The Island Of Meaning With Dr. Brian Cox - Episode 9

the way i look at life is that it's the most important phenomenon we that exists in the universe without life the universe is by definition meaningless it's clearly that meaning enters the universe with consciousness and consciousness is a property of living things and so without living things there's no meaning so so i think that let's flip it round if this is the only planet in the milky way galaxy that currently hosts an intelligent civilization then it's the only island of meaning in a sea of 400 billion stars and therefore we have a tremendous responsibility notwithstanding our physical insignificance to um to protect this island dr brian cox is one of the most popular science communicators in the world full stop if you've never heard of brian cox you might need to get your nerd card revoked he's been hailed as a natural successor to dave attenborough as the foremost science communicator in england and his bbc specials are some of the most popular science programs they've ever aired in the last decade uh some of those programs include wonders of the solar system wonders of the universe and wonders of life as well as some of the books that he's written like the quantum universe and y to z equal m c squared all this is outside his day job as a professor of particle physics at the university of manchester and he's been the recipient of multiple prestigious awards including the michael faraday prize he's been elected a fellow of the royal society and he's been named a commander of the order of the british empire which in my head i imagine is presented in a ceremony with a sword of some kind and yet despite all that he was generous enough to spend some time with me talking about everything from the origin of life to life on other planets cosmology and his upcoming live tour called horizon's a 21st century space odyssey which will employ some groundbreaking visual effects uh techniques that we're actually pioneered on shows like the mandalorian which is really cool the tour kicks off in the us and canada at the end of april and we'll hit the uk and ireland at the end of august i'll put a link to some of the dates in the show notes below but he's hitting up 50 cities on this tour that's just like that's insane this guy's a total rock star um and he used to actually be a rock star we talked about that just a little bit you don't get much cooler than dr brian cox all that said it was it was kind of surreal to get a chance to talk to him i really don't share on on facebook with my friends very often what i've got going on with my youtube stuff anymore but this was definitely one of those where yeah i took a screenshot of our zoom call and and shared it i couldn't help myself and i don't think my friends like me anymore but anyway fascinating conversation i really enjoyed it and i want to thank brian and his team for setting this up i'm super honored to get to do this but enough of that let's jump into my conversation with dr brian cox has have you started the tour yet uh no we've done some um sort of a lot of warm-up shows in the uk because because the tour is um tremendously complicated to the horror of everybody who has to pay for it right so all the promoters yeah what are you doing you know because for example we've um been working with their epic games so with the unreal to build virtual worlds so we have a planetscape which is all generated in real time on the stage and so you can shine lights into it and if i move around we have some ai bot things that can interact with me and follow me around on the stage and of course all that is really complicated and stupid and i think what when i said to my you know when when when people cost it out they said oh this science guy is going to go and give a talk yeah she's going to he just needs an overhead projector or something you know those things you used to write i think hello i'm getting the driver about the universe yeah and so they cost it all out and then i go now actually i want uh 30 meter wide led screens uh virtual worlds created um i mean i the intro video is um i'd spoke to a friend of mine who is a conductor an orchestral conductor and i said to him what um if what should stanley kubrick have used in 2001 for the music what where did stanley go wrong in 2001 and he immediately said he should have used this piece of music by sebelius sibelius's fifth symphony the third movement which is it was written in 1915 and it's this beautiful piece of music and it's at one level it's about swans taking off from a lake but at another level it's about the deep beauty and uh coherence of nature right the the the the the deep majesty of nature and it just was it sounds like every science fiction film you've ever heard it was from 1915 and everybody's ripped it off ever since it's a beautiful thing so i made i basically remade 2001 in eight minutes to this piece of music which is how the show opens and of course that actually probably per minute cost more than 2001 so yeah so yeah so it's it's quite a an ambitious um it's my friend robin into my he's a comedian who comes with me to lighten things up a bit uh i i sort of say sometimes you know thank you for coming to this um thing it's uh and he always says yes it's a show though it's not a lecture at these prices right so it's got to be redefined as a show but it is a show so you know it's like a giant screen behind you isn't it yeah led yeah and we put as much as we can into the venues so however much we can fit into each venue we put in it's like lego led screens you can just build them just stack them on top of each other yeah it makes me think a little bit of uh like how they shoot well a lot of things now but i think the mandalorian was the first one where instead of using a green screen or a blue screen that you have a giant led backdrop that kind of like interacts with the camera movement and everything that's it using unreal which is what we've done on the on the live show so you're just doing a live version of that live version of mandalorian yeah yeah let's that's we can back to lightsabers [Laughter] i was also when you were talking about 2001 i was like do you have a stage that rotates where you can like walk in a circle and it looks like you're yeah you know i might promote it can can we do that can we can we have a rotating stage last minute edition coming to space station he says yeah just throw it together so we're on a call in a production [Laughter] so so you're still working out some kinks and some some bugs and getting it all figured out and stuff yeah i mean it does um i mean it does actually change as well over because it's not really um scripted because i it is obviously you know i know what i'm going to talk about but i do like to get distracted because sure for example i'm i'm doing a lot of work on black holes at the moment i'm writing a book on black holes but also i have a part of the phd student that i'm co-supervising who's working on black holes and so it is possible and likely that during the section where i talk about black holes i'm going to go off on a tangent we have actually a black hole that um in graphics that we a company called d-neg did for us which um which uh so they did the black hole in interstellar all right they um that was that skin right uh keep thorn keep the worm so it's it's kip's um code but which has been published actually so uh working with dneg so so we use that code and it's great because everything that you see in those simulations is it is a simulation it's using einstein's general relativity no kind of artistic license really other than the way you construct the so-called accretion disk around it right and so i can talk to it you know because it's there behind me we we all bit around it in my the view that we did so you can see all the the way the stars shift around it as you orbit or the images of the stars it's spectacular actually that's really cool yeah and i think like i wonder because i know that one of the the things about that sort of i can't keep reading the name of it but we were talking about with mandalorian as an actor it's something you can play off of and get you know emotion from you're not just looking at a blue screen or something you're actually looking at the thing and reacting to it i bet i bet you get a little bit of that too just just kind of like you can presence i guess and as we're playing with it the interesting thing is you can you can change camera angles from the lighting desk right on your graphics so traditionally with graphics with tv graphics or film graphics you have to render them and that's it so you have to determine everything ahead of time and if you want to change your camera move you've got to re-render it and it's tens of thousands or a hundred thousand dollars or something to redo it but with the uh using those technologies you can just go one night you can go actually it'd be nice to go a little bit closer to that city in the distance so let's just move the camera in i can change the lens you can go wide angle or narrow angle change the light in state let the sun set it's really fascinating actually the way that you can play with it yeah i actually went to school for film and tv about 50 lifetimes ago but um it's funny how much has changed since then like even when i was learning we had i was cutting actual film on what they called a steam back like the reel to reel kind of thing like like my grandpa would have done of course all the kids did here like seriously um yeah but even like while i was there non-linear editing became a thing like computer editing and premiere and final cut pro and all that and now they have like you can just build whole worlds and interact with them in real time it's just and we do you know the shows because at the end well you'll see it has a kind of a we run some credits over the over this world you know it's just like a bit of a movie ending you know and and i can and i do sometimes we'll look at the credits and i can change them every night so i can add different people in if that i could put the name of the theater and just re-render it you know because the laptops are powerful enough now even though for a film geek like you our resolution is uh 8 000 by 2000 pixels which is because it's a very wide aspect and a lot of pixels but um for the real geeks it turns out that the uh i'm not going to advertise i can advertise i don't care i didn't get them for free i bought them but i bought a one of the new m1 max and it really does actually um render quickly at a premiere so there you go and i i i promise you i have no sponsorship i'm just telling you but uh it's quite it's capable of doing that in a reasonable amount yeah