Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene

[Music] [Applause] [Music] let me use a ball and the coaster young men clawed at his efficiency prostrate on the on the ground in this area the Vermont study called cap they do with he ship from the country and they barely get by with someone else at the 92nd these people out behind that whenever big within trait but the people got pass you crashed on the grass nobody better no-mind could imagine such a change of scenery the culture was strong and in fact like the tree [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the change was unto the planner revolution made it happen really fast I said how can we find hello New York my name is Robin bloomer I'm the CEO of the Center for inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins foundation for reason and science thank you so these organizations merged about two years ago because we had the same mission which was to promote reason science and humanism the magic elixir of human progress so the the evidence-based community has sort of taken a sucker punch lately wouldn't you say newsgathering responsible journalism is fake news we have expertise being denounced as as partisan dribble facts are full are fake well there's an antidote to that and that is the Center for inquiry and the Richard Dawkins foundation so so I'd like to know from the audience how many people here care about the separation of church and state all right and how many people here want to make sure that evolution is taught in science classrooms and not creationist dribble how many people want to make sure that children are vaccinated entirely all of them and finally how many think that it's about damn time that an open atheist was elected to political office all right okay you can stay so today have a wonderful time tomorrow think about joining the Center for inquiry and the Richard Dawkins foundation you know when the Religious Right wants to rally the troops it gets millions of people responding and we need a secular army we need to be able to challenge the power of the Religious Right and we need your help to do it so have a great time tonight join us tomorrow and now I'd like to introduce the producer of the evening Travis Pangburn [Applause] all right how's it going everybody it's nice to see you all what do you think of the space pants thank you they kind of look like painters pants I'm sure from back there sorry about that yeah I'm so excited to be in New York again I just had to come out and say thank you guys so much for supporting this event like it's becoming popular to think yeah a couple quick announcements we will have a Q&A about an hour and 15 into the talk and we will do a book signing in the lobby Brian and Richard will both be part of that and what else ok our next event that we have coming up very controversial event on November 17th we're doing a conference here in New York City you can find out more about that on our website at payment philosophy com hope you guys come and check it out we have a lot of great speakers the topics are very controversial the first topic of the evening is as me too gone too far so that kind of sets the stage for what kind of a conference is going to be so I hope you guys join us for that again payment philosophy calm and then Matt Dillahunty how many of you guys have heard of Matt Dillahunty nice well those of you don't know check out Matt Dillahunty he's going to be going head-to-head for the first time with Dinesh D'Souza on yeah Dinesh D'Souza socks on November 29th and so come out to that that's going to be at the Town Hall theater here in New York City it's gonna be a lot of fun I'm looking forward to that you should check out the video of Matt Dillahunty and Jordan Peterson that we have on our YouTube channel that's one of our highest trending videos and that's going to give you a taste of what that events going to be like I think and then also on December 6 back at townhall theater we will have Steven Pinker and Matt Dillahunty having a conversation so I hope you guys come out for that anyways that's way more than enough for for me please welcome to the stage richard dawkins and brian greene [Applause] [Applause] so it's a pleasure to be here tonight Richard welcome back to New York and welcome everybody here to tonight's conversation just to sort of get things going Richard we spoke I guess it was in 2014 we had a conversation I think was at 92nd Street Y and I could be wrong but I got the impression from that conversation that you were doing a lot of a lot of work a lot of self-reflection to try to come to terms with your own religiosity no and so but but that's exactly right so you came out with a very strong position on that but you know as time goes by people get older sometimes their view shifts you can just give me yes or no on this has anything changed in that regard since we last spoke yes I think we you know we don't know each other that well but um you know this is how you get to know the person that you're gonna be conversing with you just get that right in there is that tight it's the second time it's come off I think that's good right well let's try to go with that and see how they go okay good so anyway so um so nothing's changed No thank God that's great and you know the you know when I think about the big questions I tend to organize them into origin of the universe origin of life and origin of mind and I'm actually teaching a course with that theme of Columbia and we've read The Selfish Gene this term as part of that I hadn't read it since I was in college so you know it was spectacular to re-engage with the wonderful book that you gave the world a question came up in the class all right and I would like to check with you to see if the answer I gave makes make sense it aligns with your thinking so the question a couple of kids asked was look we read this book and we a very clear sense of evolution you know the gene as the basic unit of heredity but we're still left with the question what is life and had life get started so my response to that which some of them found quite unsatisfying is that that's not as precise a question as you think right I mean in some sense trying to draw the line between animate and inanimate and trying to have a very precise definition ultimately amounts to words right it's a continuum from from inanimate to animate and once we have the molecular Darwinism in place rolling forward life just emerges in that continuum so my question to you is that a reasonable way of describing I think it is I think there's a to greater tendency in the human mind to try to draw lines and try to whether whether is a spectrum Misun has there really is a line but in other cases there isn't and we should not insist that there has to be a line well in the case of life I suppose you could sort of see a kind of line when the first self-replicating entity came into existence because that was the moment when natural selection and hence Darwinian evolution could start you can't get natural selection unless you've got something equivalent to a gene so the first gene which would not have been DNA by the way but the first gene would be a kind of watershed event I suppose but I agree with you we don't want to get too hung up on the questions of definition which didn't like a definition of life as a person on life right which demand a particular moment at which life came in to exist and when you say first gene in that context can I think of it as the first molecule that discovers this capacity for making copies of itself period yes making copies of itself and that would include making copies of errors in itself right so that there there has to be a variety in the population of these replicating entities the reason I say wouldn't have been DNA is DNA has been described as a high-tech replicator that requires a rather complicated infrastructure of biochemistry in order to do its replication so people in the field agree that the first replicator would not have been DNA would have been something else that had the property of self replication probably much less efficient at it than DNA and DNA would have been a late usurper of that role it could have been RNA and do you think it was RNA I don't know I mean that but that's a current fashionable idea that and the reason it's fashionable is that as you know there's a kind of divide in in biochemistry between the protein which acts as enzyme and and the variety of enzymes which is the key to everything that goes on in in in life the fact that the three-dimensional form of a protein molecule when it crawls up into a sort of knot which gives it its enzymatic properties and that is determined by the one-dimensional sequence of amino acids which in turn is determined by the one-dimensional sequence of DNA DNA so there's this double act between DNA and protein DNA is not an enzyme it's an excellent replicator protein is an excellent enzyme but cannot replicate RNA is kind of moderate at both so if our if it started off with RNA that could have done both the enzyme role because then RNA is a kind of rather bad enzyme right and the kind of rather bad replicator but it can do both roles and so the idea is then the DNA would have come in and use up the replication role and protein then came in and use up the enzyme role so how how big how big a molecule do you imagine this first replicator would b i suppose it would be quite small if the the first one right i mean i don't know i mean it this is this is an active field of well I suppose research but very speculative missile right because you know you'll see people making the argument that whatever molecule you put forward as the first one if it has some degree of complexity associated with it you can then ask yourself you know what are the odds yeah that molecule will warm and when that number is necessarily quite small some people see attention with the naturalness of the process and the unlikelihood that would happen so how do you answer that well it is a field where whether there there is no answer yet and and people are not are not confident of it there are there's various problems with the so called catch-22 that you can't get DNA without protein vice versa right there are there are other problems with it some people have favored what they call a hyper cycle where there are various stages in the in a chain and each stage gives rise to the next as there is no one molecule is the is the key replicate of the entire hydro cycle is that he is the is the replicator but it's it's not a field which has been solved it's not a question which has been answered it is still conceivable that the origin of life the origin of the self through replication the origin of natural selection was a stupendously improbable event right and the corollary of that would be that there's no other life in the universe I mean put it the other way if you want to believe that there is only one life form in the universe which you're entitled to do then it a corollary of that is that the origin of life on this planet must have been a base fantastically improbable event so much so that any theory we come up with has got to be a very implausible theory right because if it were plausible so there would be life all over the universe yes which I suspect there probably is I'm just saying that if you want to believe that life only arose once then what you're looking for in a theory of the origin of life is not a plausible theory such as you could replicate in the chemistry lab so I mean there's so there is a lot of evidence that all life on Earth comes from a common single-celled and yes they ever the evidence for that is is that the DNA code is all but universally the same in every living form that's ever been examined and the odds of that coming about convergently as extremely low so I think just about everybody is convinced that every single life form at least those that have been looked at it descends from a common ancestor it's because it's got the same machine code at its base there does that strike you as as a puzzle or just something that we need no it's a puzzle I mean it could be that more than one life-form arose originally we just don't see them and we don't and and as Darwin said originally Darwin said um one of them eat up all the others right so that's that that's a possibility Paul Davies your physics colleague things it's worth looking to see if there are other life-forms he just they may be around