Brian Cox (physicist)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.

[1] I'm Dan Shepern and I'm joined by Monica Mouse.

[2] Hello.

[3] So this is a confusing guest, as you'll learn about in the episode.

[4] Yeah.

[5] Because there's a very famous actor of the same name that's on one of our favorite shows, Secession.

[6] That's right.

[7] This is not him.

[8] No. This is an equally impressive, perhaps even more impressive, Brian Cox, who's a physicist.

[9] Yes.

[10] And he is a Peabody Award -winning physicist.

[11] Okay?

[12] He was also in a rock band.

[13] that charted.

[14] This guy's incredible.

[15] He's got a few wonderful books.

[16] One, why does E equal MC squared?

[17] The quantum universe, the human universe, and right now he has a super cool live tour where you can go get dazzled by the wonderments of our cosmos.

[18] It is called Horizons, a 21st century space odyssey.

[19] Now listen, if you didn't like science, you're going to be half -ass tempted to bail from this episode because it gets deep.

[20] We've never had an episode like this.

[21] I feel I can definitively say that.

[22] I agree.

[23] I was fucking lost.

[24] But here's the beauty.

[25] This is why I say don't bail.

[26] Because we're lost too.

[27] And we claw our way back.

[28] We find the threads and we try to pull ourselves to his understanding.

[29] We didn't really get there.

[30] But we got much closer.

[31] It makes you so curious about the universe and existence.

[32] And it's kind of profound.

[33] Yeah, even if you don't get the intricacies of what he's saying, the global thoughts of our place in this enormous realm, are really worth having.

[34] Please enjoy Brian Cox.

[35] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.

[36] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[37] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[38] He's an armchair expert.

[39] So thank you for doing this.

[40] I really appreciate it.

[41] Do you live here or no, you live in England?

[42] Yeah, because you're teaching still.

[43] Yeah, in Manchester.

[44] My only European girlfriend was from Manchester when I was a child.

[45] Met her skiing.

[46] Really?

[47] Does that mean you can do the accent?

[48] No, no, no, no. You would hate it.

[49] I mean, when you're not here, I'll do it for sure.

[50] But in your presence, I shan't dare.

[51] Now, didn't one of the guys from Weezer go pursue, like, a doctoral degree in physics or something like that?

[52] I don't know.

[53] The famous example is Brian May. Yeah, the Queen's guitarist.

[54] Oh, he became a physicist.

[55] He was a physicist, and then Queen, you know, signed their deal, and so he stopped, did Queen, and then went back.

[56] Did Queen.

[57] Get out.

[58] He went back afterwards.

[59] Just not Queen out.

[60] Yeah, got that off.

[61] Check that out of my system now.

[62] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[63] I've done the rock star thing.

[64] Top 10 most legendary band ever.

[65] And then finished his PhD.

[66] And did he go on to do anything relevant in physics?

[67] He does, and actually in the UK, he's been quite involved in a program called the Sky at night.

[68] I think it's the longest -running TV show of any kind, actually.

[69] It's an astronomy show that's being gone.

[70] for 50 years or more.

[71] He's a very, very keen astronomer and finished his PhD not so long ago.

[72] And if he was in Queen, he is not in his 30s.

[73] No, he went back later in life.

[74] Okay, so you have a similar trajectory from show business to academia to now back to show business.

[75] But before we get there, I'm curious, both as a guitar player as he was and then as a keyboardist like you, I was shocked to learn years ago that music is just mathematics, right?

[76] Yeah, although, if I'm just sat there playing piano or keyboards, I don't see any crossover at all in the thought processes.

[77] It seems to me to be a completely different mental space that you go to, I think.

[78] Is it possibly that when you hit the keyboard, it makes the same note every time, and that you then search for another thing that would give order to the world around you and that you actually seek control greatly?

[79] Is that possible?

[80] I mean, honestly, I've thought about it, and I just don't see it.

[81] The crossover is that music and art and literature and science, all those disciplines are emotional reactions to the world.

[82] So I think they all share a common foundation, which is you have to notice there is something interesting and worth exploring and worth representing.

[83] I think that's where the commonality lies, because science is a creative endeavour.

[84] It relies on you to be interested, first of all, and to ask questions.

[85] And I think in that sense, music is similar.

[86] I would say, yes, science is even driven more by having a perspective that is novel and unique and requires this huge barrier to break through.

[87] And I think also music, when it's successful, is someone brings their own point of view to these same notes everyone's had and somehow arranges them in a way and does all these things and makes it novel and interesting.

[88] Yeah, the live shows that I'm doing, they start with a piece of music, which is a classical music.

[89] It's by Sibelius, a Finnish composer, who composed the piece that we use in 1915, 5th Symphony Third Movement.

