[Music] if you're watching this on YouTube you might have noticed that this episode is a week delayed but if you want to get early access to our episodes consider becoming a paying member if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share it with your friends thank you for all your support well Stephen I find myself somewhat in awe both as with one of the world's most distinguished scientist but also a physicist where physics is in some sense a sort of senior science I mean the Bedrock of all other science I'm a mere biologist I suppose biology has the complexity but physics has the fundamentals of course we physicists feel that way but we're much too polite to say so yes um um it has been said that uh whereas most um distinguished scientists tend not to be religious Believers um there's a slight tendency for biologists to be even more atheistic than physicists you have heard that do you what do you make of that if anything oh I don't know perhaps it's just that biologists have bloodied their Knuckles so much fighting over Evolution that they've become a little bit more militant and um I think physicists perhaps tend to since they hope that they're approaching some ultimate understanding of the laws of nature uh they tend to use God as a metaphor for that Einstein famously did uh Hawking has um without necessarily meaning very much by it um that's been all always my impression that that that most physicists who say they're religious if you actually probe a bit deeper it turns out that they're religious in the einsteinian sense um but you you probably know some genuinely I mean genuinely Christian or genuinely Jewish who really really do believe oh absolutely yeah um I know a number of general relativists for some reason people who work in Einstein's general theory of relativity uh who are devoutly religious uh I don't know why that in particular I knew uh one astrophysicist who said he was an orthodox Jew but didn't believe in God yes I mean nobody ever says they're an Orthodox Christian but we don't believe in God but that I mean because Judaism puts so much more of an emphasis on uh observance as compared to belief that it makes sense in way I think Hinduism in that sense is like Judaism that what's much more important is the dietary rules and the keeping various sabbaths and holidays uh you're honoring a tradition and in Judaism nobody ever catechized you about what you believe uh in fact obviously many of my friends are Jewish and uh I've asked them what they understand about the afterlife and they don't have the foggiest idea yeah it's not part of the official religion to have a definite idea about the afterlife I mean I think very different from Christianity yes and I think also in Judaism there's a a tradition of continual questioning isn't there sort of examining and turning the beliefs over and I suppose so yes the talmudic tradition um of course Christianity is more like Islam in that way it's really important that you believe in specific things and um you're likely to get killed by someone if you don't believe the right thing particularly someone of almost the same religion that's right but uh but not not quite um the whenever I'm asked sort of what's the most convincing evidence you could think of if which would really convince you that there is some kind of a supernatural being uh I think once upon a time uh say in the time of William py uh biology was was was was it because the the prodigious complexity of Life the beauty of it the the um the she intricacy and the stunning illusion of design which living things uh project py himself said said um I think something like um the heavenly bodies are not best fitted to demonstrate the existence of the creat you know I I think that's just an accident of the time that P lived uh because at that time the physical scientists had done a good job of explaining the solar system um although there were still things that were not well understood but you know you go back earlier everything seemed to require a Divine explanation even Newton uh thought that um all although he could account for the way the planets moved um and the tides and the fall of fruits um he could not account for the fact that there was a difference between dark matter and light matter between the Sun and the planets and in a letter to Bentley he uh said that that was the sort of thing that required Divine um intervention to explain why the sun shown and the planets did not nevertheless the eye as the instrument that sees things with sunlight uh surely Newton would have regarded that as even more of an Evidence of the Divine wouldn't he I don't know I don't know I don't know that he ever speculated about that he had Great Hopes for a unification of all the Sciences in terms of various forces acting on corpal of matter uh I don't know how far he went in in thinking of that that would apply to living things that's an interesting question I doubtless Newton Scholars could tell us but I don't I don't know the answer yes but it it's um it's true that uh by the early 19th century uh when py wrote the outstanding problem that seemed to require a Divine explanation was the problem of life and um I believe Cardinal Manning at least this is what I learned from Lon str's biography of Cardinal Manning uh became a de devout Christian by reading paley's book he was so convinced well Darwin himself was I mean Darwin himself read py as an undergraduate know Cambridge they all had to but Darwin was particularly impressed by it and and uh I think on The Voyage of the beagle he probably thought that what he was seeing when he roam through the Brazilian jungle and things was was evidence of of um God but although it's often said that it was Darwin who finally killed that kind of p pism and I think that's probably right nevertheless even before Darwin came along it never seemed to me to be a very logically co coherent argument I could have imagined indeed as David Hume did that before Darwin came along one would have said well I don't understand where this illusion of design comes from but a supernatural designer doesn't help we're still left with a with a with a mystery uh and so although it's very nice that Darwin did come along and actually answer the question even before Darwin came along we didn't actually so to speak need him in order to reject the idea of a supernatural designer we physicists are somewhat in that position because we hope for a uh set of very simple laws of nature that will account for everything we see but when we have them there will always be a question well why those laws and many people say in fact a Jesuit has argued to me that that's where God comes in that God ordained the laws and he is the ultimate explanation and of course the the response to that is well you know what uh have you really helped at all with that uh what explains God uh what explains why God is the way God is uh if you if you have some specific understanding of that three-letter word g d uh then you have the mystery why is God that way rather than some other way and if you don't have any specific understanding of what you mean by I hear the thunder I hope he's not getting annoyed with it um if you don't have any uh specific understanding of what you mean by God uh then what are you talking about yes quite then it then it's just an empty word I suppose a biologist would put an additional spin on that which is not just why he's God this way rather than that way but in order to do what he's supposed to be doing which is say ordaining the laws of physics to say nothing of forgiving our sins and listening to our prayers and things he would have to be a complex entity which is exactly the kind of entity that we are setting out to explain and which Darwin