on earth but never been been found I liken that to the looking for your keys under the lamppost and when somebody lost his keys and so he's looking under under the lamppost for the keys and somebody else asked him why looking under the lamppost is that where you lost your keys no but that's where the light is so if we're asking the question is there life elsewhere in the universe we can't go elsewhere in the universe yet it's very difficult let's look at the universe can't come to us and some have suggested that maybe the origin you know life in some yeah or may have come here in a you know on a meteor yes humbled off of ours well that's not so implausible as it was once thought to be perhaps the theory of panspermia invented by a swedish but a Swedish biologist called Aranea about a century ago now and it was espoused by fred hoyle the astronomer very distinguished astronomer but he kind of went adrift a bit on on evolution anyway directed panspermia is a is a more far-fetched idea which was actually favored I think a bit tongue-in-cheek I mean there are actually some incentive yes I mean a seed by Francis Crick the the great term co-discoverer of this structure of DNA together with Leslie Orgel suggested that we let our planet could have been deliberately seeded by an alien civilization I think it was a joke I mean I mean did they sort of presented it as though it was a serious theory but right so so when you consider the the rich spectrum of life on Earth at all saying arose from this singular starting point do you find that the the range is sensible relative to the environment that life found itself trying to adapt to or do you find it strange that we don't have you know beings with you know nine eyes or eyes that work under completely different principles or I don't know some being that would be sensitive to gravitational wave yes now that I'm very fascinated by that kind of question and you can get a long way by looking around the animal kingdom and asking how many times different things have evolved and you can work out how many times they've evolved because you couldn't work out what the tree of life actually is you know which animals are close relations of which so we know for example that there are I think it's nine different principles of eyes different ways of doing doing the optics and that eyes have evolved independently several dozen times one estimate is is more than 40 times really so I is actually evolved with great ease with great frequency and they're all sensitive to the same part of the spectrum because it's not exactly same but it's overlapping right insect eyes move towards the ultraviolet for example but it's it's it's nice to think that all the ways of making an eye that physicists have thought of have been thought of by evolution in in rather interesting ways I mean the comp the compound eye works and it could have totally different way from the camera eye which is what which is what we have there are mollusks which have a reflector eye a parabolic reflector you mean like a radio dish out there yes yeah but but it optical Wow so there are scallops that have what have them and there are lots of different kinds of compound eye a lot of different kinds of camera eye and they've evolved independently other things like say echolocation navigating by sonar by sound waves that's evolved four times independently in bats whales and to different families of birds into cave-dwelling birds in independently so that's rather more reluctant to evolve but nevertheless it has evolved more than once some things have evolved only once and so you feel they're improbable things right so someone trying to understand the likelihood or not of the emergence of life and therefore to try to gain some insight into the question that you made reference to whether we're alone or there's other life out there in the universe you know sometimes people write down this this Drake equation which I every time I see it I always feel like it's it's misrepresenting the situation because it's not so much an equation describing the actual likelihood of the arising of life it's more a way of encapsulating our ignorance of all variety of qualities of the universe that we really don't have any insight into so any number that comes out of it is really just totally dependent on the ignorance that we have regarding the numbers that go into it but but be that as it may when when you think about that life may have just started once on this planet does that minish your expectation that the search for extraterrestrial life will be successful we come to state for the fact that it did arise on this planet oh yeah that's a pizza with so it's a sample size of once yeah do with that I would love another one I mean yeah because we just don't know and I'm very intrigued by the question how much of what we know about this this form of life yeah had to be so because there's only one way for it to be for example does there have to be like something like a gene I think the answer is yes does it have to be me just because you need something to carry a serum here right does it have to be a one dimensional array does it have to be digital right I think that probably has to be digital digital because otherwise errors were too much error right does it have to be one dimensional string of data which DNA is and I don't think that's clear I mean could imagine a two dimensional matrix right which could be read not three dimensional because you can't get inside the right that the three dimensional blob so that's kind of question doesn't have to be sex would you expect to get either I bet you'd get eyes because because I have happened so many times here presumably if it was a star that emitted strongly in a completely different part of the spectrum that's a sensitive over there or something of that sort yes yes exactly so so it leads to the question then if you had your choice in some sense as to what we would find if we encountered life in another world would you want it to be the same in order that you would have a unified theory of life in some sense or would you rather it be different so that now you just see this grand spectrum a possibility with us just being one of many I'd be delighted by either I mean if if it if it were if it were too similar if for example you found life on Mars and it was dna-based and the DNA code was the same right then I probably the same got to be contamination right because we didn't we know that so we mean we're Martians it could have come from there right but we we know that a lot of meteorites have come from from Mars right so but if it's some if it were DNA but a different DNA code that would be riveting ly exciting right if it were not DNA but something likes unit and that another polymer gosh it would be fascinating yeah amazing I knew it would be the most exciting discovery ever actually to find to find something like like that I mean we as you say we've got a sample of one life on this planet is uniform at the biochemical level even even great big creatures like us we do our biochemistry quite largely using tricks that were discovered by primordial bacteria and they in many of them are in us doing the same trick we just haven't a commandeered them yeah exciting almost exciting is string theory or something like that yeah come on to that yeah but so so so you know as we enter an age when we can begin to actually tinker with the actual structure of life say CRISPR cast nine do you imagine that we'll be able to gain some insight into these questions in the laboratory as the things I mean I would I when I'm ever I meet a biochemist I was asked them can you imagine an alternative biochemistry could construct an alternative by registry or if you can't construct it at least didn't imagine it does it have to be carbon-based for example I think the answer that is probably yes would you agree with that as well I mean carbon is certainly the natural go to species if I didn't know anything about life and you gave me a list of criterion that you want to have a very active molecule you wanted to be able to bond with all sorts of other molecules in the environment you wanted to be a species that's commonplace so that it's not a rare species that we deal with but there are other pretty active species too well silicon is a-- is making first element which which could could possibly do the same job right but I asked Harry kroto the famous sorcerer and he's confident it'll be better have to be carbon bears had to come this but that leaves a lot of freedom nevertheless I mean even more even within carbon with even within organic chemistry and enormous freedom that to divert devised alternative biochemistry right now do you do you think that there will come a point when we just can create life from scratch in the laboratory I mean is that in our future yes I think so yes I know well craig Venter has already created well sort of replica I mean yes we produced the same thing but yes so so did you want to say what Craig have done just to well he has recreated a particular bacterium from scratch but it is just a just one that already existed right well if you couldn't do that then you could theoretically create one that doesn't exists already and and so then from that I suppose you could eat might even go ahead go on to multicellular right life and so you know this is I mean obviously this is an exciting possibility does it scare you it's excited to be more than it scares me I I'm just fascinated by it and by the possibilities so I'm I do think we have to exercise a precautionary principle and have you had how would you imagine doing that as you know sydney brenner a great molecular biologist i persevere keep the lid on your petri dish well screwed down he said you know but any any you know you know criterion and and restrictions you place in this country or in your country right I mean this is not a worldwide type of no so but there have been attempts I mean there was there was a meeting of molecular biologists at one point or sort of devise a kind of moratorium list of things that you mustn't do and I get it held for a while but yeah I mean I suppose a greater more present worry would be if the techniques of creating or varying microorganisms were to fall into the wrong hands I mean biological warfare yeah has been experimented on by some of the great powers and if that if the techniques fell into the hands of terrorists it especially if the terrorists for religious reasons want to die and therefore don't care whether they destroy the world right it that I think that's probably more of a worry than them the kind of thing you were raising the right of creating life but the but the bottom line then summary if I'm hearing you correctly is you would agree presumably the statement that whatever a hundred years or five hundred years from now people will look back at this era and sort of smile at the mystery that we once thought was embedded in life and it will just be another concoction of chemicals that happens to be able to carry out certain processes and people will shrug as opposed to revere this entity that forms at least on this planet I suppose if if there's a lesson from history that we always want to look back on earlier eras and feel that way yes well I mean you know at the end of the you know in 19th century there's a famous statement in physics that I'm sure you're familiar with Lord Kelvin is usually credited with saying it it's unclear that he actually did that you know all the laws of physics were worked out except you know this or that constants of nature that needed to be evaluated to the six vii decimal place and of course that was before the discovery of special relativity general relativity quantum mechanics it was spectacularly wrong it spectacularly for excited yes but um do you think it's possible that there is a discovery a phase a step on par say with quantum mechanics which you know for physicists is the Revere step in our understanding of the natural world that we're completely missing right now yes a different kind of precautionary principle it got to be precautionary about what you say and not fall into the Lord Kelvin error right I think it was Lord Kelvin also said radio will turn out to be a hoax and what else did you say I don't know for now that one he said heavier than air flight is impossible these are really taking my hero and just cutting the legs out well no he was a great physicist in his time but he