i'm waiting i'm sure there's pros with those yeah that's right i'll probably be able to bend space time with it no it's funny because like when i was in college um they still didn't have the school didn't have non-linear editing yet but there was one guy that had a hard drive big enough to handle video and people were literally paying him to learn how to edit on his computer it was a 13 gigabyte hard drive and we were like there's never going to be a bigger hard drive than that that's insane you know yeah it's it's just funny my my first pc had a 40 megabyte hard drive i remember it so vividly mm-hmm 40 megabytes did it fill the room maybe it's quite a big slow thing yeah yeah it was it was internet show i was at um i was at jpl we were just um it's one of the reasons i'm here in california we've been making a a film a little film following perseverance the rover across the surface of mars and uh when you talk about the technology that's in perseverance the rover it's impressive at one level but it's it's extremely slow because they have to be radiation hard electronics and so so these processors are 1990s process i think they i think they're 130 megahertz processors remember that i mean when did you last have a computer that was only 30 megahertz the point is it doesn't crash so it can survive on the surface of mars with the radiation and so on so it's very reliable but they're so far you know back in terms of computing power and it drives itself it's an incredible machine and drives itself autonomously across the surface of mars using a processor that you would have probably been like you said editing video on 15 years ago or 20 years ago how much of that though is is for the radiation reasons and the safety reasons and how much was just because they started working on it a long time ago no it's it it is um the electronics because the the helicopter on mars ingenuity that thing is way more powerful than the rover because it didn't have to be specked to the highest space standards because it's an engineering test so it's basically a couple of mobile phones and it wipes the floor with the rover because it has to because it's a drone that has to fly itself and that's hard a lot of processing so it's interesting so yeah if you could just stick a couple of phones in in things they'd have far more intelligence but of course you zap it with the cosmic ray and it breaks wow basically that's funny i was actually just working on a video about the south atlantic anomaly and um and how like there are some satellites that have gone through and had what they call them single single event upset single event website yeah thank you it was like scu but i couldn't remember what it stood here um but uh anyway it's just a weird little thing we just kind of touched on the same thing there um so so this tour when does it start so it starts at the end of april um okay what is the first date april april 22nd in dc and then it comes to philadelphia new york boston just after that and then head off across the states going to some places i've never been before um and we end up in the end of june in texas so that's where i am i'm in dallas in dallas when are we in dallas i see it sees no one do not have i haven't got people that's why i'm actually pretending for the viewers that there's no one in here there's nobody i'm just trying to be grand oh june 23rd june 23rd okay the last time i was in dallas uh was when i was in my band d ream a band i was in the 90s and we played a little gig somewhere called the lizard lounge yeah yeah is it still there i don't think so i think it shuts down not too long ago yeah yeah so we that's the last time i was in dallas it must have been like 1993 or something okay so you know what that answered my question i was going to ask if you had done tours before like because i've never done anything like that i've been kind of dipping my toe into thinking about doing live stuff just to sort of support the channel and whatnot uh but the idea of just going on a tour and just traveling and having a whole group of people it sounds fun but it also sounds grueling um it's like a whole lifestyle sort of it is i mean and i have so i've done really big tours in the uk australia and new zealand those places and we also did one uh big us tour actually uh but in smaller venues about two years ago two three years ago um so i i like it i mean i enjoy it uh it i i try to do it in an enjoyable way so i don't do anything else which is nice because i've always got so many things going on you know with the at the university and all the things i do so in some sense it's quite good to just go okay all i have to do is be awake from 7 30 till 10. so that's it the whole day is that the rest of the way just focused on that yeah that's almost yeah it's like clarifying you don't have to you're not as scattered you have this one thing you're kind of focusing but but in the uk it's kind of a bigger thing i mean we play you know arenas so it's they're 15 000 seat venues so i think it's rock and roll we've got four trucks and two tour buses and a crew of 25 or something like that so and the great thing about the us tour is though they were in smaller venues all the the production is that production so it was it's an arena production squashed into a theater which you wouldn't normally do because you you couldn't you couldn't do that you know you couldn't have all these fancy video effects and things if you play you know 1 000 seat places but because we in the uk i can play 15 000 seat places i can i can create these these things which is fun wow but what is it i mean you get up you you probably have a day or two in the city whatever city you're in or is it just like that day it's often just one day yeah so uh yeah so they just hang out the hotel or do you try to get out and explore or i do i i like to i like to i'm not very rock and roll anymore so if you go back to the 90s then yes i i would after the show i'd go out and go to bed at four in the morning and sleep until the next show now i don't i go to bed straight after the show and then i get up and exercise which i like to so so what i do is i see the city because i go for a run and try and find a nice park or something or down by a river if there's a river and find a place to exercise so i'm really boring now but i get to see the cities and whereas yeah when i was in my band i wouldn't do anything basically do you have i like family that comes with you or anything i mean if you're if you're gone for months at a time no we uh we actually arrange it so that it's not it's outside of school holidays so school holidays i stay um stay at home or go on holiday so yeah i don't work uh when when the family are available basically yeah that makes sense my wife's a teacher so we don't have kids but i still have to like schedule around school stuff i'm still on a semester schedule myself yeah when it comes to travel and stuff uh well that's all that's really cool like i said i've never really been on a tour and i think about musicians that go off and do that and just kind of have to i mean traveling is fun but it can also be really grueling and and you see you hear all those old uh songs from like motley crew about like on the road and you know living the life on the road and stuff and it sounds fun but it also sounds like an ordeal but i think they just made it up though motley crue i think they were just like doing what i do they're going to bed straight after the show um i think that they were you know just going home if they could and i think it was just all a fantasy in their own minds maybe after a certain point maybe maybe in their younger days they were they were partying no i'm sure they were i'm just making it up um i have no idea what motley crue got up to i've never think i wanna know there's probably some some books out there about that um so you get to talk about science all the time i thought it would give you a chance to talk about something that's not science for once well no there's nothing i i can i if you want to challenge me i will turn it into science so there you go i i've taken the channel no matter what it is i'll turn it into science i'll turn into science well no i wasn't gonna ask you about anything specific i was just gonna see if like um i like to ask people you know what rabbit holes have you gone down recently like what what movies might you be watching your tv show or books or just like what's just something outside of what you're always talking about that you're like into these days um it's a good question because what i tend to do is um bring i think so the show the live show is at one level about cosmology and the questions it raises you know black holes the the study of the deep structure of nature but actually it's also about the um human impact of those discoveries the emotional impact so that wider society so actually in the show we have i said we have classical music sibelius mahler there are sort of literary and artistic references because because the thing is that the question questions such as there's a question i pose at the start of the show which is what does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal universe which i think is the only interesting question actually and it's a question that is raised powerfully when you consider the size and scale of the universe that's a question about the human experience of life right and um if you think about everything like you said movies music arts for back hundreds or even thousands of years most of it has been about that question it's about the it's about dealing with what it means to be human so i don't think there is any separation at all between anything that we could talk about be movies or literature arts or whatever and um science it's not they're not separate they're all things that we do as humans to try to understand what it means to be human ultimately i think so therefore whatever you ask it's about that isn't it it clearly is about that i think okay so but that's so good so you want to know what movies i'm watching um i watched uh what did i what the last movie i watched was on the plane here where and it was uh house of gucci because it was on okay yeah on the on the thing and i really enjoyed it actually i know it's had loads of criticism but i just thought jared leto was incredible i thought he'd lifted it you know changed that film into something else i mean gaga was brilliant as well but she's always fantastic so i enjoyed that film that was the last one that i watched okay i haven't seen that one is it nominated for any article scott i think it is it's you know ridley scott as i don't think has made her i mean he's made some of the best films in my view ever met