Lawrence Krauss: "The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far"

good afternoon good evening how's the sound can you hear me everyone hear me okay great well good evening I'm Rachel Bronson I'm the executive director and publisher of the bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and on a half of the bullet on behalf of The Bulletin and its partners I'm delighted to welcome you to tonight's program with Lawrence Krauss on his new book the greatest story ever told so far a story about reality and all of its messiness Lawrence Krauss is a theoretical physicist and a cosmologists who has foundation professor of the school of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University and the director of its origins projects he is known as an advocate of the public understanding of science of public policy based on sound empirical data of scientific skepticism and of science education dr. Krauss is the author of several best-selling books including the physics of Star Trek and a universe from nothing among other works users 2pn of many honors and a board member of the Federation of American scientists Lawrence is also the chairman of the bulletins Board of sponsors a group of leading scientists and security experts from around the world that includes 16 Nobel Prize winners who endorsed the activities of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as many of you know the bulletin is a 70 year old organization located in Hyde Park bounded by Manhattan Project scientists who are concerned that the advancement of science of Technology was fast outpacing our ability to manage it in 1945 nuclear energy was the perfect example of what one of our founders called Pandora's box of modern science and today's issues of climate change in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity raised similar challenging questions The Bulletin publishes a bimonthly journal and host of very active website at www.texaslatina.com the set by our board of directors each year our board is in town tonight for a biannual meeting which will be held tomorrow many are here tonight and I'd like to offer them a particularly warm welcome I'd like to take a moment to thank our partners for their help with tonight's program the Chicago Council on science and technology and the Illinois Science Council many of you have heard about the programs through our partners the Chicago Council on science and technology or c2s t is celebrating 10 years as a not-for-profit organization C 2ft brings scientists out of the lab directly to the public it works with National Laboratories leading academic institutions and museums to educate the public on issues of critical scientific importance in an age when barely 1 in for voting adults meet a basic level of scientific literacy C 2's T's aim is to reignite an excitement and passion for science and technology and remind Chicagoans of the quality and quantity of rnd that takes place in our own backyard thank you also to c2 SP this is quite important actually c2 st has also made it possible to video tonight's program if you miss a word tonight or would like to share tonight's program with friends you'll be able to find that video tonight's programs on c2 s T's website and the bulletin so thank you to Cristina le key and her entire team many of whom are here with us tonight thank you also to the Illinois Science Council IFC is an independent volunteer driven 501c3 organization that engages educates and entertains the adult public about science technology engineering math or stem and everyday life it highlights the scientists and research of the Chicago area institutions and companies that make Chicago the nation's - city of sciences thank you to this executive director Monica Metzler for ifvs help and getting the word out for tonight's program and helping to ensure tonight's sellout crowd after remarks from dr. Krauss I'll be back on stage to help moderate a QA with with the audience so we can pick up maybe where he left off and after the programs copy of Lawrence's book and other of his bestsellers will be available and he'll be available for signing he probably passed them as you came in I'm also delighted to share that tonight's program is being broadcasted live across the world via Facebook's live so with that please help me in welcoming to stage Lawrence Krauss well thank you it's always an honor to be do anything for the bulletin it's nice to be here to talk about this subject which I want to concentrate on a part of the book that I think is most relevant to the bulletin so that's what I'm going to do and if you want to read the rest or hear the rest you have to read the book more importantly if to buy the book but but this is this is actually one of my favorite quotes I was first brought to my attention by I found friend of mine a filmmaker named Werner Herzog who loved this book the Peregrine it's a naturalist book it's about a peregrine and and and literally all about the Peregrine the person evaporates quickly at the beginning but this quote I think it's very important for what I want to talk about the story that I told in this book it's also I think important for the bulletin it really captures in some sense one of the things that I think the bulletin and see John over there it's so good about which is to reveal to people the reality of what's really there which should be the basis of public policy and too often ISM and so I think it's a pretty good appropriate to use that quote here but now here what I want to talk about is the is the amazing story of the illusion of reality that that that sciencism helped us uncover it is amazing that the universe we see is literally an illusion in ways that I'll describe to you and in fact let me begin in this case by by by using this image which I allude to in the book but but it so this is in Chicago you know what these are actually I was speaking about this to a group in Phoenix a while ago and they had no idea what they were but anyway these so these are ice crystals on a window as we as you see in May in Chicago and and so what I want you to do for a moment is imagine that you're on one of these crystals they say this one and imagine that your civilization emerged and grew on that crystal what would it be like well you'd be something very special about that crystal that direction air and physicists would develop and understand laws of physics that would tell you what the forces along is find the crystal would be different than the force is perpendicular the crystal and they'd explain them and codify them and maybe even develop laws to describe them the theologians would explain why this direction was meant by God and and wars would be fought in fact over whether it was this direction or that direction that was the important one and all of this would give a significance to something that has no significance whatsoever and that's the key point there's no significance to that direction at all it's an accident of nature and it could have been lived on any of these other crystals what we have learned is that that is exactly the case in our universe in ways that I want to describe to you in ways that are remarkable that the many things that we consider significant that we consider designed for our existence in our universe are similar accidents of existence you know you know in a very real way so the story of course in the book goes back to Plato and Beyond and goes through the one of many of the key revolutions in this greatest story that of humans being being taken by nature to understand reality whether they wanted to understand it that way or not through Maxwell and Faraday and Einstein and grit and the unifications of the 19th century of electricity and magnetism two forces of nature that seemed quite different but really are seen as two manifestations of the same thing the hallmark of progress in science is just that whenever two things which on the surface seem completely different is seen as exactly the same thing at least in physics that's certainly the hallmark and that unification electricity and magnetism led to a unification of space and time that Einstein realized that weinstein wouldn't have been on set if it hadn't been for Maxwell he would have been Einstein but we wouldn't be talking about him if it hadn't been for Maxwell and Faraday and and his and relativity was the unification of two things which on