the words that he wants and these words are then assembled into a sentence and when the sentence is ready then he can process it through the the voice synthesizer so whenever you're ready professor Hawking we'd like to hear from you in the last 300 years we have discovered the laws that govern the universe the null but the most extreme conditions I think there is a reasonable chance that we may find a complete set of laws by the end of the century if we don't blow ourselves up first if we do find a complete unified theory that will be a great triumph not just for scientists but for ordinary people as well in time the unified theory would be simplified and taught in schools at least been outlined then everyone would have some idea of how the universe works well that is a tremendous vision now Carl Sagan you wrote an introduction to the book and one of the striking things that you said is that it's only children nowadays who ask the big questions because they don't know enough not to what I was trying to get across was the notion that the school systems it seems to me have a a attitude of discouragement of asking fundamental questions if if a 5 or 6 year old asks why the moon is round or why grass is green the usual adult answer at least in my experience is to discourage the child so what what shape did you expect the moon to be square what color did you expect the grass to be blue instead of saying that those are interesting questions let's try to find out the answer or maybe nobody knows the answer and and when you grow up you will be able to discover the answer it would be very healthy for the human species if there were less discouragement and more scientists Arthur Clarke one of the reason why I write science fiction is because it does free the imagination and does inspire people to become scientists and has tossed many astronauts have made me feel a very old man by coming up and saying to me you know your books turn me on when I was a small boy excellent now I have planned a reasonably finite structure for our little colloquium and I'd like to start if I may with professor Hawking how did the universe start with a big bang we observe that distant galaxies are moving away from us this means that they must have been closer together in the past in fact one can show that all the galaxies must have been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago this lacerio Big Bang not a beauty thing that took place on the stock exchange a couple of years ago it was the beginning of the universe enough time itself anything that happened before the Big Bang could not affect what happened after so we can neglect events before the Big Bang and say that time began at a Big Bang after the Big Bang we believed that the universe expanded in a very rapid inflationary manner again this inflation in the universe quiet puts modern economic inflation in the shade an increase of billions of billions of percent then a tiny fraction of a second of course that was before the present government during the inflationary period the universe borrowed heavily from its gravitational energy to finance the creation of more matter the result was a triumph for the economics of case a vigorous and expanding universe filled with material objects the dead of gravitational energy will not have to be repaid until the end of the universe I'd like to stay with this basic proposition for the time being the Big Bang Theory and to come to you Carl Sagan could you help me by putting into layman's terms what was involved with this Big Bang well we here we are on a planet which is about 5000 million years old the Sun around which it goes is not much older it is part of a galaxy which is perhaps ten or twelve thousand million years old which is one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of millions of other galaxies and none of this planets Suns galaxies was around at the time of the Big Bang at the time of the Big Bang there was energy elementary particles which slowly evolved into the kind of universe we know today we are the product of a grand evolutionary sequence cosmic evolution about which we are only occasionally aware one of the great accomplishments of dr. Hawking is to plug us better in to the knowledge of this long evolutionary sequence well what I have in my mind is a picture that Carl Sagan had been leading me towards of the whole universe in quite amazingly small packages like putting the whole world into a matchbox as it were immensely dense and immensely tiny in fact sometimes it's kind of disappearing into a little point is this the is this the the earliest imaginable point that our minds are taking us to so far Carl Sagan well the as dr. Hawking said the galaxies are expanding running away from each other the further away they are from each other the faster they are running away if you run the cosmic movie back into time you come to a moment perhaps fifteen thousand million years ago in which all the matter in the universe was touching in if you like a point and a key unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question is where did all of that matter energy come from what was before that and if it was made from nothing who made it and who made the maker uh-uh and of course an infinite regress behind that is the universe still expanding fast I mean is there a lot more room in space as I think of it for the the universe to carry on getting bigger as far as I know nothing in the way and the expansion continues the question is whether there is sufficient matter in the universe matter that we have not yet counted that will slow the expansion down stop it and have the expanding universe followed by a collapsing universe or whether there is not enough matter to stop the expansion and so the expansion then continues forever this is an observational question which is still unresolved and the Hubble Space Telescope which who knows might be launched next year if we're lucky might answer this question professor Hawking use is very striking metaphor of the earth borrowing is energy from itself now in straight banking terms that means you can be overdrawn and in the end there is going to be a collapse a big crunch so does Big Bang get followed inevitably by Big Crunch no not inevitably it depends on how much matter there is in the universe which is a still unsolved issue I should say that the prevailing opinion is that the universe will continue expanding forever but that in my opinion is is by no means a very secure conclusion let me bring in the poet amongst us here Arthur Clarke you know what TS Eliot said this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper when you think of the end of the world if you think of the end of the world does it end with a bang or a whimper well I would like to think that we will end with a bang of course we'll never know it is a rather a long way in the future some billions tens of billions possibly even much further in the future and as Carl said we may have the answers to these questions in very few years with the Hubble Space Telescope gets successful in orbit and can peer out to the boundaries of the universe if we are living in a little suburb of the galaxy can you