Joe Rogan Experience #1233 - Brian Cox

that's very cool three-two-one yeah a guy named was online Twitter errors Instagram handles TGT studios and he makes these I actually had one made for Elon Elon Musk loved it too so we made him one with he made one with like this very beautiful redwood and those are what are those things made out of Jamie that some diodes or something Nixie tubes Nixie tubes yes yeah he has to get them from Russia that's uh he has them delivered over from Russia so they might have like listening devices implanted in them as well yeah so Brian good to see you man great to be back yeah great to have you back so tell me what this tour that you're doing it's a it's a willed tool try to keep this sucker like a fistful oh yeah there you go how's that perfect yeah it's a world tour starts next week in the UK and then we go everywhere from the South Island in New Zealand all the way to the Arctic Circle so Svalbard which is north the furthest north that you can go on a commercial aircraft in the middle of we're in the States for a month in a mainly May and yeah it's it's about cosmology and about the questions that cosmology raises so if you're interested in the science of how did the universe begin even questions of what may have been there is the universe eternal is there such a thing as before the Big Bang what is the future of the universe how does complexity emerge spontaneously in a universe I mean we sort of take you for granted that we there's a big bang and it's all hot and there's just this kind of hot glow of stuff and I out said that spontaneously in 13.8 billion years you get something like the earth with the civilization and life on it so how does that do we know anything about that I mean we do I'm asking the question atomically we know quite a lot about it so it's it's really about showing the size and scale of the universe but addressing those questions I think everybody has about what is it what does it mean to be human this tiny little finite life that we lead in a possibly infinite universe sense of that well it's incredibly exciting to me that there's a giant audience for this and that what Neil deGrasse Tyson had been doing and what a lot of public touring intellectuals are doing now they're doing these giant theaters and these people are coming out to see these shows and we're realizing that there's I'm I hate to use the term market for this but there's a demand for this and there's a lot of people who are incredibly fascinated by this and yeah it's it's spreading information expressing knowledge yeah I mean in the UK particularly I mean do Wembley Arena for example you're talking about 10,000 people 12 times equal and you're right they are coming all the other you know their big shows spectacular screens and all that they're coming for to think that they're coming to hear about what we know about the universe and nature and I think you know I think I'm not surprised people are interested because these are questions everybody asks you know I mean just why am I here you know everybody's asking that question but I my point is that there is a framework there's a framework of knowledge there are things we know about the universe so it is true that science scientists are not going to tell you why you're here they're not gonna tell you what the meaning of life is but there is actually a there are things you need to know if you want to start to explore those questions for yourself but you need to know that there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe you need to know that the Milky Way galaxy has got 200 billion stars most of those stars now we know have planetary systems we estimate there are something like 20 billion earth-like planets or potentially earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone so if you're asking questions about what is my place in the universe you need to know those things first of all it's a framework within which you can think when you get to those numbers when you're talking about trillions and billions and though all those zeros my brain just goes numb there's this lack of comprehension that I'm well aware of like those numbers get thrown about I go oh 200 billion hmm I think everybody does I think I've every scientist and no scientist can picture that number I mean he even the small number 200 billion starts in one galaxy and then when you say two trillion galaxies you know that's I challenge anyone to be able to picture that but it is the reality that we've observed we've you know we haven't counted all to trillion by the way we have you ever think all the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which maps the positions of galaxies so you can you know how much of the sky you've surveyed and you know how many galaxies you counted and then you can spread that across the wider universe and you get this picture of a vast and possibly infinite universe I mean we we know that the universe are very strongly suspect at the university is much bigger than the piece we can see so we have good reason to think that's the case whether it's infinite or not is another question and then that goes to your you know that can you picture infinity well no one can picture infinity you know we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago so that's a measurement so because we can measure the speed that all the galaxies are flying away from us essentially and then you so you can run time backwards if you like so to find out when they were all on top of each other and so quite simple measurement and we've done that so we say the universe began 13.8 billion years ago but actually all we know really was the universe was very hot and very dense at that time and we have some theories that the universe was in existence before that and perhaps some sort of circumstantial evidence and that means that actually the universe could could have always been there eternal and then when I talk to people sometimes they get a bit some people get upset about that some people would rather it had a beginning the idea that it might have been around forever is more frightening somehow than the fact that it began now it's it's interesting the way that people's minds work what what terrifies you the most an eternal universe or a finite universe yeah they're both incomprehensible though the eternal universe the if there was an eternal universe is that negate the theory of the Big Bang or does it mean that there's a constant cycle of big bangs and then expansion and then recompression or it could do so those theories are back King vogue some of those theories are back in vogue again so yes some of them say that there's a cycling universe so the Big Bang is an event when space gets very hot and very dense and filled with particles and that may happen again are some of the other theories there's a theory called eternal inflation which is a theory there and it's actually the most popular theory I think at the moment but what happened but why the Big Bang is the way that it is who's got some very special features the Big Bang which we could talk about but inflation is the idea that space space-time was around before the Big Bang and it was expanding extremely fast there was doubling in size in the most popular of these theories every 10 to the minus 37 seconds which is point no no no no 37 knots one of a second so he's an unimaginably fast expansion and then the idea is that draws to a close so quite naturally so dies away in the expansion slows down and all the energy that was taken there was causing that expansions sort of gets dumped into space and heats it up and makes particles and that's what we call the Big Bang and those theories that slight extension to those say that that slowing down just happens in little patches so most of the universe the overwhelming majority the universe is still inflating that insane speed and that just little patchy stop and there Big Bang's so you get multiple universes a multiverse it's called the inflationary multiverse and we are in one of those bubbles and that's what have the more popular theories that's another one I mean but right now I'm aware of what you're saying I can I can sort of visualize it in some sort of a graphic form but it's incomprehensible like my mind doesn't it doesn't have the capacity to expand the this sense of distance and size to that that grasp is this because of just the way we evolved we evolved here on earth to deal with the space that's in front of us and now over the course of you know in industrial civilization and education we're now grasping these concepts that are so alien to the reality that the tangible reality that we exist in everyday I'm sure that's right and they're the you know even very simple things like you go back to the Greeks so Aristotle and there's great you know very clever people but they thought the earth was a center of the universe no why because it feels like it's at the same time it feels like we're not moving and that's quite a deep point actually in physics it's like why is it that we're flying around relative to the Sun very fast at whatever speed is 80 miles a second or something like that and the whole solar system is going around the Milky Way galaxy and so on why is it that we don't feel it and then the Greeks quite naturally said well because we're at the center of the universe they also said everything falls towards the earth so therefore the earth possibly at the center is its natural right and actually it's quite a deep thought so to understand why it didn't feel that we're moving you you have to go all the way to Einstein really for someone to take that very seriously and he said actually he said well this there's a great little explanation in Stephen Hawking's brief history of time about this that the idea that you can't tell whether you're moving or not demolish is the notion of absolute space so if we think about spective as its face of you or most people I suppose you'd think the way that Newton did have a big box within which things happen and that's gotta be that's a natural picture of space and the universe isn't it a thing in which all the planets and galaxies are placed but in in the brief history of time Hawking says well imagine bouncing a ball so he bounced a ball that stable now a tennis ball so I drop it and I catch you again so let's say I drop it it takes a second to bounce up so in that second the earth has moved about 80 miles or so in space around the Sun so you could ask the question did that ball return to the same place in space or not and the answer is you can't answer it it does from our perspective but from the perspective is someone watching the earth go all the way around the Sun it when I caught it again it had moved 80 miles and then from some other perspective it would have done something else so the point is you can't say this is a point in space it came back to the same place because that just depends on your perspective depends on whether you watching the Sun the earth go around the Sun on whatever it is so so Einstein said that means there's no such thing as absolute space which kind of follows if you think about it but that's a difficult it's it's a cool but difficult thought process right I mean that's that's essentially what's happening when you're on a plane I mean if you're throwing a ball up in the air and catching it on the plane it's happening in a much smaller scale right yeah yeah I mean you're flying it whatever six hundred miles an hour relative to the ground but when you're sitting there yeah and Einstein elevated that to a principle and said if you're moving it a beauty you're not accelerating you're just moving at a constant speed in a plane or now I mean that's essentially what we're doing now we're moving around the Sun it effectively constant speed then you can't tell so there's no experiment you can do we could look at the decay of a radioactive nucleus or some electricity and magnetism or bounce a ball have a pendulum whatever it is and there's no experiment you can do to tell you whether you're moving or not therefore that concept has no meaning because you can't measure it and that that's led Einstein to relativity so that that's the basis of general relativity which is our best theory of the universe now why is it that we think that the known universe is larger than we can observe well one point is that it's an expanding and and we always see the same radiation out there so the glow of the Big Bang but there's some deeper reasons and the one from the theory of inflation there the the best way to explain the universe the properties that we see is that it's very much bigger than the piece we can see so for example we measure space to be what's called flat I don't mean I'd say what's called flat it is flat so if you imagine slices of space let's imagine slices of them at different times so you just slice the universe and say there's a big sheets like this today I could tear a sheet of space and there's another sheet another sheet and it can it can have a geometry right flat like a tabletop or it could be curved like a sphere or it could be curved in the opposite direction sort of like a saddle or a bowl and we can measure that and when we measure it we see its absolutely flat and that's a very unusual thing for it to be like it requires because what Einstein's theory says is that the shape of space that the curvature of space is determined by the stuff that's in it that's that's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity put stuff in space and it curbs it and bends it and warps it and stretches it and so on and what we find is that with there's precisely the right amount of stuff in the universe to have a completely flat universe and the the explanation the most favored explanation for that is the universe is way bigger than the piece we can see and so it's like looking at a piece of the earth oh you look a little one mile square of the earth right then it's flat I mean you have to look at big distances it's kind of a vorded the radius of the earth or not you know bigger bigger than 1 kilometer anyway on 1 mile to see that actually you're on a curved surface and that's one of the ideas about the the universe and white appears to be the way that it is because it's way way bigger so we just we're just looking at a little piece and that's why it looks flat and that's one of the ideas now when you say flat like that my brain doesn't understand this because from our perspective when you look up at the Milky Way you see all these stars all over the place so if you're saying flat like it wow much height and what what are you saying so terms of like the way to measure it the best way to think about it is not to think of three dimensions of space because then we can't picture it ok but you can think of two like this tabletop and that's all right we just forget the other one for now and so you know what flat is on this table I mean you could define it so you could say for example that if I draw a triangle on the top of the table then all the angles add up to 180 degrees so that actually defines flat if you did that on the surface of the earth with a big triangle then the angles wouldn't add up 280 degrees or you could draw a circle and say what's pi so pi is the ratio of the circle inference of a circle to its diameter that's only true on a flat surface it's different if the surface is curved so you can define flatness so when you but even when you're saying flatness how what is the height and what is the width like if you're talking about it as if it's a table there must be some sort of a there's a dimension to it correct oh yeah there's a third dimension of space but the same applies it's just a generalization of geometry then say you can pick there fires we can picture it in two dimensions but you can you can draw you can quite literally you could imagine sending like beams out then we do this measurement actually we can look at the the disk the most distant light we can see which is something called the cosmic microwave background radiation which is if you if you imagine looking out if you look at the Andromeda galaxy which we can see with the naked eye here in LA you can see that it's the most distant object you can see with the naked eye and it's about 2 2 million light years away also which means the light took 2 million years to get to us so it's a long way away but it's very big so as you look further out into the universe 2 more and more distant galaxies you're looking further back in time because you look at something that's a billion light years away then the light took a billion years to get to us so you see as it was a billion years in the past and we can actually look so far out that we can see almost back to 13.8 billion years ago which is very close to the Big Bang so we can look to light that began its journey before there were galaxies and that's the oldest light in the universe which is by the way one of the one of the pieces of evidence when people say I don't believe in the Big Bang the answer is where you can see it so actually just there you can see it we have pictures of it and that light it turns out that there are such structures or ripples in that light which we can use as a ruler so quite literally as a ruler on the sky and then because that light's been traveling through the universe we can see how that rule has been distorted as the light is travelled through space and so we can infer whether space is flat or curved or how it's warps if you like just from that measurement it's a beautiful measurement is it possible that in the future we'll be able to see past 13.8 billion years not with light no because what the picture is that before it's actually was released 380,000 years after the Big Bang it's a very precise number you might say how do you know that well before that time the universe was so hot the atoms couldn't form so you had a soup of electrically charged particles it was just too hot for electrons to go into orbit around nuclei so the universe was opaque to light so you just couldn't it's like one almost like a big glowing star if you like and then when it was expanding it cooled past the point where the atoms could form and at that point it becomes transparent really almost instantly in a cosmic timescale and so the light could then travel in straight lines through the universe and we can see that light so we see the light from that time but further back than there it's opaque so