a surface seemed completely different space and time but in fact are one person space is another person's time and this beautiful edifice was built in them in the last part of the the the 19th century in the beginning of 20th century and then where I want to pick up on it now is where things had to change because of the discovery of quantum mechanics so I want to pick it up with this guy here who all of you recognized or many of you to Richard Feinman who I wrote a book about who worked on the Manhattan Project alongside many of the scientists who would later help found and lead the bulletin and the Board of sponsors and Fineman was a was a remarkable scientist one of the greatest time scientist for the second half of the 20th century but he he assigned himself the task and later did along with several others for what you wanted to la prize of reconciling this beautiful theory of electromagnetism that Maxwell and following Faraday had developed this beautiful theory that described light the existence of light as electromagnetic wave and and all the phenomena that will now make this room possible but quantum mechanics have been discovered to describe nature on very small scales and quantum mechanics is strange in the extreme and 5-minute others try to figure a way to reconcile electromagnetism and quantum mechanics successfully eventually and the key idea the key craziness of quantum mechanics is that it's like as I often say it's like Washington or corporate America which are now the same thing in sensitive any if if you can't see it anything goes okay that's quantum mechanics and we'll we'll be learning more about that with investigations over the coming weeks but but the key point is that this is really reflection of something called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle the fact that if I measure a system for a short amount of time then no doesn't matter what kind of machine I have it's an independent of machine I have if I measure a system for a short period of time then I can only know certain quantities approximately and not exactly if I measured for a certain amount of time I can only know the energy of this system approximately and and there's no way I can know what exactly now that point eventually allowed finding others to develop a picture of the quantum theory of electromagnetism called quantum and he developed it pictorially viewed many things this is what we call a Fineman diagram and this is how we now understand the interaction of two electrons that were repel each other as described originally classically by by others before Faraday and Maxwell but eventually them as well so here's electron repelling another electron we now understand it quantum mechanically as follows the electron emits a particle the quantum of the electromagnetic field electromagnetic waves are waves but they come in particles attached as a particles called photons and so the light coming into your eyes is individual photons that are being received that's the quanta of the electromagnetic wave okay so the electron emits a quantum called the photon that is interesting however that's impossible it can't happen in the real world because an electron just sitting there cannot emit a photon because if emitted a photon the photon will carry away energy but the electron would still be there and where did the energy come from there's no way you can that just cannot happen but this is quantum mechanics if you can't see it anything goes so if the photon survives for such a short time that you can't measure the energy it carries away then it's fine it's just like embezzlement in fact it's identical to that as long as you get it back in the morning then you can do whatever you want with the money at night and the photon in this case so the fault is emitted it's received by this electron causing that repulsion and we call that the virtual photon because it isn't there if you could see it you'd see the violation of energy but you can't but as long as it disappears and timescale so short that you can't measure that energy violation anything goes and this picture describes exactly the electromagnetic interaction perusing the best theory we have in nature the best theory we still have in nature with this theory from fundamental principles you can explain and describe and predict the results of experiments on atomic systems at the level of 14 decimal places the comparisons of the predictions and the observations there's nowhere else in science that you can predict things to 14 decimal places this is as good as it gets it never gets better than this and there's one other aspect of this interaction that's important not the first you emit the photon it's a virtual particle transmitted the interaction but the only thing that's important about electromagnetism is it works across the universe by the importance for our existence we can see stars we see the light from stars but an electron here will repel an electron in Alpha Centauri four light-years away or in a different galaxy because electromagnetism is a long-range force now quantum mechanically we understand that as follows the photon is massless why is that the case well a equals MC squared and because the photon is massless the photon can carry an arbitrarily small amount of energy when it's emitted but if it can carry an arbitrarily small amount of energy then it could travel for arbitrary long time without being detectable by violating the Heisenberg uncertainty principle because if the energy carried by the photon is so small you can't measure that energy violation so the photon can exist for an arbitrary long amount of time in fact so long they could travel from here to Alpha Centauri and be absorbed so the reason electromagnetism is long range is because the particle that transmitted them that transmits that interaction is massless so the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows it to travel as long as it wants before it's absorbed again by carrying an ever small amount of energy okay that's it now you understand quantum electrodynamics in principle the rest is practice your homework problems if you hand it out afterwards okay so that's it that's as good as it gets good thing now we have a quantum theory of electromagnetism developed the 1940s after completed after the after the interruption of science by the Second World War on the introduction of physics brought together great physicists but there wasn't there was some interesting physics going on but the people like Klieman didn't do the real work till after the end of the war and and then produces the greatest theory we have that's great until nature intervened the nature of intervened by something it's relevant in this room into the bulletin a fact which should discourage some of you the neutron is radioactive this I remember learning this from a wonderful astronomer named Tommy gold when I was in high school shocked me it should shock you too because your body is made of neutrons most of the particles in your body are neutrons there are more neutrons than any other particle in your body because the atomic nuclei of atoms have protons and neutrons but the heavier atoms have more neutrons than protons so neutrons are the most abundant particles in your body but if I take a neutron and hold it here it will live ten minutes day before it - case that's the life time the neutron some of you will notice that you were listening to that song go on interminably for more than 10 minutes before the talk and maybe you're hoping that your neutrons would decay but but it so the question is how what gives how come you're here if neutrons have a lifetime of 10 minutes how can you be here how can any Stealth's day be elements here well it's an interesting accident of nature so the neutron to create decays into three particles a proton and this depends you with writing an electron and a neutrino three particles now the amazing accident is to the neutron and a proton way almost exactly the same amount the neutron is one part in a thousand heavier than the proton but the two are almost exactly the same mass now that means the neutron has barely enough mass to allow to decay because this mass is barely heavier than the sum of the mass of the proton plus the electron plus the neutrino because it can barely decay it takes a long time to decay take ten minutes which doesn't sound long but in particle physics