also he also gave Darwin some grief because he opened a can of worms here yeah yeah he gave Darwin some grief because he calculated that the Sun was too young to have allowed time for evolution and that's because he thought the Sun was a fire burning burning fuel and it had no way of knowing the Sun is a nuclear reactor and and so Darwin wasn't intimidated because physics was that was the senior science and so it in a way Kelvin kind of came a bit heavy on Darwin and and said well physics proves the evolution not possible what Darwin should have said well the evidence revolution has ever whelming say your physics must be wrong Touche okay so um you know if we go from from life to intelligence you know conscious self-awareness there's a similar collection of puzzles obviously different in detail but revered by many through the centuries and in the modern era you know David Chalmers is famous you know down down anyway you know famous for articulating the so-called hard problem of consciousness right the problem that if matter is all there is matter and fields and if electrons and quarks and the entities that they built up protons and neutrons if they have no inner world if the lights aren't on inside an electron if it has no inner sensation if a third-person account precisely describes what's going on with an electron there's nothing else how could it possibly be that when these particles swirled together they somehow generate an inner sensation equality that simply is absent at the level of the fundamental ingredients so you know he was dividing up the problems in in neuroscience and brain science into those that have to do with the mechanism the function of the brain which ultimately can be difficult to work out but it's clear what to do to figure out you know what's going on when you know my arm goes up and down what sort of brain signals are making that happen but he considered a qualitatively different question to be the one that I was referring to namely how can the lights turn on do you do you see that distinction well I always confess myself baffled by it I mean I do see it as a deep as a profoundly difficult problem I am committed to the view that it there is nothing there other than physics there's nothing there other than as you say atoms and electrons and what is weird I mean I groove you but where does that sensibility come from is it based on evidence I suppose it comes from the feeling that as an evolutionist we start with physics mister let me get chemistry and we get an a process Darwinian natural selection which gradually builds up nervous system step by step they get more and more complicated I cannot under I can't I can't see any other way but that I could that be limited mental acuity and creative powers I think it has to be that but I mean I'm more curious to know what you think but as a as a physicist I thought I was asking the question no that's good no no we actually we're gonna go back and forth on questions and um I I agree I can't imagine that there's something beyond Schrodinger's equation of quantum mechanics and the interactions with the particles that's going on inside this physical structure inside of my head but I still feel deeply puzzled by how it is that I can sit here and have this this inner world everything that we do in physics and think science more generally is so focused on the third-person account we can look out objectively see data in the world find the patterns in that data articulate the patterns in mathematical equations use the mathematical equation to predict what's gonna happen next or the probability of what's gonna happen next in a quantum mechanical framing and that's what we do we never have this turn inward to try to have that same kind of rigor and description of what's happening inside of our heads now what David Chalmers says is he says that's that's that's not just a small issue that's a huge issue if I understand what he was saying correctly he's saying we perhaps are missing a side of the story which would endow perhaps electrons and quarks and other particles with the degree of proto consciousness maybe there's something beyond mass and charge and spin maybe there's something they and only by taking to account that quality that we've been missing can a lot of those particles yield the sensations that we're all having right now it starts to sound danger like defense off right okay well you know I'll tell David that you said that but I mean I I'm also intrigued by philosophers thought experiments where they say things like imagine that you could make an exact copy of your of every single item of your of you of you and yeah and there are and there are there are two of you standing side by side which one which one is I have no doubt that they're both yes but then but then presumably would you would have the same consciousness yes same varies but then they would die dards drift there was not drift drift apart yeah you know I'm not sure that would be such a good thing for the world but uh yeah that that's that's I on that question I feel I feel secure in saying that uh obviously if one day we can do this it'll be the best way to find out but part of that sensibility for me and I'm wondering if it's the same for you I don't think that consciousness has to take place inside a particular physical structure you know the human brain or the brain of an any other any other animal you know I think that once you replicate the function you've replicated the experience do you do you and I mean I think if you if you could somehow upload everything into a computer that that also would have to have our consciousness and and but but these I agree with David Chalmers it is the hard problem and it's certainly too hard for me but I'm but I wouldn't take the leap to say that therefore I know something like you know every adder must have a little smidgen of consciousness writing like no I don't think he took that step without a great deal of difficulty with basically banging into every possible Avenue that he pursued for many years and and it almost felt like there was no other place to turn and having not gone through the journey that he and others who spend their lives trying to figure out consciousness have gone through it's hard to know whether I or perhaps and you would feel the same way after hitting wall after wall after wall but it's certainly the case that even on planet earth where we discussed that life may have had a unique origin the arising of intelligence and conscious self-awareness that also seems to have been a miraculously improbable event that allowed that to happen yes I mean what if the meteor hadn't wiped out the dinosaurs I mean would we all be sitting here and we'd all be dinosaurs and having this conversation or would we never have gotten to that place I suspect not I mean I think I think there would be lots of dinosaurs around but it's yes I think it's a I think it's a it's a major step we were talking about whether the origin of life was a big step and perhaps it was so we don't that and I said that was a corollary of whether we think there's life elsewhere so it so might be swarms all over the universe of bacterial type life but if we ever discovered that life elsewhere it would have to be by radio waves coming in and that means would have to be technologically sophisticated life and that means would have to have overcome another barrier so that the barrier from bacterial level life maybe there are several intermediate ones and then up to the kind of life that's capable of producing radio waves that we can detect right so long if it's far enough away if it's near enough by in principle we could it's near enough by yes good and I'm suspecting that's probably not and I suspect that if we ever do discover extraterrestrial life it will be by SETI bye bye and in that case we have the question do we have a second barrier or maybe a third or a fourth barrier right and put to produce the sort of intelligence we don't have to get into consciousness I mean it could be unconscious but it but if you talk to us I would be good enough but if it if it can produce radio seeked signal right and that that's an and that's a much more mundane question than the question of whether it whether the light as there the contras lightest terms are so do you think you mean if we if we discovered life that's not intelligent would it make much of a difference ultimately to life here I mean it would be an exciting moment and so on but with it then you know you know we have what you know it used to be you had a week news I know 24-hour news cycle now it's like every ten minutes so would this be like from 10:30 to 10:30 for bacteria found on Mars and then by 11 o'clock Trump would do something else and everyone forget about it I like to think that it would change the way we think about our own life but it may be maybe it wouldn't I think it it it really would if we if we were contacted by intelligent life forms elsewhere especially as if it was intelligent enough to get its signals here it would have to be a lot higher level than us and so we would be that we would have a lot more to learn from them than they would learn from us and so right and that really ought to shake our confidence and shake our you know if it was far away would be a pretty slow conversation you couldn't have a conversation that's right but you could listen to them right so so let's say we did have this conversation going let's say we get over the barrier somehow we learn how to communicate with each other and fancifully let's imagine that the conversation happens more quickly than 500 year in so let's put all that to design for just a second which is certainly a technical detail could you imagine that the logic by which this intelligent extraterrestrial society lived and thought and work and created would be fundamentally different from the logic here I love that invention I mean I think you've heard this question before I mean well frequently asked you I don't feel so hackneyed I thought there's a good question love it I mean I I mean clearly they would have Pythagoras's theorem they would have numbers they'd have geometry they'd have but I'm like you I'm curious to know whether they'd have a completely different kind of question that we don't we don't have because there are in mathematics you probably familiar where different kinds of logics yes and you know they're they're interesting mathematically people study these logics you know do is you know multivariate logic where it's not just true or false it can be somewhere in between you know there's a subject called quantum logic which in some sense is modeled on quantum mechanics where you know it's not just the particles here or over here but it's you know some quantum mechanical mixture of the two so so is it conceivable that one of those or some other kind of logic would would yield a kind of engagement with the universe that's utterly distinct from ours well it's sometimes suggested that the the way in which we think which is not the way quantum theorists think the way people think only people think is dictated by what's the necessary kind of logic that you need in order to survive on the African plains yes and so when you're when you're a medium-sized object hunting other medium-sized objects and moving at medium speeds then you need a different kind of logic then even if somehow you could imagine that we were shrunk to the quantum level we would have a different kind of right now you can well imagine that some very forward thinking one of our remote ancestors who was out there in the Savannah and and actually thinking about quantum mechanics got eaten right so so so that's why you know take so much dedicated effort for us to figure out these quantum laws because it's not built into our evolutionary structure didn't have any survival value presumably that's a reasonable way of thinking about it yes I mean that that's kind of what I meant but not why should that in those terms I I mean I I'm curious to ask a an advanced theoretical physicist which is I don't often get that opportunity but but um the the weirdness the sheer utter utter mind-numbing weirdness of quantum theory do you are you one of those physicists who as it were takes that in your stride and says well I don't actually i can't conceptualize it but the mathematics works and so i and the predictions that it produces are verified by experiment and so in some sense it's got to be true or