in fact does explain and so in a way um darwinian the darwinian theory raises our consciousness to the fact that any God worthy of the name would have to be much more complicated than an eye or a brain or a or a heart and therefore particularly uh I love this this is really great uh particularly demanding of just the kind of explanation which he purports to provide yes once in a just to change the subject for a moment uh once in a debate about this sort of thing uh someone in the audience said uh uh your view of that there is isn't any God is not falsifiable and I said yes it is falsifiable a bolt of lightning can come down and strike me dead on and then it would my view would be falsified and I suppose listening to the Thunder reminds me of but going back to what we were saying yes um expl it's it's a little bit like the explanations the uh the Greeks were satisfied you know Aristotle explained falling bodies by saying going to their natural place which is toward the toward the center of the earth well when you say that you really haven't learned anything more about falling bodies it hasn't helped you to say that and in the same way talking about a God who is comple complex and created the world the way it is you haven't learned anything it doesn't help you to anticipate anything you'll discover in nature but I don't think one should underestimate uh the fix we're in that in the end we will not be able to explain uh the world that uh we will have some laws of some set of laws of nature we will not be able to derive them on the ground simply of mathematical consistency because we can already think of mathematically consistent laws that don't describe the world as we know it and we will always be left with a um question why are the laws of nature what they are rather than some other laws and uh I I don't see any way out of that and I I just regard it as just another one of the tragedies that we have to get used to like the tragedy that we will die and the tragedy well I don't want to uh Linger on tragedy but I think essentially the position of human beings is a tragic one uh and the more we understand the more clearly tragic it is and um part of it which particularly affects a physicist is the tragedy of never being able to come to a really satisfying conclusion of our questions why and uh know what do we do in in in this tragedy I think uh well Shakespeare showed us that one way of living with tragedy is to mix it in with comedy yes and um uh we can have we can take a certain amusement at our position always seeking why why why never coming to the end um I think humor is one of the leavening agents that uh makes our the tragedy of our position uh possible uh the Greeks in writing their plays didn't understand that that you could mix comedy and tragedy there's no comedy in in Sophocles um but Shakespeare understood and I think that's what's so great about I that's right I mean I mean moving to to another level I I love the comic novels of Douglas Adams uh have you read any of his oh well I think you might like them because he uses comedy but in a a rather sophisticated scientific way and so and so his jokes would would really appeal to a modern physicist who who understands well I've heard of the one you know what is the the secret to everything it's 43 or no no yeah they're much much better than that I mean um I can't you might you you might enjoy it but going back to the to the tragedy of never finally understanding I mean you're making pretty good progress working your way back through the first three minutes and and getting where where are you now to the first Pico second or something we don't I mean if our present there's so many powers of 10 that I I don't even know what English word to apply to it but uh we certainly uh can directly observe the universe as it was when it was 380,000 years old that's the microwave radiation that uh comes to us essentially undisturbed from that time and that's been a great success story in cosmology the detailed analysis of this radiation that fills the universe and is not quite uniform everywhere it's the non-uniformities that are so interesting um and so important for what happened later of course yes well they that they are the non-uniformities that ultimately grew into uh the Proto galaxies and then galaxies and then clusters of galaxies and uh allowed us to to arise um but looking back earlier than the first 380,000 years old we we have theories and the theories work in fact um uh some of our theories that describe what happened when the universe was 3 minutes old uh tell us the chemical composition with which the Stars started and that that works too I mean the predictions come out right uh there's a certain amount of hydrogen a certain amount of helium a certain amount of certain rare isotopes of hydrogen helium helium 3 and hydrogen 2 that uh we can calculate the amounts and that's what we observe in the app oldest Stars so that actually uh more accurately that's what we observe in uh The Intergalactic material out of which the stars form uh so in terms of things we can actually observe I suppose you could say we've traced the history of the universe back to the first three minutes um earlier than that it's just pure Theory except that the these in non-uniformities in the microwave radiation which is so important which we're studying with radio telescopes and which we believe and have every reason to believe grew into the distribution of matter we see in the sky these non-uniformities we we believe we have a theory for their origin in terms of a pre- big bang phase called the period of inflation and it works that is it it predict certain properties for example the the strength of the fluctuations as a function of how large they are um what's the probability of seeing a fluctuation this big as compared to one that big uh that theory works and it deals with a period of time which is incredibly uh early in the history of the universe so much so early that you really begin to wonder whether there there really was a beginning or or should you even talk about a beginning I mean it's so I don't even know how to say how early it is but it's it's way earlier than the first hund 380,000 years or the first 3 minutes it's uh it's an incredibly small fraction of a second after the beginning and that those theories seem to work but you know that's only going back so far then you you have to go back to what started inflation what started this inflationary period and we have theories uh there are some attractive theories but they can't be tested we don't have any observational handle on them even without an observational handle however if you've got a theory which is even plausible I'd be grateful for that well there is a theory of chaotic C uh inflation due to Andre Lind at Stanford that um there there are certain Fields uh they're the kind of fields we encounter in our modern theories of elementary particle physics they're known technically as scalar fields that fill the universe and essentially they they are chaotic at the beginning that one does not impose any particular initial condition on the universe U it's just as complicated as you can imagine which is a nice uh beginning because you don't have to fine-tune any conditions and U this burbles on and it it the flu you have fluctuations which are continually increasing and decreasing it's all very complicated every once in a while uh Sheely by accident a patch of this fluctuating field become happens to become smooth that is it it doesn't vary much over a sufficiently large region of space just by accident not by any design that region you can show according to reasonable dynamical assumptions will then blow up will inflate will increase in size exponentially becoming