i mean you know alien and blade runner obviously i love gladiator but also um even his the things i would consider to be not so good particularly prometheus which i was so annoyed about because it started so well and then i i think if only you'd ask me to tell you just let me direct this plot a tiny bit and it was such a promising idea and it went after it but even then it's an enjoyable film i think so so yeah so they i'm a film critic now but so i like ridley scott and i like lady gaga and everything that she does so you know it's i i would recommend house of gucci some people say it's too long but there's no there's no such thing as too long if you're on a transatlantic flight it's only too short actually so or intercello into another one i hear the batman's about three hours so i'll watch that on the way back yeah if you want to watch three more hours of batman um what's kind of interesting what you're just saying about like kind of everything coming back to science because it's like the question and um it's sort of a universal thing that we all think about um and yet there seems to be um i don't see a pushback but like some some people just have a hard time getting into science and i've never really understood that myself it's like how can you not be blown away when you hear about the scale of the universe and that kind of stuff you know yeah um it's it's just a it's a a manifestation of our curiosity that's why it is um with a with a very important caveat which is really important actually which is one of my great heroes richard feynman wrote a great essay called the value of science in 1955 in which she reflected on what's the most valuable thing that the study of nature teaches us and how that can be used in other fields of human endeavor and then the most important thing he said was that science nature very often tells you that you are wrong right so whatever your opinion is and however important you are um if your view of nature is wrong then nature will ultimately tell you and you have to accept it so he said that scientists have a great deal of experience with being wrong and um it's a delightful experience because you've learned something so the way you thought the world works turns out not to be and so you know something that that and you've learned something so you understand more and um so he called science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance which i think is a brilliant definition and uh but his point was that you can take that right take that delight in being wrong the fact that you don't know because obviously in order to do research you have to first accept that you don't know otherwise you wouldn't do research that's the way that we have built our civilization but you can take that idea and transplant it to other fields of endeavour such as politics for example so imagine that our politicians um uh started every speech by saying well of course you know i could be wrong here of course i don't know it's really complicated but the best about the best availability at the moment i think this is a way to go and if we find some we make some observations and it's not gone quite right then we'll just change a bit and we'll fiddler and we'll do something else so we'll do we'll increase taxes i will decrease taxes that will change the way that we target environmental emissions or something anything whatever it is imagine if they said that then we would live in a profoundly better world right well instead what we have are a bunch of people who are certain and the one i don't get involved in politics so much but the one piece of advice i always give people is if if the person you're gonna vote for sounds really sure then do not vote for them yeah they're not suitable right they're either dumb or disingenuous or some combination of the two because they should know that it's really hard to run a country in fact feynman said in that essay that democracy is um a manifestation of that it's the acceptance that we don't know how to run a country so what we do is we change everything every four years why would you do that if you think you know how to do it you wouldn't do it right but of course so so the pendulum swings backwards and forwards and that is as feynman said and oppenheimer said this as well the great robert that that swing when you see the swing then what you're seeing is your freedom right you're seeing the fact that that this bunch of people think is this and this is this and we'll try them all we'll try all these different ways so it's the manifestation of your freedom when when when people vote and it goes against you and it goes towards you and it goes against your beliefs and it goes and that's just great the moment it stops doing that is the moment that you're no longer free and we've made a big mistake because feynman said because every time we think we know how to do it then we make a mess of it and you can see that in history right the more certain the leaders are the bigger mess they make seeing some of that in europe right now yep oh yeah it's people who've forgotten that the road to wisdom begins with the statement i don't know that's what they and once you've forgotten that you you you should be you should not be running a country yeah no i like that um it's funny as i've gotten older i've seen the pendulum swinging so i've kind of become more of an observer and it's kind of been like oh everything's going this way man wait you know it always swings back the other way sometimes we won't agree and sometimes we'll agree but that's democracy yeah you brought up richard feynman a lot here um and what's funny is i'm thinking about doing like a kind of a bio video on him or something because he comes up all the time like he just he just kind of did everything yeah and and like influenced a lot of people well i mean he was a truly great physicist the first thing to say nobel prize richly deserved for quantum electrodynamics um but and if you look at if you want to know about physics and you're at the kind of undergraduate level you know you should be looking at the farming lectures because they're absolutely brilliant um but also i i was i'm going to name drop now so i did an event with um kit thorne just a while ago we did a conversation together and uh kit knew him very well and worked with him and he said that um so feynman was always uh very dismissive of uh philosophy for example the philosophy of science he said then what did he say he said i think it was fine when he said that the uh philosophy is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds [Laughter] however um kip said that he thinks that feynman's book the character of physical law is the best work of the philosophy of science ever written and he said he said that to five men once he took it into his office and said that and firemen threw him out of his office but the thing about feynman is that he was if you read the value of science which you can just get online right you find when the value of science comes up it's the most beautifully written eloquent thoughtful piece of writing you could ever imagine it's absolutely it's profound and brilliant and i think feynman sort of played on this kind of idea that he was kind of a guy from far rockaway new york and he was kind of a bit tough and and and the way that he lectured often was to you know use that kind of slang you know that language he was very very down to earth right but he was capable of writing this most tremendously deep and insightful prose which he which he could do so he's a very multifaceted individual and a but first of all a brilliant scientist well those are two different skill sets being a brilliant academic and also being able to communicate that to like the masses um yeah which i mean i would argue you are as well um but uh you mentioned something earlier about kind of engaging people's emotions around science and i wanted to touch on that a little bit because we we are not logical creatures we're emotional creatures and um there is sort of like a gap you've got to bridge between getting that hard logical science stuff into people's heads through an emotional sort of catalyst you know um i was just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit in terms of like how you do what you do it's because i why did i become interested in astronomy because i had a you know an emotional reaction to the night sky clearly that that's what it was when i was younger five six seven years old i just found it you know a powerful romantic fascinating thing you know and so i think at the heart of all science is just a desire to know which is an emotional reaction if you're a biologist you might get fascinated by the way that the ants are making a path across your garden or something like that you know but it it's interesting not not because you're you're initially interested in the detail you've just found something interesting that you want to understand and so i think that at the heart of science at the base of science is an emotional uh there's an emotional seed which is that you are just interested and fascinated by something um and then the the again you'd find in five minutes for everything right feynman it all comes down to said he well i don't even need to quote five minute i can i can do my version of it so if you i made a series years ago called wonders of life which was a science a physicist view of biology really it was as inspired by a book that schrodinger wrote so schrodinger showed his cat fame and quantum mechanics called what's his life back in the 1940s where he really laid the foundations for a lot of modern biology in particular dna right it was a very and also bringing thermodynamics into biology it's a very profound book and so i made a series like that and then i realized that if you look at for example a blade of grass right so go out into everyone can go outside now after listening to this and find a blade of grass and actually the whole history of life on earth is written into that blade of grass right we share a common ancestor with that blade of grass um back um not actually hugely long ago actually the eukaryotic cells you know whenever that was let's say two billion years ago maybe it's quite a long time but um you know but there's like there's a single origin to life the last universal common ancestor called luca which is back there about 3.8 billion years ago we think so in what you should see there is is an organism that's essentially essentially four-dimensional right the structure of it cannot be understood without understanding the history of a planet and and that's what science does for you it makes it even more beautiful so it's a beautiful thing in itself but the more you know about