foresee a time when we need to get out of the the suburb and colonize somewhere else because of the gradual curve towards the end well I think the human race if it survives the next few years will go on to colonize first the solar system and then to send ships out to the Stars and ultimately perhaps to other galaxies but if the expansion of the universe is fast enough we will never be able to keep up with it now one fascinating aspect that is raised is the question of time itself in the book now we all think we know what time is it's a relentless march forward but for the purposes of your argument Stephen Hawking you use a mathematical concept that you call imaginary time which seems to be able to run backwards as well as forwards in our theories there are two kinds sometime there is what is called real time this is a kind of time that is measured by a clock the time had me feel passing the time in which we grow older then there is imaginary time of course imaginary time is an idea that science fiction writers like Arthur have used in their stories but imaginary time is also a well-defined mathematical concept it can be thought of as a direction of time lettuce at right angles to ordinary real time in a certain sense the universe has a beginning in real time at the Big Bang and it may well have an end if it collapses to a Big Crunch but an imaginary time that has no beginning your end rather imaginary time is closed in on itself like the surface of the earth the surface of the earth doesn't have any beginning your end I know because I have been round the world and I didn't fall off individual particles can travel through imaginary time and arrive back at an earlier real time but I don't believe that people will ever be able to travel back in time like in the film Back to the Future I'm gonna compress my may to to you Carl Sagan because this idea in in professor Hawking's book this extraordinary four-dimensional model of the universe with no boundaries but finite just like the earth this to me is is really stretching my own capacity for imagination to to the utmost how do you how do you turn it into words for me a layman well the first thing I would say is not to feel bad if it's not immediately intuitively obvious our our ability to understand things instantly so called common sense derives from a certain range of size and speed and duration that are appropriate for human existence we know about things from 1/10 of a millimeter to a few kilometers from a fraction of a second to to a lifetime and so on so when we are dealing with matters of quantum physics where particles have a size of 10 to the minus 13 centimetres or in cosmology where where we are talking about 10 billion light years or more it is very reasonable that our intuition is not adequate to the task one point I'd like to make about this is that every human culture has a set of creation myths but they're in the realm of mythology or religion or folklore and they are of course all mutually inconsistent the great thing that is happening in our time is that we are able through a method which can actually make some progress towards the real universe out there to find out something about origins and this is the scientific method applied to the science of cosmology so I know that's not a direct answer to your question but I thought it was more important to to address the issue of feeling unhappy because it wasn't immediately understandable well yes I find that extremely soothing actually because it is a kind of it is a kind of a formidable task of grasping this it makes me want to retreat into trivial questions like is this idea of predicting backwards going to put astrologers out of business nothing will put astrologers out of business but alas that certainly added a touch of lightness to these tremendous issues that we are discussing infinity black holes and imaginary time and at this stage let's this stage let's relax a little bit and have a bit of fun with mathematics at the most abstruse I'm going to ask Arthur Clarke here to do some doodling with his computer and with a fascinating exercise with complex numbers which is called the Mandelbrot set now this is named in honor of a French scientist working for IBM it's a mathematical equation which leads us towards the infinite in effect it makes the mathematics of the universe visual and incredibly beautiful this is what we would see if we had eyes to see it when order meets chaos this is what's going on in the universe every day an ordered universe is breaking down and becoming more disordered this is the second law of thermodynamics in action what Stephen Hawking calls Murphy's Law now dr. Clark you've been using your computer back home in Srilanka to explore the Mandelbrot set at the high magnifications over to you sir yes well this strange-looking object is the Mandelbrot set which actually is extraordinarily simple in concept it's defined by the equation of just two terms Z squared plus C that's all there is to it yeah that simple equation Zed squared or Z squared plus C continued feed a number and then carry on over and over again sort of cranking the number back round around and then plot the result on the screen so I won't go into details but this is the first appearance of this set and what it does it divides all possible numbers into two categories it's really a map or a boundary or a fence if you like dividing one class four numbers from another and you can tell your computer to go into any spot here and say recompute that area to a higher degree of precision and then blow it up on the screen so you can use the computer as a microscope and you can continue that process forever some of the images are incredibly beautiful and it could have a great impact on artistic design the next decade or so I found what looked like black holes and I'd like to show them to you some what I'm going to do now essentially is to zoom into it increasing the magnification many-fold and if I press the right button it should happen now the computer will now give you this image and I think you'll agree when it comes up it's a very impressive black hole and you'll be more so when I started interaction oh yes it is magnificent isn't it oh you ain't seen nothing yet I should explain that this magnification you remember the original picture we took at the same area this time I've magnified it at about a thousand times so the pic you saw first is now 500 feet across now let's see this works now isn't that lovely so there's matter streaming into this black hole well now well I found this black hole I started exploring the neighborhood and I very quickly found another know this lovely now this is the second black hole though it looks just like the earlier one but this is on a far greater magnification the original Mandelbrot set now is I think about ten million miles wide this is enormous ly bigger than the first one you saw yet essentially it's the same kind of pattern this is black hole number three and this one took me 22 hours of computing the day before I left Sri Lanka it had the computer running all night and I'm rather proud of this one because on this scale that original little picture you saw is the