you can't see past that with light but you can potentially with gravitational waves which is this measurement that got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago the LIGO experiment here in the United States and that see it looks for ripples in the fabric of space and time and in principle if we had a big enough detector you could see the ripples from the Big Bang so you couldn't you could take an image of the Big Bang in gravitational waves which would be but you need enormous of space based datang so that we're not going to build any time soon no obviously this is all through equipment and technology that's been invented over the last few hundred years and perfected is it possible that things could get better and you could get some some ability to detect things even in a far more distant way yeah I mean the gravitational waves are incredible I mean Einstein predicted them in 1915 never thought they'd be detected because you need to search your hyper you need lasers for him didn't have lasers but they think like oh this experiment which is half in near Seattle in Washington state and half in Louisiana so they've got two detectors and they're basically so ever and no three-mile-long laser beams and that just sit and measure this of stretching and school king of space as the riffles in the fabric of the universe and go through and and what they've been observing collisions of black holes so you can imagine how extreme like a colliding black holes it said incredibly extreme event so it shakes the fabric of the universe and the riffles come across the universe and these laser beams but she just basically rulers can detect it they just so ring ganas like you know just vibrate as the ripples go through in space and time they keep Thorne he got the Nobel Prize last year for this he's one of the greatest living physicists so I was assigned describe it as a storm in time so you've got this is a time to storm it's a beautiful image so that technology is incredible because it the change in length is a kind of an exact number but it's way way way less than the diameter of an atomic nucleus so the change in length of the beams it's tiny measurement but we can do it so this time a collision of black holes the idea that you can detect that yeah yeah they they were I said the paper the first paper they published their to black holes and they were about 30 times the mass of the Sun each and they're orbiting each other and spiraling in towards each other and they accelerated at one point they were approaching each other at one-third the speed of light and they accelerated to two-thirds of speed of light in a tenth of a second and they'll hit each other and the explosion the energy release was I think I'm right it was something like 50 times the energy release that the power of all the stars in the observable universe glowing and it was something like 50 times that amount of energy for a tiny fraction of a second but it's an unimaginably violent event and that's why our detectors can see the ripples that that makes in space and time and we detected at least two or three of them now and also two neutron stars colliding we saw that as well with it so it's an incredible machine which is why it got the Nobel Prize now there's a supermassive black hole the center of every Galaxy yeah there is also other black holes that aren't necessarily in the center of galaxies yeah so these little ones a little they a few times the mass of the Sun and they're from collapse tiles so they are stars at the end of their life very bigger than the Sun more massive than the Sun but they run out of their fuel and they start to collapse because gravity squashes them and if they're sufficiently massive then there's nothing that can stop the collapse and so they collapse as far as we know to a point right essentially an infinitely dense point we don't really know what happens at we don't know what happens right in the middle but they collapsed a search and extent that there's a region around it where from which light can't escape and that's a so nothing can escape and that that's a black hole and what happens to them do they travel are they moving through space yeah they're still stars right you know so they they're still there they're surrounded this region where have you fallen it's called the event horizon and if you go across that horizon then you are going to the center there's one way of thinking about it which is quite cool which is that the time and space sort of flip is one way to think about it so in the same way that we are going into the future now so we're going to tomorrow there's nothing we can do about it we are going to tomorrow in the same way if you fall in across the event horizon of a black hole you are going to the middle the singularity is called so that's that's your future every every line of your future points to the center of the black hole so it's kind of the ultimate I've no escape for the ultimate prison you're gonna get squashed to an infinitely dense so anoint not every star becomes a black hole at the end of its life no because if something like the Sun and we have a small star it's quite small yeah and when it collapses there's a there's a sort of pressure a force if you like which is caused by the fact that electrons don't like to be very close to each other so it's called the Pauli exclusion principle but essentially what happens is that so as they get squashed closer and closer together they move faster and faster to get out of each other's way if you like and that makes a force which holds them up and so that creates what's called a white dwarf star so you can have a blob of matte so they're about the size of the earth but they're about the mass of the Sun and so that's that's for smaller stars they end up as these white dwarf things which are very dense objects there's another version which is called the neutron star which is the same thing but for neutrons and they they move faster and faster so if it's if it's massive enough that it overwhelms the electron thing then the electrons sort crush into protons and turn into neutrons and the whole thing starts again and so a neutron star can be you know elite one-and-a-half times the mass of the Sun let's say but it can be about what 10 miles across so so that's an incredibly dense ball of matter held up by this the neutrons moving around it's got a fancy name it's called Neutron degeneracy pressure but I someone did it but if you go even bigger then even that can't hold it up and as far as we know then there's no known force that we know of that can hold hold the thing up if it's too massive and so that's when it just we almost winks out of existence if you like oh it collapses and collapses and collapses and and that's when you get a black hole we try to put that into perspective the earth the Sun is a million times bigger than the earth yeah and this this neutron star is would you say one and a half times the mass of this yes it has miles wide yeah yeah so and it allowed to those around that they called pulsars so we see those all over the place though the first one that was discovered was called lgm1 because there's spin very fast and then it was called lgm1 because it's a very regular pulse and they thought it was little green men so they called it kind of jokingly little green men one and then so yeah we've seen that there's one called the crab pulsar which is in the Crab Nebula which we saw the supernova explosion so that's when one of these stars explodes at the end of its life and then collapses to form a neutron star and we saw that in 1054 ad wasn't there some speculation that our gal or our solar system at one point was was a binary star system and that one of those stars had become a dwarf I don't know and some someone had read something about that in relationship to the dense object they believe is outside the Kuiper belt yeah I mean there's some evidence there's a bit of evidence that there's something out there yeah yeah good because of the periodic extinctions and things on earth you get periodic bombardments from out in the Kuiper belt so yeah I think one of the theories is realloc extinctions well yeah so feel like the you know that they've been there have been mass extinctions on earth where a lot of the life died and then we don't know what caused all those but sometimes their impacts from space that seems clear and so yeah there are theories that there's something orbiting out there which can disrupt all these objects out in the Kuiper belt that sends loads of comets and asteroids inwards to the inner solar system can cause havoc so there's some people look at those theories I mean I don't know it's one of those it is a possibility the speculation was that there's something out there's correct me if I'm wrong something called the Galactic Shelf like that it gets to a certain space in it indicates that there's something far larger out there yeah I mean I think I don't know the exact about the stellar-sized no massive objects out there I don't know that I mean there's some sort of suggestions there's another planet out there a big planet for example but you're right that can be that can be stuff always in way beyond the Kuiper belt and we're talking you know a light year away or something like that now it's it's interesting because it's incomprehensible the distance right and in our minds how far that must be out past what we used to call Pluto but for whatever reason that becomes more interesting because it's in our neighborhood whereas if they find some distant star system and it might have a planet that's similar to earth that doesn't seem as compelling for whatever weird reason no yeah I mean I think the the planets around Alpha Centauri Proxima Centauri which are the closest stars it seemed like there are planets around those now and then that that was interesting because we could conceive of going there right and there was this idea you're Stephen Hawking actually and some others before he died had this idea called breakthrough starshot which is the idea to send a little probe out so at the sense at the Alpha Centauri system and I think in their view yuri milner as well the you know the entrepreneur wanted to do that and there is i think it's in like a hundred years travel time or something with with with our current technology and they pointed out that yeah we don't do that now we don't think hundred years in the future but did we go back when people are building cathedrals people used to routinely start projects that would take a hundred years to bear fruit yeah so we could imagine going there and that's that then becomes fascinating I think because then you've got a solar system another solar system that you could go and visit conceivably conceivably yeah I mean what kind of speed are we talking and how long would it take to get there well yeah I mean so it is I think that the idea was about a hundred years to get there so it's going yeah four light years or so in a hundred years to essentially do what they didn't like to Ridley Scott alien film and put people into some sort of a oh yeah it wouldn't be a cruelty probe wouldn't be possible for a crew well it is reason yeah that's always that you know whenever you talk to engineers you had a London use yes engineer's always say you know physicists go well it's possible in principle so over to you you know there are no laws of physics that tell us we can't do it so we just do it right but you know yeah but but yeah in principle you're right if you can send a little robot spaceship there you can send a crude spaceship I am of the opinion as time goes on and augmented and virtual reality gets better and better that it doesn't really totally make sense unless we're talking about colonizing some place to send biological life to another planet if we can send some probe that doesn't have to worry about you know the biology being affected by radiation or by the speed of travel or even by food we can send something out there and almost be there by virtue of you know goggles virtual reality goggles or something else yeah you hear that in science at the moment space science we have this debate a lot actually because of course space probes like curiosity that's on Mars at the moment that's really cheap compared to sending people to Mars and so quite often the scientists who want to find out about the worlds will say well we should spend it on robots we shouldn't spend it on people I think Croods face exploration is in in some ways and it's clearly true at the moment that humans can do more than robots so we can explore the place better for now yeah but but I think it has to be it's about something else I mean it's about and it's not only it's about living and working off the planet which I think it's quite persuasive argument actually we've already industrialized near Earth orbit so it's already a multi-billion dollar industry in every communication satellites and weather satellites GPS whatever yeah we're already up there and so learning to live and work in space is I think a natural extension of our of our civilization plus the fact if you talk to Ilana or Jeff Bezos they point out that the amount of resources available just slightly above our heads is vast and so I remember I talked to Jeff Bezos actually once and he he thinks really simply and he said no for example in the asteroid belt there's enough metal I think to build a skyscraper what is it something like 800 stories tall and cover the earth in it right if you want now we don't want to do that where's point was that that the energy from the Sun is all up there the resources are up there so you could almost imagine trying to zone the earth residential at some point in the future to protect the planets and do your heavy industry off the planet for example and these sound this sounds like science fiction except that now SpaceX and Blue Origin those people have got reusable rockets so suddenly the economic become sensible so I think it i think i think expansion is good and I think we will expand and I think we will expand outwards because there's not much room left on this planet to expand so I think we'll do so but it's that's a whole different idea it's not about gathering scientific information it's about a frontier and all the benefits that come from operating as a civilization on the frontier which we've lost on the earth because there is no front to your left and so I like that idea mmm that Mars and when you talk about Mars especially with Elon he's right that that's the only place you can go so the reason our the planet we can go to other than Mars you can't go to Jupiter or Saturn goes of mercury or Venus so if we want to go somewhere and expand our civilization it has to be Mars and everything is there that you need so with that that's a different thing saying you want to find out stuff you're right if we just want to find out stuff then you send robots but as far as expanding actual civilization and bringing it to another place one of the things that freaks me out is people get depressed about living in Seattle I mean you're gonna live on Mars I wouldn't I really yeah it's if he had horrendous thing it's like the like the Western Front yes difference here when people cross the States yeah incredibly dangerous thing to do across the states they still got to Wyoming in beautiful places and Colorado and yeah but it was hard yeah I wouldn't wanted to do it but once you got there there's a river and there's trout in the river and then the meadows are green and it's it's right I mean I I agree with you right I mean I'm not gonna go that of the ravine yards and hotels but however it is true that there are people who like the challenge and what is true about Mars it's interesting actually because we know something about the history of Mars now quite a lot about history of Mars and it's certainly clear that there was water almost certainly oceans and rivers so and that water is almost certainly still there so I would say certainly still there well they have found large quantities of ice now right yeah so there's certainly ice there may even be pockets of liquid water below the surface somewhere so a couple that with all the the mineral and the resources that we know are there and you have everything you need so that's the thing about masses it's quite nice relative to everywhere else other than the earth you can't go to Venus you know you just melt it what is it four hundred and something degrees and ninety atmospheric pressures yes so so so Mars is quite nice but I wouldn't go there I agree with you because it was not gravity of Mars in relationship to it so yeah so it would still have a significant like weakening effect like if you went to Mars and then somehow or another in the future they they were able to get back to earth yeah your body would have a real problem with that right would but there there is there is still grab my spent more than a third I can't quite remember but it's something like that but yeah so you there's still gravity so there's gravity there's some protection from the you'd probably want to live in the caves actually or something like that you'd because there's no magnetic field there so it's quite a high radiation environment but not too bad it's further from the Sun than we are it's not - there are places on Mars that there's a very deep crater called helis which is a big impact basin and at the bottom the the it's so deep you could fit Everest in it so you put Mount Everest in there the summit of Everest wouldn't reach the rim of the crater so it's just something like I don't know what it is seven miles deep or somewhat six miles deep so you could go there and at the bottom the atmospheric pressure is so high that you could just about have liquid water occasionally on the floor of that crater so it's quite water sometimes it can be 20 degrees really yeah Celsius Wow so right now exactly I was experiencing a serious cold face right so it can be warmer than Minnesota and so there are places where it's not horrendous or Mars you know so the Martian it's it's kind of really sticky nuts and sort of bits of it do you watch those movies and shake your head I like him I like science fiction you know so yeah and it's it there I grew up with Star Wars that was my when I was 9 years old or some finite yeah I'm not having this I did an argument with Neil deGrasse Titan on argument but debate with him about lightsabers once because I claimed that