how it got there and what it represents and its story the more beautiful it becomes so that's not that's emotional yeah it's an emotional reaction to the thing so you should have an emotional reaction to a blade of grass because it encodes the history of a planet this podcast episode was brought to you by curiositystream so i mentioned earlier that many people consider brian cox to be the heir apparent david attenborough is britain's premier science communicator well one of the people who believes that is well david attenborough himself and you can watch a lot of his programs on curiosity stream that includes light on earth which is an award-winning documentary that explores the use of bioluminescence in nature in other words how plants and animals create light to communicate to hunt to mate that's pretty much most of what plants and animals do but that's along with some of the other documentaries he's made like ant mountain which explores the world of ants deep ocean which is about life miles below sea level and hot tuna which is not about a spicy tuna sandwich it's about the atlantic bluefin tuna which is far more interesting than it sounds um his documentaries are famous for getting footage that's never been filmed before so they're all groundbreaking in one way or another and they are of course just a handful of the thousands of documentary films from some of the best filmmakers around the world on just about any topic you can possibly have an interest in science art engineering history you name it even better when you sign up for curiosity stream you get free access to nebula the streaming platform where you can find all my youtube videos except totally ad free along with extended cuts and companion videos and original series like my mysteries the human body series nebula is basically a curated list of awesome smart youtube content free of any algorithms or advertising seriously most of the youtubers that i follow are on there and you can see their videos before they release into youtube so yeah it's a really cool service and the best part is you can get nebula and curiosity stream for the ridiculously low price of 14.79 for an entire year i actually i did the math it comes out to 62 cents per month per service and you'll never run out of amazing content to watch so yeah to get all that just go to curiositystream.com joescottpod again that's curiositystream.com joescottpod and you can start the process of wondering why the hell you waited so long to sign up for this thing in the first place because it's that good i promise you and because science says you have to hear something three times before you remember it that's scott curiositystream.com so go check it out and thanks to curiositystream for supporting this podcast now back to brian i i the the context i feel that like that sort of understanding brings i i love what you just said because um i didn't i didn't really have a science background when i started my youtube channel just kind of like became a science thing just sort of an accident which is great but um as i've you know been more in that world for a while and have more context around it like you're right i could i could just be walking down the street you point out a blade of grass but it could also be a tree it could be a beetle walking down the street or something you know and it's just like when you have that that deep time context it's just like that's an amazing thing yeah and i try to get that across to people i feel like if i can share that then i've done my job sagan said it there's a beautiful i think it's in them billions and billions i can't remember which book it's in but he writes about um when he was a kid and he looked at the stars and he said what are those things and someone said to him they're just lights in the sky kid right so he went to a library his mum took him to the library and he got a book and he found out that they were other worlds right suddenly and he thought there were other worlds and now we know that they've all got planets right to a good approximation all of them have planetary systems so every point of light you see in the night sky has got planets there's a solar system there and then you can dream about those other worlds are they earth-like what are they like super jupiter type things what's that you know so the more you know the moment you know they're not just lights in the sky they're infinitely more magical and that's true it's always the case that the more knowledge you acquire the more magical something becomes that's not science that's just emotion right that's just that's just the way it is it's interesting to know more yeah so uh that makes me want to talk about james webb because they just released the sort of the first not really the first image but the first test image that's a real image that just can't see the galaxies though you can see the galaxy behind it so it's not just the the star with its points and it's kind of interesting about the optics of the web and it's all focused and it's cool brilliant but then you look in the background and they're just countless yeah i don't know how many there are in that image but there's a lot it's like a mini deep field sort of yeah one first image um the well the star that it was on i was kind of like okay yeah that's a star and then they were saying it's a hundred times less bright than what you could see from the human eye and yet it's blowing out this this picture yeah i was like oh my god that's crazy yeah it's quite a machine the web and and it's you know it's got a lot of purposes but one of them is that it can see into what's called the infrared which is longer wavelengths and the reason we're interested in long wavelengths is because the light from very objects that were forming very early on in the history of the universe um so from which the light has taken up well over 13 billion years to reach us and those things the light's been stretched by the expansion of the universe and it's been stretched so much for the earliest stars that hubble which is our most powerful space telescope other than the web can't see it because it's gone into the outside of its visual range so the web is going to be able to see the formation of the first stars in galaxies you know so you can see further back in time than the hubble into the what we call well the dawn right just uh the edge of the cosmic dark ages before the dawn and so that's just one of the things the other thing is it's powerful enough to look at planetary atmospheres beyond the solar system exoplanets to start looking at them really seriously to say what's in them you know they do they have the carbon dioxide on nitrogen if you saw oxygen high concentration i i i doubt it but if we did you'd see photosynthesis in action most likely so you discover life so is that specifically what they're looking for most is the the oxygen or are there other elements that would indicate maybe advanced civilizations or something like that well exactly someone said half jokingly to me once that imagine if we found cfcs you know then you know something that can only be created by a civilization i mean i don't think anyone expects that imagine if you saw a heavily polluted atmosphere someone had to the planet yeah you know it's like this would be the greatest discovery ever because you saw they're just like us mess with it yeah so i i mean i don't i don't expect that i i think that civilizations are extremely rare that's my guess but um you never know so are you a rare earth hypothesis kind of guy um rare rare civilization kind of guy so i think that i mean we know that there are a lot of earth potentially earth-like planets i mean i think the current estimate is of order 20 billion in the milky way so maybe one in 20 stars or 1 in 10 stars something like that um but that's potentially earth-like so rocky the right distance from the star possibly to have oceans on the surface if the atmosphere is right and so on um and and you might expect and we don't know but knowing what i know about biology in the history of life on earth you might expect some of them to have microbes on them um you know it doesn't seem so far-fetched given that we know that life arose pretty quickly on the earth when the conditions were right um there doesn't seem to be anything magical about the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry which is what life is on a planet but the history of life on earth also tells you that from the origin of life it took some the best part or even a bit more than three billion years to go from the origin of life and some single-celled things to complex multi-cellular life and three billion years is a long time even in astronomical terms it's a quarter of the age of the universe yeah and so that suggests without knowing anything else if you just have to guess that suggests that the transition from single cell living things to complex anything something as complex as a blade of grass never mind a human being something that can build a civilization is not as likely right because it took i mean you think so from the origin of life on earth to to the first industrial civilization on the planet is four billion years 3.8 billion years um if you ask the question how many of those potentially earth-like planets are stable over that kind of time scale then the answer might be very few so so it's in that sense that i think i'm a rare earth person i think that if i was forced to guess uh with the additional bit of evidence that we haven't seen any evidence of anything so we you know that there isn't any evidence of anti-civilizations out there currently um then i think you put those seasons together and you think it's probably biology i think the biology is the thing that stops it there's a very good friend of mine actually um in manchester he's a professor of zoology and he likes to say that all there will be there at best bestest slime yeah so it's probably a slime-filled galaxy if i was to guess i'd love to be shown there's no reason why i should be wrong though i mean you know no one would be less surprised than me if a flying saucer landed tomorrow because i'd go okay well that's fine that solved the problem for me because now i understand because it's a big mystery it's like why why with all this time and all this planets does it seem that nothing there's no big space-faring civilization out there that's written its existence the evidence of its existence across the sky it's a problem so so i'd just be i i i just tick it off and go okay it's good i i understand that fully yeah so i wouldn't be surprised people always have a go at me on you on twitter and things like that but you you're close-minded you don't believe in the flying saucers