units that's a long time and so we call that a weak decay because it takes so long to happen this week interaction is a new interaction of nature however this complicated thing before that we had gravity and electromagnetism gravity can't cause this electromagnetism can't cause us to cake so somehow there's a new force in nature that was discovered and that force meant we had to describe it this force is is weak but important it's one of the reasons we're here two reasons but let's first go into the reason we are here the reason the nuclei on your body body just so the neutron decays in ten minutes if I have it I here now let me drop it in a nucleus what happens when it gets dropped in nucleus it gets bound what does it mean to be bound well some people know but what does it mean to really be bound it means it takes energy to get out I'm bound to the earth so when I when I jump down off his stage walking down because I don't feel like jumping it takes energy to get back up okay so I lose energy when I get bound to a system so neutron loses energy here but a equals MC squared so the neutron loses energy and therefore it loses mask and it's mass it loses enough mass so that inside the nucleus at caño longer decay into a proton plus electron plus a neutrino so you're only here because of that accident that the neutron proton mass difference is so small so when the neutron is in a nucleus it suddenly stable and that's why there can be heavy elements the ones that are important for life carbon nitrogen oxygen iron all those things all those nuclei can only exist because this mass difference is so small that you put the neutrons in the nucleus and they're stable a remarkable accident of existence so that the nature of that of that mass difference and the force associated with it is in one sense responsible for our existence but of course this is also the force that's responsible for our existence in another way and maybe the end of our existence as the bulletin has focused on it's the forces responsible for the nuclear reactions to power the Sun that similar actions that turn hydrogen into helium and produce all the energy that allows life to exist on earth but also of course produces the energy that produced thermonuclear weapons so this is a this may be a weak force but it is one that is incredibly important for our history our past and maybe our future if we have a future so we need to understand it so the first person to write down a description of potential description of force is one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century Enrico Fermi the University of Chicago and Fermi was an amazing physicist I could go on about him for a long time he's a hero mine and many others he was the last physicist it nuclear physicist and particle physicist who was equally good at experiment and theory now the two fields both have enough baggage that you're either a theorist like me or an experimentalist but he could do both and he of course as I was just watching at the bulletin exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry which isn't which if you haven't seen you should see firmly built the first nuclear reactor as part of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and I've always thought was great it was underneath a football field which I thought was brilliant because if anything went wrong you just kill football players and it's no nope no problems in the law so anyway it did nothing went wrong and they built that but Fermi developed a model for this interaction and he submitted it to the journal Nature and it was rejected which is a great solace to many of us who have been rejected by nature many many times but firmly didn't take it lightly he was so disgusted that he said I'm forget it I'm not doing Theory anymore I'm going to go do experiments which was good for him because the next experiments he did one in the Nobel Prize in Physics and were relevant actually the processes that that were relevant for producing the bomb it turned out but so fairly had this model but others tried to develop it now one of them one of the important aspects of physics that we don't talk about it enough is that physics is like Hollywood it's if it works you copy it now you keep copying until Halloween 23 okay as long as it takes it and physics is the same if it works copy it so it's got the best theory in nature this one copy it do we have the best theory this is quantum electrodynamics the best picture gives the best predictions of any theory let's try and have a have a mimic that and produce a theory of this new force in nature so we can draw a picture that looks the same sort of with a neutron turning into a proton it's made of quarks but that's just it added complication and then there's electron neutrino emitted and we could try and make a picture looks the same by the exchange of a particle this force works by the exchange of particle let's make this course work by the exchange of some new hypothetical particle but there's a problem this force is long-range this force only works within the size of the nucleus but this one's much stronger than this one apparently so although it looks the same they're very different how can we accommodate that well one way is simple if we give this particle a big mass then we can solve the problem because you see the electromagnetic force is long ray because the photon is massless if we give this particle a really big mass then because equals mc-squared when you emit that particle you emit a lot of energy but the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says if you emit a lot of energy then you got it that particle has to disappear really quickly otherwise you'd notice it so if it's very massive it can't travel very far only the length of a nucleus or less so you can explain a short-range force if you give that particle a really big mass great everything works seems to work out there's a problem however that is that this force is this description is beautiful this one's nonsense on the surface this one produces beautiful predictions this one produces infinities physicists don't like infinities mathematicians love infinities but physicists don't because when you have infinite result so you can't make any predictions easily so this was actually a remarkable because this was a problem that was known in the 1960s and it represents one of the important aspects of the story that make it great in my opinion that the science supersedes the scientists another big secret is that scientists are human and the only one know that but it's okay that means that they have prejudices and biases and they're pigheaded and they'll go in the wrong direction and the won't give up their ideas even if they're wrong for a long time but the science overcomes that the process of science of skeptical inquiry reliance on empirical evidence testing retesting going back and checking trying to prove yourself wrong that forces the scientists inevitably in the right direction and this is was an example when I was writing the book and maybe if you read it I wanted to shake these scientists in 1960s and say you're going in the wrong direction the right answer is right here because in the 1960s they were willing to give up this beautiful picture of relativity and quantum mechanics and said maybe it doesn't work on the scale of nuclei maybe in something new it has again they just gave up this whole handily but they didn't have to but again they were just fixated in the wrong direction the right direction was somewhere else and they should have realized it the right direction comes from another area of physics superconductivity in 1911 this physicist named cameryn ling honest and a dutch physicist discovered that if you cool mercury down to four degrees above absolute zero it becomes superconducting as he said what that meant is it the electrical resistance goes to zero to zero not very small but to zero now that that may not sound astounding but it should because that means if I take a mercury wire and I attach it to a battery and start a current going in it and I cool it down to four degrees above absolute zero and I take the battery away the current continues and it won't continue just for a day or a week or a month or a year it'll continue forever it'll never stop it's magic it sounds like because if that kind of thing shouldn't happen but the current will go on forever he called