width of the orbit of Mars so you understand that no human being has ever seen that picture pattern before simply because of probabilities and you can explore the Mandelbrot set by blowing up bits and pieces of it and you're really sure that you knows I've seen that you're the first person to see it and each time you're being drawn towards you being sucked into it Mathematica infinity into small urns yes this is real mathematical infinity this goes on forever and ever it limited only by the capacity of your machine and the speed which it can do its calculations I am doing calculations here you may not going to see that enormous Li long number the 20 digit numbers or so and the machine is multiplying those together hundreds of times a second now the thing fascinates me about this is that it is infinite in detail you can go on forever and ever now I would like to ask Steven this question is the real universe also infinity detail I mean we know we have molecules atoms electrons protons subatomic right down to the quarks so far but does it continue forever and ever or is there a limit is there a basement to the real universe professor we will discover new structures when look at a universe on smaller and smaller scales but in the case of the universe there seems to be a limiting scale it is called a Planck length and is about a million billion billion times smaller than an inch this means that there is a limit to how complex a universe can be it also means that the universe could be described by a theory that is fairly simple at least on scales of the Planck length I just hope that we are smart enough to find it are we smart enough to find it out there well I wonder because after all we're still pretty primitive organisms and the universe is very old and I just don't know I would like to think so but then there's a feeling when we found it then what where do we go from here I'd like to turn our attention back now to Professor Steven Hawking do you think that we could ever hope to use the old science fiction trick of diving into a black hole and then traveling to another part of the cosmos some recent work indicates that particles that fall into a black hole can come out again from another black hole somewhere else in the universe at first sight this seems the ideal method of space travel just find a black hole and jump in it but there are snags first there doesn't seem to be any way to choose where you come out worth and that your history in real time would come to a sticky end as you were torn apart by the gravitational fields inside a black hole your history and imaginary time would continue out of the other black hole but that might not be much consolation to someone being made into spaghetti it would be like traveling on some airlines I could name so how do you see the the actual role of science fiction is it purely escapism or do you see it as having a very real purpose in broadening our our patterns of thinking opening our minds to the kind of vast concepts which we're discussing today well first of all there's no reaction to escapism in the right places in fact CS Lewis once remarked to me the only people don't like object to escapism are jailers and we all want to escape occasionally but science fiction is often very far from escapism in fact you might say that science fiction is escape is escape into reality it's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues the origin man our future in fact I don't think I cannot think of any form of this year which is more concerned with real issues reality well what do you have to say to that professor Hawking I don't believe in stories of flying saucers another unidentified flying object if time traveler possible we should have already been visited by people from the future I think if we were being visited by people from another time or another planet that would be much more obvious and probably very unpleasant I don't want to make contact with another civilization except at a safe distance it might be like the North American Indians making contact with the white man I badly wish they had never sold men happy I'll bet they did now cow you are the world's leading expert in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence now professor Hawking doesn't want to make contact with them why do you want to make contact with them well first off I would say we have little choice in the matter that is we have already announced or rather I should say Magnus you fellas have already announced the fact that there is a low-level technical civilization in this part of the galaxy because television programs get out at the speed of light and since any other civilization who detects those signals is unlikely to be at or before our state of technological advance since we just invented radio technology so to say they are much more likely to be in our technological future and the question as to whether their intentions are benign or otherwise is of course of interest but we have nothing to say about about the matter so therefore I think we might as well hope that it's benign if they're if they're out there from my point of view the search for extraterrestrial life and especially the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the key philosophical scientific and human questions that have been posed but we are at the very yuning of searching surely it is important for us to know the answer one thing that interests me a great deal is the way in which the public perception of being smarter space have have changed over the years there used to be the baddies but now there is a there's a optimistic feeling that any extraterrestrial life is if not benign is at least not as hostile and aggressive as one used to fear is this the drift of your writing as well Arthur you're thinking yes I'm an optimist and I believe that any malevolent super civilization would rapidly self-destruct as we mean be in the process of doing ourselves so if we do have contact physical contact with aliens I think it will be benign my frivolous mind is much taken telogen beings reasonably err why have they not visited us well that's a very good question let's throw it right across - Arthur Clarke there are literally dozens of ants this they may have come in the remote past they may be visiting us every 10,000 years I mean the universe is a huge place and even there are fleets of survey ships going all over the cosmos we shouldn't explain misters less than I say in every thousand years or so they may know all about us and they may have put a quarantine around our planet for pretty good reasons they may be totally uninterested us it may be so much higher that they you know we just breathe they're really contempt if you like but we does your uncle inspected endlessly I think we should just wait and try and get more evidence maybe they're space probes are saying there's no intelligent life on earth they may have received our television programs and decided that that is the case may I attempt a different answer to to Stevens question please do housing um the the first large-scale commercial broadcasting on the earth was in the late 1940s so that's what 240 years ago so you must imagine a spherical