you know and i say well i dipped into that i'm not close-minded i thought about it very deeply and it surprises me that there aren't any flying sources but i don't think we've seen any yeah so i'm very open-minded about the subjects that i just don't i haven't i've seen not one scrap of evidence from any any reputable source that tells me that we've been visited by aliens and and when you play this on your youtube channel i will get another barrage of from from you know line after line of nonsense on twitter from people and i'll just go no i just you yeah it's just so you're echoing me a little bit actually because i did do a video when you remember when they had that uh report that they were doing to the to congress the the pentagon had some yeah ufo program yeah um so i did a video on that and i was basically kind of what you were just saying i was like i would love more than anything else in the world for this to be true it's just it had the the burden of proof is so high for this that a blurry image is just not going to do it for me sorry so yeah and i got all the comments and all the emails and stuff you can see it with them you talk about that the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence so we look at this search for life on mars at the moment so the perseverance rover it's got experiments on it it's going around it's it's taking cause it's on its way to river delta at the moment it can drill it can do chemistry and spectroscopy and all these things but ultimately every scientist i've spoken to on that mission said that even if we get signs that there's complex organics there which we could gather from those instruments the only way we will believe it is if we bring those samples back to earth and we subject them to experiments with these huge facilities we've got here on earth and even then it will probably take about 20 years before people accepts it because if you look at the there are structures called stromatolites on earth right we should now accept it as the oldest ex evidence of living organisms on the planet 3.5 3.8 billion years ago off the coast of western australia for example and those things were the subjective debate even though we had them in our hands it that for 20 years or more people were arguing about whether they were evidence of life or not so that's how hard you have to work when you've got small amounts of evidence from a long time ago in that case or a different planet in terms of mars you've got to work very very very hard to show that you've not been misled and that's that's we're going back to all the way to feynman again the satisfactory philosophy of ignorance a lot of science is is is what's called in my field particle physics it's about errors it's about quantifying the errors in your observations what are the possible sources of error what the you know it's like if you toss a coin ten times it might come up heads ten times doesn't mean the coin's weighted there's a probability that will happen so you've got to make sure that you understand the probabilities and things that when you so when you're looking for life beyond earth remember that even looking for life on earth if you go back three and a half billion years has been tremendously controversial because it's hard to show so it's short of you know very clear evidence of a of a a ufo literally landing in like hyde park or something then i'd go okay uh oh you know some signal we could receive we look for it we've got this seti which is a i strongly support it's a really valuable scientific endeavor to go and listen i mean the first thing you want to do is look for evidence of civilizations out there so we do and we haven't found any we found a couple of little blips and they they they don't end up being repeatable so then we try to look for them again they've gone like the wow the famous wow signal right right so it's just the case that you know it's uh there's an analogy i sometimes draw which is that you know we all get on aircraft for example imagine getting an aircraft um imagine if they hadn't repeated repeatedly tested it right you know imagine if someone had gone i think the wings should look a bit like this stick them on be fine then you you know imagine what that would be like that experience that that's it's just an example of how we in in certain things in engineering we take it for granted that someone's really careful and it's good when you build a bridge you don't just go i'd be all right it's like the golden gate bridge you know just yeah stick a few squares fine [Music] it's well tested it's the same with knowledge actually so knowledge only becomes reliable knowledge when you test it like a bridge and it becomes a reliable bridge when you test it it's the same so i i encourage people to do that when when they're just kind of guessing based on a fuzzy blob taken by someone on their 1990s phone you know just say actually imagine that this the analogy is that this is an aircraft that i'm going to get on and imagine if it's been subjected to an equivalent level of scrutiny maybe it's yeah you know were talking a second ago about bringing samples back from mars i know that perseverance is kind of doing that it's collecting samples that are eventually hopefully going to be picked up and taken back but even if you if you got that back home and they subjected it to the experiments and they found some kind of microbe or something um wouldn't you still have to prove that it didn't come from earth to begin with yeah so that would be another controversy i imagine or another it's very possible so we know that material is exchanged between earth and mars we have martian meteorites on the earth and we know that microbes can survive space travel and we know that they can exist in hostile environments like the international space station on the exterior for example so um there's no reason at all you're right where there couldn't have been a single genesis on earth or miles and that life could have been transferred just randomly because the planets exchange material so you've got to show that it's a different biochemistry and it's very hard to do yeah especially because you might have things like stromatolites which are not really life at all they're they remain they're they the products of life right they're the structural evidence of life essentially without the biochemistry because one of the ways you look for life on them [Music] in a rock is you look for um it's not really looking for just the elements the molecules and things it's looking for how they're distributed because life tends to clump things together and distribute things in interesting ways so layers or concentrations of things that's what life does so that one the key thing that perseverance is not doing is grinding things up and putting them into a laboratory internally to see what's in there because now it's much better understood actually that really part of the evidence for the life is how how the structure of the rock has been modified by life that's what we see on earth you see that that's one of the key smoking guns actually so it's hard to show that life exists um we think it probably does otherwise we wouldn't be looking for it you know that's the thing so again you know when people say oh you're so close-minded you don't believe in aliens you go back actually i most people do think there's a chance of aliens otherwise you wouldn't build perseverance and send it to mars right most people think there's a good chance that there might be martians right but um but you know as i said it's it's extremely difficult to show that's the case and there might not be as well i don't know can you clarify what stromatolites are exactly i've heard the term before about but not they're found in them in in western australia in particular so they're they're they're now i suppose i don't know what the geologist has called them but let's call them almost like the fossilized they're not fossils but they're they're structures that were created by microbes okay so so they're they're big they're rock that is has been arranged by life right basically that's that's a way to say it but it but it took um a long time to convince people that that was the case um but they're the oldest some of the oldest evidence of life on earth yeah okay um basically you were talking about the fermi paradox a minute ago about like um you know there's so many stars and everything outcome we don't see aliens everywhere that was actually that was a video on my channel that got me started talking about science stuff i was just doing comedy stuff and then i did a video on the fermi paradox just kind of randomly and that was the first video youtube was like hey let's show this to some people and uh that brought in some other people and it became a sciencey kind of thing what were the jokes what's the fermi paradox joke well it wasn't it wasn't really a comedy video it was so long ago now um but everything before that was just kind of like it was actually called um ask a joe in the beginning now it's called answers with joe but uh i would get questions from people and i would just answer the questions and that's what this was when somebody asked a question on why don't we see aliens or something so i did a video about the fermi paradox and um there were probably some jokes in there but i don't even remember what they were it was a long time ago but i actually did a video fairly recently that was sort of challenging the the uh premise of contact where you know we had this radio bubble that's gone out from our planet since you know for the last hundred years or so and the idea that some alien civilization could have picked up on that so i actually kind of sat down was like okay so if it's about 100 light years out because it's been about 100 years and it moves at the speed of light you know so how many stars that are you know sun-like in that area and everything and um and i really kind of dug into it and i i i came to the conclusion that that there's there's nothing out there i was curious what your opinion of that was nothing in terms of civilization right yeah and in that in that small area yeah i mean uh i i think yeah i mean i i in in what sense in the sense that we should have detected any civilization that was in such a bubble in the sense of that there's a civilization out there that could have hurt us inside that bubble i could have had it yeah i mean there aren't many you're right there's a thing that there's a little thing online isn't there where you can just type in a bubble it tells you how many times there are in there you calculated it yeah there aren't that many it's true there aren't that many stars i don't know what the number is i mean it's an