it super conductivity it affair four names but it's a really complicated phenomena I took almost 50 years for physicists to derive a theory of how the interactions of electrons and the medium caused that allowed that to happen okay what's that got to do with anything I just said well now we can make superconductors that are superconducting at a much higher temperature so we can do experiments on high school physics classes that look neat and here's one we can make superconductors that are superconducting at dry ice temperatures now and if we invent a superconductor and dry ice okay make it superconducting then if you take a magnet near it it'll and put the magnet on top of it it'll float that's a little little thing we do in high school physics classes why will it float because it turns out magnetic fields cannot permeate a superconductor they die off at the surface and the same would happen for an electric charge here would float as well because electric fields can't die out for the surface so what it means is the field lines the magnetic field lines get repelled if you wish by the superconductor and that levitates the magnet a fun little thing to do and in a physics class but well now what's that got to do with anything well now I want you to do what I asked you to do with the crystal imagine that you live inside this superconductor what would you see we develop laws of physics you develop quantum mechanics and and and you try and understand electricity magnetism but for you electricity and magnetism would be short range forces because in the superconducting magnetic field die off and a very short distance as do electric fields so the electromagnetic force would be very short range if you develop the quantum theory to describe that you'd have to have a particle transmitted that's very heavy and in fact inside superconductors photons are heavy photons have a mass inside a superconductor they're massless out here in the real world they travel to speedlight but in a superconductor they travel more slowly and they have a mass now this should have been the key that people realize but they didn't because they were looking in the wrong direction and the key is basically I like to think of it this way say you're swimming it's a swing pool you feel nice and light you're feeling very fast but if I replace the water with molasses and ask you to swim well most of you would do it but some of you might and if you'd started to swim in the molasses useful much slower you feel much heavier because of the resistance of the molasses now let's imagine for a moment that there's an invisible field everywhere in the universe everywhere throughout the universe in nature and some particles when they're moving through that space they interact with that field and feel a resistance and there might be massless but they feel the resistance and they slow down just like the photons traveling in a superconductor experience the resistance and slow down and get massive so let's imagine that if you want wish we kind of live in a cosmic superconductor an invisible superconductor everywhere in the universe a remarkable and absurd claim but what would it apply well we could now draw these two forces I talked it as the old one with sideways the elected electromagnetic interaction was always and so are these but now let's and here's that here's a picture of that nuclear force with the quarks producing electrons and neutrinos and it turns out the three particles associated with the weak interaction but that doesn't matter but I can draw them they too look very similar but now let me imagine that these particles aren't massive the ones that mediate the weak force they're massless just like the photon but let's imagine that those particles interact with that background field and act like they're massive and to us they act like they're massive in the force they mediate become short-range in that case it solves everything because now these particles are massless at a fundamental scale their only mass the only peer math so because it's accident that we live in this cosmic superconductor and if they're massless then the mathematics of this kind of associate with these kind of diagrams is the same as the mathematics associated with electromagnetism so instead of producing nonsense infinities you produce numbers that you can calculate and they're right and better still if the mathematics looks identical maybe it's more important more than that maybe the forces are identical maybe the weak force which seems so different than electromagnetism both of which in different waves are responsible for our existence because of the fact of their difference but maybe in spite of the fact that they look incredibly different they're really the same thing the weak force and electromagnetism are really fundamentally a single force which we now call the electroweak force this would be a remarkable unification the greatest unification of physics in the 20th century certainly one that's unheralded in fact because it would mean that these two fundamental forces nature are really the same thing and we and everything we see is here by an accident the fact that there's it's invisible field everywhere in space well that's the issue up to now that sounds like religion think what I just said there's an invisible field everywhere in the universe responsible for our existence ok and if I if I left it there and be religion but it isn't because this is physics you can't assert the existence of an invisible field if you can't detect it so how can you detect that invisible field very simple cosmic sadomasochism you spanked the vacuum and you spank it hard what I mean well in the quantum world for every field there's associated particle and that means if there's a some visible field everywhere if I dump enough energy in a single point maybe I can kick real particles out let me call that field the Higgs field if I if I figure out a way to dump enough energy in a single point maybe I can kick out real particles I'll call them Higgs particles that would demonstrate the existence of that field how do I do that how do I dump enough energy in a single point simple I build the most complicated machine humans have ever built the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva this accelerator which if you were to if you fly to Geneva there and many you may have there's the lake and there's the airport there's a little spray up there and you come out of the airport in Geneva you look out you see beautiful countryside Swiss countryside in French countryside underneath that countryside however is a tunnel a 26 kilometer tunnel around and what we do is we take protons and we accelerate them to 99.99999 8% the speed of light in this direction and 99.999999 9 8 percent the speed of light in this direction and we collide them together in a few places in a tunnel we try and focus them down and dump enough energy into empty space to maybe kick out real particles these particles go around thousands of times every second here's the French Swiss border right here by the way so they go across the border thousands of times every second without passports or anything which mr. Trump is going to change if you years of other but but and and so we we do that now in this country there is an anachronistic holiday which we celebrate called July 4th which means something to people here but nothing to anyone else as it should but now it has a cosmic significance because on July 4th 2012 we reported at the Large Hadron Collider that 50 events had been discovered 50 particles had been produced that can't walk like a Higgs and quacked like a Higgs and so we thought there were Higgs us and in fact in the intervening five years we've been able to measure them more carefully it produced many more and every property of these particles is identical to that which was expected if the Higgs particles are real we discovered the Higgs which meant we discovered that there's an invisible field everywhere in the universe that we live in a cosmic superconductor I mean is truly remarkable I never I must say I I was certain the Higgs would didn't exist I had three papers in my drawer waiting for them not to discover it and but nature lives in many cases nature and fortunately has been wise enough to follow my advice but but uh this is this is truly one of the most amazing discoveries in the history of science because