smoother and smoother turning into the inflationary phase which we think preceded our big bang but this didn't just happen once it happened again and again with and perhaps time without end and uh our big bang that we are that that is all we can observe directly that is 13.7 billion years old and we now know that number to 1% right um that big bang is just one episode in a chaotic Universe which is always burping off these big bangs does that I mean there are lots of universes then there are lot well what we call a universe Our Big Bang there are lots of them I mean I guess for linguistic Purity one should reserve the word Universe for the whole thing the whole shebang and uh talk about each of our big bangs as a subuniverse but very often people refer to each Big Bang as a universe and then they use the term Multiverse for the whole thing and I think it's it's IR it's up to you what language you use uh the Multiverse idea has some very attractive features I mean it arose out of thinking of INF theories of inflation uh but it has had interesting byproducts because if this idea is correct and we don't yet know it's at this point it's just a speculation but if this idea is correct there's every reason to expect that in the different Big Bangs that occur you will have different conditions different values for what we call the fundamental constants and um so that the fact that the constants of nature are suitable for life which is clearly true we observe uh may not be um may not be a universal fact it may just be an accident just as the fact that the temperature of the earth is suitable for life is not true of planets in obviously we have to be on a planet we have to be on a planet in which the temperature is suitable I don't know exactly what the range is most people think water has to be liquid we could argue about that doesn't leave very much range yeah no May perhaps life could arise in liquid methane but clearly there is some limits I don't think life can Arise at one degree Kelvin I don't think it AR can Arise at 100,000 degrees Kelvin so there's some range of temperatures in which life can arise and it's only as you say it's only on the planets that happen to be in that fortunate position or in the universes that happen to be and and then this this is U then carried over by analogy into the um into our universe that it's only in those big bangs where the values of the constants are suitable where life can arise in other words um if there was I don't think there's really any evidence for a very precise fine-tuning of the constant of nature that's interesting because some physicists seem to think there is Extreme I know I've argued about that uh one one of the examples that is often quoted is a certain energy level of carbon of the carbon nucleus if it was 10% higher or 10% lower than the nuclear reactions that build up oxygen from carbon and stars wouldn't work this was Fred hil's argument wasn't yeah well if Fred hoil was the one who realized there had to be this energy level and that nuclear synthesis wouldn't work well with without it well the the fact that there is such an energy level that just that energy does not require a fine-tuning of the I think and I've argued with people about this I don't think it requires a fine-tuning of the um consant of nature because that state of the carbon nucleus um is essentially a a a bound state of a burum 8 I'm getting very technical buril nucleus and a h and a helium nucleus and that's just the condition that you need in order to allow nuclear synthesis to occur so even if you change the constants of nature the value of the energy of this state would change but it would still be a bate plus an alpha particle plus a helium nucleus and so it wouldn't make much difference as far as nucleo synthesis yes there is one constant that seems to be fantastically fine tuned but we don't again we're not sure and that is the constant called The Dark Energy the or the vacuum energy or the cosmological constant this is the energy in space itself not associated with any particles or or radiation but just an energy so many calories per quart of space everywhere in the universe whether there's matter there or not uh the uh amount of this has been measured it's been observed that it's not zero it has a small finite value uh to give an idea of the value it's it's about the amount of in a volume the size of the Earth whether the Earth is there or not just in that volume of space the amount of energy is the energy in a few hundred barrels of petroleum okay uh not a lot for the volume the size of the Earth that energy is detected by its effect on the expansion of the universe it's causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate and that that's something was discovered 10 years ago by two different pairs two different teams of astronomers studying the uh the speed and distance of distant galaxies um this now we can we try to calculate what this energy is from first principles uh there are various reasons why we can't calculate but we can calculate certain contributions to it for example we can say fluctuations in the electromagnetic field just due to the quantum nature of radiation uh not down to arbitrarily small wavelengths because we don't understand anything at very very short distances but just down to the shortest distances is at which we think we understand physics which is roughly 100th the size of an atomic nucleus those are the shortest distances that have been probed in our accelerators so counting the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field or the gravitational field or any other field down to the shortest distances that we have probed the energy that we can we can calculate what energy that gives space and it comes out to about 56 orders of magnitude larger than the observed value um that is a one with 56 zeros uh now it could well you just have to shrug your shoulders and say well there are the other contributions we can't calculate like the contributions from fluctuations with even shorter wavelength they clearly cancel but it's a it's a pretty accurate cancellation a cancellation that's accurate to 56 decimal places yes and that has us Disturbed and uh there are I mean it's possible that that will be explained in a way that has nothing to do with the Multiverse uh it may be that for some fundamental physics reason that we don't know uh the universe is evolving toward a state where that vacuum energy that dark energy is exactly zero and it's small now just because the universe is old and it's not far from that final State no one has constructed a theory in which that's true I mean it's not only a speculation the theory would be speculative but we don't have a theory in which that speculation is mathematically realized yeah so it but it's a possibility uh but the only other explanation well it's not even an explanation because we don't have a candidate Theory but the only explanation that seems to work is that um this is just one of those things that varies from sub Universe to sub Universe from big bang to Big Bang in most of the big bangs it's very large it's much larger than what we observe and in those big bangs They go through because this energy drives the expansion of the universe depending on whether it's positive or negative the universe either blows up so rapidly there's no time for Galaxies or stars to form or it crunches it Recaps so rapidly again there's no time for life to form yes so it has to be small for life to exist uh and it's about as small as it as in fact that's interesting it's not much smaller than it would have to be to allow life to arise and the fact that the cancellation is so precise means that the number of universes in the Multiverse you need to postulate in