they're physically probably in principle there possible and he was trying to say that down but they are would they'd have to loop back around cuz the light's not continuing like the fact that it goes to a certain distance and pauses we have a mirror or something I guess yes something that's pretty the end of it that's true so it wouldn't be a different kind of light so the only point I was making is that photons particles of light can bounce off each other hmm so we see that in really high energy experiments in parts of accelerators we can collide photons together so my point was a bit of a pedantic physicist one but he's because he it is true that light can bounce off it it can hit light right but very very high energy but when they press their body to a certain yes I wasn't that's engineering right I agree with you I agree with you the distance to it right so as you're swinging it around you wouldn't have the leverage of a long thing so why not make it really long because it wouldn't be difficult to swing around like you could stab someone with a light saber a mile away that's true that's just a laser and yes why make it so short you have to swing you have to be close to any person with it it's a silly silly design you are picking holes correctly in the engineering part of my the only point I was making is the physics is that which i think is quite interesting his light can bounce off light yes so but it would have to there would have to be something that causes it to stop at the very end yeah yeah yeah which would be you're right it haven't merit but he wouldn't look cool with it if there was a no kind of thing with him what drives me crazy about Star Wars is not the lightsabers it's the lasers when they're shooting the guns I'm like why can I see that well I can't see bullets yeah this is we're supposed to be way faster than a bullet yeah this because it's like they really slow off that so angry I feel like this is so dumb I could go warp speed in this Millennium Falcon and travel the speed of light but for whatever reason these lasers are so slowly you could duck out of the way of them that's so dumb and it's not only Star Wars it's everything every single film does that yeah yeah it's like it's like films like also I worked on one of these films years ago sunshine very underappreciated movie yeah I think so I think but in that so they they asked me or Danny said I want to do it right so I'll do the spacecraft without any sound so when it's traveling through space they'll be silent and it looks [ __ ] you know just when you watch it's the same when when you try and film astronauts and you and they're in zero-g and they always move slowly yeah but it looks silly so this kind of I suppose it's what audiences have got used to over the years and so in the end you happen 2001 which didn't do it yeah silent in 2001 well Kubrick was a stickler for science and for he was apparently he would do complex mathematics in his spare time well fascinating guy that must have been yeah I read that they just and someone just found an interview didn't they the other day where he explained the ending of 2001 I didn't say that yesterday actually and it was it was kind of a really simple version of it he just said well the super intelligent beings take him in and put him in a zoo basically and watch him grow old and then send him back to the earth as a super being that's the worst explanation at the end of 2002 one I've ever heard but he was Kubrick's that's what Kubek said so there he falls into the monolith yet they just put him in this room which is kind of a bad version of a French chateau or something watch him grow old and then send him back to the earth is a super being Wow okay that was Kubrick's yeah it's uh it's a it's a weird genre right because sometimes people get things right like didn't HG Wells predict a significant amount of scientific inventions in the future well there was he said I mean depends which one doesn't it there was a moon one wasn't though he did M agenda to the moon I mean his time machine is no right to do that really worked out yet so yeah I think it's I I always liked science fiction yeah I like arthur c clarke a lot you know cuz i i think it is you're right it's a a form that you can let your imagination wander and address things that restriction i think did you like the alien series i loved it yes I leave when I was at school he's 1979 and we had a school film Club in the 70s they weren't like they are now we don't so the first films they put on the three films I was a 11 and it was alien Apocalypse Now in Life of Brian Wow which I that was my introduction to wow those are three great choices but I feel like really Scott's original alien is probably one of the greatest horror science fiction movies of all time one of my all-time favorite movies but I really like the newer ones as well like Pete I like Prometheus and I really like covenant the the last one yeah Prometheus I don't know I yeah it's not the best one I look they're like what they're trying to do with it the whole idea about the engineers coming back in time and that's it that's why I was disappointed with it because I thought this set up the opening is brilliant and I thought this is just going to be brilliant right then I thought it just lost its way and it was a disappointment because it could have been so brilliant yes I agree with you yeah the beginning was fantastic but I think covenant was more more exciting and well it's also preposterous like if you went to another planet like the last thing you'd be doing is just breathing in the air right I mean we'd have to be really care if there was a life on the planet we'd have to be really careful not to contaminate but be not to be contaminated right yeah yeah I mean yeah there's also I mean you know the other thing in science fiction films is gravity because you always yeah an alien you always just say the spaceships got gravity again there's only 2001 right where everybody flows around yeah because all has a spinning thing right the spaceship has gravity and then when you land the gravity is exactly like Earth yeah perfect yeah you know yeah what are the odds that you would find a planet that is exactly like even if a planet was one and a half times the size of Earth it would have far more gravity right and that's that's really common for a planet to be like just a little bit bigger yeah and then we would be like the [ __ ] everywhere would be walking with people we'd be getting crushed right I agree with you yeah but that's not the point it's about ideas yes and you know this whole idea where you're just supposed to let it let the you know let the story play out and I mean sunshine was and you know they put the premise is is silly I mean it's the premises the Sun is dying and we're gonna go and fix it yeah so both of those things it fails on its first line a bit in the sense of realism but the idea is that it's not about that it's about it's about the it's about the Sun as a God in some ways so it's about our response to the power of nature and it's about defying this thing and worshiping it and how ultimately you go mad if you remember the film there's pin backer who's the first captain that went to the captain the first mission to go and restart the Sun which is the mad bit mm-hmm but then became a religious fundamentalist essentially and then decided it's a fascinating idea that he decides to bring meaning to his life he will become the last the last man the last human and so he wants to be the last he wants the Sun to die and he wants it to take humanity with it and he decided to make that happen so he stays there waiting for the second ship I like those ideas that you know that what's your reaction to the power of nature this it after him one of the things that in my shows I'm not being a commercial person I just thought one of the great things about cosmology is that it is terrifying in the in the truest sense of the word when we talked a bit about the size and scale of the universe and black holes come those things you know it is very frightening but also the I think the act of trying to understand our place in nature and the size and scale of the universe now our your tiny presence within it is valuable it's a it's a so that you can be terrified but also inspired and interested and it's part of if you want to find if you want to ask questions about what it means to be human and means to be alive then I think you find the answers in confronting that reality which is that we live in a terrifyingly vast universe the palette powers in the universe that we cannot comprehend as you said but that that that's what you've got to face because that's reality so you can't hide your head in the sand and just duck it and it sends some it can send some people crazy I'm sure it is really interesting that we need that suspension of disbelief in order to sort of make a film on space you you almost have to like oh well this isn't really how it be but this is how you have to make it in order to fit it into a two-hour movie yeah and then and then the film as we sunshine becomes about you then you can have the film about something else yes it's not really about that well did you like a event horizon yeah I did actually I always wanted to ask about their their concept of propulsion that you that almost like space would be flat you would fold space over and you would intersect those two points and you would be able to travel vast distances instantaneously right and I'm doing a terrible job of explaining I'm sure but is that a concept that people have actually considered yeah you can in in general relativity so so I instance I should say what it is Einsteins theory general relativity is our best theory of space and time and so it really is as we talked about before it's you imagine space and time as a sheet just imagine it as a thing sort of literally a sheet surface and all the theory says is that if you put matter and/or energy into that then it curbs it and distorts it and it can stretch it and make it shrink and so it's the response of space and time to matter and energy so if you if you the simplest version will be the Sun so you put the big spherical ball of stuff in there and it warps face and time such that the nice straight lines something just traveling - Oh in business through that warp space turns into an orbit and that's why you can actually kind of see things that are behind the Sun yeah okay so light bends around the Sun because it's just traveling through the curved space the earth goes around the Sun because it's just rolling minding its own business through the curved space so an example would be you might say well how does a curved space how does can that give rise to something looks like a force she's gravity so the best analogy I know of is to think of walking around on the surface of the earth so if you stand on the equator of the earth and you'd you with your friend and you say we're gonna walk Joo North so we're gonna set off let's say we're a thousand miles apart on the equator and we're gonna walk Joo North and what's going to happen so you walk in straight lines you don't change direction you don't give any accelerating but the straight lines are lines of longitude on the surface of the earth so as you go further and further north you get closer and closer together and if you carry on to the pole you bump into each other mm-hmm but nothing's happened no one's know and there's no forces acting it's just that you're moving on a curved surface and so you get closer and that's basically Einstein's theory of general relativity now why did I start talking about event horizon the idea of oh yeah so so you can so all you have to do so that those folded kind of geometries is you have to try and specify how where you would put the matter and what kind of stuff you'd put there to make the geometry fold in that way and you can do it you can do it so you can you can write down that geometry it's called a warp drive geometry I think is called that is in textbooks so you can do that to have a warp drive the question becomes what sort of stuff would you have to actually put into the real universe to make it warp in that way and it always it usually turns out that the kind of stuff that doesn't exist right but it has properties it's math sort of matter or sort of energy that has properties that do not exist in nature as far as we can tell but you can still write the geometry down in Einstein's theory so if you had mystical force or mass or whatever it is if you had that stuff that doesn't exist it is a concept that yeah so the geometry exists so you can you can you can do it and you can do the calculations and you can see the warp drive you can construct wormholes that connect distant regions of the universe which you could use as time machines and you can do all that in the theory but in nature you'd have to have the right stuff to do it but that stuff is not real that seems to be as far as we know yeah now what would have to happen like the you would have to have enough power or mass to be able to fold those two things together like it tends to be weird stuff like an stuff that has a negative pressure or something like that so stuff that has physical properties that are just bizarre and that no matter our energy that we know of in the universe has so that that to make to make the geometry happen but it's conceivable in theory that this could exist even though it doesn't it's it it said it said the very altom utley and so wormholes are a good example so that would be quite literally it we've talked about the surface of the earth so you fly to Australia from LA and you have to go quite a long way around this edge of the earth oh you could tunnel straight through and get there quicker see that's a worse name he's got a little graphic up there and there it is so you could go all the way around the edge or you could cut take the shortcut so the question it's so you can do that in Einstein's theory you can write down that geometry and there it is so the first question is can you make it and as we've said we don't think that stuff exists there's a second set of theoretical bits of theoretical work which if you had a wormhole then what would happen if you tried to travel through it and what seems to happen is that is that they become unstable the moment anything tries to go through so you get kind of a feed if still going through and through and through and through and so it collapses and that there's a great this great book by Kip Thorne actually we just mentioned him he got the Nobel Prize last year for the gravitational waves and he wrote a brilliant blog links in the 80s called black holes and time warps way talks about the the answer is we don't fully know but most physicists think that even if they existed they would be unstable then as soon as you even try to transmit information through them send a bit of light through then there will be this sort of feedback and they'd collapse and ultimately the reason we don't really know absolutely is because you need what's called a quantum theory of gravity and we don't have one so we don't have the theoretical tools to be absolutely sure that these things would be unstable or don't exist in nature but we strongly suspect that they don't they did you could build a time machine so there Stephen Hawking wrote a paper called the chronology protection conjecture and conjecture is the important word so we conjecture basically was that the laws of nature will be such that you can't have stable wormholes and you can't build time machines and if you send something through it it would destabilize ya and if it didn't destabilize it how would your physical body deal with the stress of that well it doesn't have to be that you can you can build them that's called the tidal gravitational force so it's the difference in gravitational pull across your body which is one of the things that gets you fall into a black hole so before you actually get to the singularity you can get its cause spaghettified yes it's certainly cool so you get it's just like the moon's you know the tidal effects on the earth which is quite small but they still raise tides on the oceans so that can be a if you think about something like a black hole that can be a massive difference in gravitational pull from your head to your feet and so it can stretch you out and so but you can with wormholes you you can you can write the geometry down the United States theory so that you could go through so so you don't have to be destroyed of anything weird happen to you would you have to have some something protecting you some force some some sort of just literally fall through I mean it so you know if they were they would exist you just you just go through you sit in a little spaceship but you you you wouldn't there's nothing inherently in them that says that you would be ripped apart but what are your thoughts on on alien life on life outside of this planet something you think about yeah I think there must be even in the solar system I would not be surprised if we find microbes on Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn where there's liquid water like Europa yeah and the reason is if you think about the reason I think that it's a guess it's because if you look at the history of life on Earth then so earth formed and it was just a there was no life he was a ball of rock and almost as soon as it cooled down we see evidence of life so certainly 3.8 billion years ago possibly even further back them there we see evidence of life on Earth so somewhere along the line geochemistry active geochemistry became biochemistry on earth and we have some idea you know that if you get gradients of temperature and acid and alkaline and the conditions that are naturally present on the surface of oceans then complex carbon chemistry spontaneously happens so we have a we know that life almost certainly we know that life began on earth I mean he had the other option is it came from space or something like that but he probably didn't probably probably began on earth and so that means that at least here that happened and that we know that the conditions that led to the origin of life on Earth were present on Mars 3.8 before billion years ago and we know that they're present on your own for today so I don't see that there's anything special life is just chemistry and it and the the idea that geochemistry becomes biochemistry is not