do you lie awake at night wishing you could under stop reps you do until you understand it at ah well I I don't feel I understand it in the same way that I understand tables and players in a classical experiential perspective and I do wish that I had quantum mechanical reasoning in my bones I think I would engage with the universe in a neurotic ly different and quite wonderful way I mean look we all know if I you know I won't do it but if I took this and I tossed it to you you'd put out your hand you knew catch it which is an amazing thing because you didn't do the Newtonian calculation of the trajectory while you sort of felt it in your bones and we can put your hand near you catch it so it's so mundane but it's so wondrous that we're able to do it and it just shows the power of imbibing the rules that are relevant on the scale at which survival takes place and I wish I had that same quality when it came to an electron in the hydrogen atom that I could just sort of feel the S orbital and I could feel you know the P orbitals like be in my bones right so if you ask me some question about the hydrogen atom I wouldn't have to go calculate I would just sort of be able to do what you did when you put out your arm and catch the bottle so so I don't have that I wish that I did at the same time I certainly do use the mathematics to gain a confidence with the ideas you ask me a question and it doesn't you know send me scurrying for cover it because I'm like okay I don't know really fully how to think about that but I know how to set it up I know how to solve the equation I know how to interpret the mathematics because it's been going on for 8090 years and that gives me at least some semblance that I know what's going on but it isn't in the same intuitive deep intuitive way and that that is a strange way to live right you live you know as a physicist you know your career whatever 30 40 50 years and most of the time you kind of don't really know what's going on I mean do your colleagues do do any of your colleagues claim to have built into their bones so to speak or do they all accept pretty much what were you've said you know um I don't know that I've ever heard anybody really say that well actually no there is one he came over to dinner uh my wife is here summer Tracey remember Andy's Rominger came over to our apartment at Harvard physicist and he was really angry at me for saying what I just said in pomp you saw it in some version of this in some conversation and he said you're giving the wrong impression of quantum mechanics we fully understand it I was like Andy like what do you really mean by that but he wouldn't but that was we had the equations we have the math you do the couches just what you said anyway yes so I I don't know that he would say that he has a table that you know I believe that he did not say they had that deep intuitive understanding but um most people who think deeply about quantum mechanics even say that it's incomplete subject is currently formulated we do not know how to go from the fuzzy probabilistic mixtures of the reality that the math is telling us about the electron is fifty percent here and fifty percent there and is in some sort of fuzzy mixture of the two but yet when we measure the position of the electron we always find it here we always find it there so somehow a transition happens from the fuzzy probabilistic reality to the single definite reality of common experience and we don't have an equation for that we just say it happens or I should say people have proposed equations for if we have no idea if they're right well Schrodinger ridiculed the the Copenhagen interpretation with these caps famously yeah so right thought experiment and I'm aware that there are others who talk about the many-worlds interpretation yeah we'll save in in in terms of Schrodinger's cat there are there are worlds in which the cat is a there are other worlds in which the cat is dead that seems to me to be although a hideously unpassed ammonius way of looking at things yeah nevertheless I could it's not totally ridiculous the way the Copenhagen interpretation right yes just quicker to the Copenhagen interpretation just says hey we don't understand the process but here's an algorithm here's a procedure follow the procedure or is it usually described shut up and calculate right that's the summary of the Copenhagen approach but that's not a that's not a theory of physics right that that's a set of instructions I I thought in terms of the catch satire so to speak yeah the Copenhagen interpretation would say the cat is neither alive nor dead until you open the box which yes that's what I'm saying yeah the algorithm is open the box yes and at that moment one of the two happens you know does it happen I don't know but it happens we see it happen now that's a little bit of a cartoon description there have been more refined versions of this story called decoherence that have been developed over the decades so it's not like it's stagnant but it's not really a theory it's known as a set of rules but let me just quickly the one point that you did make about the the many-worlds yang on parsimonious and um you really need to bring the right barometer there are many many ones would be that there are lots of worlds in which the cat is alive in other words in which the cat is dead and that's right so the many-worlds basically says if quantum mechanics says that this can happen and this can happen and that can happen with some probabilities then actually all three do happen they all happen in their own separate world yeah so every outcome allowed by quantum physics takes place now that sounds incredibly uh NECA nama chol right the world is just becoming the landscape of reality is coming larger and larger with all these distinct realities allowed by the unfolding of quantum mechanics but here's the point it is the most parsimonious theory when you look at the mathematics yes so the equation is pristine and sharp and if you stare at that equation long enough this is where the equation takes your thinking if you just literally look at the symbols and say what are symbols telling me whereas all the other approaches add in other equations other ideas baggage in that sort so if you use the art stick of the number of universes out of control if you use the art stick of the mathematics it is as simple as it can possibly be like laughs is there anything good by the way have you see it was a lovely New Yorker cartoon of a vets waiting room and the people were standing around with their dogs and cats and things and the the nurses come coming out and talking to a gentleman sitting there and saying about your cat mr. Schrodinger I have some good news and some bad news so so I'm glad you asked about quantum mechanics because it does give a sense of how our intuition can completely mislead us the things that our intuition tells us are true or false may not even be describable in that language in the quantum world it could be a mixture of both and that is a fundamental layer of reality that our way of thinking about the world is not tuned into not tapped into if you're a trained quantum physicist you can work it out as we're describing but intuitively it's just sort of not there so I guess the question that comes from that sort of relevant to other things that that you you're famously talked about what what does that tell you about the nature of truth I mean you spend a lot of time important time going out into the world as an advocate for for truth and we all know what that means in sort of everyday scales but if we can be a little bit more expansive in our thinking here um does this disjuncture between the truth at the level of fundamental physics and the truth of the level of intuition excuse me for that spital that just went halfway across the stage um does does that distinction give you any pause well we came into this by talking about if Martians had a different kind of yeah I mean to what extent is conception of logical truths governed by the the what's necessary in order to survive on this plane and if for some reason you need a different kind of logic to survive on Mars or Alpha Centauri or somewhere would we have a different conception of truth I mean the dangerous time to be talking about this with fake truths and post truth yeah I I said I think of myself as a naive realist I mean III think there is such a thing as truth but quantum weirdness does worry me and and but I I'd like to think that although our view of the world is no doubt shaped by the need to survive in as I said in in in in Africa for hunting buffaloes and things I think I want to say there is such a thing as objective truth I mean I hate the idea that which we hear from some academic circles that I don't know truth is a social construct on yeah and that there's no well well I obviously I would agree that when it comes to the fact of the matter about the electrons magnetic dipole moment right that's a number that quantum mechanics predicts we go out and measure it they agree digit by digit by digit nine ten digits down the road and that does feel like it qualifies as truth in in some way or are close extremely close approximation of truth but when we go to sort of higher levels I guess I feel worried about scientists going out into the world and then and you're right it's a very curious time because you know we're meant to be out there proclaiming the facts about the world and the facts about the matter and the truth of the world but with my experience in realms that are so different from the truth that we normally talk about in everyday life it gives me some pause can you make me feel better about that a little bit no because I I live in a in a more naive I mean I live in a sin a simpler world and objective truth is that is something that that we all live live with in our everyday lives and that and that's the that's the world in which we evolved and so that I don't have that difficulty I'm just kind of aware and I have difficulty not just in the quantum field and I mean there are other parts of physics which upset me as well well well in in Cosmo happy to help if I can cosmology for example yeah I I read that the Big Bang a bit that at the moment of the of the Big Bang everything was compressed not just into a small volume but into an infinitely small volume like I mean worries me I thought yeah I mean I I can I'm aware that a solid object like a table or a rock is mostly empty space but nevertheless if you were to compress it and get rid of all the space between nuclei yeah it would not just be the size of a proton I mean it would be it would still be a fairly substantial oculi I went to this calculation that if you were to take every person that's ever lived yes planet Earth and removed the space between the electron and the nucleus yeah all of their atoms then the remaining particles without that space would fit inside of a baseball but a baseball is a pretty big freakin thing that's my point i I'm I'm agreeing I mean it that is an astonishing calculation by the way I mean that it really is is that really right it's really right yeah and I have the baseball right here to prove it no um yeah but but okay but but actually I'm agreeing with you I'm yes you know and and and so we have exactly the same worry that our equations Einstein's general theory of relativity are the equations that we use here those equations actually break down at time zero times zero is when everything would be crushed yes infinitesimally small size and the equations themselves break down which means that we don't really know what's happening at time zero which is why for instance we've developed ideas that have tried to go beyond in Stein's equations really to answer that very question that question can be viewed as the motivation for a theory like string theory are there attempts to put quantum mechanics and gravity together to try to resolve that puzzle we've not yet resolved it yet but I will say one thing that is often misunderstood so today we don't know whether the universe is finite or infinite right and in fact Einstein ones family said they're only two things that might be infinite space and human stupidity yes and he said he wasn't sure about space you know and and and there and we're still not sure about space but if space does go on infinitely far then as you go further and further back yes it shrinks but you know if you take infinity and you divide it by two what do you