order to anthropically be comfortable with it is very very large and it must be at least 10 to the 56 or or in fact yeah if you think you have some idea about fluctuations at even shorter distances I think you would say at least 10 to the 120 uh in fact that that's a little disturbing but it a completely separate development not motivated by this at all has taken place recently in in string theory uh String Theory you know is our best hope for a theory unifying all the forces of nature gravity and all the other forces all the particles it's the most um it's been a little disappointing that it hasn't led to any specific breakthrough in understanding what we already know but it still it's the best game in town the best hope we have for a really fundamental understanding it was realized number of years ago largely through the work of Edward Whitten uh that what had seemed to be about half a dozen different possible string theories was really only one string theory that there's there's just one string theory uh which but it manifests itself in many ways and in fact not in half a dozen different ways but the solutions of string theory are incredibly numerous and in fact the estimate that people usually quote although it's it's highly uh approximate is something like 10 to the 500 Solutions of string theory and these Solutions fill out what what string theorists call A landscape and uh each one of them may represent a possible kind of big bang now again this is very speculative uh because we don't understand String Theory at a really at the Deep level that we need to understand it but this has already upset some um religious leaders um Cardinal shanbor the the cinal AR Bishop yeah of well you've had problems with him with regard to evolution he wrote an oped article in the times a few years ago in which he um he attacked the Neo darwinian synthesis is that the right word yeah and um he attacked the idea of evolution without design but he also attacked the Multiverse idea yes and it did my heart good to see that because you know you evolutionary biologists get all the fun being attacked by religious zealots and here cardinal shanbor at least knew enough about cosmology to realize we were worth attacking um I'm glad you enjoy it I I must say I don't mind either I no I mean isn't it better than being ignored yes uh there are teachers of biology in this country who tell me that they are intimidated they don't dare teach these contentious subjects and I find it hard to understand because I should have thought it would be more interesting to teach her something controversial but they're frightened of being I I don't know attacked by parents or by uh maybe the children themselves sometimes well yes I mean the uh I think there are school boards that are very backward uh I've I testified in front of the uh Texas State Board of Education which is particularly influential because of Texas that's right it's at that point uh they were honestly confused they really thought that uh intelligent design was an alternate scientific theory and why not present both scientific theories and uh they were not anti-science they uh they thought it was science they thought it was science and they were I think I think they their mind was changed by scientists coming before them and telling them no it's not science it's it's jiggery pokery um I mean the myth has been assiduously promulgated this it been taken in by uh I mean there are people who are uh much more uh difficult to deal with than than I found the Texas Board of Education and I think and we won that argument now it's coming up again in Texas um I think this is beginning to be a problem in Europe yes and I understand it's very much a problem in the Islamic world that there's a strong prejudice against teaching the theory of evolution there that's true in fact perhaps of teaching basic science at all uh the Islamic world uh took a turn away from science sometime in the 12th or 13th century which is really quite tragic uh given their rather good role yeah preserving Greek science before there's a lovely line in Philip hit's book about the Arabs uh he's talking about the great period of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad at the time of kifs harun Al Rashid and al- Mamon and um he said while uh al- Rashid and al- Mamon were studying Greek and Persian philosophy um shamain and his Lords were dabbling in the art of writing their names yes right very go very good coming back to the to the alleged fine tuning of the Universe um I was interested in one of the things us well many things but um I've always tried to explain it as an amatur because I'm not a physicist um having accepted the the word of physicist that there is an element of fine tuning and I've tried to lay out three possible explanations one one would be God which as I've said isn't an explanation at all one would be um the um Multiverse and then anthropically with hindsight saying we have to be sitting in one of the universes that could give us but the third one which I've attributed to you oh no possibly wrongly uh would be um I what I call the Macho physicists who say well uh it's just that we don't understand um uh why these things are are the way they are one day we will uh it when when we have a theory of everything it will be understood but it sounds from our conversation as though that I I misrepresented you there well I don't know I mean I really am not impressed with the amount of fine-tuning there is with the ception of this one the dark energy yes that might I mean and that you can say qualitatively the amount of dark energy now is comparable to the amount of energy in matter now it's a few times larger but it's not very different maybe there will be an explanation for that and and uh in a fundamental explanation uh people have aimed at at that sort of thing Stephen Hawking for instance has um so I think it's fair to say we don't know if you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning that uh if you change some otherwise arbitrary parameter numerical quantity by 1% in either direction life would become impossible and that was just a free constant in your theory it could have any value uh then I think you would really uh be left with only the two other explanations either a benevolent designer or a Multiverse but the benevolent designer we we we know can't work because it it begs the question that you've raised so that leaves us with the Multiverse doesn't it uh well it doesn't solve the problem but it opens up the realm of possible speculation um in a way that I can't even imagine thinking but it it changes the nature of of the game uh but the Multiverse would be really an explanation then very satisfying I mean I've heard it said that physicists somehow think it's cheating but but I think it's rather elegant I think it's rather beautiful uh well we've had to live with this before you know um there was a time when it was thought that the distances of the planets from the Sun were dictated by geometrical principles Kepler had a theory like that although it was only the ratios of the distances and it somewhat of a disappointment to learn with Newton's theory that we were never going to have a fundamental theory of um the distances of planets from the stars I mean each planet is the distance it is because of a historical accidents that can't when will we ever be able to explain precisely why the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun now clearly we're not going to be able to do that the only explanation is a rather fuzzy anthropic one which allows for it to be 92 or 94 million miles from the Sun um the uh the difference between that and the Multiverse is of course we can see that there are lots of planets I mean we uh