it really means that in a real explicit way that everything we see is illusion the properties of the universe have seemed like they're designed for us that make stars and galaxies and planets and aliens and people and everything the particles that make us up the interactions we feel are all an accident of the fact that this wheat field exists if it didn't exist none of the properties of our universe appear nothing we see would be there everything would disappear this story is the greatest story ever told not it's because people have been because the real universe a story the real universe is so much more interesting than stories people invent and to me this what I want to celebrate this here and in the book and I think in the context of the bulletin as well it's because to me it represents humanity at its best you know Anna foltyn was was developed to warn of dangers in some sense that humans developed by technology but not to forget that science has provided us with the technologies that allow us to exist at the same time but more than that the real the real great asset of science is not the technologies I would argue in fact it's almost unfortunate that although it's fortunate that science produces technology most of us wouldn't be alive here now if it weren't for that but when I talk about these things people say well this you know what's great does it bill to make a better toaster a faster car or something like and the problem is we associate science with technology and the real virtue of science to me is the same as the virtue of art and music and literature which is to change our perspective of our place in the cosmos the cultural benefit of science is what's so important it makes being human worth being human to ask those questions and to change our minds and to change our perspectives that's called learning that's called civilization this is civilization at its best and in that sense I think of the Large Hadron Collider as very similar to the it's the Gothic cathedral of the 21st century the Gothic ah the Gothic cathedrals were built over centuries by thousands of artisan beautiful structures with the most sophisticated technologies at the time learning how to keep those roofs up and things those artisans came from dozens of countries speaking many different languages the Large Hadron Collider was built by 10,000 physicists over 20 years from over a hundred different countries speaking dozens of languages different religions everything but none of that matters they all came together to work towards his common goal and the goal was not to develop a faster car it was just to answer the question why are we here to learn something more about ourselves the fact that we would spend 50 years amassing this and building the most complicated tools we can ever build just to answer this question amazes me it's wonderful and we should celebrate it because of what has caused us to discover about ourselves not because the worldwide web was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider or at least at the CERN before the logs on earth have our Collider so of course they've been benefits from it but these machines are amazing this is this is not the accelerator this is just one detector the Atmos detector one of the larger ones is a smaller one called the compact muon solenoid which isn't so compact it's that contained there's as much metal as there is in the Eiffel Tower in this detector and you really can't you feel like Gulliver when you're in there and it's hard to appreciate it unless you're there I have a better picture of it because I'm in it but it's really an amazing it's amazing and you can't give enough hyperbole about the Large Hadron Collider here's one fact every and at the Large Hadron Collider enough data is generated to fill more than one thousand one terabyte hard drive more than the information in all the world's libraries every second and the tunnel the 26 kilometer has to be evacuated with a vacuum sparser than the vacuum outside the International Space Station every aspect of this gargantuan machine brought together by people from all around the world is amazing and science brings people together science can bring people together science should bring people together another thing which I think in many ways is implicit in the celebration that the Bolton is all about the Bolton is basically saying we want to preserve the Wonder that's humanity the civilization the knowledge the the fact that we can live together science can be the basis of that by using the tools that we've developed in science to uncover this illusion of reality if we use those tools we can uncover the illusions of reality in the political arena those same tools of skeptical inquiry demanding empirical evidence for claims testing things looking at many different sources not just echo chambers all of these tools are an essential part of our existence I think and the best part of this is in the best part of the title of my book is the so far the greatest story ever told so far because the greatest part of this greatest story the story the real universe is that it changes it's not like that other greatest story ever told okay which I heard refer to it the other day it's a way that I cannot help but use from now on as the goat herders guide to the universe but in any case anyway this story changes it gets better every day because we discover new things every day because the imagination of nature is greater than our own imagination I happen to love art and the Instituto art nearby here and I love art my favorite area of art is the impressionist because I reason I like impressionist paintings is because they look really beautiful when you're far away but when you get really close up they're crafty and and that's physics because sure we have discovered standard model the best theory in nature that describes every experiment we can perform but but every time you make discoveries they're new questions a host of new questions sure that Higgs field exists but why does it exist why did it freeze in the early universe and the way it did why didn't it freeze in a different direction why did the freeze of the skeletons for the weak interaction as a strength it does all these questions we don't have the answers to and the Large Hadron Collider is going to continue to operate for another twenty years to try and answer them maybe it won't maybe another machine well maybe we'll learn evidence from the early universe to try and discover it the story gets better all the time and this story will only keep on getting better if we keep on asking questions and that's that's really what I kind of want to sort of end on this this fact that we should be willing to go wherever the universe takes us and go with our eyes open many people think of when I talked about the bulletin for example think of it as kind of a downer at times the Doomsday Clock is a downer why would they think that but but as you know as I think I said when we unveiled it this year as pastor once said fortune favors the prepared mind and if you're not willing to go into the future with your eyes wide open wherever it takes you then you'll never be able to deal with the challenges of this century in the next century and that's what the bold is all about helping people would keep their wives wide open and not being afraid and realizing that it's okay for example this one of the the discovery that I just told you about tells us that our existence is a cosmic accident it is literally identical to this icicle again nice crystal remember that direction was really significant to these people you think but everything about the universe that seems like it's designed for us is really significant people think the universe is designed for us because we live so well in it actually we're fine-tuned for the universe not the other way around but there's nothing special about the fact that electromagnetism is long-range and the weak force of short-range it's an accident if the Higgs field are frozen in a different way those forces be different we wouldn't be around to ask the question now imagine that the physicist on this ice crystal learned that realized discovered that that direction wasn't very special that there could be other ice crystals in different directions let's say they discovered that at 4:00 in the morning when these things often happen and at 6:00 in the morning the