get infinity take him today divided by ten what do you get infinity so things in the universe get closer and closer together but the grand expanse of reality at times zero at the Big Bang would not be infinitesimal it will be infinitely big but it would have infinite density so the idea of a little tiny dot from which the entire not the observable universe emerges that's that could well be the wrong picture well but I don't know why you make it so difficult for yourself because you well in the following sense Hubble's law and you and you reverse the processes yes yes I can see you know you crunch it down to something a bit bigger than a baseball yeah why go to something infinitely small good good you you could you could imagine running the film in Reverse the cosmic film universe and you simply stop it a couple frames before times here he said let me up let's just stop it right here and we'll go forward in our explanations from that starting point um we're really goddamn ambitious as physicists right we want to go we really want to go to time zero we really you know and so it will feel to us as though we have left out the essential quality of cosmology if we have to sort of by hand say let's stop the film we don't know what's going on and go further everywhere but why when you get to x 0 does it have to be infinite it's more why why shouldn't it be it may not be good at the size of a cannonball or a minute if our mathematics told us that then indeed the mathematics yes so so maybe I didn't say clear before but 9 Stein's general theory of relativity when you metaphorically won the cosmic film further and further back imagine the universe is finite in size so an Andorian okay identity then indeed it goes right down to zero size the radius of the universe goes right down to zero and if somehow you could correct Einstein's equations which we hope may be string theory will do so that with the correction when you wind the film back to zero the universe does not have zero size but it's a little tiny nugget like a baseball or you know some smaller entity then that would be a very satisfying cosmology to start from this from that point that just doesn't let you okay well I we've come to string clearing out so so I I mean I I often hear the criticism of straight string theory is devoid of evidence and Rizzo mr. string theory yeah yeah yeah no I I i I've heard that too taking the taxi down to dinner the taxi comments all about string theory no evidence what are you guys doing you know rational science reason you know I just sort of cowered in the back and pape I'm not but um so so what's the real the real situation is the following so we have a real issue on our hands a theoretical issue of putting gravity and quantum mechanics into one consistent theoretical structure Einstein's general theory of relativity does a fantastic job for gravity makes predictions and they're confirmed to high accuracy same for quantum mechanics as applied to the small domain the problem is you try to put these two theories together and each claims that the other is wrong they shoot each other in the foot and it doesn't work so right there you see that you've got to make progress of making these theories harmonious because they both are at work in the universe and the universe makes sense so the mathematics has to make sense now we have finally Einstein is in some sense looking for this theory but he wasn't really thinking about it in quantum terms but the unified theory is what he pursued for thirty years so we have this unified theory in hand and then the question is how do you know whether it's right or whether it's wrong and now we come to the issue of predictions and evidence and here's the thing we can use the mathematics to make predictions the predictions unfortunately are extraordinarily difficult for us to test if we had a sufficiently large particle collider then the collision of particles within the context of string theory would make a prediction that that Collider could test now how big would that Collider need to be well people have done estimates and it would probably need to be the size of the galaxies and here's the thing the cost of a accelerator goes like the square of its energy and if you're talking about a Collider that as far as you get funding you know so so that's what it all comes down to but but my point is a serious one yeah if this theory was not able to make contact with reality you really think physicists would would would would spend time on it I mean we most I think could go around once and I don't want to waste my time and something that that has no chance of ever making contact with the reality but it's hard now in in lieu of being able to build a Collider the size of the galaxy you try to find in direct tests clever tests that might somehow be extracted from the theory and we had hoped one such test would be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider which is their collection of particles that naturally come out of string theory they're called supersymmetric particles the name doesn't really matter but these are particles that no one has ever seen and the hope was that the Large Hadron Collider slammed protons against protons you produce these particles in the debris and that would be a nice piece of circumstantial evidence in favor of the theory the fact of the matter is those particles have not yet been produced they may be produced shortly which would be a triumph circumstantial but still a triumph for these ideas or it could be that the machine is just not sufficiently energetic to produce them so it's not so much that the theory doesn't make any predictions it's that it's very hard to test a theory and this will be true of any approach to put grabbed in quantum mechanics together because yeah I see over there I'm sure I'm ignoring you but I see you yeah yeah yeah you know it's gonna be true of any approach to unifying right I get that completely it's it's one thing to say it is in in principle meaningless because there is no test yeah I say that it is testable but not in practice not it not not not feasibly whether under exist and I think that's a fundamental distinction that gets lost and I think it's a vital one well yes and it's what's Ilyas lose that distinction it's perfect perfectly good distinction yeah um so so can I go back to two to one line of discussion that we were pursuing a little bit before yes cuz I still have the following question which is so-so do you mind if we talk about God for half a second I made a joke at the front but you mind if we talk are you just so tired of talking about that good okay you know because we've had a conversation on on occasion on this subject and there's a lot we agree on but there's some stuff that we don't agree on and and just as I feel like we've made progress on string theory and evidence right now I'd love it if if like you could convince me to see the world differently I would love to leave tonight that would be a wonderful outcome of this evening and if I could do the same for you well I'm not gonna succeed but you know that that would be a wonderful goal to say here's my question um III hear you say that you would you would like to and stop me if I'm saying things and precisely that you would like to rid the world of religion is that is that too strong that's not too strong okay good all right good all right good [Applause] and and so when you say that here's my question are you saying that the structure and the history of religion is something that you just want to get rid of or are you saying that you want to get rid of what some people do in the name of religion do you make that distinction is that one that's relevant I certainly want to get rid of them well I I see virtue in the effect that religion has had on human culture I mean I see virtue in music and and art of and things like that I but if we think of religion as providing an alternative idea for how the universe came into existence how life came into existence that kind of thing then as a scientist I want to get rid of it so I mean which I agree with okay well what part do you not want to get rid of yeah good so so well let me just give you a an example and you can tell me where you come down on maybe that's no way of doing it so you know in in Jewish I'm Jewish maybe a few others in the audience um thank you uh and so so not all of course but but many Jews here in New York view their religion in the following way they're willing to cherry-pick it for the parts that enrich their lives they're willing to throw away the parts that are cake and just have no place you know in in in in the modern world they're willing to view it as almost poetry almost as as fiction literature with the one difference being that it connects them to a long lineage that makes them feel part of a larger narrative is there something that you don't like about what I get that totally I mean I had no problem with that no problem with that because I mean you you you have a heritage you have ancestors you here you have literature you have I mean that it's the same as I feel you know that you feel to a connection with Shakespeare yeah right you know it I don't have any problem with with with saying I have a Christian heritage a Jewish heritage in the case of a Jewish heritage you have an even stronger reason which is the persecution of Jews right which has happened through the centuries and perhaps the most notably in the 20th century but other centuries too this is a very powerful reason for a kind of loyalty to a tradition where I part company with it as you do is in in where it makes claims about the universe and then the nature of life and yeah that guy so when you when you say just from my own clarity when you say that you when you agreed and everyone sort of cheer which is sort of fun that you want to rid the world of religion I wouldn't have thought that this would then be your reaction to my just well I I suppose by religion I meant the scientific falsehood of religion I did not I did not mean tradition because because there are in the Jewish tradition there all sorts of other traditions and traditional literature tradition in art right um I don't want to get rid of that sorry then I wonder about about the following so religion has um you know as a word you know few hundred five hundred years old or so it's not one that really goes back to our k ik times so um and and there are some who have fought through the history of religious development and have indicated that the use of religion in the ways that you find utterly unacceptable is relatively recent a relatively recent development so if you take this structure you know go back a handful of thousand years where ever you sort of want to you know view its origins you know 150 not 2000 BC something of that sort let's just say does it not feel that you're focusing so intently on the last part of the development of that structure in a way that at least as I've heard it and it's different from hearing it tonight which is very interesting for me wipes it all out by virtue of what's happening now I'm skeptical of the suggestion that the scientific falsehood part of religion is real I'm sorry what the scientific falsehood part of religion is recent i-i-i-i've I'm aware that there are people who say that yeah and I think they're wrong I mean I I just think if you if you go back to the Old Testament it's just it would just be nonsense to say that the the characters in this Abraham and and David and Moses and people were not interested in the scientific quasi scientific aspects right of course they were I mean they were they were obsessed with it they were they were they believed that there was a and a person called Yahweh who made the world and who actually intervened the whole time who could who wrought miracles and things like that I think it's Karen Armstrong who made the made the case that that the the scientific part is recently I just just think that's not historically accurate so but if one takes this metaphorical approach as I was sort of describing it and yeah particular case well let me actually frame it somewhat differently so so to what extent are are you okay with I don't know how so say it but irrational ideas can I just give you an example again you know I don't know about three weeks ago you know I live uptown and my mother lives over here 81st Street she's you know in her 90s and I and I and I called she's always home she doesn't really