we have only discovered a few dozen planets in this universe but our theories tell us they they're vast numbers because most a large fraction of stars seem to have planets so the existence of the other planets is no longer a speculation well the existence of the other Big Bangs is a pure speculation right now but it may not always be but it uh it's not the case that the existence of the other Big Bangs we postulate only for anthropic reasons I mean you have other reasons for that's right in fact Cardinal shanbor in his oped article said precisely that the Multiverse idea was invented in order to avoid the appearance of design in the universe and that's simply true it's historically not true okay right now going back to the planets which is a much easier case of course um I've I think you can turn this argument quite interestingly on its head and point out that since there are obviously going to be probably billions and billions of billions of planets um if which is perfectly Possible only one of them has life because we know no nothing else than that then we would have to say that our theories of the origin of life in our theories of the origin of life we are looking for a chemical event which has to be quite staggeringly improbable uh because otherwise we would expect the universe to be teeming with life well you're the biologist you would know better than I do how improbable do you think it is that that's a quite separate question and and it's an interesting question but what I'm saying is that the statistical argument allows us to postulate an event which would be so improbable that we would ordinarily call it impossible uh because it it only has to happen once uh yes and with hindsight we have to be on on that planet right I mean the our existence tells us nothing about how probable it is for life to arise given the right conditions uh even the fact apparently we know now that life arose rather early in the history of that helps a bit that's an additional but even that doesn't help very much because suppose life had had Arisen on Earth uh not when it did but a 100 million years later still very early as the earth goes the Earth is four and a half billion years old but still very early well that means Evolution would now be 100 million years behind behind behind schedule behind schedule and uh we would not be here talking about it and uh so the condition well I don't know does it take uh no two billion years for intelligent life to arise once Life Starts perhaps it does possibly um I mean may maybe it takes that long to get a eukariotic cell however I don't think there is a shedule once you get out to I mean it's it's not clear why the dinosaurs didn't produce intelligent life they might well have done in which case it would have would have happened uh at least 65 million years earlier so I I don't think you can say that that it took uh as you say two billion years from the origin of the eukariotic cell in order to get intelligent life I think it could have happened much earlier than that or or indeed much later I think that's anci I can't believe that something like that worm that all the biologists study C eleg which has about a 100 neurons in its nervous system I don't think that could ever oh no no no uh but uh I mean that's that's a multi-celled organism with a nervous system but it it it still is not going to learn Quantum there's no there's there's no timetable in the sense that um 65 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct only then had Evolution kind of breasted the tape of of it it could have happened 10 million years earlier or 10 m million years later or well it may be that uh we're on the G the taale of the gaussian that is uh it's very improbable that life arose as early as we did as it did after the formation of eukaryotic cells and if that's true then there's a strong selection that it's only U life that arises very early in the history of the universe that has a chance becoming intelligent has time before before so and if that's true and we don't know that it is but if that's true then the fact that life arose very early on Earth does not argue that life arises readily whenever the conditions are right uh it might be that it's still an incredibly unlikely thing and uh it's only on the doubly rare cases where it arises very early that uh it then becomes intelligent and of course we don't know how rare life is it could be very common I think we pretty much know that intelligent life is is rare because otherwise we'd have been visited by radio uh transmission the firy argument where are they where are they um and so I think you have to say that maybe there's a a Cascade of improbabilities there's the origin of Life perhaps the origin of the eukariotic cell or something like it and the origin of intelligence and Technology but even we've got through all those hurdles even that you know uh We've sampled um in terms of how long it takes to reach us we've sampled only a few tens of thousands of light years even assuming people can travel at the speed of light yes um or that they send us signals um so we've we've perhaps sampled a volume of our galaxy it's a pretty small sphere 10,000 Lighty years but it's only one Galaxy and there are billions of galaxies um so it may be that life maybe occurs a few times in each Galaxy I would have thought yes I mean yeah and and and then it's still quite uh frequent um well it's it wouldn't it be exciting if uh signs of a completely independent uh life were found even on Earth I mean it might be that you one could find organisms that had a different genetic code well Paul Davis is actively looking for this it would only take a different genetic code I mean because as far as we know the DNA code is universal the minor Minor Details but a different genetic code either not based on DNA or based on even based on DNA with completely different lookup table because are there's nothing very attractive or elegant or efficient about the genetic code we have no I mean Francis Crick devised a much better one yeah I heard that yes yeah what a Pity yes what a Pity that's right uh the uh you know I'm quite an opponent of man space flight uh not because I think it's bad in itself but just it's incredibly expensive and it's sold as a way of doing science and I don't think it is a good way of doing science um I think space flight uh unman missions are very important I'd like to see lots of unmanned missions to Mars scooping up soil and examining it but I must say if they discovered something on Mars that required human inspection to decide whether it really was a sign of life that would change my mind about wouldn't it be staggering wouldn't it be amazing but I don't see that happening and I don't see why we would want to send a very limited number of humans to Mars examining just very small regions of the surface rather than hundreds of robots yeah that's pure that's public relations isn't it that's that's oh there's some kind of Mystique about putting people into space I've argued about it and uh uh most astronomers I think would agree with me most a aeronautical Engineers or whatever they are disagree they love the idea it's a challenge to them yeah that's right and of course politicians love it what about talking about big science I presumably you're excitedly looking forward to what CERN starts to produce uh with a certain amount of Terror that uh you know they may discover great things things like the particles that make up Dark Matter or they might discover signs of super symmetry uh they probably will discover the so-called higs boson uh which in theory of Salam and myself is responsible for the breakdown of the Symmetry between the weak and the electromagnetic forces but um uh it may be that they'll