wave expanding out from the earth at the velocity of light which contains all the jury programs of the late 1940s since then that expanding spherical wave containing the news of a developing civilization on earth has traveled some 40 light-years suppose that there are no civilizations closer than 40 light years perhaps they're not here because they don't know we are about just yet but in time the message gets to them and perhaps they send a little expedition to look us over I was delighted when I read that when space probes went out out first of all you put the figure of a of a man and a woman on the outside so that any alien life would recognize what we looked like and then in a latest probe I think you put in an LP of Earth sounds with instructions in hand signals on on how to work the LP how do you think anybody would have reacted if in fact alien intelligence had heard this LP my guess is that it be something like oh look another artifact from some extremely primitive civilization which one is this but then some degree of thanks that we were thoughtful enough to send a message into the far future which could in no way benefit us certainly a selfless act and perhaps it would be recognized as a hopeful an optimistic gesture by an emerging civilization just setting foot into the great galactic wilderness yes Arthur I know what is going to happen to your voyagers Carl I'll be overtaking one day by a terrestrial spaceship and brought back to the Smithsonian it's certainly technologically possible but I hope they let it go on its original mission now it's very nearly twenty years ago since man landed on the moon do you think that we basically stopped trying to get man any further is there any chance that another Neil Armstrong will set foot on Mars in our lifetime the United States and the Soviet Union have managed to booby-trap the planet with about 60,000 nuclear weapons with a little help from Britain France China and Israel a tiny fraction of those weapons is enough to destroy the participating nations certainly the global civilization possibly and the human species just maybe it is now time for the United States and the Soviet Union to demonstrate that they can undo this Spectre that they can demonstrate their ability to work together on high technology for peaceful hopeful purposes that carry us into a benign 21st century and that is why I support the idea of joint us-soviet cooperation in the exploration of Mars leading up to a international manned and by the way woman'd mission to the planet Americans and Soviets as representatives of the human species other nations I presume would also be involved and then a glorious whatever it would be few month period in which Mars I have a globe of it right next to me in which Mars would be explored there are hundreds for example hundreds of ancient river valleys on Mars Mars is today bone-dry it was once much warmer much wetter much denser atmosphere much more earth-like what were those conditions like why did an earth-like planet get converted into this deep Ice Age condition that Mars has has today and is there life there could there once have been life are there fossil forms there are extraordinary enigmatic geological features on the planet what is their nature there is a huge amount of exploration to do and all of it every step that I've described could be before the television cameras of the world and we could all participate in such exploration is not a danger that the human bits that we take with us will pollute and destroy something enormously precious out there simply because we are so so inquisitive about it Arthur well as to the question should human beings go into the other planets I think the answer to that is or we could have stayed in Europe and explored America by robots it might have been certainly saved a lot of human lives but of course we didn't we went there and lived in this new concept now admittedly Mars and none of the plans of the system is anything like his behind as the United States or the other parts of this planet but one day people are going to call them home there will be Martians one day and there'll be our great-grandchildren and they'll think it was Earth Poly's a horrible place in which to live now as to whether we will pollute these environments yes to some extent of course colonization always it involves the destruction of what was there first and I'm quite sure in the next century in fact already it started as a conference on the pollution of space planned engineer in the United States in the very near future this is already a serious problem in the earth space but we have to control it women you can't you have to cut down forests on this earth to make new cities and on on the moon I'm afraid one day we may have to abolish much of the lunar vacuum vacuuming on Mars we may have to change the atmosphere but I do hope we will leave leave bits of the universe in a pristine condition but are we also going to have to change ourselves on Mars I mean are we going to put evolve differently Mars will change us in fact this is part of the evolutionary progress by going out into new environments by occupying new biological niches that is the way we progress and discover the universe and explore the and perhaps fulfill our destiny do you think that other planets might have the same kind of system in which there would be a morality in which there would be people taking moral attitudes it may not necessarily be the same as ours of course all societies must have some moral structure I mean otherwise you just can't have a society mean it must be understand rules you way you behave to our neighbors and even if the societies consist of machines they must have a machine language so they can agree to react together so morality in some way is essential in universal now professor Hawking in the very last paragraph of your book you say that if we discover a complete theory of the universe then it should in time be understandable in broad principle to everyone and not just to a few scientists and when that happens all of us will be able to start discussing the why rather than the how and I quote if we find the answer to that it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason for then we would know the mind of God do you think that God can intervene in the universe as he wants or is God too bound by the laws of science the question of whether God is bound by the laws of science that submit like no question can God may pistone that is so heavy that he cannot lift it I don't think it is very useful to speculate on what God might or might not be able to do rather we should examine what he actually does with the universe we live in all our observations suggest that it operates according to well-defined laws leash laws me has been ordained by God but it seems that he does not intervene in the universe to break the laws at least not once it had said the universe going however until recently it was thought that the laws would necessarily break down at the beginning of the universe that would have meant that God would have had complete freedom to choose how the universe began in the last few years however we have realized that the