Sun rises and it melts okay and they're gone the civilization is gone and because they can only live on the ice crystal well that - maybe our universe because now that we've discovered the Higgs field and we do calculations which we can't do completely because we still don't know that why the Higgs field is the way it is but when we do the estimates we find out that the Higgs field is precariously close to melting that the parameters of the Higgs field are such that it could go away it probably won't but it could now don't get nervous phases here but no it turns it you don't have to worry because it turns out when we do the calculations it won't if it goit melts it's not going to melt next year or year for now or a million years or a billion years or a billion billion years it's a it will happen in the far future if it happens at all but if it does everything we see in the universe will disappear all the stars the galaxies the planets the people everything will go away because particles become massless again the universal a virtual beautiful symmetric form but not one in which life like us can exist which is another aspect of our misconceptions about the universe and nature that somehow we're the pinnacle of everything and it's always going to be the same I you know again to make a to relate it to the bulletin one of the problems that I encounter and many of my colleagues and the board encounters it is complacency about nuclear weapons since the second world war there's never been a nuclear weapon used it so why worry about it okay so things change and this too can pass and our universe may pass and so that's the way it is the future may be unbelievably miserable it certainly doesn't seem like it's designed for us and and I want to end with that design issue because the illusion of design is really important in science it is really we are hardwired to look for purpose to things and to look for design and so we look at Christmas ornaments and we say they're clearly designed by people to be artistic and beautiful but those aren't Christmas ornaments those are snowflakes electron micrographs of snowflakes so all you need is polar molecule in laws of chemistry and physics and you make snowflakes so there's no design there and even though it looks like it but you say well maybe you know that's but Chicago is famous for its architecture so human architecture is clearly designed take good old buckminster fuller domes which when I was growing up everyone all the hippies had them in their backyard they did neat things in them and and clearly evidence of an intelligence but of course you could take buckminsterfullerene suit if you take suit you'll find carbon 60 okay and it's called buckminsterfullerene it's a buckminsterfullerene there's nothing less designed and so that they can one the chemists who discovered this is on a board of sponsors won the Nobel Prize for it so we have to be very careful when we when we think things are designed for us and there's a long history of that and of course in my opinion one of the greatest scientists had ever lived greater than Einstein in my opinion is Charles Darwin who was the first one to point out that the illusion of design can be compelling in this case in life and the last paragraph of the Origin of Species is one of those beautiful paragraphs anywhere in the history of science writing in my opinion there is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved the remarkable statement that the diversity of life on Earth Whitman and its complexity in the fact that it seemed to be so well designed for an environment could result naturally from the process of natural selection without design without planning without purpose and that changed everything and really that's what we're done in income in physics we're saying that the incredible diversity of the laws of nature that we measure that approves all the structures we see in their incredible diversity are not designed that diversity can result from a very simple beginning and accidents of nature like the accidents of natural selection can change the future and but we also realize it sister our products of their time in myopic and so in 1863 he said to Joseph Hooker its mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life one might as well think of the origin of matter which was rubbish in 1860 but now I get paid to do it okay and that's what's important because what seems like rubbish to us now will not be rubbish 100 years from now because science changes the greatest story ever told gets better and things that we cannot imagine science discussing or describing that people have often say all science will never describe it so I'm always amazed when some of the signs will never ever explain X because think of the incredible conceit in that statement because it implies that somehow you know if you know what science can't discuss them somehow you must know something about it that we don't we don't know what we'll understand unless we keep trying unless we keep willing to bravely go where no one has gone before in that sense to bravely go where the universe takes us to continue the process of science but not just science art music literature to me that's the tragedy of what we're living in right now that we have to fight as well not just a tragedy of ignorance of social with nuclear weapons will unwillingness to recognize that climate change is happening an unwillingness to worry about other problems of devoting worries about from cyber terrorism to biotechnology that we have to think about that our that can produce wonders for Humanity but also potential terrors and to me the field of physics that I'm talking about is in the current for example in the current budget proposed budget is being cut by 20% but that's not what's important that's part of the Department of Energy and what many people don't realize including the current head of the Department of Energy until he became head of the department is that it is the major funder of all physical science in the country it is a dominant funder of all physical science in the country part of energy stopped by 20% but in that budget as you know there are bit other cuts National Endowment of Humanities cut to zero National Endowment of the Arts cut to zero corporation of public broadcasting cut to zero Institute of museums and libraries cut to zero if you add all that up the budget savings 1.8 2 billion dollars I did the addition big numbers are easy for me but if you look at that same budget there's a line-item of 2 billion dollars which is the first installment with a wall against Mexico right so we're willing against it protect us from imaginary hordes we're willing to to get rid of the very essence of what makes truly makes this country great and the greatest comeback to this I know of and I want to answer I end with is from Robert Wilson who was the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory which is near Chicago which was until the Large Hadron Collider was built the largest accelerator in the world and and Wilson was asked in 1960s when it was being constructed if it would aid in the defense of the nation and here is the statement that he made no sir I don't believe so it is only to do with the respect with which you regard one another the dignity of men our love of culture it has to do with are we good painters good sculptors great poets I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and our patriotic about it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending and that's what we have to make sure the greatest story the greatest gift that science can provide us will not continue if we step back and stop being willing to ask questions I'm not too rough with just the greatest gift that science gives us but art music literature all the things that we really care about that really matter that really would make this country great we don't then you know 100 200 years it won't matter how many ARMs we sell to Saudi Arabia it'll matter the literature the music the science the things we produce that are called civilization and so I'll land with two quotes one from the beginning of my book which was from Virgil the very beginning that I needed I learned in Latin because I grew up in Canada so I was educated these these are the tears of things and the stuff of our mortality cuts us to the heart well that's the famous quote but at the end of