only discover the higs boson and nothing else and we'll be left um looking at our toes and wondering what are we going to do next you know uh there may be nothing exciting really new that can be reached with the large headon but it was worth doing nevertheless oh well we have to find out and of course there's a good chance that they're going to discover something very exciting but uh I have fears that uh my in a way it's less in if they don't discover the higs bone because that would be a contradiction of our good theories and then we would all go back to the drawing boards and we have various alternative theories that might explain that uh and it would be exciting for a while but if all they discover is a uh a higs boson with roughly the properties that the theory predicts and nothing else uh I I what you're saying uh nevertheless wouldn't you say to a young person now would be a very exciting time to go into physics because of this mean in Britain they're moving away from physic s has cut it's not only cut it support for this it's cut its support for uh a number of uh telescopes and other things it's cut its support for the next linear collider yes no it's kept its support I think for CERN uh I think Britain yes has maintained its support for CERN which is the laboratory where the large hron collider uh will be placed uh well I would say that anyone who goes into physics right now would be a little bit too late to participate in in the work of the LHC and uh whether or not it would be a good career move depends on what they're going to discuss I think I'm thinking of theoretical physics that that that depending upon what they discover mightn't there be a sort of opening of yes damn walls if they discover something exciting then then by all means but if all they discover is the higs bow on yes uh and it has the properties we expect then no I would say that uh the theorists are going to be very glown right um a moment ago you you mentioned um Abdus Salam yeah uh can I ask was was he one of those who was a genuinely religious I mean I've heard it said he was a devout Muslim and I've always wondered about well when I first met him I visited Imperial College in the Academic Year 6162 he had a bottle of Scotch in his desk drawer yes so he was he was he wasn't an observant mus he wasn't completely observant he was religious and as the years went by he he gave up alcohol uh but he was he belonged to a sect the AMD uh I think that's what it's called I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly that has been officially declared heretic in Pakistan his home country and as a result for many years he wasn't allowed back into Pakistan uh but he was quite religious about that I mean uh you know I regard all religion with a certain sense of bemusement and the amdis sect seemed even a little bit more peculiar than the other branches of Islam but uh he was quite serious about it he had two wives uh one of whom uh an Oxford D I know her yes and the other is a very conventional Pakistani woman who lives in London and they both came to the Nobel Prize uh in 1979 and they alternated um appearances at the uh at the official events um he uh it's interesting because although he was quite devout as a Muslim he deplored the anti-scientific attitude that he found in the world of Islam he he told me that he had tried to get the the states of the Persian Gulf which are very oil rich like Dubai and and so on um Bahrain uh he tried to get them uh to put money into building universities that would uh include a component of basic science and he said that they were very resistant to that that they wanted to go into technology they were enthusiastic about technology but they they they did not want to do fundamental science but because they thought that was um corrosive to religious belief probably rightly so yes I I suspect they're but he didn't think that then he didn't think it was no no his point of view was that of many well-meaning physicists I know in America who think oh there's no problem you science religion can happily coexist yes I think in fact um uh although it's a slow process and there are many exceptions that in the long run uh science is eating the lunch of religion yeah I think so too and that uh we already have seen a great weakening of of religious belief it's obvious in Europe I think it's also true in America I I think Americans believe in religion I on the average they believe that religion is good for you and um they uh but but when you ask them what do they actually believe about the afterlife or about how do you how are you saved they're likely to tell you know well it isn't so important what you believe the important thing is to good live a good life I've heard that so many times me too so I think the um the you know if I really cared about religion and I looked at the state of religion religion in America I think I would cry over it it it's religion is a mile wide and an inch deep it it doesn't go very far it doesn't make me cry it makes me laugh but we we we're running out of time um so can can we resume after I began by saying I felt humble as a biologist and one of the reasons is the sheer mysteriousness of physics which I suppose is nowhere more true than in fundamental particle physics uh and but as a biologist I I try to come to terms with why it's so hard to understand and I I'm wondering what do you think of this that something about um well natural selection equipped our brains to uh control medium-sized bodies which is moving at medium speeds um in roughly two Dimensions rather than well in three three dimensions um and therefore things like multi-dimensionality things like um particles B iously going through two slits or one depending upon when anybody's looking at them uh and um the the slightly less mysterious aspects of of Relativity our brains were never equipped to understand that kind of thing because we didn't need to but if we had been denisons of interstellar space traveling at near the speed of light relatively would be second nature to us and if we had been uh the size of fundamental particles we wouldn't find mysterious the things that that I at least find mysterious do you find them mysterious or or or do you cope with them in in your own mind I think you're exactly right about why they seem mysterious uh we cope with them uh using mathematics and we um have mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics that are perfectly satisfactory we know how to calculate things uh a course in physics is a series of problems the student has to learn how to calculate the energy levels of the hydrogen atom the classic problem that um convinced people that they were on the right track during the development of quantum mechanics uh occasionally perhaps we lose our sense of strangeness because the mathematics become so familiar to us um I think there are things that are U truly strange and that U even though we can deal with them mathematics we shouldn't lose the sense of strangeness not relativity uh which no long seems to me uh paradoxical or weird but quantum mechanics is really strange uh the the the interpretation of quantum mechanics that developed in the early 1930s uh under the leadership of Neil Spore in Copenhagen the Copenhagen interpretation I think is fundamentally flawed it it divides the world into physical systems and observers yeah and that can't be right observers are parts of the world they have to be described by the same quantum mechanical language as everything else uh the the first person who uh thought seriously about that and tried to develop an alternative way of looking at quantum mechanics was a graduate student at Princeton Everett you ever it you ever it and but his solution to the problem uh is in a way