laws of science may hold it in at the beginning of time in that case God would have had no freedom the way the universe began would be determined by the laws of science well thank you very much and can Sagan in your introduction to the book you commented on this you said this is also a book about God or perhaps about the absence of God because Hawking left nothing for a creator to do now god of course means many things to many people what sort of God basically are we talking about when we talk about reading the mind of God well I think that's that's an excellent question and and I'd be most interested to to hear Stephen Hawking's answer but just just to try to illuminate the range of possibilities consider two alternatives one is the the notion popular in the west of God as a sort of outsized elderly white male with a long white beard sitting in a throne in the sky and telling the fall of every Sparrow contrast that with the idea of God in the mind of let's say Spinoza or Einstein which was at least very closely the sum total of the laws of the universe now it would be madness to deny that there are well-defined physical laws in the universe and if that's what you mean by God then there's no question that that God exists but it's a very remote God a what the French call a fanny on do-nothing King on the other hand the former model the one who intervenes daily for that there seems to be as dr. Hawking said no evidence I think it is wise my own personal feeling to be a little humble on on such matters we must recognize that we are dealing with by definition the most difficult things to know the farthest from human experience and perhaps we will be able to penetrate a little way into these mysteries the professor Hawking you tried to come in here I lose God in the same sense that Einstein did there is a really the reason why the universe is as it is and where the universe exists at all can I ask Arthur Clark what he meant when you're alleged to have said to the papal nun see oh I don't believe in God but I'm extremely interested in him well I guess I haven't placed my bets yet and you know Stephens remarks and Karl Marx reminded me that this was said 200 years ago when Napoleon I think was talking to Laplace who published his theory of the universe and Napoleon said God isn't in it and Laplace replied sir I have no need for that hypothesis do you think that the church is in fact beginning to recognize that it may have to lose its priority its eminence as the sole arbiter of of these matters and that Sciences will be allowed to come in as an equal partner well as churches certainly when I say into the Church of the Roman Catholic Church you've become very much more liberal I had the pleasure of giving a talk in the Vatican myself in the Pontifical Academy of Science quite recently and met the Pope and of course they're reinstating Galileo and so things are moving in fact are they moving backwards as well as forwards Carl Sagan because I understand it in the earliest days of civilization then the priests were in fact what we call the scientists the ones who could study astronomy who could predict eclipses and things do you see the scientists coming back into an on the sack a total position like this or am i overstating it well I I hope you're overstating it I think the essence of the scientific method is the willingness to to admit you're wrong the willingness to abandon ideas that don't work and the essence of religion is not to change anything that suppose the truths are handed down by some revered figure and then no one is supposed to make any any progress beyond that because all the truth that's thought to be in hand I'm really talking about setting this agenda for the future my sense is that the scientific way of thinking questioning some delicate mix of creative encouragement of new ideas and the most rigorous and skeptical scrutiny of new and old ideas I think that is the path to the future not just for science but for all human institutions we have to be willing to challenge because we are in desperate need of change and I put the same questions you Arthur Clark them politicians or priests are setting the agenda or scientists I'm really fond of quoting and enero on this when he once said that politics and religion are obsolete the time has come for science and spirituality I hear from the clicking that professor Hawking would like to come in I don't think that physics tell us how to behave to our neighbors ah physics may determine who our neighbors are and what planets they live well you said science should be skeptical of politics don't we ought to be a little skeptical about science too when can we trust you guys I I think you should certainly be skeptical but my view is that there is no community of people on the planet more skeptical than science it's our stock-in-trade it's the lifeblood of our subject science is a self-correcting subject not like politics our bodies are corrected by other forces can I ask one question of of you all and that is the the question of creativity which fascinates me here we have three enormous ly creative people with enormously creative intellects how in fact does it does it operate do you Arthur Clark you've to find a problem that you'd like to work on and then look for a solution to it I'm not sure what my mechanism of creation is and I don't think I really want to know because I'm afraid if I discover it I would like the centipede when it was asked how it walked just fell distracted in a ditch or a golfer over his ass about his swing yes so you don't think about that Carl Sagan there is a serious side to this well this issue where creativity comes from is I share your fascination with it I don't think we understand very much about it I my practice is merely to to respect my unconscious mind who often is much wiser than than the conscious part of me and and pay attention to what it says in fact I think this is connected with that that delicate tension at the heart of the scientific method I talked about before the unconscious mind proposes a range of possibility of possibilities and the conscious mind dispossess that is compares those ideas with the real-world checks for internal inconsistencies and so on I think the creative process is a partnership between a conscious and an unconscious part of our of our minds at least that's how it seems to me I'd like to leave the last word on creativity in fact with a professor Stephen Hawking just whenever you're ready son I am just curious I want to find out how things work I follow my nose one thing leads to another and I don't know what I will find next now I think I would like to retreat a little bit into poetry myself because it's nearly 150 years ago since Matthew Arnold wrote his splendid poem the future but what was before us we know not and we know not what will succeed well perhaps if professor Hawking's magnificent vision and curiosity is realized will have proved Matthew Arnold wrong before the hundred and fifty years are up gentlemen to all of you to professor Stephen Hawking to dr. arthur c clarke to you Carl Sagan in America our warmest thanks to all three of you and to all of you watching good night you