the book I was looking at again and I was reminded of the next line in the I need which is much less well known but to me equally important release your fear and that's what we have to do we have to release our fear of the unknown of the threatening pause possibilities of civilization of the future which can be terrifying and wonderful at the same time and boldly go and be willing to accept a future that may be miserable a future which Humanity is in the center of the universe a future in which there are technologies that we may have to control or that may change what it means to be human and accept that with open eyes and therefore instead of being afraid we should enjoy our brief moment in the Sun thank you Thank You Lawrence we do have time for some questions and we have a mic up there and a mic down for ya and so if you do have questions please go ahead and raise your hand wait for me to recognize you and then ask your question into the mic and please keep it brief it's only because there's so many of us here anyway yeah we'll go for a few minutes and then I'll answer questions later up back out there here's one it's so right here please um you are going argue for universe based on happenstance and um how long your argue about it I just say that's the way it is okay and if you accept this and do you think that it's just a human construct that we seek symmetry and beauty and is that a legitimate pursuit well humans seek symmetry and beauty and so the scientists because scientists are human and so but we have to be aware that just because something appeals to us doesn't mean it's true and that's that's really important in physics we have to be aware that just because something's elegant or what appears to be mathematically beautiful does that doesn't mean it describes the universe nature is the ultimate arbiter of what what is true and what also works out after the fact always almost always after the fact I have to admit we can see the beauty of things after the fact Maxwell's equations when he wrote them downward nothing we're not beautiful in any sense and the motive and the description they've wheels within wheels if you read his papers there's anything to people but now we have these four beautiful equations and then underneath you know physics students wear them and underneath it says let there be light because that really explains why there's light not like the other organ okay and so I think we have to realize that humans of course are hardwired by evolution for many things we and what we call beautiful is in fact what we call beautiful is also culturally determined what you think is beautiful is very different than people from other cultures science takes us out of that myopia to realize that what we think is normal beautiful wonderful or the way the world is supposed to be may not be the way the world's supposed to be and that's what's great I once said and I think I'm even saying the book that that one of the purposes of science is to is to make you uncomfortable but it's the purpose of they're all great its purpose of learning so if you're not at all uncomfortable at the beginning then you're not ever going outside your comfort zone so be wary the fact that we want to believe as the x-files would say there's a question made up there yeah I have a softball question for you a study that I've noticed one of the most fundamental churches has done they started it in 2009 in their words just about every denominational Church in North America is hemorrhaging young adults I wondered with your travel and as a professor do you notice that kind of trend of them leaving or actually as in your perspective joining more people taking science and they noted that the trend happens I look after grad school yeah you know look there's a part as a professor I'm very worried of how little historical perspective I have because I remember it is time-invariant that my colleagues who are older than me will always tell me that students were better and I say that to my nerd colleagues when I say see because we have memories of things so it's so I very wary of anecdotal evidence that I might have it is certainly true however that in the first world there's a monotonic decline in the number of people who declare themselves of having religious any religion uh and and that and I think that is a property of in my opinion of Education of the educational system yet but at the same time what is really much more of concern to me than that that doesn't but either way that doesn't bother me what's more I'm more concerned about people accepting the real world I don't care what other things I think and and being willing to deal with it when it comes to public policy and what is sad is that everyone is fascinated by science even if they don't know they are and every time we I run an event we have a 3,000 people come to it people are fat they just fascinated by times they just don't know what science are fascinated by because we teach among many reasons we teach science the wrong way we teach science as a collection of facts but that is exactly wrong science is a process for discovering facts and we don't teach the process the process is something that everyone innately enjoys because everyone loves solving puzzles but if you just teach science as a bunch of facts then people can have alternative facts okay we're seeing that but what we need to do is teach that process of of using science and by science I just simply mean empirical evidence combined with reason and logic basically those things together and that that I see no evidence happening in the public arena which is why it's necessary for some groups of scientists and others to like the Bolton to speak out when people don't accept empirical reality for empirical reality and I think that I think the only solution is not a direct political one but the solution in my opinion for democracy is to train people young people in schools I mean when I was growing up schools were its depositories of information but there's more information in this than I got in school but there's more misinformation what we have to teach kids about is the way to tell the difference and the way to tell the difference is ultimately the scientific enterprise and though that we infer the for a healthy democracy an informed electorate there's a wonderful quote in The Bulletin exhibit in the museum about just that that that that that ultimately for an informed democracy we need to we need to have an informed citizenship people who can tell the difference between sense and nonsense and then can demand our legislators to do so at the same time sure there's a demand then one there yeah we go back and we'll come up front and then maybe we'll quit hey yeah you or how about how about the woman first Oh your moderator no no no no you're in charge yes please I did exactly two that leads to the question if human beings are hard-wired to learn and be convinced be a story the innate don't we need to have more scientists who will embrace that fact of transmission it seems like there's that there's often a disparity there or disparagement actually a story for information and we've got to find a way to embrace that part of the way humans learn well I think we we dipped it I think really the way we I mean it's the story is more fundamental than stories and I do think we need to tell stories and this one reasons why I tell stories but but it's more than that I think what really gets the story going there's a great quote from another one of my books that I wish I maybe someone has here but it's a it says that the most important part of any mystery is how do the how do the traveler get to the starting point in the first place and really what we want to get is people to the starting point and that involves questions so really what gets stories going is questions what could happen if what might happen how could this happen and and in my opinion we should teach using questions rather than answers the answers aren't important as a physicist 99% of what I know I got I learned after my PhD the information it's it's the questions and kids love puzzles and and teachers and parents and politicians should all be willing to say when a kid asks a question I don't know I don't know let's find out or maybe we don't know maybe we should think about it and so that's that I really think that's the basis of good storytelling is ultimately