go out without me I called you know the answering machine picked up she didn't answer I called again she didn't answer don't know like really freaked out so I get in the taxicab and I'm racing down to 81st Street and I'm telling you in that taxicab I was praying to God that you'd be okay and I'm praying to God and I know that there I do not think there is a God okay this is a totally irrational thing I'm doing let me just quit if you're there I'm sorry alright if you're right you know I just got to hedge my bets yeah it's a conversation here I'm just sort of saying how I feel so so but I'm like really a praying and and when I got there and everything ultimately it was fine it felt like you know a small miracle to me now I don't believe in miracles I believe that we're all bags of particles governed by the laws of physics and there's nothing else besides that but at the same time I find it useful to hold these irrational ideas in mind at certain moments and I don't give a shit that I do yeah I get that I mean I I think I'll make this a mannequin confession I would I would hesitate to spend the night in a notoriously haunted house and the faintest oh this is a good night man that is so but but I mean we're both being irrational and yeah and and and and that is a sin I agree alright I'm being waved at to open the discussion for audience questions I can't see who's out there I don't know who has a microphone but underneath the lights out can we have the lights up please and in the auditorium that's not so much on us yeah good perfect that's not perfect it shows in your eyes yeah thank you in just about dimly see people now yeah whoever has it might just just jump right in good evening thank you for a wonderful wonderful night I guess my question is how do you dovetail rationality into the social and political dialogue that's going on in the not just the United States but in the world today how do you how do you combat irrationality with rationality and an emotional level such that it's yes so the question is yeah did you hear it yes I was hoping you'd answer it yeah I can take a crack and then you can sort of you know clean up and then finish it up I mean we live in a time when rationality and truth are not respected in in in corridors of power and how do you reconcile you reconcile them what you do is you get out and vote the bugger out but I would add what one went quick thing on that it's it's it's it's virtually impossible I found to have a conversation with somebody who's not going to play by the same rules and and so it's verse impossible to use rationality to convince someone who's looking at the world and describing things in a rational manner and I you know I think we once discussed this oh no mistake but I saw a video of yours once when you had a long conversation with with a woman and trying to convince her about the the you know archaeological record right and and I sat there and I and I felt for you because I have had those conversations with people about you know the Big Bang and things of that sort but it was clear that you were never gonna make headway in that conference oh so you stayed with it which is great but that approach probably is ineffective yes she was she was a hopeless case I know I know who you mean her name is Wendy right and she she was she clearly was not listening and and you're right that was a totally lost cause but remember this was a television program so although I was talking to her right it's irrelevant whether I could convince her I clearly couldn't but there would have been lots of people watching that television program through yeah who would have been influenced by it and recognizing that that she was being completely irrational and so I don't buy the argument of that which I've heard often that because you cannot convince the idiot you're talking to that means that you should should simply give up right right yeah I guess the question but we have others it would there be another strategy and I don't know what the answer to that question is and there are one or two questions from the audience still so I think your your your seller so going back to the idea of string theory when you guys were talking about how to actually combine the two formats of math I guess yes when we since we are the ones actually created math to begin with is it possible that what we use is fundamentally flawed to describe what you're attempting to you totally it's totally possible I mean I have I've had you know thoughts I don't know nightmares that when we have these conversations with the alien intelligence that we ultimately talk to you know they'll come down and say show us guys what have you done and figuring out the universe we pull out general relativity quantum mechanics we open it up and they just sort of look math we tried that you know it takes you part of the way but no no you'll never get anywhere with mathematics you know and the problem is when I then try to imagine what it is if they would substitute for mathematics I don't have the creative imagination to think of anything that isn't ultimately isomorphic to math math just with some different formulation that we could map on to mathematics that we currently use so yes it could be that we have a limited set of tools based on the limited thing inside of our heads is taking us so far but maybe it will not take us to the end so when I end up having discussions about science and religion to a surprisingly frequent extent I end up encountering the viewpoint that science and religion are actually one in the same thought process that science is a form of religion in one way or another and I try to debate that in a number of ways but I would be interested to hear what you would have to say to someone who says well science really isn't any different from religion in the first place well I'll give a real quick minute maybe a follow-up you know there are similarities there are radical differences in the most radical of all is show me how to use any religious texts I don't care to pick any one that you want show me how to use that to calculate the spectrum of Helium right so so there are qualities of the world that we understand rigorously by virtue of the scientific structure it is mathematics that makes predictions that we can go out and test and moreover if we test a prediction and it's wrong we throw the thing away because we are incremental moving toward truth in that that that's quite different and me just quickly also add to that just so you know that I'm not just spouting hot air I really will put you know my money where my mouth is I would be thrilled if tomorrow string theory was ruled out I've worked on it since 1985 okay I had black hair when I started okay but I'm not invested in it I'm invested in truth or getting closer to truth and this is the way that we can move toward truth i I have nothing to add to that I mean yes I think it's absolutely right and there's a huge difference this and the difference is evidence in massive massive massive quantitative evidence and in the case of religion there is absolutely none whatsoever [Applause] given the the singularity at the beginning of the universe the Big Bang and the the evidence that that particles are entangled yes that if that implies that all particles are thereby entangled with each other does that intuitively have any implications for consciousness theory it's a good question since we don't really understand consciousness as we were describing here it's a little hard for me to give you a complete answer to that but I will say the following it is the case that when particles interact with each other they do acquire this very strange quantum mechanical quality called entanglement Einstein again it was a key figure in figuring out entanglement as you no doubt know but just so that we're all clear if two particles are entangled one could be over here one could be over here they could be at opposite sides of the country opposite sides of the universe you measure this particle and somehow it instantaneously affects the particle over there that's weird right Einstein called it spooky spooky action at a distance right now when you have all these particles interacting near the Big Bang they do all become entangled but the thing the greater the number of particles the more dilute the entanglement becomes and it can be diluted to such a degree that to some extent it doesn't really play the kind of fundamental role that it would with just two particles in a pristine environment that you set up to be maximally entangled so while in some sense everything is connected to everything else and maybe you want to think that consciousness therefore sort of connected to the world through some quantum entanglement with our brains the degree of entangle is just so fantastically tiny that it's hard to imagine that that's how things will turn out Richard anything obviously not thank you I'm just fascinated thank you very much for both coming out and a lively discussion I had I grew up in New York City and I had a Jewish earth science teacher but you know and so I didn't have the conflict between religion and science that mr. Dawkins grows up with and he just pointed out if you believe the world was created in six days how do we how long what a day have been by that metaphorical understanding so I was very grateful for my public school education with my question but they I went to PS 87 I is 44 right down the street so I'm with you my question is entangled with the previous one yeah the double slit experiment in quantum physics implies that an electron will behave as a wave when it is not being observed but returns to acting like in a particle when we try to observe it judging by the interference pattern it produces this implies that the universe we live in is conscious without personifying this intelligence would you agree mr. Dawkins that quantum physics implies that our universe is conscious no they think of course it doesn't imply that it's not nothing to do with it it it deeply mysterious but there are there are different ways of being mysterious just because it but they're both of the stairs it doesn't mean that the same thing yep there can be a an error in thinking that often tries to imagine that consciousness plays a critical role in causing the fuzziness of the quantum world to resolve into a definite reality such as an experiment that that you described so well but there's no evidence that consciousness is a vital part of that story we believe I mean there were people in the 30s and 40s who put this idea forward and very hard to rule it out just like it's hard to rule out many things in the world because we always bring consciousness to bear on any data that we look at that we become aware of that we can speak of consciousness as part of it you could say therefore consciousness was part of ensuring that that reality arose but as far as we know it doesn't need to be consciousness that brings the definite reality doesn't need a physicist with a PhD it could do doesn't it could be a mouse could do it it could be a dust mote that could do it it's any kind of interaction it could be a photon in the microwave background radiation that bangs into the electron and that forces it to snap to attention so I I don't see any direct role for consciousness but who knows we could be wrong good evening gentlemen thank you one of the tangents we went down tonight was exploring the concept of extraterrestrial life or life outside the galaxy so from Richards point of view you said we're a sample size of one so all our concepts of what one maybe is what we see before us regardless of our imagination and when you look at Hollywood and you look at aliens there's sort of humanoid and I kind of my thinking is any superior race has to be sort of like us because we got to be able to make sure I can't see something with tentacles making a watch so are we limited to what are you limited to what you believe a race maybe outside of our existence because we're human and you you we have no other concept to measure against science fiction writers are often criticized for lack of imagination and making them sort of humanoid but with three eyes or even there's a minor difference like that there are biologists Simon Conway Morris Cambridge University is one who actually thinks that the likelihood is that life would produce humanoids and he goes I think too far but he does make the point that convergent evolution is very