fanciful because it happened here so I think that given the same conditions it would be surprising to me of the same thing didn't happen in that life begins so III that's one of the two tests that is one of the great frontiers of science now one of the great challenges which is why another reason we're interested in Mars because we know those conditions were there we know there were what's called hydrothermal vent systems on the floors of oceans on Mars 3.8 or 4 billion years ago so it would be good to know II what I've said is right and the way we find out is to find life or evidence of past life are you aware of the speculation that was going around how was it that occupy thing the octopus eggs they there was a group of scientists that were speculating that it's pop you know panspermia the idea of panspermia that it's possible that octopi had come from somewhere else some frozen eggs had actually come from somewhere else and and landed on earth and these are like legitimate scientists are contemplated not morons I don't think I've seen this the now I didn't but I mean it I think suddenly so panspermia doesn't have to be unlikely right I mean for example you might seen the other day we found an earth rock on the moon yes right well the earth now because he probably know it's probably back didn't they missed four billion years old or something one of the oldest rocks ever found yeah so we know that material gets transferred between planets and so it's not inconceivable that microbes could survive that journey we know that microbes can survive in space for example so that isn't mad it's probably unlikely but he's not mad but with the octopus I didn't heard that but the thing is that the octopus is still extremely similar biologically to us I mean the differences are negligible yeah so it's still got the same energy system with a single ATP in DNA you know aster it's all very very similar it was something about RNA and DNA did you find that article I'm looking at a different one for certain websites about the same thing I did with the Cambrian explosion and there were 33 authors on a paper that got published in the progress and biophysics and molecular biology that talked about this possibility there are other people that disagree with it though I mean I suppose the I haven't seen it so I think it's unlikely because the octopus is extremely similar to us so that suggests a common origin to me there suppose the counter-argument you could you could advance would be there's only one way to do life so you could say they're actually given because the laws of physics and chemistry are the same everywhere so maybe it's maybe DNA is the only way to do it so that's the way it gets done which is why they're so similar to us yes all those so alien as well yeah they're not though you know that's the thing about so that's why I'm surprised about it because they're not that alien they're very similar well there are in their abilities I mean their ability to transform their outer texture and their color instant almost instantaneously oh yeah I mean they have incredible camouflage abilities that really don't exist in the mammalian world yeah but I'll sell you a level you look at an octopus cell in among under a microscope and you wouldn't be able to tell the dish so you know it's for sale and humans so the only way that that would make sense as if all life comes from basically the same kind of building blocks and just varies depending upon the conditions and where it takes place I'm guessing but yes that must be the the only way you could sustain that given that they're so similar see was because they really are biochemically is that that's the only way it can be done given the given the building block the toolkit the laws of nature and the the elements and so on that we have in our universe we have so many different life forms on our planet but if we found anything that's remotely similar to what we have here on earth on another planet it would be such an incredible discovery like we sent if we found a frog on the moon I mean the world would stop right I'd be very surprised if we found anything anywhere that is any in any way similar an insect on Mars well this is I mean it as I said it be micro I didn't be single-celled things remember I mean you mentioned the Cambrian explosion so that is that what we do know that Earth is that although life began let's say 3.9 billion years ago it wasn't until around 600 million years ago or so that or maybe most seven hundred that you see any complex multicellular organisms that's all so first something like 3 billion years it was single-celled alone and that's one of the reasons why I would guess if I had to guess I would say that microbes would be common because life began very quickly on earth and I would be surprised to find it on Mars but complex life multicellular life insects plants intelligence I would guess will be very rare because it took so long on earth to get there who doesn't slime about 3 billion years of slime that was it what happened how did it go from slime to giraffes it's a very quickly once it once it got going yeah and it's one of the great unsolved mysteries in biology the one thing that is true is that we seem to be all complex creatures seem to be we call eukaryotes right rusa cells with a cell nucleus and all that kind of stuff and they look like they're the merger between two simpler life-forms bacteria and a thing called an archaea and our Keun so it looks like somewhere in two billion years ago whatever it was in some ocean the bacterial cell got inside the archein and survived as a symbiotic organism essentially and then somehow unbelievably managed to reproduce and replicate in that configuration and that does seem to be the origin of all complex multicellular life on Earth so it's called the fateful encounter hypothesis and then if that's true then it's just a bit of look any happen once right and that's why we're here now when lined look consider like how many billion earth-like planets did you say exist just our solar system alone in the galaxy 20 billion something like that so well intense towers so the odds of complex life out of our incredibly fortunate situation but the odds of that occurring on any of these billions of other planets that exist we don't know but let's say the earth is let's say it was on the fortunate side so we're with talking about give or take four billion years right from the origin of life to now and we have a civilization now and we've had it our species have been around what a quite a million years or something so it's just now basically so let's say four billion is on the fortunate side let's say that it was double that or triple that on the average suddenly that's the age of the universe right that's a third of the age of the universe so how many of those worlds have been stable for three or four billion years that that's quite a tall order actually it looks like our solar system might be quite unusual in that respect because it could the planets got to remain stable in a stable orbit the Stars got to remain stable the large mean stabilizes yeah Jupiter plays a big role take some roots yeah sucks a moon so and that you know that there's a thing there's a theory called the grand tech theory which is so it's very hard to explain the evolution of our solar system so that when you do computer models of solar systems you don't tend to get for rocky planets too close to the Sun and for big gas giants further out and one of the current best theories and this I say this because it shows you how look you we might be is that Jupiter that they tend to form these big gas giants and migrated inwards towards the star so you know I must all the computer simulations just because you've got this big gas giant orbiting all the dust around the star they tend to drop inwards and it looks like Jupiter did that so it looks like it formed and came in and came in almost to where Mars orbits today and and cleared out the region around Mars actually which is maybe the reason Mars is so small compared to the other so it's a Venus and Earth oh but then Saturn was coming in as well and in the computer models the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn stopped Jupiter coming in before it gets to the earth and they both get dragged out again and so it to where they are today and so that and that that seems to be it's one of the best theories for the evolution of our solar system so what are the chances you know that the chances of that are so mini school might tiny so that's the thing I think about these rocky planets you in order to get a civilization on them I think you need I guess you need quite unusual solar systems and that would be a guess and you need quite unusual stability on the planet for billions of years and that's why I think we might be quite lucky mmm and how does bodes law work bodes law is a method of detecting if you look at the mass of a planet you can accurately detect how much mass and the size of a neighboring planet I think it wasn't just the positions of the orbits I think right where it is yeah and it's one thing that is true about our solar system is that you if you get the computer simulations you can't put more planets in if you try and fill put more planets in they become it becomes unstable very quickly so that the mass of like if you measure Mars you can accurately depict where the next planet close to it would be it it was I mean it was that's what was done was it 17th century or so long yeah it was just one of those things where you know it's a pattern they were just trying to fit just a pattern which is an you know not there's nothing to that really other than to say that most simulations of the solar system if there are if you put other planets in they tend to get thrown out by gravitational interactions so there is a sense in which our solar system has got as much stuff in it as it could have so the planets are nicely spaced and you're right given the mass of them that depends on how close another planet can be before the interaction goes wrong and it gets thrown out into the intergalactic space I some because mannix do that you know we we know that planets get thrown out of solar systems by gravitational interactions so yeah so it again it points to the fact that solar systems are not are not stable over long periods of time they're not like clockwork things not like you know Newtonian clockwork and it just goes on forever they're not like that that they evolve and planets can shift orbits and change and one we know you look at the surface of the Moon for example it's covered in craters and that was cause they all seem to hit about the same time and it's about 3.8 billion years ago or so and that's called the late heavy bombardment so we know that if you look at cratering rates on Mars and on the moon it all seems happening this all but a big peak around that time and that seems to be correlated with Neptune moving outwards in the solar system and into Kuiper belt basically are towards the Kuiper belt and causing all sorts of havoc and everything comes into the inner solar system so those things happen and it but it didn't happen when life was established on the earth so it's all extremely old stuff that this is shifting textbook but how long is how long's the solar system been in this particularly stable situation that's in now it's it's since about 3.8 billion years ago so if it had been unstable at any point since then then we likely wouldn't be here right do you think that it's possible do you ever entertain the idea that it's possible that we are the only intelligent life in the known universe III like I said Teresa I tend to restrict myself to the galaxies so I do think it's possible that at the moment there's one civilization in the Milky Way and that's us and I think that's important actually and it goes back to our saying to start about the astronomy and cosmology being part the framework within which you have to think if you're looking for meaning you're looking for how we should behave even politically you know the that has a bearing to me I mean imagine that we're the only place where there is intelligence in this galaxy and how should we behave should we actually notwithstanding the fact that we're tiny and fragile things and insignificant physically should we consider ourselves extremely valuable in that respect because there's nowhere else where you know the the I would go as far as to say there would be nowhere elsewhere meaning exists in the Milky Way meaning because meaning it's one of those things that scientists don't talk about very much although Richard Fineman one of my great heroes did talk about it there's a quote where he says what is the meaning of it all it's a great essay called the value of science and so what is self-evidently true is that meaning exists here because it means something to us so that's kind of a an obvious statement your life means something to you and me and so meaning exists but I think it is a local and temporary phenomenon I think it's it emerges meaning emerges from configurations of atoms which is what we are we are simply that we nothing more than that we're very very rare configurations of atoms I think and so that means that we are if you go all the way down that line of logic we are the only Island meaning in the galaxy I'm meaning only to ourselves yeah it means something to us because we're the only ones who can grasp the concept and we are finite we are finite organism we have this temporary existence while we're here and to us there is meaning yeah and that's I don't know any other way to define it right so I'll define it like that yes I don't think there's a globe yeah otherwise you have to believe there's some kind of global meaning and that's a god type mingun I don't think that's I think it's more wonderful and and more challenging to us because we have to take responsibility for it to say we should operate such that we are it in this galaxy mmm there's nothing else I'm sure I'm just I'm sure there are other civilizations out there in the universe because there are two trillion galaxies I I just can't believe this hasn't happened in other places the question is how often does it happen and how widely spaced our civilizations and I think they're very widely spaced and I think there may be one or two per galaxy on the average I could but that as you said it that what you said it basically that what else can we think right well then what else do you want I mean I think what it says is you have to take responsibility for all those things as spiritual things that you think about and the emotional things you think about it you you are you are responsible for that you are that like that whatever that is it exists in you and it will only exist for short amount of time and so what you know make the best of it it'll be my it's so unbelievably compelling though to consider the idea that somewhere out there there's another civilization that maybe even more advanced than us and this this thought of it it's just so attractive it's it's it's incredible that [ __ ] there should be if if civilizations are common or even slightly common then there should be civilizations ahead of us yes because there's been so much time but wouldn't you want to see what that's like yeah I mean we so compelling you imagine the timescales we've been around as a civilization let's let's give it say forty thousand years I don't know long our civilization has been around let's say that the the galaxy is pretty much as old as the universe it's thirteen billion years worth of time so the idea that there are no no civilization zeros you know 100 million years ago 200 million years ago 1 billion years ago and imagine what they'd be like if they'd survived I mean we've been we've been around we've had science for let's say since Newton or Copernicus 500 years at most we've had Sun look what we've done we've gone beyond the solar system with Voyager we've walked on the moon and we're about to go to Mars I would think so we're about to begin colonizing our own solar system and so we've done that in 500 years so imagine a million years in the future so I would it's one of the arguments often used to say there aren't any civilizations out there in the galaxy it's called the Fermi paradox because if you imagine a civilization that's a million years ahead of us they should have written their presence across the sky by now they should used to see him I mean you'll see us leave we survived a million years into the future actually even a few thousand years into the future we will be exploring the galaxy we will have spacecraft that are going to of the stars we will be doing it so our signature will become visible I'm sure if we last into the medium said would we choose to not do that here's my thought on that is uncontacted tribes like do you know about the the gentleman who was the missionary who visited North Sentinel island yeah it was killed by the natives North Sentinel island which is a really unusual place because they branched off from Africa 60,000 years ago and they've been living on this one small ion the size of Manhattan and as well as we know there's only about 39 of them left somewhere around there and we can't we're not supposed to contact them like people are not supposed to like leave them alone and there are a rare tribe when they find them in the Amazon the uncontacted tribes our initial instinct is back off leave them alone leave them alone do you think that perhaps a universe like if there is a civilization that's a million times more advanced than awesome been around here for you know millions of years of life as opposed to quarter million why would they why would they let us know like will they look at us dropping bombs on each other and polluting the ocean sucking all the fish out and putting clouds into the skies of dirt and particles and why would they look at these crude monkeys look at their data they're so far beyond where they need to be before they could join the Galactic Civilizations it is true it's an argument that there is an argument as well that it technology's so advanced would be difficult for us to detect I mean we tend to think of you know when you say written across the sky I suppose it's true I'm thinking of starships like Star Wars right big energy things that you can see the signature of but actually maybe the civilization just becomes a nano civilization a tiny little