i know do you remember in in 100 light years uh i don't remember but i want it was the number 90 or 91 or something like that is in my that seems like it might be something like i can't off the top of my head i don't know yeah but well there's a picture though where you can see like a dot that is the radio bubble in the milky way and it's just it's just a dot it's like yeah it's small yeah i mean 20 odd thousand light years to the center yeah a hundred thousand light years across or so depending on how you measure it yeah so 100 light years is nothing and plus it would get diffused so much by the time it got out 100 you know light years and whatnot and anyway i pointed to it yeah it's not a powerful signal yeah true not many at some point it might just blur into the rest of the background radiation and whatnot yeah anyway yeah i agree some people didn't like that but well contact is a great film it is a great phone yeah there was another because he was telling me it was just it was just trying to give you that sense wasn't it of going back in time as you go out and and distance it was a good way of showing distance well and that was another thing about the fermi paradox was um was the time factor you know if the universe has been around for was it 14 billion years or something and it took this long for us to show up and we've only been sort of a blink of the eye in in terms of the earth years and stuff like how many civilizations might have come up and popped up and gone away yeah in that time you know there's a there's in the drake equation which is uh frank drake wrote down to twen it wasn't to try to estimate the number of civilizations really it was to try and focus your mind on what the what the variables are how you should think about it but at the end of that the way that he wrote it there's uh an l the letter l which is the length of time a civilization will be broadcasting or contactable through radio waves and uh you know you can set that i mean we've been around in that form which is with radio telescopes i like it that astronomers define civilization as when did you get a radio telescope then you're civilized and you know it's less than 100 years for us so we've only been that l for us is the contactable lifetime of civilization it is you know 100 years or so for us and you know we could have gone you think about the cuban missile crisis for example we could that could have been 20 years for us 50 years you know we're still in that position yeah where we could uh you know how long is l how long is the lifetime for civilization once it once it acquires nuclear weapons for example which it will how long does your civilization manage that um it's not clear we're doing the experiment and we've dodged it a few times and the way you use resources and what that does to the environment what's the climate challenge all the things that you are inevitably challenged with as you industrialize um oppenheimer thought about this a lot because he you know on the manhattan project he'd been felt himself responsible for creating the bomb um you can look at it many ways you can say that he shortened the war in the pacific or you can say that he invented this thing that we don't have the wisdom to control he felt the latter i think um he was very worried about what he'd done and then you know he was surprised he just strongly felt that he might still be right that we didn't have the wisdom to control the knowledge that we've acquired through science and so it could be the case so that's that could be another answer so the great silence that people call the funny paradox fact there's nobody seems to be there might just be because we are fundamentally idiots so all it's the great stupidity is the great stupidity oh intelligent beings are fundamentally just dumb yeah and the moment they work out how to do it they erase themselves from the universe that's actually a possibility which you know and i challenge anybody's listening to argue that there's at least a possibility that that's what we are you know it it gets kind of what's the word nihilist or something but but um when i think about like you have planet earth and all the little things that kept it stable and you know our magnetic field and the moon and all those things uh all those little factors kept it the nice little warm little shell and and then and then the stuff starts growing on it it's like mold you know and and then this other mold starts like just going out of control and like digging up too much stuff and you know ruining the whole thing it's like it really almost feels like an infection i i don't think so i think that's kind of a nihilist way of putting in i guess yeah i think it's that's the i i don't the way i look at life is that it's the most important phenomenon we that exist in the universe without life the universe is by definition meaningless it's clearly that meaning enters the universe with consciousness and consciousness is a property of living things and so without living things there's no meaning so so i think that let's flip it round if this is the only planet in the milky way galaxy that currently hosts an intelligent civilization then it's the only island of meaning in a sea of 400 billion stars and therefore we have a tremendous responsibility notwithstanding our physical insignificance to um to protect this island of meaning if we mess it up we will be responsible if that's the case for annihilating meaning perhaps forever in a galaxy so i think life's important you are a good counter balance to me [Laughter] i'm over here like we're an infection that needs to be no well think about it i mean i said i love it i love what you just said though that's good yeah i mean what's the point of an asteroid yeah right it's just kind of it's a lump of rock there's nothing it's pointless i don't care when people say should we mind the asteroids it's like well yeah what else are they doing yeah well yeah what are they doing there there's no point they're just there floating around in space waiting to be mined i think life is a different thing life that's why we're careful and rightly so about exploring mars because there might be martians right not things with loads of legs and things but microbes but even so if they've been there if there's a separate genesis of life on mars then that's a tremendously valuable thing and we should think about it very carefully and if there are no martians build cities on it yeah you know why not yeah but if the emotions that sort of gets to the uh the sort of that rare earth hypothesis thing i was talking about a second ago like i guess there's two different ways of looking at it one is that um life is i don't want to call it a fundamental force but like a fundamental just something that's going to happen with the chemistry of the universe you know like given enough time in the right conditions it's just going to happen and it might not even be like the life that we have here it might be different kind of conditions but it works in a different way whatever um and the other way of putting it is is that it's the universe is just this absurdly huge thing and and it just happened to some kind of weird fluke in this one spot that just happened to be the right conditions or something like i guess those are two different ways of looking at it well sure no i'm sure i'm sure there's life out there and civilizations out there because you rightly say that what was the word you used absurdly it's absurd it is absolutely big i mean there are you know the piece of the universe we can see there are of order two trillion galaxies yeah in in the observable universe which is a small patch of the possibly infinite universe beyond so they're definitely alike in civilizations out there there has to be um but the question really is how many of them are contactable how far away do you have to go and um it could be you have to go out of our galaxy to get another one so i think that's the real question is it's internal to our galaxy because i don't see we're ever going to be contacting things from another galaxy i just think the distance is too big so it's practically you know it's almost irrelevant right um but inside our galaxy 400 billion stars then that's the question what's what is there in there well didn't we find on on some comets like organic molecules yeah or organic compounds oh carbon chemistry yeah complicated it gets complicated right yeah so that that was interesting to me because it's like i mean you can see on earth with the tides and the little you know tide pools and stuff and over time the bubbles you know all that metal theory but like out in space in the in the dust clouds and stuff to be able to get the basic building blocks of life to happen to me that that kind of sounds like you could see a lot more of it out there if the basic building blocks are that easy to create and so yeah but you've got to if you think about it you've got to um somehow those building blocks have got to come together to encode information and copy it that that and that becomes a bigger ask and that requires metabolism it requires energy there's a thermodynamics there's fundamental things you need to compute right it's running it's running software essentially um so that that's a bit different from a few amino acids floating around it's like how do they end up running software copying data and i think that's the the great mystery that we don't understand do you think it's possible there could have been a second uh i guess the word is biogenesis of life on earth i i don't know i mean it all comes from one i do ask biologists that and uh sometimes people will say it's true that every living thing we are aware of everything that we're aware of shares the same biochemistry at the fundamental level same dna uh coding or rna even viruses right that broadly speak and you can see it's common and so but there is there are people who think of a so-called shadow biosphere whether there might be some other kinds of life that perhaps quite rare that we haven't detected perhaps the way we detect we search for life wouldn't turn up wouldn't detect it as life you know i think that's on the fringes i i don't but there are serious people who think about that and and it becomes relevant when you're looking for life on mars because it would potentially be a different biology so you know you can't just test you can't just you know like well obviously we've covered we're all used to those kind of tests the what we call them in the uk the lateral flow test the covet tests and things that's all that you know they're looking for biology they're looking for that particular things particular gene sequences or whatever it is and so if you've got a completely