powerful and we have spectacular examples in the animal kingdom of different radically unrelated our animals converging on the same design because that's a very good way to be and you probably familiar with a well for example Australian mammals the marsupial fauna of Australia produced a range of mammals which were niche haneish convergent upon the hamilton and asia and independently in south america so he deploys the the power of convergent evolution to suggest that if there is life elsewhere in the universe quite probably it will look pretty much like us I don't think I'd go along with that quite but but the point has been made we talked a bit earlier about different kinds of life whether it has to be carbon-based that kind of thing and I think it's an open question I think we could get a sort of handle on the question by looking at the animal kingdom and looking at the the different things that have evolved in the animal kingdom with divergent and convergent but I think it's an open question and I would as I said before I would love that I would love to come across a second sample of other love life I didn't hear that I didn't hear it either but it was definitely funny uh you guys have talked a lot about g0 what happened after that I don't think there's been a lot of talk about what happened or not what happened at at g0 what what happened at d0 what created it isn't that and the universe happened four and a half well 14 billion years later we have life so everything was so precise does that imply some kind of God watchmaker something I mean could you delve into more what you think about what happened before that incident of the Big Bang not everything after well I'll start with a Big Bang then we should maybe take it into the biological domain but the question you're asking is why is there something rather than nothing and it is the key question and it's one that we really have absolutely no idea how to answer and I think we're all upfront about that but once we allow for stuff to exist space-time matter in some sense the laws of physics with that minimal architecture we can then run things forward and as far as we know we don't need anybody from the outside tinkering with things in order to get things where they currently are so could you say that some God created it and then stood back of course and this has long been said and there's very little that we can ever say to refute that the point of the matter though is it's not very interesting it may be true it ain't interesting why because you're just replacing one mysterious collection of words with another word which to me holds as much mystery so from the standpoint of explaining science I don't find that it takes us anywhere forward from the standpoint of understanding the rich structure of human heritage and our ongoing attempt to figure out who we are and how we fit into the cosmos I do find there's a lot of value in that way of thinking about the world but I don't find any value in terms of trying to find Scientifics planetary power I think it's worse than that I think it's worse than than just not interesting because the the point is that although it's very difficult to know what happened in at the at the beginning and whether laws of physics come from where the physical constants come from what we can say is that it is relatively easier to understand how simple things came into existence then complex things and a God who thought it all up and created it even a deistic God who didn't subsequently intervene whatever else he she or it what was was like they could not be simple I mean if they're going to be we're going to credit them with the brainpower to devise the laws of physics and to divide em to set the physical constants to some optimal value then they've got to be the kind of entity that requires explanation in its own right of exactly the same kind of explanation as we in biology are used to providing in the theory of evolution so if we have to be intelligent in other words and the intelligence intelligence creativity inventiveness qualities like that come late in the universe we understand where they come from they come from evolutionary processes to suddenly smuggle in intelligence at the very beginning is to betray the entire scientific enterprise so it's much worse than being uninteresting it's positively anti-scientific so the one thing I would say it well since you got applause I'll sort of agree with you but you know you know my my suspicion or at least I raises the possibility the judgment of the complexity and intelligence required to give rise to the universe as we know it I feel like you're coming at it from what we currently understand which could well be completely misleading there may be this incredibly simple starting point that a divine being could have invoked and all of this might by virtue of some deep symmetry and the structure that isn't even apparent it's all simple from the standpoint of the ingredients and and the laws and it may be the so I guess I slightly worried even though I largely grew there slightly worried about saying what would be required because we don't know what would be required that's what I mean by us not being able to figure it out but if it's simple why call it God I mean no no I agree that's exactly the point that I made it's just replacing one word with another but I guess I worry about the argument of trying to delineate the degree of intelligence and complexity required I have no idea whether what you said is true in that regard but if it's just so plain simplicity just call it simplicity what what yeah so that I that I agree with but it was the attributing a certain necessary level of complexity intelligence that that I find hard but but I agree with the larger point that we're just replacing one word with another so you see him unsatisfied with that I should have stopped when I convinced him a string theory okay good yeah if I was listening carefully enough earlier I think it was said that the whole range of physics from quantum mechanics to general relativity you could understand the Machine of the brain but not consciousness and two things occur to me about physics that aren't understood and I'm wondering if you have any comment as whether consciousness might be fueled by dark energy or by the collapse of Schrodinger's multiplicity into the actual yeah so for dark energy I it's hard for me to see whether it be any connection you know the amount of energy in dark energy is so feeble in any volume compatible with everyday experience that's hard for you to imagine that energy making a significant difference but when you come to the collapse of the wavefunction the Schrodinger equation that you described there are some very smart people who do draw a connection to consciousness right Roger Penrose is a very smart man it was my graduate advisor at Oxford for two weeks and and and and he is convinced by virtue of analysis that he's done for a decade and experiments that he's done with neuroscientists that there is a connection between microtubules in the brain that can collapse the wave function and he believes that that's the seat of consciousness I've looked at it I'm not I don't see it I'm not convinced of it but I can't say that I've studied it in great detail so so is that a possible link I guess it conceivably could be I don't you I've tried to read Rogers book but I must say I didn't I I don't understand a bunch of theory enough to write right hi so my question it's a fun question that I thought of because we were talking about a little bit how Lord Kelvin though a really brilliant scientist was astoundingly wrong about certain things about the universe and earth and so I wonder if we took two well-known scientists from your respective fields let's say Einstein and and Darwin and we brought them to our time what do you think that they would be the most astounded amazed by with our current scientific understanding and what do you think they would find the hardest to accept or be most skeptical about sake do I your honor Darwin III want some had to do a television program in which a Japanese television company brought an actor dressed up as Darwin to visit me and I was supposed to bring him up to date as to things that have happened since since his death and it was an interesting experience because he he he was well made up he had plenty of slap on which kept on dropping off and I sort of bowed very low and said what an honor it was to meet him and things and then I had to explain to him about modern genetics and he this would have been very surprising to him very interesting that's about surprising as revelatory to him because in his own lifetime not only did Lord kelvins estimate of time worry him he was also worried by a man called Flemming jenkin who made the point that because of the prevailing genetics of Darwin and Jenkins time which was blending inheritance they were aware that of course that animals inherit from both parents but they thought of it as being a kind of mixture of the mother and father or was like mixing two liquids and Fleming jenkin pointed out that if that were the case offspring should be intermediate between their two between the two parents and if that were the case then there would be a rapidly natural selection would run out of variation on which to select and this did worry Darwin he shouldn't really avoid because it was quite obviously not true that variation disappears it's not it's not the case that as the generations go by and animals become more and more gray and sort of uniform they do retain their their their their variation but nobody understood why and it wasn't well meant Mendel who was a contemporary of Darwin actually didn't discover why but Darwin never knew about it he wasn't rediscovered and until after Darwin's death so I had to explain Mendelian genetics to this actor posing as Darwin and also DNA and he did his part well he said so I don't no matter that I mean I I think that's it that is one thing that that would have as I said not quite surprised Darwin but but but he would have felt yes everything clicks into place now and I I now what was the one thing that Darwin got wrong he did he got precious little wrong I mean if you read the Origin of Species it is an amazingly prescient book it's Michael gazillion said he was working a hundred years ahead of his time astonishing man but the genetics he did get get wrong and and so that yes I'm there quickly on the Einstein one I think Einstein would be surprised that quantum mechanics is still with us effectively in the form that he'd to test it and he thought that advances would do an end run around quantum mechanics and somehow all the weirdness would disappear with the deeper understanding and that hasn't happened I also think that you know as we describe advancing you as you describe string theory and and and all the qualities of the theory and and I think you just say you guys are geniuses utter geniuses I have a question for Brian regarding mass I understand from Einstein that a particles mass increases with acceleration at CERN they take protons and accelerate them to very close to the speed of light over 99.99% of speed of light my question is what is the change in the mass of that particle from rest to the point of collision multiplied by 1 over the square root of 1 minus V over C squared V the velocity C the speed of light right thank you thanks very much I didn't understand that answer at all and so I have to write this but I'm gonna ask hopefully for a non pessimistic answer to this question which is I'm a little puzzled by the disappointment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life because it seems challenging by or severely limited by two elements one is astrobiology which seems to suggest that the combustible energy sources that would be they would they suffocate the species that create sufficient advancement to support radio wave broadcasting we're suffocating ourselves and the other element that I find challenging in terms of evidence for extraterrestrial life is the time synchronization needed to collect a radio signal the duration of a species that broadcasting is probably short yeah the universe when I was growing up we thought it was expanding now you guys have changed the rules again then a still expanding but its accelerated yeah it's accelerating so in some period of time we're only gonna see our own a galaxy so you've got a dual pong problem of combustible