[90] And the reason it's there is because an asked a friend of mine, who's a conductor, what should Stanley Kubrick have used in 2001?

[91] And he immediately said this seriously.

[92] He said, now, Sibelius would have fit those ideas.

[93] The thing is that cosmology, astronomy, those disciplines, they raise profound questions when you're faced with the size and scale of the universe and our apparent insignificance within it.

[94] How do you make sense of the things that we discover?

[95] Well, I think there are commonalities in those great composers faced questions like this.

[96] I say at the start of the show, what does it mean to live a fragile, finite life in an infinite eternal universe?

[97] That's a question that's universal.

[98] Cosmology forces you to face that question.

[99] It's why many people terrified about the discoveries that we've made about the size and scale of the universe.

[100] But composers like Sebelius thought about that.

[101] They thought about their own mortality.

[102] And the piece we use, it's about swans taken off from a lake in Finland, but also it's about the deep beauty of nature and the transience of life, and you can hear it in the music.

[103] And so I think that mixing science and music and art and literature allows you to explore the meaning of the discoveries more easily because those artists have already done it.

[104] They've thought about it, and that that music was their response to these big questions.

[105] Yes.

[106] We could also maybe say that in my experience with the musicians I grew up, with, there is an incredible amount of time spent by yourself.

[107] In the absence of humans, you're doing just fine.

[108] You're so focused on this thing.

[109] And then by this practice, you become great at it.

[110] And I would argue getting a doctorate degree in physics is going to be a lot of you just sitting with ideas and being comfortable in that space.

[111] Yeah, definitely.

[112] And just trying to understand things with physics, I say to students a lot that it's about not kidding yourself that you understand something, not deceiving yourself.

[113] You have to keep going.

[114] And only you will know ultimately when you really have a deep understanding of something.

[115] And it can take a long time.

[116] So when you have a student and the student...

[117] Me, I was horrible at visits.

[118] You were.

[119] Oh, the worst.

[120] The worst.

[121] My brain cannot go there.

[122] See, I don't think there is such a person whose brain can't go there.

[123] It's like saying there's a kind of person who can't learn an instrument.

[124] I don't think that's true.

[125] I think it's about practice.

[126] People will go at different rates.

[127] Some people are fantastic and pick it up quickly and some people it takes more time.

[128] But it's ultimately practice.

[129] And I don't think it's the speed.

[130] It's the same in science.

[131] It's not how fast you are at picking up the ideas.

[132] It's what the music you make is, right?

[133] The understanding that you read.

[134] Although there is a historical stereotype about physicists in particular that they seem to have a window of great creativity and breakthrough.

[135] Not unlike comedians, we seem to have a shelf life, as you'll see as this unfolds.

[136] I would have been much better 10 years ago.

[137] I thought you're going to say, like, first 10 minutes.

[138] No, no. You age out, it seems.

[139] But there is a pattern, isn't there, among great physicists?

[140] It's generally like your 20s and 30s.

[141] Yeah, certainly in mathematical physics.

[142] I think you're right.

[143] I mean, you look at Einstein.

[144] Actually, quantum mechanics is a great example.

[145] It's one of our foundational theories of the world.

[146] It was really developed initially in the 1920s and 30s.

[147] And it was cold.

[148] In German, I'll pronounce it wrong now, but it was Narban physics.

[149] It was boy physics, because most of them, all these people, Heisenberg, they were quite young when they were doing it.

[150] And by young, I mean 20s.

[151] And actually Schrodinger, who's most famous probably, Schrodinger's cat, he was in his 30s and considered to be the old guy.

[152] Even that history is really interesting because I read one of the great Oppenheimer books, and it talks about, again, this is kind of a Malcolm Gladwell thing where it's like you're gifted and then you have also some luck.

[153] You end up in the right place at the right time.

[154] And so Oppenheimer happened to be in Europe when those young guys were all proposing this, which was kind of sacrilegious at that moment.

[155] And he came back with a wide openness to quantum mechanics that no one else really had.

[156] Offenheimer has actually become quite a hero of mine.

[157] The BBC have a thing called the wreath lectures.

[158] They're just, you know, interesting people giving these lectures every year.

[159] And they're really prestigious.

[160] And Offenheimer gave them in 1953.

[161] And it was just before, months before McCarthy sort of went after him.

[162] And he was reflecting on the experience he's had in the Manhattan Project.

[163] So he doesn't really mention it, right, but creating the atom bomb.

[164] And reflecting on how science.

[165] as a discipline and the way it teaches us to think can be deployed more widely to help us gain some wisdom because he felt that our knowledge that he played a large role in delivering in particular to build a nuclear bomb.

[166] He felt that our knowledge had exceeded our wisdom.

[167] And he was very surprised that we were around, that he was around in the 1950s after delivering this power.