different biochemistry then it's not obvious how you'd look for it so there are people who think about that but uh yeah yeah there's actually teasing up a video a little bit here but there's a project that i've been working on where um it's very different from most of my normal videos but it's the idea is the the entire history of the earth in 10 minutes proportional you know yeah and and it's funny because i've got some some writers that work with me and um one of them was working on it he was like and i was like the point is that it would you know uh unicellular life would probably begin you know early on but then multicellular wouldn't be until like way later you kind of touched on that a second ago but um but he was like well there's not a whole lot really happening between like minute two and minute six or something and i was like that's the point like this should be the most boring video in the world it's just literally sitting there waiting for this thing and you know but that gets the point across that like for some reason yeah that jump from from basic life to complex life it just took a really long time yeah yeah the i mean there was some things got you know photosynthesis yeah complex things going on in the single-celled organisms um but you're right the the origin of the so-called eukaryotic cell with the nucleus and everything which is right necessary for complex multicellular things that that's shrouded in mystery i think and happened quite late could you consider that a great filter this is a good question the great filters are that i touched on this in the live shows actually that where is the great filter give it given that let's assume that we are the only civilization around is the filter in our past or our future right um and the service in the past as you said it could be yeah the the origin of multicellular life so single cell life fine multicellular organisms not fine so we've gone through the great filter we're very lucky we've made it through and here we go and our future is out there amongst the stars or as we spoke about the filter could be in our future so it's very difficult for civilizations to go through the industrialization process and they just don't so there were lots of them and they all stopped about now basically which is also a possibility so obviously we hope the filters in the past and we came out but then there's always like yeah sci-fi concepts of like oh no there's a a predator species out there wiping out everybody that they find well yeah that'd be cool wouldn't it at least we'd know then hey as that giant laser beam is wiping out hey there's there's aliens excellent i'll be again i'll be going oh great we finally got the answer yeah yeah well um just coming up on an hour here i wanted to kind of ask a few little just sort of trite questions just because i got you here no you never know that just do that i might end up going off on the great complex scientific and such of the truth i love it that's why you're here um so so we kind of talked about like james webb and and you know the kind of things that it could find and uh and that's all exciting and everything if if you had if there was one scientific mystery and it could be dark matter or any of the things that we just talked about or whatever but like if there was one mystery that you would like to see solve more than anything else if you could pick one i would pick at the moment the thing that i'm working on um so in in some sense professionally is with it with a half a phd student shared with someone but also writing a book it concerns black holes and it contain it concerns a very simple question that stephen hawking initially triggered and asked which is what happens to the information contained in something that falls into a black hole um does it disappear from the universe forever or when the black hole has evaporated away which is stephen's great um first great contribution to physics was to show that black holes have a temperature and evaporate emitting zero clocking radiation and so ultimately the black hole will be gone and all that will be left is hawking radiation and there are very profound questions his initial calculation suggested that the the radiation is what's called thermal which means technically that it contains no information at all about the anything that fell in if you if you burn a book put it this way very 2022 right so you burn a book then in principle if you collect all the ashes and all the gas and everything from the book in principle you could reconstruct the book so the information has not been destroyed it's still contained in the radiation and the ashes that have left but the problem with black holes according to stephen's initial calculation and really naively the production process the production mechanism is they radiate because they disrupt so the vacuum the so-called quantum vacuum empty space is really disrupted by the presence of an event horizon so there's one way you can think about it so really the the radiation is is really a property of the event horizon but if you throw a book into a black hole then it goes across the event horizon without drama according to einstein free falls in and ultimately meets the end of time with the singularity in the middle of the black hole um we're not in the middle it's in the future you have to be careful with relativity right so the singularity is a moment in time so it goes to the end of time let's put it that way and so it's kind of gone from the perspective of the book it went to the end of time but the radiation is being produced independently of the book right now it's not like be it setting on fire and and yet everything we know about physics suggests that the information should be preserved so you shouldn't destroy information in any physical process in the universe so the a great challenge raised in the 70s and 80s which has been solved i would say in the last two or three years to an extent is that challenge does the information get destroyed we think it doesn't we think it comes out and it's encoded in the hawking radiation that's leading us to a very profound reassessment of the nature of space and time and what they are so we're now strongly of the view i think most people that space and time emerge from a deeper theory which is quantum mechanics ultimately which doesn't have space and time in it so it's um so it's a it's but that's all coming from the the the study of the the very simple question of does something that goes into a black hole come out basically again in the future and um so so that's quantum gravity and we need quantum gravity to understand if we're ever going to speak with any authority about the origin of the universe if it had one or to understand what was happening very close to the big bang or before the big bang whichever way you want to look at it then we need that theory so i'd like to know what that theory is and part of that just because i'm so interested in black holes that you know i'm fascinated in the in the developments that are i mean it's really weird the the just to give you flavor the um not only now are we sure pretty sure i think everyone's pretty convinced that the um black hole evolution does not destroy information um but you say if you say well how is it encoded in the hawking radiation in in the far future and it's encoded it redundantly it turns out so in a way in a manner that is seems to be similar to the way that we encode information in quantum computers in order to prevent errors in the memory of quantum computers called the quantum error correcting code so so it seems that there's a put it this way it seems like the fundamental uh view of the universe the fundamental the fundamentals of the universe are information theoretic rather than physical john wheeler great physicist said he way back decades ago he had this thing called it's from bit which is it that reality comes from bits it's all bits and fidgets quantum bits yeah and that does seem to be the lesson from the study of black holes huh is um i think i covered the uh the holographic principle does that have something to do with the encoding that's the same thing yeah so what that's saying is that um the theory that you can write uh the gravitational theory so at the theory of our world right the general relativity and so on you can write it completely in terms of a theory encoded on the boundary uh surrounding the space right yeah okay so that's the holographic principle that's a hologram which is that you can encode a 3d object in a 2d piece of film completely yeah and so it does seem that you there's at least a dual description of our universe on a surface somehow surrounding the universe whatever that means it's very vague because people don't really understand what that means it was first done in what's called abs space which does have a well-defined boundary and now it's not yeah and so but but it broadly speaking it comes from and there's one way of describing it which comes way back the hints of it were way back with them jacob beckenstein who worked with hawking a long time ago and he um was wheeler's student actually and he long ago in the 70s realized that the the information how much information is contained in a black hole that's that question and it's equal to up to a factor of a quarter but we can forget the quarter it was a mis diagno it's a missed definition of something so let's say it's equal to the surface area of the event horizon measured in square plank units so flank unit is a fundamental length scale in the universe so for some reason the information content of a black hole is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon and you can imagine that's like saying how much information can you fit into a library well you would think it was to do with the volume of the library how many books can you fit inside the library but it turns out that it's as if you can only pay for the walls of the library with the pages of the books it's almost as if the interior doesn't exist in some description and that's again what black holes have been pointing us towards it's very weird that that would be the case there's a fundamental link between the surface area of a space and the information content it is capable of storing that's that that's quantum gravity that connection somehow nobody knows how but it's quantum gravity that's this is where my brain does start to melt a little i'm sorry a lot a lot oh it's this is the most the most difficult stuff but it's funny because when you hear the experts talk about it and i've talked to some of the real experts and they're often reluctant to put it into words because it's quite well defined mathematically and there's a thing called the