even weirder uh there there is something called the wave function which evolves in a completely deterministic way and it there is a wave function of the universe which governs everything including all our observers and their apparatus and the physics journals in which they publish their results and uh all of that all that happens during a measurement and a p subsequent publication is all described in the evolution of the wave function but if you have if you believe that then you really have to believe that uh since in an experiment uh we can have a particle which has neither a definite spin this way or this way but is a super position of the two when the spin is measured it's either this way or this way one or the other with different probabilities in you Everett in in Everett's interpretation both are realized the universe splits into a world in which the electron is spinning this way and the Observer sees it spinning this way and another world where it's spinning this way and the Observer spinning sees it spinning that way and this happens not only in physics buildings but continually throughout the universe so that uh the way function of the universe is infinitely more complicated than we normally think of the universe itself as being it contains components for every possible history uh of of the things in it now that's so weird that you know it's hard to it's hard to think in those it seems to me to be ever so slightly less weird than the Copenhagen interpretation well it's less weird in the sense that it's just hideously uneconomical yeah well I would say the Copenhagen interpretation is just hopeless because I the split between observers and observers can't be different from electrons and Spins and so um there is a hope which I I nurse but I don't see being realized that eventually we'll find that quantum mechanics as we know it now is just an approximation and that when uh when an electron which is in a superposition of states in which it's spinning this way or this way when it interacts with some big thing like a physicist a macroscopic body like a physicist or his his apparatus uh actually there is a phys physical decay of the wave function into a wave function where the electron is purely moving this way or purely moving the other way and that um in fact the history of the world has not split there has been an evolution of the wave function which is not the kind of thing that occurs in quantum mechanics as We Know It uh but represents a um something that's specific to large bodies I think uh some people have thought that perhaps gravitation has something to do with this that after all large bodies are the only ones where gravity uh is important gravity is incredibly weak force on the atomic level uh that would make sense of the whole thing if that were true but it requires a modification of quantum mechanics and there are papers that suggest possible modifications of quantum mechanics that's a great hope isn't it that would be wonderful the that's the best hope that we will find out that quantum mechanics as we know it actually breaks down for very large things now it's true that the predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified for electrons that are separated by macroscopic distances we can verify that there really is what's called an entanglement that you can have two electrons that are meters away from each other where the physical state is not a state where one is up and the other is down but one which is a superposition of left up right down and left down right up so these two particles know about each other yeah and um it's just what you expect Quantum mechanically and it happens over macroscopic distances but they're still just electrons they're not big heavy things with gravitational fields so it may be that uh these experiments that verify quantum mechanics at macroscopic Scales uh don't really settle the argument uh but I uh well I tell a story in something I wrote a true story that uh a friend of mine who was the physicist at the University of Texas who now incidentally wound up at Oxford um Philip candelis uh was standing next to me waiting for an elevator and I asked him what ever happened to so and so mentioning a graduate student who would see seemed very promising and then we never heard of again and Phil nodded his head sadly and said he tried to understand quantum [Laughter] mechanics well I try and try and try but um I never seem to get anywhere and the amazing thing is that we don't need to that um you can live your whole life calculating the energy levels of atoms and molecules and calculating cross-sections for elementary particle reactions using quantum mechanics every day as part of your intellectual toolkit and never confront these problem well I've met physicists who' have said well why bother I mean the mathematics works and and that seems to me so unsatisfactory it is unsatisfactory but it's not professionally unsatisfactory it's only humanly I can see that but there's a slight analogy it's not nothing like so profound I think I've heard you say all right uh that many physicists going back to the god question AR don't really care I mean they don't think it's an interesting question I can't can't quite get that I mean it does seem to me that I I don't believe in God but it does seem to me that uh you got to care about it because because if it's true it's the most important thing in the world that's right I agree um well I think the expression I used is that most of my friends in physics uh don't care enough about religion to qualify as practicing atheists yes uh they just don't care and they don't want to think about it and I do think about it I try not to think about it too much I mean clearly one could let it it run I mean you could let it run away with you I've visited organizations of people who are atheists and who gathered together for mutual comfort it it to me it smells a little bit like a church yeah they're not very edifying some of those meetings uh but I mean they're very well meaning people and I you know I agree with them but um I wouldn't build my life around you go along to give them a bit of moral support but well I they invited me so I went but um and I think maybe you and I have also some slight difference in our um attitude toward religion uh in on the aesthetic level I uh although perhaps not but you know it's been part of our lives for so long so much of History has been bound up with it that you you can't not not only be interested but have kind of respect for it the way you would have respect for someone who you don't particularly like but who's still very powerful and uh and has played a large role in your life I'm not sure the respect is the word I'd use but but certainly I mean when you think of the great music that's been inspired by it and and but obviously because that's where the money was I mean you get it's not only because that's why the money there is I mean some of it yes uh but some of it seems to have a really religious feeling to it um uh I don't know about music but you know in poetry there are poets um well with John Dunn I don't know I mean he was such a Randy preacher but uh but with someone like Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins I think there really is a religious inspiration there to I mean I I to be Su and I think giving up religion we would lose Gerard Manley and and I'm sure Hopkins didn't make that much money from it either but but we wouldn't lose Shakespeare there's not a bit of religious inspiration in all of shakespare that's right and that's one of the I mean that's uh that's considerably more important than Hopkins yes nevertheless you can't read Shakespeare without knowing the Bible because I mean you can't you can't take