energy suffocating us or others and getting the signals to synchronize so why would we see yeah well I agree girl you're pointing out how unlikely these programs are to succeed I mean look life on this planet us began very early on in the history of this planet but in that four billion year window as you're saying we've only been radio broadcasting what for less fifty seventy-five years so even if an extraterrestrial society civilization was trying to find us and they sort of knew where to look it wouldn't just be a matter of pointing their scopes in the right direction they'd have to be waiting for just the right interval of time so so I think you're pointing out how hard it is and therefore perhaps not surprising that we haven't found any if indeed life is commonplace throughout the universe and the other thing is look you know we now know of so many planets right that's one of the major changes in the last decade right there are so many planets out there and if a fraction of them support life right there could be whatever there could be you know a hundred million civilizations scattered throughout the galaxy okay but that's one per enormous number of stars so it's still very sparse even with a hundred million civilizations out there so it's hard to find and what about your take on astrobiology and the likelihood of a species suffocating itself I'm curious to hear further source of of pessimism would be that the interval of time between the civilisation working out how to used send radio waves and destroying itself by warfare of some sort it could be there could be civilizations winking into existence here here or there and then winking out again after a rather short time I guess that's another aspect of you're suffocating so quickly we're at ten o'clock but I think we start a little bit later you guys okay to do another five ten minutes is that okay okay there seems to be a wide spread and idea and the culture that in order for life to be meaningful we all eventually have to die and I'm a little skeptical of that idea it seems meretricious like makes us feel better that there has to be some meaning but if you imagine asking someone 50 years going by in their life is your life still meaningful are you involved in useful projects are you advancing things it seems like life gets to leave evil no matter how old you're getting so I wonder what your thoughts are about the necessity of death for the meaning of life oh that Richard well that I mean there there's a pretty sound Darwinian reason why we die which I couldn't perhaps briefly explain Gene's mature at different I mean well as a mature have have their effect at their as times during life and most of them have an effect during early embryo logy but then they have effects later and later and later and if you imagine a gene that makes you die or for example cancer at the age of 10 and then another gene that makes you die at the age of 20 another gene that makes you like the age of 38 40 etc the ones that make you die at the age of 10 are never going to get through into the next generation the ones that make you die the age of 20 a few of them will get through ones that make you die at the age of 30 quite a lot of get through etc and once it makes you die as you when you're when you're a hundred well certainly have got through by the time they kill you so we are a kind of dustbin of late acting lethal genes or sub sub sub lethal genes which is why from Darwinian point of view we die of old age and there's a more sophisticated versions of that theory but you seem to be talking rather less in a Darwinian way than in AI than in a sort of subjective way saying wouldn't it be nice if we wouldn't wouldn't life feel more meaningful I think with the way you put it if we didn't die no I I was challenging the idea that people spread that in order for life to be meaningful we have to die like people say life wouldn't be meaningful if we live forever and I just as well I don't who says that I mean well like like Bernard Williams says that I mean our philosophers who thought this issue through and have made cogent arguments that all the things that give life meaning that we usually list many of them would evaporate if we didn't die right I mean you know if you know those of you who you know your abilities could always improve over time well if you have infinite time you'll be able to achieve anything so there'll be no real challenge will be no sense of success those of you who your abilities will plateau and hit a limit well for eternity you're gonna be stuck right that's not gonna feel too good either right so so you know oh but you know these are nice interesting thought experiments it's hard to really know but I guess from a flat-footed straightforward perspective I just wonder if you had the opportunity Hey professor Dawkins you've done so much for humanity we're gonna let you live forever would you would you would you choose that and that I I may be 200 years but but but but at the end of the 200 they came back to you at the end of the 200 and said you know you're to hundreds up hey you want a couple hundred more tell me more I think the the the the the early frightening thing about death really is is eternity and I'd rather spend eternity under general anesthetic which is what's gonna happen all right so we have time for up we only have time for two more questions I have a question for both of you I'm curious if you think it's possible or even likely that the true nature of reality and physics could be something that's fundamentally just inaccessible to the human mind yeah our aims are wired no I you know I I had a manova program years ago on a book I wrote and in one of the scenes I'm at a blackboard lecturing to somebody who clearly is not getting because I'm getting frustrated and ultimately the cama pants and into Labrador Retriever that I was that was you know and and was misunderstood by many people they thought it we were trying to say the audience's liked the dog but that that's that's not what is the point was there are intelligent species that walk this planet that seems to have a limit to what they can understand right dogs and cats are smart but they seem not to understand the general theory of relativity right every time I say that I always think the dogs are a big sweet horse damn relativity stupid human you know but but barring that possibility there are these smart beings that have a limit why wouldn't be any different from that that's the point so exactly like you're saying it could be the truth is right out here staring us in the face but we just don't have the brain power to grab a hold of it and maybe we never will now the optimistic way of saying it is even with this limited brain power look what we've been able to figure out right we can figure out laws that tell us how the universe evolved from a split second after the beginning be able to pry apart matter and understand its constituents we understand how time elapsed is how space expands why stars shine I mean that's pretty great stuff so maybe we have the brain power and it's just a matter of time but nobody can say for sure one of my favorite science fiction stories is Fred Hoyles the black cloud despite its obnoxious hero is probably modeled after the author I should imagine but at the end of the book the the heat the humans are in touch with us superhuman intelligence and the human superhuman intelligence the black cloud communicates to the it's knowledge of physics and they can't take it the human brain just burns up and and two really smart physicists died as a result of overheating of the brain and so that thing is perfectly possible that we are not capable of it on the other hand I agree with Brian I'm amazed at the fact that a brain which was naturally selected on the African savanna to hunt and gather is capable of devising special general and general relativity quantum theory and it's a it's astonishing what the human brain can do given the much more limited tasks which it was required to do when it was being naturally selected these are emergent properties it's a a wonderful testament to the power of emergence and so there then maybe there isn't a limit but I don't know one way or the other do you think that modern physicists are worried enough or spending enough time on realism and ontology and specifically what do you think of Bamiyan pile of waves that is exactly the question I'd hoping we'd end on so sure yes so uh we just had a conference for instance at Columbia last week where the focus was philosophers were involved and some physicists have sort of described philosophers as having no role in physics that's utterly ridiculous these are folks who've thought hard about quantum physics forcing us to really try to link up the mathematical symbols with real things in the world and to shake those dictionaries and make sure that they really work and we're uncertain at the moment so uh on the ontology side people do think about it but it's typically more in the philosophy side of things and I do think that physicists could do more to advance that that project in terms of this bohmian approach that you mentioned this is a very interesting story that will Tellem 30 seconds the approach to quantum mechanics that Richard was describing you know the Copenhagen approach that was really in some sense promulgated by some very convincing physicists in the 1920's 1930's and so for Niels Bohr being sort of the famous father of quantum mechanics um if the Bamiyan approach had a champion of that magnitude and that level of respect I think it would likely have been the dominant way that we would have thought about quantum mechanics why in the Copenhagen approach you have to give up making definite predictions you can only make probabilistic predictions that's hard to swallow okay but you also have to give up particles having definite trajectories particles no longer go along trajectories as in the Newtonian picture in the Bamiyan approach yes you also have to deal with probabilities but particles do have definite trajectories so you only have to sort of give up one thing in the Bamiyan framework you have to give up two in the copenhagen one so I think people would have had an easier time and would have latched on to this way of thinking about things people still push this theory forward whether or not it's actually right in the sense of it's the real description of the world nobody knows but it's a worthy contender in an arena where many are still competing to win out with the right way of thinking about quantum mechanics and with that thank you very much let's give a big round of applause for Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins thank you terrific gum in today wonderful all right you guys thank you so much please join us in the lobby for a book signing I think there's a few left to grab I might still on okay on the book signing it's a very large audience and out of courtesy to people at the end of the signing queue we don't want to take too long at the beginning of the signing queue and therefore we will we cannot personalize actually dedicate books to particular people and also please no selfies alright thank you guys so much remember to go to payment philosophy comm check out our events that are coming up this month and let art and science inspire good night [Music] then use a doll and the coaster young man quad at his eyes he prostrate on the on the ground in this village told of a monster he called capitalism they could be shipped from the country and they barely get by with someone else the government these people out with the army that whenever big would inflate but the people got taxi crashed on the grass nobody paid attention no-mind could imagine such a change is seen the culture is strong and in fact between [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] yeah [Music] unto the planner revolution made it happen

Channel: Pangburn

Views: 273,273

Rating: 4.7765169 out of 5

Keywords: richard dawkins, brian greene, science, physics, theoretical physics

Id: 7iQSJNI6zqI

Length: 119min 40sec (7180 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/System777]

Thanks for posting. I actually flew from Miami to NYC on November 1st just for this. I must admit, I did not find it to be that great. There is nothing here that hasn’t been said before by either of them, but it was still a great night and it was a dream come true to listen to Richard Dawkins in person :)