nano but because that's more inefficient it's a better way to do things so it's possible I suppose then there are space probes all over the place they're so small and it's so efficient and use so little energy that we just don't see them I suppose that is possible my other thought is that where we are headed it seems to me that there's some sort of a strange symbiosis that's taking place there's there's a strange connection that we have to electronics and ultimately to an artificial creation or official intelligence whatever you want to call an artificial light life something that's created by carbon-based beings cellular beings that isn't cellular but also acts like life yeah that this may be the future of life that we are so connected to the idea of flesh and blood and bone but maybe this is just a temporary situation until we transition or if not us transition till it surpasses us and this is the next stage of life but this stage has no need for all the human and biological reward systems are in place that made sure that we survive whether it's ego or fear or emotions no need for that that it will just exist and maintain its equilibrium as this this new form of life and this is the future of life in the universe and it will get there maybe we'll only be a hundred two hundred years from now but that that's what exists all throughout the cosmos so there's no need to peacock there's no need to show our sin on the sky and that it just exists in this form yeah I agree I wouldn't be surprised yes that's the that's the counter-argument to the this Fermi paradox argument that I talks about well exactly as you've just said there basically you evolved to a point very rapidly where you just don't create a signature yes and you don't really get involved as you said maybe just yeah well there's no motivation right like it doesn't our motivations are also weird right we have these biological motivations to survive and you know there's motivations to conquer and to innovate and to spread our genes and to move into New Territories but if you didn't have biology if you were you existed completely from man-made materials or from materials found on earth and that this new form of life was created out of that I wouldn't have those unless you programmed them and why would you do that it is interesting isn't it too because we don't know what consciousness is right so something called a hard problem in science we don't know so it's a good question whether you can build let's say you want to build a self-replicating machine which is what you're talking about or something that can go and maybe go to the moon on Mars and replicate itself and then carry on which is a living thing I suppose yes does it have to have a sufficient level of intelligence very actually is conscious and all these things that we talked about this this word meaning that we used earlier that we all understand you can't define is that a emergent property that that has to emerge if you've got something that's intelligent enough to replicate itself and live and run you said be there I don't know the answer but it's worth considering that this thing this what we emotion meaning love and fear and all those things are just the things that happen when you are intelligent right I don't know the answer to that but it could possibly be and does consciousness have to have a local origin like it does it have to come from a thing like if you think about cellular communication the the if you send me if you're in England can you send me a video from your phone and it reaches my phone it's getting to me through space it's going through the sky it's like literally from a device not connected by any wires or anything it's coming to me if if there's a possibility to create some sort of global intelligence through electronics that's non-local if one piece of it falls off there's the same it is it just repairs itself or figures itself out but it's the same consciousness existing on a global scale through some sort of an electronic network that instead of the idea that you and I have that Brian and Joe are do you have your mind I have my mind and we we exist as intelligent being separate from each other but instead of that that all of it is connected and that all of it is something that we can't even conceive of because our brains are too crude like trying to explain to you know Australia Pittacus what a satellite is yeah yeah I mean yes I mean if you think about our brains they are ultimately what are they they're just a distributed network of cells connected by neurons and I mean they're very complicated but they are a colony of things that are autonomous in a sense and they're communicating with each other so yeah I don't I don't see why you can't scale that up in principle I mean I should just err the caveat is always that we don't know we don't yes it's easy it's just not understood well I think there's something weird has physics although I'm damn sure it's physical I'm damn sure that there's nothing going on in my head other than what is allowed by the laws of nature as we understand them I'm sure you mean the idea of a soul being some sort of a divine thing that's inside the housing of the body yeah I mean I I know I would say we can rule that out actually I've out in the past how do you rule it I've argued we can rule that out in the following manner so so it's my arm right so it's made of electrons and protons and neutrons and if I if I have a soul in there something that we don't understand but it's a different kind of energy or whatever it is first we don't have in physics at the moment it interacts with matter because I'm moving my hand around so whatever it is it's something that interacts very strongly with matter but if you look at the history of particle physics in particular which is the study of matter we spend we spent decades making high-precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts and we look for it for example for a fifth force of nature so we know four forces for gravity the two nuclear forces call the weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism and that's what we know exists and we look for another one with ultra-high precision and we don't see any evidence of it so I would claim that we know how matter interacts at these energies it's a room temperature now these Angele we know how matter interacts very precisely and so if you want to suggest there's something else that interacts with matter strongly then I would say that it's ruled out I would go as far to say it is ruled out by experiments or at least is his extremely subtle and you would have to jump through a lot of Hoops to come up with a theory of some stuff that we wouldn't have seen when we've observed how matter interacts that is present in our bodies and presumably we believe in the soul you want it to exist outside when you die you still want the thing to be there and you might believe in ghosts and things like that like a ghost I mean it's a it is something that carries the imprint of you presumably it looks like you right so that means that it interacts strongly with the matter that is you because it carries a patent if it carries a pattern it carries information if it carries information there has to be an energy source that allows that information to persist in the pattern to persist and so on so again you end up with a a theory that is postulating something it interacts with light because if you think a ghost is the soul then it's something that people see sometimes so that means it interacts with light but we know how light interacts and we ruled out anything but the most subtle further interaction that we haven't seen so I would I claim and I started off as a joke this actually I wrote it in an infinite monkey cage book this radio show that I do but he ended up when I'd written it down I thought actually that it makes sense and I read some is similar actually I think I'm Sean Carroll II I don't have you've had Sean yes shareable dumps he he's said something the same I think in the book they wrote the big picture I think he has a similar argument actually so it's occurred to him as well it's roughly the same argument so if you so this energy that's interacting with matter even if you're not moving at all if you're just thinking it's interacting with the matter that encompasses your mind or your brain or your nerves or your neurons yeah it's something in there that's interacting with matter whether you like it or not so even just a simple thought process or a dream is still something that's interacting with Matt yeah well obviously because it you know you your will isn't it presumably right so even but even if you're not moving the idea like the you're saying you're like your body's interacting with matter as you're moving your arm but even if you're not moving if you just thinking and you're completely still which is not totally possible cuz your hearts beating and your breathing and all that stuff but if somehow or another you were able to isolate just the thought the thoughts themselves are still interacting with matter because they're interacting with the brain itself yeah so there's something in there there's something that interacts with the physical structure of your body and and and I would say there isn't so that's the whoo-whoo version is that the brain itself and the body the physical so this this this spiritual self you are merely an antenna that's tuning into the the the great consciousness of the universe but why but then you have to answer what it we know what we are made of yes oh we know how those particles behave and interact so so why do the particles not in any way interact with that stuff because we interact we don't if that's true we don't only just interact with it we interact extremely strongly with it we're interacting with it now yeah every movement I make is the interaction between those every matter yeah yes what everything if I move my fingers everything that I'm doing right is an interaction between that stuff and me so it's a very strong interaction with matter but we don't see it in all our precision measurement well the answer for that dancer is because it's not there the answer is Jesus and you can't measure God that may be an answer but the point is you as we talked about earlier with absolute space yeah if you can't measure it yeah it's not there hmm right it's but for whatever reason for people there is some incredible motivation to find a divine something or another that's there's something greater than this physical being there's something what do you think that is like what is that compulsion we we've already sort of talked a bit about it I think it goes to the the hearts of this question of what it means to be human mmm so I would say that being human the answer to the it's not the answer to the meaning but it an answer would be we are small finite beings right which are just clusters of atoms as we said before they're very rare but we understand roughly how they how they came to be and we have a limited amount of time not actually unfortunately but because of the laws of nature that the laws of nature forbid us to be immortal they-they-they immortality's ruled out by the laws of physics but also actually what's interesting about if you look at the basic physics of the universe going from the Big Bang to where we are today then the physics is driven by the fact that the universe began in an extremely ordered state so it was a very highly ordered system and it is tending towards a more disordered system at the moment and that's called the second law of thermodynamics and it's that basic common-sense thing that things go to [ __ ] basically the second law of thermodynamics what we strongly suspect and and I would say know is that in that process of going from order to disorder complexity emerges naturally for a brief period of time so it's a natural part of the evolution of the universe that you get appeared in time when there's complexity in the universe so stars and planets and galaxies and life and civilizations but they are they exist because the universe is decaying not in spite of the fact the universe is decaying so our existence in that sort of picture is necessarily finite and necessarily time limited and it is a remarkable thing that that complexity has got so far that there are things in the universe that can think and feel and explore it and I think that is the answer if you want an answer to the meaning of it all it's that that you are part of the universe because of the way the laws of nature work you are allowed to exist but you're allowed to exist for a temporary or a small amount of time in a possibly infinite universe one of the biggest mind-blowing moments I think of my limited comprehension of what it means to be a living being was when I found out that carbon and all the stuff that makes us has to come out of a dying star yeah like there that alone that there's this very strange cycle of these enormous fireballs that Forge the material that makes Brian Cox yeah like what that that one alone that there is some strange loop of biological life that comes from stars which is like the most elemental thing that we can observe we see these things in this can we see the Sun in the sky it's this all-powerful ball of fire yeah and that that is where the building blocks for a person come from and then is it so and they will be from the carbon atoms in our body that you're right they all got made in styles because there were none of it at the Big Bang there's only hydrogen and helium tiny bit of lithium to be precise but nothing else and so it was all made in stars and it's probably from different styles you know the atoms in your body they're not all from one star that cooks it and then died there'll be a mixture of stuff from many stars in your body now and I agree with you the what more do you want you know when I see people who got I want more than that I want you know it was there must be more to it what do you mean the the we have we have we were the ingredients now bodies were assembled in their hearts of long dead stars over billions of years and have assembled themselves spontaneously into temporary structures that can think and feel and explore and then those structures will decay away again at some point and in a very far future there'll be no structures left so there we are we exist in this little window when we can observe this magnificent universe why do you want any more insults I think to people I think a lot of people aren't aware of all the all the information right and then I think on top of it for some people it's just it's so overwhelming you know this this concept of 13.8 billion years of everything to get to this point that we're at right now it's so overwhelming that they want to simplify it you want to put it into some sort of a fable structure something where it's something that's very common and similar and familiar yeah I I agree and and but I think that's the the it's the the the journey that we go on the real treasure I think is in that journey of trying to face the incomprehensible yes it's it's in that realization that it's almost it's it's almost impossible to believe that we exist that's that's that's a wonderful thing yeah and I think that that's what I think you miss out I think if you decide to simplify it because you don't want to face that you don't have faced the infinity that's out there in front of us and you don't want to face those stories as you said that you look at your finger and its ingredients was cooked in multiple stars over billions of years that that's a to me a joyous and powerful thing to think about yes and I think you're missing out if you don't want to face that well I think the distribution of information has changed so radically over the last couple hundred years and particularly over the last twenty that you're seeing these trends now where more people are inclined to abandon a lot of the even if you remain religious or remain you keep a sought or a belief in a higher power people are more inclined to entertain these concepts of science and to take in the understanding of what has been observed and documented and written about among scholars and academics and there's more there's more people accepting that have you look at the number of agnostic people now as opposed to twenty thirty years ago it's it's it's rising it's changing and I think there's also because of you and because of Neil deGrasse Tyson and you know Sean Carroll and all these other people that are public intellectuals that are discussing this kind of stuff people like myself have a far greater understanding of this then I think people did 30 40 years ago yeah and that trend is continuing I think in a very good direction yeah I mean I don't you know what we should say is that science we don't know all the answers so we don't know where the laws of nature came from we don't know why the universe began in the way that it did if indeed it had a beginning so I don't know why the Big Bang was very very highly ordered which is ultimately as Sean Carroll actually mentioned him often points out means right but the whole difference the only difference between the past in the future the so-called arrow of time is that in the past the universe was really ordered and it's getting more disordered and that's that that that necessary state of order at the start of the universe which is really the reason that we exist that's the reason because the universe began in a particular form we don't know why that was so we will probably find out at some point and it will be something to do with the laws of nature but so I'm always careful I don't want to science can sometimes sound arrogant right it can sometimes sound like it's the it's the discipline of saying to people while you're not right yeah and it's not the discipline of saying you're not right it's saying this is what we found out yeah so I like to say that it provides a framework within which if you want to philosophize or you want to do theology or you want to you want to ask these deep questions about why we're here you have to operate within that framework because it's just an observational framework yes everything we've said is stuff we've discovered it's not stuff that someone made up we we we you know we understand nuclear physics we can build nuclear reactors for example so we understand the physics of stars so we understand that the Stars built the carbon oxygen and we