Channel: TheScienceFoundation

Views: 2,527,584

Rating: 4.9268985 out of 5

Keywords: stephen, hawking, Arthur, C., Clarke, carl, sagan, albert, einstein, michio, kaku, parallel, universes, God, The, Universe, and, Everything, Else, atheism, isaac, newton, niels, bohr, atom

Id: HKQQAv5svkk

Length: 52min 11sec (3131 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/lazybast]

Who would have have bet that out of those 4, Stephen Hawking would be the only survivor 30 years later?

[u/Johnzy]

Can someone shed some light on the modern scientific agreement of the topics they're talking about? What do we know that they didn't know back in 1988?

[u/fryanimal12]

I would have loved to watch their reactions when they were told the expansion of the universe is accelerating

[u/TheConvexAirplane]

Carl sagan is the fucking man

[u/Buck-Nasty]

I would have loved to have seen Asimov join them.

[u/gagagoogaga]

Obligatory Meat Planet link.

[u/beta176]

I love the intro and outro music to this, but Looney Toons kind of skewed what comes to mind when I hear it. https://youtu.be/LHivHuPFBqA

[u/ProjectGotan]

I just worked on Childhood's End (based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke). A new mini series for Syfy. The script was pretty amazing.

[u/VanGoghingSomewhere]

I have a feeling that the first topic there doesn't get much thought or attention in this film