ads cft correspondence you might have heard of maldoca and those people but actually what it actually means what the interpretation is is not agreed upon and so many of the real experts in the field so rightly i think shy away from attempting to you'll hear people talk about wormholes connecting the interior of the black hole to the to the hawking radiation in the in the far future things like that but but actually when you try and pin people down they're not that it's more like they look like wormholes in the maths but it's not clear what that does it really mean there's a wormhole is opening up you know does it mean that where does it go yeah yeah so it it's i think it this is the cutting edge but it's fascinating what everyone agrees upon is that we're getting a glimpse of a deeper structure of space and time everyone agrees on that so there's something else below it and below time underneath the this thing we call time and space there's something else there's a great analogy actually there's a it's really similar when i look at the history if you go back to the 19th century in thermodynamics and we should study you know temperature and pressure and volume and entropy these things they what they were telling us although we didn't know it initially was that mata is made of smaller building blocks so they were they're actually telling us that there is a statistical theory of small things underlying these things that we measure temperature and we can calculate like entropy things like that people wanted to do it to build better steam engines so that that's what they were doing but it was tying us about atoms and molecules but we didn't know that and it's actually only to the late 19th early 20th century when you see that connection is made so is a signal there was something below some deeper structure and now we have the temperature of a black hole the entropy of a black hole the thermo laws of thermodynamics for black holes and what they're really telling us i think is that gravity is a statistical theory so space-time is made of something else so we just see we're seeing the the the average behavior of something else and we call in that gravity and space and time in the same way that we call the average motion of molecules temperature and and entropy and so on so those are basically just like how we experience this deeper thing yeah so we're approximating yeah but it's what we do in our lives you know we don't think about atoms we think we was a glass of water here so we say what's the temperature of it temperature is not a fundamental thing it's it's the thing that tells us about the it's a parameter that tells us how ultimately how the the molecules are distributed amongst the available energy levels which is quantum mechanics in this structure so it's telling us about the distribution of energy in the structure and the structure itself and how many different levels of energy it can have all sorts of stuff which is deep underground so hidden quantum mechanics in here but ultimately out of it comes this thing temperature we also you can interpret it as the average energy of the things moving around it's it's got different interpretations but it's basically telling us there's a substructure that's what it is so yeah so that's where we are with black holes so there's a very long answer to a short question [Laughter] next next next trivial question i i've had this sort of theory kind of just talking about time and sort of time and space time and whatnot like we know the space time is expanding the universe is expanding dark energy and all that could that expansion since time is connected to space be the expansion of time kind of be like the forward movement of time is that what's causing time to move forward is the expansion of space does that make any sense i've had this theory for a while i've never talked to somebody smart enough to tell me how how bad it is there's a theme though there's a thing called the thermodynamic arrow of time which is um really the statement that the the asymmetry between the past and the future in the universe is to do with the special state of the big bang so sean carroll we've got sean on the show but he has a really nice analogy where he says that it's like there's no up and down in space right but if you put a big thing there like the earth then there's an up and down you break the symmetry right and it's the same with time so in one way of thinking about time is that because of this special special configuration in the past that determines the difference between the past and the future but i've not seen anyone say that dark energy relate dark energy to that you you probably could somehow in a thermodynamic kind of argument but i just tried to make that i haven't thought about it but yeah but then that's very different that's that's the that's our experience of time right the thermodynamic arrow that's different from the quantum gravity question it's probably related actually but um but it's in principle at the moment different to what it is to say what is time so in the answer we don't know what time it is right it seems to be coming from quantum entanglement ultimately but i'll leave it there because that seems to be the the that seems to be where we've been pointed by black holes it's something to do with quantum information entanglement that entanglement's a way of distributing information across large right systems basically so there's something to do with that probably and everyone just waves around it's not pinned down yet well uh my brain has been sufficiently melted so i think uh it's probably time to go ahead and wrap this up but yeah where can i point people to find out information about the tour and brian cox live dot co dot uk so and all the things are there and uh all the things we've talked about are in there actually so amazingly i try and cram this into a couple of hours with load of graphics and music and a bit of comedy but it is all in there it's cool um i just happen to touch on all the same things that you're already doing yeah absolutely which is great so i'll see you in dallas i would love to come see it yeah yeah 23rd of june i believe yeah actually soon after that we're in austin and houston as well down in texas and we're all over the place actually well you missed all the hurt of the tornadoes yesterday so that's good yeah was it okay that our head that was quite it got pretty touchy for a while we um we have a little crawl space under our stairwell and we had to pull some stuff out of there to make some room just in case but i still need to go put it all back but no we we wound up okay it's one of the west appearance kind of one of the few advantages of living somewhere living in the the i mean it's not the few advantages the uk is a great place but one of the advantages is that we we always moan about the weather but we don't really have very much bad weather you know it's hugely okay it just means it's raining a lot uh-huh i mean we have a you know we've had some big storms but they're not like the things that you get there yeah they're a bit lower level almost always disturbed no i've been over there and like it just was just raining and i'm like it just rains here it's not there's no thunder there's no lightning there's no swirling yeah no maybe that's why maybe that's why the buildings last for a thousand years over there yeah there was way no it's just because we because we built them we were building we here well actually i don't know actually there aren't many a thousand year old buildings actually oh do you have to go see the pyramids and things don't you stonehenge just face but stonehenge hasn't lasted well well they're definitely older than the things here i remember i went to a pub in london and it was older than my country and i was like wow okay that's you don't get a lot of those in dallas dallas is like it was built in the 50s this is a historical marker it's like okay it's true but yeah yeah there was the yeah there was there was something on twitter i can't remember what it was but it was about being being english and it was basically being english you're just looking out the window saying it wasn't supposed to rain today that's basically that's what being english is just day after day of yeah it wasn't supposed to rain well here it's like uh it's sunny and then it rains and then it storms and then it's sunny again and it'll go from like 80 degrees and then three hours later it's 40 degrees that happens to me i was in austin earlier in the year and that happened to me it was really warm and then it was humid yeah and then it was suddenly wasn't yeah so what happened it was literally mid-afternoon yeah i think we've got this weird combination of uh we're right by the coast but there's also mountains to the west of us and planes between us and canada so it's just like this weird mix of airflow and stuff but yeah i'm not a weatherman so i don't know yeah we're just in britain we're just in the in the sea surrounded by sea it's all just nice and yeah wet yeah i don't like it there i need to go back it's been too long uh well this has been an honor i've been watching you for years and it's been it's been really cool to get to talk to you and i appreciate you doing this no thank you it's a real pleasure and good luck with the tour thank you very much okay that was awesome uh big thanks to brian cox for sharing his time with me i really enjoyed this and it's and it's cool to talk to somebody who really understands the science to like an excruciating level but can talk about it in ways that are in no way excruciating i mean he can make it fun and relevant you can just see that he has a passion for this stuff it just oozes from his pores it's a very disgusting way of putting it but you get the idea so go check out the schedule for his horizons tour this summer like i said he's coming to 50 cities so chances are there's a show that's near you i'll put the link in the show notes or you can just check out brian cox live dot co dot uk this episode was produced by kimmy britt edited by bray brown i'm joe scott you can find me at answers with joe pretty much everywhere on the socials of course my youtube channel has answers with joe anyway thanks a lot for listening please do share this if you thought this was interesting and a nice review on whatever podcast player you're using right now really does go a long way but until next time thanks have a good one now go out there and start some conversations of your own take care [Music]

Channel: Conversations With Joe

Views: 252,660

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Id: 2wLjgc8lA9I

Length: 91min 0sec (5460 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2022