know how they did it and we can see it because as I said before we can if you look far out into the universe you're looking way back in time and as you look back in time you see less carbon and less oxygen so we have a direct observation that in the earliest universe there wasn't any because we can see it and now we see that there is some and we know how it was made so I think it's so it's important to be humble when you're talking about science and you're not saying this is the way that it is I mean your own a sense but you know it's not it's not able to answer ultimate questions at the moment it's not able to answer even whether the universe had a beginning or not we don't even know that and I gave a talk to him I was asked to give a talk to some bishops in the UK about cosmology and I said yeah that'd be great fun and so when I gave him this talk and at the end I said I've got some questions so if the universe is eternal and it might be it might not have had a beginning if it's eternal what place is there for a creator you know that's that's a good question Brian I didn't they didn't have an answer of course right an eternal creator but yeah but I think that these it might be eternal and we might discover that so we don't know at the moment but we might so I think my point is that these other human desires very natural to religions and natural thing right people you see all across the world in all different cultures but I think that in the 21st century it religion needs to operate within that framework if it's going if it's going to operate there are still great mysteries and it is appropriate to think about what it means to be human and are giving you my view of what it means but but I don't think the problem comes when you when your your theology or your philosophy forces you to deny some facts some measurement now these things at measurements we're not saying it's not my opinion the universe is 13.8 billion years old we measured it it's like having an opinion between the distance from LA to New York no you can't have an opinion on that right know what it is and it's the same you know excited out that these things people say the Earth's flat or whatever there so it isn't and we've measured it so it's just stop it either said but that doesn't mean you can't be spiritual and you can't be really just I would saying it doesn't mean you can't believe in God or God's that's not ruled out by science but some stuff's ruled out well I love the way you communicate this because it takes into consideration human nature and like I love Dawkins he's fantastic I think he's very very very valuable but he likes to call people idiots and the problem with that is people go [ __ ] you you're an idiot it like is a natural inclination when you insult people to argue back and to sort of dig their heels in yeah and you don't do that and I think that's very important and I think that a guy like doc has just gets frustrated from all these years of debates with people who educated are saying ridiculous things and he's a bit of a curmudgeon you know and he seems to be softening as he's getting older well he's the evolutionary biology yes and that's the the front line in some sense isn't it yes yeah I mean the thing about particle physics is that you don't get a lot of [ __ ] because people don't understand what you're talking about right there so I understand his frustration oh I do too having said that you know I've kind of softened a bit over the years actually because now I think at this point both in the u.s. actually and in Britain and in some of the countries we are at a point you've alluded to it where everybody's angry no a lot of anger and a lot of it's justified by the way whom you could talk about that you know income inequality and all those things so it's justified anger but it seems to me that there are people of goodwill who need to band together to diffuse the anger in our societies otherwise we won't have countries like the United States yes the United States because it's United and everybody you've got the United flag there you know said that there's a sense of belonging identity and togetherness in a country which you've got to preserve and so I've stopped actually um picking I Isis for example quite enjoy picking fights with Deepak Chopra on Twitter it's just for me to laugh he says some crazy stuff in his hand but I saw Thomas I've stopped doing it going well but relative to some of the other people right he's he's someone who means well yes I don't agree with virtually anything he says however he's a well-meaning person yeah and so I've started trying to seek common ground now that's why I for example gave a talk to the bishops they asked me to come you I don't agree with them on the framework their theological framework but they mean well most of them yeah so I think seeking consensus and diffusion anger as you said is it is incumbent all of us especially people like us you have a public voice we need to defuse some of this anger because otherwise it will consume everyone yes I've tried very hard to evolve in that respect and just get better at communicating ideas and get better at understanding how people receive those ideas and I think that's it's there's it's easy to get lazy and to insult and especially me I mean I'm a comedian what I do people yeah for humor I want to entertain people that's the whole idea behind it but I think in terms of like discussing ideas especially that are so personal to people like religion I've I've reexamined the way I interpret these ideas and the way I talk about these things yeah there's a it's interesting there's a I did a BBC program my age that I was asked to do it on the thing call the wreath lectures the babies that the BBC have done since 1952 I think he was and Robert Oppenheimer did them in 53 and it was it's fascinating you can get the transcripts online they're free and you can get one recording of the five they taped over the other four and you believe it they raised them they wanted to tape something but one of them existed often Jaime giving these lectures oh my god but you can read better and Russell didn't do the Reaver they taped over them Bertrand Russell because tape was so expensive but he talks of raising yeah but it's brilliant it's cause science in the common understanding and they weren't very well-received because he thought he was gonna talk about their Manhattan projects so they thought he was gonna talk about the atom bomb meaning is that he was she ran it basically but he didn't he talked about how its thinking like a scientist which means thinking in the way that nature forces you to think can be valuable in other areas and it's a that's an insight in itself the great thing the unique thing about science is nature forces you to think like that you can't have an opinion can I have an opinion about gravity just be gentle as a building you can hit the ground that's it doesn't matter what your opinion is and and he said so if you think about for example quantum mechanics so sometimes you think of as particle like an electron sometimes it has to it's a point like object may behave like a little billiard ball thing pool ball that bounces around but sometimes it behaves like an extended thing like a wavy thing and nature forces you to hold both ideas in your head at the same time you know there's a get a complete picture of the objects they're a description of an electron and he said that's the valuable thing about quantum mechanics you know unless you're doing electronics or inventing lasers you don't need to know this stuff but if you want to learn how to think you it's valuable to be forced to hold different ideas in your head at the same time mmm it's really teaching you not to be an absolutist straight teaching you the example he uses is because he was I think he was had problems with McCarthy and all those things didn't he so you think he's writing in the 50s so he said you can either be you could be a communist which in his definition would be that you think the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few right so so societies all that matters oh it could be a libertarian all right on the far conservative end where you think that the individual is the only thing that matters and that's it but actually of course to have a function in society you need a mixture of the two and we can wait it one way or the other but you need to hold both ideas in your head at the same time and that's he said that one of the most valuable things about science because it forces you into modes thought they're valuable and that's what we're talking about here it's so absolute physicians are always a just a blinkered sort of subset of what's actually happening you can't understand the world by being an extremist yeah you've got to hold all these views in your head well that I find that so often on this podcast because I talk with people I agree with end disagree with and I always try to put myself in the head of the person that I disagree with I always try to figure out how they're coming to those conclusions or where they're coming from yeah and I think it's so it's so important to not be married to ideas I got a conversation with someone about this and they said like sometimes you change your opinions a lot I go yeah I do flip-flopping I'm not a politician like I'm not flip-flopping I'm thinking yeah I'm not sure I'm not sure like I I will have one opinion on a thing whether it's a controversial thing like universal basic income I'll change my mind a hundred percent in two weeks yeah now I think it's probably a good idea yeah and then I'll go back and forth no no no no no people need but it's as cruel as it seems they need motivation they need and I don't know I bounce around with these things yeah but I've tried really hard as I've gotten older to have less absolute opinions yeah yeah Richard Fineman another great physicist wrote a similar essay a similar time to Oppenheimer and he also works in the Manhattan Project it's called the value of science and I think that was 1955 and they both shared actually a surprise I think that they were still alive because they thought that the power they'd given to the politicians the atom bomb would destroy everything they didn't think that a political system would control it and it did so that's an emotion remarkable thing yeah we're still here but in in in that essay he said the the most valuable thing about science is the realization that we don't know and he said he said in that statement he calls science is satisfactory philosophy of ignorance by the way he said in that statement is the open door the open channel he called it if we want to make progress we have to understand that we don't know everything and we have to leave things to future generations and we can be uncertain and we can change our minds and he said that that's that it's a great last line I come exactly what he says but he said it's something like is our duty as scientists to communicate the value of uncertainty and the value of freedom of thoughts to all future generations that's the point that's what freedom of thought means freedom of thought means the freedom to change your mind in fact said that's what democracy is if you think about it democracy is a trial and error system so it's the it's the admission that we don't know how to do it therefore we'll change every four years we'll change the president or every eight years we'll change the president why because the president doesn't know how to do it so that someone better they will do someone better that comes along and then someone worse and someone better but it's a trial and error system and he's right and he's right that that is the open door that's that that's the road to progress he's certainly better than humility yeah one of the things that I love so much about Bertrand Russell and about Fineman was how human they were they were very human I mean finally like to play the bongos and who's chasing girls and Bertrand Russell was addicted to tobacco he would talk about how he wouldn't fly unless he could smoke like he had to get us was back when they had smoking sections on airplanes and he had his pipe and he just refused to fly without tobacco and he couldn't imagine being without tobacco well yeah that's so strange for such a brilliant guy to be addicted to such a gross thing yeah you're right because I think these these are faithful that found existence joyous yeah wanted to know they just wanted to know stuff yeah didn't want to know everything because you can't know everything right yeah I suppose that's what if you think about what the job of the scientist is is to is to stand on the edge of the known because you're a research scientist so if there's nothing to know then you've got no job so you have to be naturally comfortable with not knowing and if there's one thing I really do think we was how do we begin to patch our countries back up again one of the reasons I think in education is to teach people the value of on certainty but not knowing it is not weak right to not know it's actually natural not to know and that's one of the freedom is with religion is to say that you know when you do not hard to say that you have absolute truth and absolute knowledge of something yeah when it can't really exist yeah I mean history tells us doesn't it that yeah anyone who thinks they've got absolute knowledge is a cause he's trouble yeah did you see ex machina yeah did you enjoy it yes yes I know him Alex Garland because he wrote sunshine oh right 28 days later yeah and yeah new movie the weird one the alien movie he wrote that as well right yes a great soundtrack yeah yeah did you are you scared of artificial life artificial intelligence and you know I might scare the [ __ ] out of me yeah when he talked about it like he talks about it like were in the opening scene of a science fiction movie where he's trying to warn people and then they don't listen to the genius and it goes south so depends I chaired a debate on this for the role sites in London a few weeks ago and the so it's treating now at the moment what people seem to be frightened of a general a is no I AG I they call artificial general intelligence which is like what we talked about earlier a human-like capability thing yes and we miles away from that we don't have to do it we haven't got them and we're miles away so at the moment artificial intelligence is expert systems and very focused systems that do particular things you can be scared of them in a limited economic sense because they're going to displace people's jobs and actually interestingly in this panel discussion we had it's going to be like why you Mike on middle-class jobs in the UK so white-collar jobs it's not actually why people are interested in universal basic income to sort of replace money that's kind of lost because there will be no jobs for all these people otherwise we have just a mass catastrophe yeah they're very good someone said that these systems are special intelligence systems at the moment they're very good at doing things like lot lawyers work so they're very good at reading contracts and things that's interesting it's a revolution it's not like the Industrial Revolution where it's manual labor that gets hit necessarily this is kind of interesting because it hits that kind of intermediate level that usually escapes so you're right one of the answers is to tax there was an example was a robot tank so in a car factory you say to the manufacturer well okay you can have a robot well you pay the robot the same as you pay a person and then that money goes into funding universal basic income or something like that mhm so I think there's got to be an economic change because these systems will be there but all the experts I suppose who agreed the the idea of a Terminator style general intelligence taken over the world is miles away and so whilst we might start thinking about the regulation it's not going to happen soon is the general point I think so I would disagree with him on that I think I think it's too far in the future at the moment I thought it might be one of those people that's okay it's gonna be all right right and then then you know my iphone takes me out on the way so a choice at the moment isn't it I mean don't don't give your iPhone a laser that doesn't matter if it goes crazy and tries to take over the world I know I know that's a bit facetious because they can he would say they could take over power grids and all that kind of stuff yeah well it's these concepts that are really hard to visualize like sir Kurt's Wiles idea of the exponential increase of technology leading to us to a point in the near future where you're gonna be able to download your consciousness into a computer you talk to computer expert still like there's no way we're miles away from that yeah on you're a scientist yeah scientist one brain cell probably we can but Kurzweil is convinced that what's gonna happen is that as technology increases it can increases in this wildly exponential way where we really can't visualize it we can't even imagine how much advancement will take place over 50 years but in those 50 years something's going to happen that radically changes our idea of what's possible and I think Elon shares this idea as well that gonna sneak up on us so quickly that when it does go alive it'll be too late yeah I mean it's worth putting the the the framework in place I think the regulatory framework even as you said for the more realistic problem which is people's jobs are going to get displaced yes and there's a great I was at a thing and some someone said I come he was but they said that the jury was a politician the the job of the innovation system is to create jobs faster than it destroys them so you've always got to remember that as a government and as regulators if you're going to allow technologies into the marketplace that destroy people's jobs it is your responsibility to find a way of replacing those jobs or compensating those people as you said otherwise you get breakdown so human being those that people need some meaning like they just giving them income I think is just gonna mean just my speculation but it's gonna create mass despair even if you provide them you provide them with food and shelter they need people need things to do so it's there's going to be some sort of a demand to find meaning for people give them occupations give them something some tasks let's say it seems to