you have to know about it and he uses witches and and he has Hamlet worrying about sending claudius's soul to hell but there's not the slightest feeling that Shakespeare himself took that very seriously no that's right but I but I mean I am in favor of religious education in the sense of of Education in the Bible and and I suppose other holy books well and also the the Greek myths and the and the Nordic myths as well or you can't um you can't understand some of it is great literature some of it isn't I mean the Bible is a mixed bag of uh a friend of mine who more learned in these things than I am said it was really an anthology of Hebrew literature and some of it's good and some of it isn't so good uh well in the in the King James vers it some of it is I'm talking about the Old Testament of course yes um I I I I can't read the Hebrew but but but I'm told that for example my favorite book Ecclesiastes which in in the in the 17th century English is Ravishing I'm told that in Hebrew it's very good as well yeah well in fact a uh an Israeli told me that the King James version is closer to the Hebrew Bible than Modern English versions because the Hebrew Bible had a archaic flavor when When It Was Written I see yes and and you get more of a feeling of the Hebrew Bible by reading the King James I remember I went to a a Catholic mass and a friend took me to and I went to be friendly and um they use that line which in the King James version is now we see as through a glass Darkly they translate into Modern English now we see as obscurely not clearly or something like that it was it was soad yes yes um vanity of vanity sayth the preacher all is Vanity that's translated as hopeless hopeless or something like that just awful um I mean if if you really want to kill religion translate the holy books into into modern speech and and and that that will go a long way towards it and of course we would an architecture we would lose so much those wonderful Cathedrals and mosques uh this I remember how impressed I was with the alaxa mosque in yes in Jerusalem yeah you you can't get away from that and I I wouldn't I wouldn't wish to but but it's done so much harm and uh well I use this metaphor that it's a crazy old Aunt who used to be beautiful quite fond of her we fond of her in a way but it still be better when she's gone I think that's I think that's right what do you think about um but you said I won't recruit reget it at all I won't regret it at all no but but but I I I get the point even even so um in American Education in my own field of of evolution it's it's there's a very very serious attempt to subvert Science Education that doesn't seem to be happening in physics or is it oh I don't think it's happening uh I've never heard of anyone attacking the the teaching of cosmology but they don't go into it very much in high school and at the college level there's no attempt I mean I I you're not saying that at the University level there's an attempt to subvert the teaching of evolution well I think I think so really I have wasn't aware of that uh I'm i' I've known teachers who uh in almost every class they teach there will be a significant minority not maybe even quite a large minority of students who will ostentatiously fold their arms and kind of look defiant when you when you start uh talking about maybe even walk out in extreme cases go and complain to the dean that they've been offended uh their religious beliefs have been offended one of the uh things that may help may work in this direction is that we I think we over rely on student evaluations yes uh I think um student evaluations should not be given very great weight uh uh precisely well partly for this reason because they provide a uh incentive for the teacher to teach in an ingratiating comfortable way yes and uh well I taught a course in course in the history of science uh in fact I will again in the fall and uh I went a lot into the interaction of Science and religion and uh I was sort of hoping that some student would get upset with me and that we would have an interesting interaction but you know I'm I'm at a position where I can I can live with it uh I think for someone say an assistant professor who doesn't have din it's a serious problem it's not a serious problem for me I was actually looking forward to a little uh Donnie Brooke but um it didn't happen I don't I don't think I somebody of of of your clout and Prestige might actually just look around and perhaps ask whether there are any Junior professors of biology who are having a hard time well that would be interesting perhaps you could put put your weight behind them if if they are getting in trouble yeah well I uh the only one people in the biology side here I know are senior professors but uh that's an interesting question and I certainly will ask the question if if I have a chance I I had assumed that the universities just as you know American secondary school education is pretty terrible on the average American University education is pretty good and when you get The Graduate Ed education it's excellent um I assume the same was true about academic freedom that uh there's a lot of pressures at the high school level much less so for undergraduates and none at all for graduate students but I may be wrong about that that that maybe I I have heard the story about Texas having a particularly disproportionate influence on on um textbook yes well that's just economics that for uh historical reasons Texas selects its um textbooks at the at the high school level excuse me at the state level and um so it buys a lot of books all in one package yes I I remember you know I I gave a talk once soon after coming to Texas uh to a uh Convention of high school science teachers and they were interested in just this sort of question and I was talking about how it's important to resist pressures and teach Evolution and all this sort of thing and they sat there they had heard that before and then I said I really didn't see why the question arose because it seemed to me that every High School teacher should be able to select his or her own textbooks and to to fit the kind of course that he or she wants to give at that point I got a roar of Applause and I got a standing ovation because was much more important to them uh than the question of what they taught is is their intellectual Independence and they they really chafed under the system of having prescribed courses with pre prescribed textbooks our daughter did not go to a public well what we call a public high school um she went to the equivalent of an English public school um a private private school yeah Andover yeah uh George Bush's school and um although she turned out differently yes I'm glad to hear that and her her professors her teachers they weren't called professors her teachers uh designed their own courses chose their own textbooks and they were very much more stimulating courses I bet they were uh I uh there is this deist tendency people attack the idea of government doing things they say government is is inefficient and then they do their best to make it inefficient by forcing it to behave in a bureaucratic uniform way everyone has to use the same textbooks um I think people should be much more relaxed about people even though they're employed by the government doing things in the same kind of U free willing way that you do in private business and every once in a while a taxpayer's dollar will be wasted but I bet the tax pray will get better value for the dollar that way than under the present system thank you very much it's been a great privilege enjoyed it thank you if you enjoyed this episode you can show some support by subscribing to the podcast sharing it with your friends and leaving a [Music] review