raising questions and and getting kids to ask the questions and then and then make it a process of discovery which is also part of storytelling it's not being told who killed them it's the process of discovery of reading the story and and discovering for yourself what happens anyway that's my now this little go here you've been very patient and then we'll come down yes yeah so I have a bit of a awkward question or a strange one I guess but I'll throw it at you in hopes you might entertain me I think so I've always been interested in science and physics and a few years ago I really started to get curious about science and physics and how would - things like consciousness and for her life and what happens after death and things of that nature and I'm wondering is there anything that about that topic that you might be willing to share with us sure yeah which is literally almost nothing um the people think I'm joking when I tell them that I do physics because it's easy but it is consciousness is a lot harder we we don't know what there's not even a good definition of consciousness my opinion I run meetings unconsciousness sorry my Institute which looks at everything and well beyond physics and so it's just much harder and so physics deals with the low-hanging fruit that's why it's been so successful consciousness is it is a topic which I think will and the brain is an area of hot understanding for which we're there new techniques to discover and learn about because science progresses really when they're new experimental techniques but it were the infant stages of that and and when everyone tells you they understand consciousness in general I think you should just walk away certainly as someone pointed out to me you can tell how well we understand something by how many books are written on it the more books the less we understand because right you know it quantum mechanics you just got a book on climb again you don't need 100 there are a number of books but one book will do direct book on quantum mechanics is all you need okay and there are tons of books on consciousness because we don't understand yet so physicists really have nothing to say about consciousness and there are some physicists have claimed to but we should be should be really skeptical of those just like you should be skeptical of everything you read but it's gonna be a long wait but now and then people say we'll never understand consciousness that's garbage because you know we're learning a lot and probably one of the ways we learn about consciousness and the Bolton is going to be involved in and is it has been involved in a meeting we've run on artificial intelligence at my Institute and one we're going to run probably will learn about consciousness by understanding machine consciousness as we make machines that one day may be conscious so I think that'll be interesting the question right here I've listened to your episode on the Joe Rogan experience about four times now and I'm still struggling so much to understand you know the content so I'm sure I'll do this time with your book but my question is um what advice you have for someone like me who's trying to continue to ask these questions and continue to inquire and really not I guess adopt one certain ideology or one certain form of thinking but just to continue to do research in and you know I ask you questions well I mean continue to ask questions really continue to ask what interests you that's all that matters is I mean I'd only do what I do what I do because it interests me I hesitate to give advice but I'll give you the I Gogh and get asked by students whether it bites in their from new physics students and I always tell them the same thing don't let the bastards get you down namely always remember why you're interested in stuff and and and just keep asking questions and you know what you don't have to master things that's the other misconception but science that bothers me so much that people somehow think that if you're not a scientist you can't if you don't even signs worth reading a but forget it book my mine or anyone elses and it amazes me because again you don't to be eric clapton to enjoy the guitar you're not Picasso to enjoy paintings you know you don't have to be Shakespeare to enjoy plays but somehow people think you have to be a scientist to enjoy science and that's not true because it's an experience all of us can share so just keep reading and asking questions and following your interests and and the world is a wonderful place and you don't need to be a master of everything - or a master indeed of anything to appreciate the vast wonder of the universe just enjoy it we have time for one last question it was a good way to end but we'll take this I'll take one more though I don't know this question which would better be a really good question oh I guess my question is when you talked about the higgs field and how the specific settings that these numbers of cosmological constant everything constants um relate to our existence do you feel like that's all there is and we happen to just have that lucky roll of the dice or is there some sense that you have that all these things have or do exist in some sort of multiverse and all we're just on well one that we can't exist on what we don't know the answer to that question but it could be that you're it could just be that the Higgs field froze in our universe in the way it did and it could be the other universes exist in which Higgs like field froze in different ways and then their laws of physics to be very different in fact that's the best motivated picture we have now based on some other fundamental physics if I describe in another book in the universe of nothing it's most likely we think there are the universes and it's quite likely the laws of physics are different nation in that case then you can understand this picture that I just gave you in a way that really is very similar to that of Charles Darwin because what I would describe to you that is cosmic natural selection you know bees weren't designed to see the colours of flowers they wouldn't exist if they couldn't see them it wouldn't we would be amazed to find ourselves living in a universe in which we couldn't exist could be worth a book or two but no one read it but but and so it really could just be that the properties of universe that seemed so fine tuned up for us or rather that we can have our fine tuned for are just that are just an accident in that sense or it could be that that that it could be that even in what might you might call a single universe the Higgs field could it over what are called causally disconnected regions could freeze in different ways and once again have different laws when it's very different than when I was growing up when I was growing up I want to be a scientist because I want to describe why the universe is the way it is it's very disconcerting to think that that in general the universe is quite different than this then it is us and it's a cosmic accident but once again the universe doesn't give a damn what we like or not and so the current best picture is that maybe that there may be fundamental reason why the Higgs had to freeze in a way it did that in different universes it'll freeze in different ways and that's probably the best picture which I find immensely satisfying because it's again like that that ice crystal there are many ice crystals in that image I showed you there are probably many universes and you know it doesn't mean that life can't exist in those universes it just means that life like ours can't we don't know what the locus of all possible intelligent life forms is so it could be that with different laws different systems can exist and those beings in that other universe may say Wow is it amazing that the universe is just so fine-tuned cannot communis it's just like to me it's just like asking isn't it amazing that my legs reach all the way exactly to the ground [Applause] hang around to sign some books if you have any and please grab a few on the way out thank you very much we'll see you again soon [Applause]

Channel: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Views: 15,868

Rating: 4.6744184 out of 5

Keywords: Lawrence Krauss, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Space, Time, Origins

Id: 0yGwbFsTb0w

Length: 68min 23sec (4103 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017