be one of the critical parts of being a person so we need things to do that we find meaning in you know like you were talking about we're the only things that we know of that have meaning that find meaning and share meaning and believe in that we're gonna need something like that if universal basic income comes along I don't think it's going to be enough to just feed people and house them yeah they couldn't want something to do if you know a person is a you're doing something for an occupation and this is your identity and then all sudden that occupation becomes irrelevant because computer does it faster cheaper quicker these people are gonna have this incredible feeling of despair and just not being valuable yeah I mean oh what wonder utopian so their version of this is that everybody gets to do what we're doing now Rush's make a living so thinking and creating and now that kind of you know so that that's the the utopian ideal is you don't need to do the stuff the job that you don't really want to do in the factory you can do the thing that humans are best at that but I agree it's that's a very utopian view yeah does everybody want to do that or does everybody have their mindset well because we're education if everybody had an interest like that if everybody went on to make pottery and painting and doing all these different things they've always really wanted to do and their needs are met by you know the universal basic income money they receive every month but boy there's a lot of people I don't think have those desires or needs and to sort of force them onto them at age 55 or whatever it's gonna be yeah seems to be very very difficult yeah yeah I agree yeah it's a big challenge but I think that in concept at least it's inevitable that we do have some sort of an artificial intelligence that resembles us or that resembles something like ex machina if people choose to create that I mean choose to create it in our own image but that's very godlike isn't it God created us in his own image yeah and again yeah see I don't know that when I talk to people in the field as you probably have most of them say don't have to do it yes it's really right it's gonna be miles away so maybe I'm hiding my head in the sand a bit but I don't think so I think it's I think we'll know it when I don't think anyone's gonna do it accidentally right so I I don't think it's just suddenly going to be upon us I I think we will see we'll see ourselves getting acquiring that capability we'll see ourselves getting close we'll see their systems beginning to emerge in them we'll think about it just think 200 years ago if you wanted a photograph of something you want to picture something you had a draw it I mean there was no photography 200 years ago yeah I mean just think of that it's almost inconceivable no automobiles no photography what was automobile about maybe there was some sort of machines that drove people around right something close there wasn't three is earlier than that right you go back 500 years you have almost nothing yeah it's crazy how we've been quick it's so fast it's so fast I mean and then this what we're doing right now that there's people right now in their car that are streaming this so they're in their car and they're listening as they're driving on the road maybe they have a Tesla maybe they have an electric car they're driving down the road streaming to people talking where it's ones and zeros that are broken down and there's some audible form and you can listen to it in your car that is bananas yeah I agree we've been quick so quick well think of the world you know the internet I mean it's a it said not long I mean I remember it being invented yeah you know oh well certainly the web went on so the web well it was very early for me because I was in doing particle physics and of course that the web comes from CERN the WWE bit right so it's certainly in the early 90s I was involved in that you know in the university environment with email and all that kind of stuff so I don't know when it kind of didn't really you could you could have a web browser that just the only sites they were there in NASA and I think NASA had one of the early sites and CERN it was very little oh when did you become involved with CERN so that would be I started doing particle physics in 95 and when was when did the Large Hadron Collider go alive that was an I remember 2000 and 2007 I think he pause of 2008 is so long ago about 10 years ago but he started that we stayed up and then we had a problem with it and then it took a bit a while to fix it hasn't been taking data that long but it's a tremendously successful thing now and its operating beyond its design capabilities it's quite incredible it's so stunning a physical thing that this how large is it how long is in its 27 kilometres so I sat about 60 miles 16 miles and it's a circular yeah sort of a building yeah well I say it's a big cube I mean you think basically is mainly under France and partly under Switzerland and it accelerates protons around in a circle both ways they won't one beam goes well my one goes the other way and they go around 11,000 times a second because that's so very close to speed of light 99.999999% the speed of light and then we cross the beams and collide the particles and in those collisions you're recreating the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang so we know that physics so going back we said about the carbon and the oxygen we can trace that story back way beyond the time when they were protons and neutrons so when there were quarks and gluons around and and go all the way back and the Higgs boson doing its thing back then and we so we can see all that physics in the lab so that's why we have some a lot of confidence in that story it's so fascinating that they were able to talk someone into funding that that they got a bunch of people together and that you you were able to explain to you know politicians and and you know regular people what what you're trying to do it's a great example of how you get something done so it was the night the fifties when certain was established I think was 53 or 54 can't quite remember it something like that and then it was built out from the Second World War so you have Europe at the end of the war and it was realized that the only way forward for you it was collaboration to rebuild the scientific base and in it for peace for peaceful purposes and so CERN was set up as an international collaboration in Europe initially with that political ideal that it was it was explore nature just for the freely and for peace for peaceful means and peaceful reasons and and so that was a the pilet the politics was right so it was said it by international treaty so that the member states are bound together by treaty and they pay a small amount relatively small amount each into CERN every year which is a percentage of their GDP and that's the money they used to build do the experiments and build the accelerators so it's very hard to get out of it and you wouldn't really want because it's a small amount of money per country and CERN doesn't extra money to build things it just takes its money and basically saves up and plans itself but because it's got a regular stream of money it can do it so you can say we're gonna build this machine and it will take 8 years because that's how much money we've got and we'll build it in 8 years and we know how much money we've got so we can do it you know it's a lesson I mean that the reason that the u.s. Collider the SSC failed is because it's the problem you have in the US with the funding system as you've seen in the last few weeks yeah is that it's very arbitrary and it's open to political maneuvering and things can be shut down and take and uncertain is not like that CERN has got a guaranteed stream of funding small from each country and so you can do these projects and the one in the u.s. that was during the Clinton administration so what it was yeah it was close was it Clinton it was closed down by Congress and a very slim vote and it was in Texas so it was it was one of those things where you got States vying for money and he was half built mm-hmm and everyone was there you know I mean the thing it was bigger than the LHC it was so you waste a lot of money is that a huge disappointment for a scientific community like where people very hopeful that this was going to go along yeah it was being built dug half the tunnel what would it be able to do that the LHC couldn't it was a higher energy accelerator than the LHC so it would have discovered the Higgs particle first had it been running but the the half bill part is it useless now or can they I think you know so that's the thing it you can do these wonderful things for not a lot of money if you just do it over many years and have stable funding yeah it's commit to doing it the filling in in part asleep and you look at CERN as well and people you have people ask me now I think the UK pays about it's about one hundred million dollars a year that's what the UK pays in and it's about same for Germany same for friends and so on and so people say what do we get for that I mean first of all it's not the whole budget of CERN is about the same as a budget of a medium-sized university so it's not a lot it's about a billion dollars a year or something which is what a university has so it's not a lot in the scheme of things what's it done though well we invented the world wide web as we've just said a lot of the medical imaging technology they were use comes from CERN it's pioneered the use of these very high field magnets which is what it needed so it's engineering at the edge and engineering at the edge generates spin-offs and expertise to get used in other fields so there's cancer treatment so-called hadron beam therapy so if you've got a brain tumor now it's quite likely that you'll have one of these targeted particle beam therapies which is like very highly targeted sort of chemotherapy it's not chemotherapy it's radiation that you can target in the beam into your head and attack the tumor and those those are particle accelerators so most particle accelerators today are in hospitals and in medicine but they came from doing particle physics that so the the spin-offs of these big experiments at the edge of our capability are always immense which is why they worth funding at these very low levels but it's not just the knowledge it's the engineering expertise that there is a practical application for every everyday there always is it's just finding out how to do hard things is usually useful the model and it wasn't just the Higgs boson particle that you guys are discovered what is quark gluon plasma yes that that's a shortly after the billionth of a second after the Big Bang yeah you end up with a soup of quarks and gluons so quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons and gluons are the things that stick them together and so a proton has two up quarks and a down quark and in each one has two down quarks and up quark and so on so their constituents the protons and neutrons which are the constituents of our atomic nuclei so we go if you go to very high temperatures our high energies then the protons and neutrons fall to bits then you end up with a soup of quarks and gluons then that's a quark gluon plasma and it's insanely dense right yeah well very high-energy so so you get that so we've been exploring that by could we don't only collide protons together we can collide lead nuclei together or silver nuclei together at the LHC and that's when you make these kind of soups of nuclear matter if you like very hot nuclear matter to explore that physics to that and that nuclear physics Wow and I was reading something about the the weight of of that stuff that like a sugar cube like what is that what is the actual weight well it depends our density is that so don't they're I mean they were the thing I remember is it the sugar cube of a neutron star material which is I don't know how many hundred million tons I can you know that it depends but so I don't know with the quark-gluon plasma I don't know what number you there was something it was one of the things after the discovery they were talking about the massive weight of quark gluon plasma and like yeah almost incomprehensible yeah yeah I don't know the number of it but something crazy yeah yeah now one once these you got something here does 40 billion oh my god a cubic centimeter would weigh 40 billion tons oh yeah the densest matter created in the Big Bang machine what are they doing right now it's a closed for engineering and upgrades upgrades yeah I mean one thing we're trying to do is one of the things in particle physics is that you want as many collisions per second as you can generate and then they we have a collision whether what's got a bunch crossing LHC we can bury it but it's something like 25 nanoseconds different they don't want so it's really we get a lot of collisions per second and and the more collisions per second you can get the more chance you have in making interest in things like Higgs particles or whatever else may be out there waiting to be discovered that means it's possible there are other particles out there that we haven't yet discovered that could be within the reach of the LHC and if this one that was in Texas had gotten built and it was more powerful then the LHC you'd have even more opportunity to do something like that yeah now when these things are created by these collisions how long do they last oh fractions of a second so that the general rule in physics in particle physics is that they're the more massive it is and the more things it can decay into the faster it will do that so basically the heavy things decay into light things and so the only the stable particles are things like electrons and some of the quarks and the up quarks and down quarks are stable things but so everything tends to decay very fast so we're talking fraction billionths of a second fractions and how are they less than that are they registering its existence like what is uh what is being used to measure it so what you see if you collide what are they I see we collide protons together then-president got loads of stuff in them loads of gluons and the quarks so you get a big mess first of all so most of it's a load of particles Asprey and I wish you're not interested in but sometimes when you when let's say a couple of the gluons bangs together and they can make something interesting like a top quark or a Higgs particle what's a top quark it's up quite a very heavy there's six quarks it says up and down charm and strange bottom and top from end strange yeah so it so strange was literally in there was it the fifties I we discovered them someone said that's really strange strange a new kind of particle and so that yes we have six quarks and they're in three families so the up and down or warm family and then the Chairman stranger another family in the top and bottom of the third family and so we for some reason so the only thing the only particles we need to make up you and me they're up quarks down quarks and electrons but for some reason there are two further copies of those which you're identically every way except they're heavier so there's the charm and the strange quark and if they're in a heavy electron called a muon and then there's a the top and the bottom quark and another heavy electron called the tail and that's it so that there's this weird pattern that we don't understand so we don't seems like you only needed the first family to build a universe right right but for some reason there are two copies now heavy ones decay into the lighter ones is the point so when you make them they're not around very long and just answer your question what happens is that when they decay they throw their decay products out into our detector so we take a photograph of the cascade of particles that comes from these heavier particles decaying and the trick is to patch it all up to see to try and so work out what everything came from Wow now when they five find these unexpected particles then what happens then there's the study of them then there's then everybody gets together and go okay what the hell is that yeah what is that what do we do so we want to know with a Higgs particle we know what it does which is it gives mass to everything so it's fundamentally the thing that gives mass to all the other things in the universe at the most fundamental level so so electrons for example and the up and down quarks there get their mass from their interaction with the Higgs that's why they're massive that's another reason we exist you know we go right back we wouldn't exist if there wasn't mass in the universe and the Higgs is ultimately responsible for that mass I keep saying I keep caveat in it because then you get other sorts of mass that generated but but that the fundamental basic seed is it were it's from its from the Higgs and so what we want to know is we want to know how that thing behaves and their weight so we're study is so you want to make a lot of them so you can take a lot of pictures of it and study a lot and see exactly how it does that and so that's what we're doing that's what we're engaged in at the moment we're making high-precision measurements of the way that particle behaves so we can understand the laws of nature and that daddy's the laws of nature how are those particles behaving and what are they doing but it is possible that some new form of some new form of particles something else could be discovered yeah the way we know about yet because we know almost no that there are other particles out there in the universe we almost know a thing called matter yes so we look how into the universe and we see that there's a lot of stuff there that it's interacting gravitationally but it's not interacting strongly with the matter out of which we are made and the stars are made so it's almost certain that that's some form of particle that fits beautifully and we see lots of different observations the way galaxies rotate and interact and even that oldest lie in the universe the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation we see the signature of that stuff in that light as well so we think that there's some of the particle out there and and to be honest we thought we would have detected it I think at LHC we have lots of theories called supersymmetric theories that make predictions for all sorts of different particles that would interact weakly with normal matter and I yeah I think it's broadly seen as a surprise that we haven't seen them at LHC so that just may well mean that either their vote they're a bit too massive so we need more energy to make them and we just haven't quite got enough well we're not making enough of them often enough to see them which is one of the reasons we upgrade in the LHC so we also look for them by the way directly so we have experiments under mountains we bury them under mountains so the cosmic rays from space don't interfere with them and we're looking for the rare occasions when these dark matter particles bump into the particles of matter in the detector so it's so because ya D would be these rooms full of them I mean the galaxies swimming with matter as far as we can tell but it interacts very weakly with this matter so it doesn't bump into us very often so we're looking for the direct detection of it and we're looking to make those particles LHC so it's everywhere but it doesn't interact with us very weakly and so interacts through gravity and the the the archetypal particle that's everywhere that doesn't interact strongly is a neutrino so we do know about neutrinos we've detected those and there there are something like sixty billion per centimeter squared per second passing through your head now from the Sun so they get made in nuclear reactions in the Sun but they go straight through and actually straight through the earth pretty much occasionally one of them bumps into something and we can detect those because with so many of them going through but we only detect you know know one or two a day and the idea is that dark matter encompasses an enormous percentage of the universe yes it's five times as much matter is dark matter than is normal matter and the number is twenty five percent of the universe so it's roughly speaking about five percent of the universe is normal matter stars in gas 20 say percent as dark matter yes oh yeah five Norma about 25 dark matter in about 70s dark energy that's the other thing yeah yeah so what the hell's that don't know know what it does so again what see we got we talked about Einstein's theory earlier so Einstein's theory which works spectacularly well says that if you put stuff into the University we said before then it warps and deforms and stretches and it very precisely tells you given the stuff that you put in it how much does it stretch and how does it stretch and the the measurement we have is how its stretching so so we observe the thing we observe is how the universe is expanding and how that expansion rate is changing and how it's a ship how it's changed over time so we have very precise measurements of that so then we can use the theory to tell us what's in it given that we know what how it's responding to that stuff and that's how we discover dark energy so we noticed that the universe's expansion rate is increasing so the universe is accelerating in its expansion which is exactly the opposite of what we thought noticed in the 1990s that we discovered that so we can work out what sort of stuff and how much of that stuff you need to put in the universe to make that happen and that's where we get these numbers from was your resistance to that when that was first proposed yeah I remember my one of my friends at Brian Schmidt got the Nobel Prize for that and then I remember I talked to him and he said he was a postdoc I think at the time so young and he made he's making measurements of supernovae the light from supernova explosions which is so bright that you can see them you know hundreds and millions billions of light years away and he noticed that if you look at the date so the light is stretched in the wrong way so we look at the stretch of light as it travels across the universe and the universe is expanding it stretches the lights so it changes the color and he noticed that it was a discrepancy which which said that the universe that the expansion rate is speeding up it's been speeding up for him think something like seven billion years or so it's been speeding up so he thought these done something wrong because it you know so so he checks it and checked in checked it and he couldn't find anything wrong so he did what a good scientist does which is he published it so that somebody else could find out what he'd done wrong and he said that he thought it would be the end of his career he thought I'd be a laughingstock you know then he got the Nobel Prize because he was right it is stretched Wow it's a great lesson means that if you if you're sure that you can't see what you've done wrong then you publish it because back to that thing about humility we saw it earlier you know what we ultimately we're not trying to be right we're trying to find out stuff and so the good scientists will be really happy if they set out to be wrong because they've learned something yeah that's that it's good that yeah that's that because he got the Nobel Prize now when he received the Nobel Prize in this concept started being discussed what was the initial reaction to it well it's it's interesting because it's allowed in Einstein's theory and it was in Einstein's original theory so it's called it's got a name it's called the cosmological constant and that's a it's it just allowed in the equations and Einstein actually introduced it initially so because I signs the equations strongly suggest that the universe is expanding or contracting and not just sat there so even before we'd observed anything Einstein had a theory that suggested that the universe is just not static and actually really strongly suggest that there's a beginning right so that the theory itself on its own suggests that you can see that if the universe is stretching today then have been smaller in the past right everything must've been closer together let's say that so the as a man that chuckles George Lemaitre who was a who worked independently of Einstein but the same time in the early 1920s before we even knew there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way and they noticed that the the equation suggests the universe might be stretching and so he wrote to Einstein and said your theory suggests there was a day without a yesterday because he thought if everything's expanding now then he must have been closer together in the past and so there might be a time when it was all together and he was a priest well so it's a Belgian priest so I think I mean I wrote about this now it's kind of mind socialization of it but I think that he was more predisposed to accept what the equations were telling him because a beginning an origin for a priest is really a nice thing because it tells you the creation event and Einstein tried to dodge it and and put this allowed term into his equation which is the almost the stretchy term so say well if it's all if it's all kind of contracting or something can I put something in to make it stretch a bit to balance it all out so it can be eternal so an you can't you can't make it eternal that way but he so tried it then he took it out and called it his biggest blunder taking it out was ya know you can't put any in his biggest blunder or at least some people think what what he'd done was miss the prediction of the Big Bang really so by trying to fiddle around to have a static universe that's stable he missed what the equations were screaming his own theory was screaming to him which is that no the universe expands or contracts and he missed it right so I think that's probably what he meant by biggest blunder but in any case he took it out and then later in the 1990s it turns out there no it's there but it's really small it's a tiny tiny effect but it's still dominating the universe now and it will and it will dominate even more in the future so we think that we're in the universe that will continue to expand essentially doubling in size a fixed time scale which is about twenty billion years so within every twenty billion years into the future forever unless something happens the universe will continue to expand and double in size two years and that's the dark energy that's driving it but nobody knows what it is it's the it's one of the cutting edge massive problems in theoretical physics and what is being done to try to get a better grasp of what it is I mean it's theoretical at them I mean we're making very precise observations of it right but it looks like this constant so it looks like it's basically one number if you like in Einstein's equations and just really simple so it looks like it's something that's maybe a property of space itself don't know but it looks like a very simple thing that doesn't change over time and just stays there so so it requires theoretical advance as well and so people are trying very hard to do that it's so crazy when you go from Galileo to modern theoretical physics that they're still in the myths of this understanding yeah of what all this stuff is yeah I mean that these are you know these are fundamental and difficult problems and we're talking about the origin and evolution of the universe right that's what cosmology is and it's also particle physics I mean the way that these things this stuff we keep talking like this stuff in the universe that's what the LHC studies it studies how the stuff behaves um right now these are it's very theoretical right they're trying to wrap their their minds around what this is and what the properties of it are do you envision a time where you can actually physically measure this and then have a a real clear understanding of what it is and what its properties dark energy and I I don't know I mean for example there are theories for example which you're probably not right but they're not necessarily wrong either there are theories that try to link it to the Higgs particle so the Higgs particle which we've discovered and can measure has some properties that we think the dark energy would need and also this inflation that I mentioned way back at the start of the universe as some of the prophecies that can do that as well so for example there are fearfully tries to link them so we do have an observation of the Higgs we can study that so are they linked don't know and so it could be that we can study it even though it's a very small weak effect and it could be web direct access food so it's great I mean it's just these are big mysteries that there's something really profound we don't understand about the way that stuff in particular the Higgs actually interacts with space and time so very naively the Higgs should blow the universe apart just very naively it's loads of energy in a very small amount of space huge amounts of energy in the Higgs field but it doesn't do anything apart from give mass to things it doesn't seem to it doesn't directly affect space but everything else that you put in space directly affects it so you know there are there are kind of issues there that we don't and it just says we don't get it we don't know we don't get it yet it's just I can eat another one of those they'd probably late that I if I stood guess I'd say there's some link there you know there's something going on and solving one of them might solve the other to inflation Higgs dark energy something how many people worldwide would you estimate are trying to grasp this and working on this the good question I don't know I mean it's a it's probably tens of thousands tens of thousands if you can all the people who work at CERN and the particle physicists and the theoretical physicists there'd be tens of thousands because it's it's so important to for us to get an understanding of what's going on but yet so outside of the grasp of most people including me like I'm listening to you talk about this and I'm like thank God it's people like you think whatever thank the think quarks there's people like you out there that are doing this but it it's almost like you're speaking another language it's so strange to me was very new stuff yes you know I mean even when I was at school and so when I when I was at university we hadn't discovered the top quark and we we sorta knew it was there we thought the Higgs might be there but we had no idea whether it was you know so so we're moving in my career we're moving quite fast and yet you're right these are the most fundamental questions about what Weiser eat ultimately why is the universe the way it is and even possibly why is there a universe right movie we're away from that yet but if we're ever going to answer that it will be by doing stuff like this and this is all addressed in this live show that you're doing this world yeah live show and certainly be they also the consequences of the not that comes words of knowledge but the the cosmology is terrifying that as we've started with so I think it as we've said it raises questions it makes quite vivid questions that we all have about you know what are what are we doing here right this sigh try I think it's got all the way back to me really been into Cal Sega and he always used to try this you you try to link it to things that people think about naturally then that's why people are fascinated by this stuff because they do actually think about it you might not be with the right names or the right words or the right facts even but they're thinking about how did I get here how did I come to exist what is the future do we have a future what was our past yeah these these are universal questions I think there certainly are and the way you're doing this with your live show you were saying that you have an enormous visual aspect to it well we have a we we have the biggest screen we can get in every venue and it's led it's when the the state-of-the-art modern LED screen so they're like Lego then you can build them so you fill the venue with it so you know Wembley Arena then it's 30 meters wide whatever by 8 meters high it's enormous you must have a huge crew carrying on yeah 16 or 18 people and to rock'n'roll show some of the venues were doing in North America they're in Canada they're a bit smaller venues but we just fill it with screen as much as we can get and then the graphics a lot of the graphics I I have we're done by a Dean egg who did ex machina actually Aunt Estella and the reason I I mean I I say chose them I drank them up and goes please please will you do this and they said how much money have you got and you know cuz it's way lower than Chris Nolan yeah they did it they were mean that they just liked the idea of these messages and these ideas so they use the software that they use for interstellar to create images of black holes Wow and they they use general relativity they coded it into their their graphics software so they can rate race lights around black holes and you can move the camera around the black hole and it traces the way all the light moves around it so if you remember those amazing get the gargantuan the black hole in interstellar that's that's a simulation it's not an artist's impression it's a simulation of what Einstein's theory tells as a black hole will look like and so I can use that to talk about what happens when you fall into a black hole what would you see watching someone fall in and you can explain all that using Einstein's theory you know the idea that it's kind of a well-known idea it's a bizarre idea that if I was to fall into a black hole and you were watching you'd never see me falling you'd see time slowed down my time slowed down as you watch me so in the end I'd just slow down and slow down and slow down and then I get frozen on the event horizon and just fade away as an image a reddening image on the event horizon so time passes at different rates as you move close to the black hole and far away because space and time have distorted by the mass of the black hole and so I could I talk about all that but I talk about all that with this incredible image which we had it's so high resolution by the way that they it was higher resolution than they're used for interstellar because my screen so big so so we need a special machine to play it you can buy the most expensive Mac Pro in the world and it will not play this stuff so I loved that from a geek perspective you have a special video player to play the dampers just like a series of CPUs are attached together and some sort of a super yeah it's yeah it's one of those this one's a big sort of visualization graphics things but but these files are like you know there are 20 gig video files Wow because there's so many pixels might the Pixar resoluteness is really geeky in it fakes the resolution 6400 by 1536 so impress my screen it's a lot like that yeah are you coming to Los Angeles with this yeah wait a month Taliban Theatre in May the end of me I'm there yeah I'm here oh yeah no you've gotta come 24th of May oh you're in San Diego as well hey I gotta see one of these yeah it's gonna be great fun and however much stuff we can fit into those handsome devil look at that nice jacket on looking good someone gave me that to scrounge that but it's cool cuz you're looking a cool guy cool guy with space behind you that's awesome man well listen thank you so much for doing this I really appreciate you appreciate everything you're doing it's awesome no thank you I always enjoy crying I loved it last time and people still talk about it when I was on less time more people ask me about making you than but should anybody else say get ready like because it's like a hundred times more popular than it was back then is it it's gonna be very strange now but thank you again really appreciate it I can't wait to see your show thank you so much thank you [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 8,567,345

Rating: 4.8349705 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, JRE, JRE #1233, Joe Rogan, Brian Cox, physics, Professor, space, CERN, higgs-boson, quark, gluon, quark gluon plasma, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, funny, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: wieRZoJSVtw

Length: 154min 54sec (9294 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Willful ignorance. I think, deep down, a lot of people know what they believe isn’t true. But man it sure as shit is comforting

[u/Debscass37]

My fave episode ever. I’m in love with Brian Cox . Saw his Universe show it was epic. He’s so smart and he speaks with such passion. Oh and he’s 50/51 yrs old. Doesn’t look a day over 40 lol

[u/Th3Guns1ing3r]

That was quite enjoyable, thanks!