[168] These children basically, which I mean the human race, that don't have the wisdom to control the power that science had delivered.

[169] Well, in fact, they tried to map on to you, I think, something that was true with the Manhattan Project, which is they tried to say that Hadron Collider, that the physicists involved had an inkling that perhaps once these protons hit each other that they'd create a black hole.

[170] But that's horseshit.

[171] That wasn't true, right?

[172] No, no, I mean, when you think about these things, I mean, the answer is cosmic rays, which are very high -energy particles that come from space.

[173] We don't really know the origin of some of them.

[174] They're really ultra -high energy.

[175] There have been single particles detected that have hit the Earth with the energy of a professional tennis serve, right?

[176] So tennis ball travelling at like 100 miles an hour, one particle.

[177] So energy is way in excess of anything that we deliver at the LHC.

[178] It's child's play.

[179] And the Earth is still here, right?

[180] So it's bombarded by those things all the time.

[181] And you can actually do the analysis.

[182] We know about how many of those particles hit us per minute or per hour or per year.

[183] And so you can say, well, the Earth's been here for four and a half billion years, and so we can calculate the probability that at those energies, nature is not stable.

[184] And you find out, of course, that it is stable at those energies because it's just that we're doing this little experiment in Geneva.

[185] Nature's doing the experiment all the time on a much grander scale.

[186] But you can check.

[187] That's the point.

[188] So obviously, we do check.

[189] And that was the answer.

[190] But famously during the Manhattan Project, there were many of the physicists.

[191] Well, I don't want to say many.

[192] There were some of the physicists involved that prior to the first detonation, they said, we can't do this.

[193] it's going to ignite all the hydrogen in the atmosphere.

[194] Earth is going to catch on fire like a big fireball.

[195] And many left.

[196] I mean, it's a different thing, isn't it?

[197] Because that was wartime, and they were charged with a particular job in the face of a great evil at that time.

[198] But it's interesting to read Offenheimer and Feynman, actually, isn't a great hero of mine?

[199] You got the Nobel Prize later.

[200] You know, Offenheimer and Feynman thought really deeply about how we could gain more control over our impulses, given that we've now got this tool, the atom bomb.

[201] Offenheimer's reflection, they're worth reading.

[202] You can get the transcript of the lectures that he gave with the BBC.

[203] You can only get one recording because they erased over the other ones because the tape was really valuable.

[204] It's astonishing.

[205] And they've recycled it.

[206] Yeah, they did.

[207] But there's one of them surviving.

[208] And they're really dense.

[209] But the thoughts that are very relevant today, actually.

[210] So he thinks about the way that nature forces you to think, right?

[211] What is useful about that in other areas?

[212] And one of the things that nature teaches you very, very quickly is humility because you have an idea about how nature works.

[213] You do a bit of research, make some measurements, and it says, no, you're not right.

[214] And Feynman actually said, that's the most valuable thing, is not to be afraid of doubt, not to be scared to not know.

[215] And he called science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, which I think is a beautiful phrase.

[216] It's Feynman actually, but Offenheimer alludes to it in the 50s, said, if you think about democracy, that democracy is that, it's the, acknowledgement that we don't know how to run a country, therefore we change it every four years.

[217] That's so valuable.

[218] The moment you think you know how to do it is the moment you should not be doing it, right, in politics.

[219] Science teaches you that and nature teaches you that.

[220] And that's an uncomfortable feeling for people.

[221] People desire definitive statements.

[222] They like the laws as opposed to the theories.

[223] We're attracted to certainty.

[224] I remember the line very vividly in Feynman's essay called The Value of Science, you can get on the web.

[225] And he said that we have to learn that doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.

[226] I think we established the wrong expectations.

[227] So if the expectation is science can right now tell us everything about the known universe, that's a bad expectation to have.

[228] That's not what's happening at all.

[229] And that would go for everything.

[230] I was a social science major.

[231] It's changed 30 times since I left.

[232] Yeah.

[233] And only because it was propositioned as they have the answer, Now does it look like there's some kind of a failing in it.

[234] But I don't think anyone involved would claim, oh, we've got it, stop thinking about it, let's move on.

[235] But just like, I think the broader objective is like, oh, let's just keep pushing the ball further up the hill.

[236] We're certainly a cabillion years from knowing, but we have a little bit more than yesterday, and that's really the objective.

[237] And social science is far more complicated.

[238] Physics is a simple thing, right?

[239] In some sense, you're dealing with little particles or actually the whole universe, which is still simpler to understand than a human being.

[240] or a collection of human beings.

[241] Far more predictable.

[242] Yeah, exactly.

[243] But you'll never advance your knowledge if you think you know everything now.

[244] Science is the best that we can do given our limited knowledge at any given time.

[245] It changes.

[246] And people sometimes think when it changes, when the advice changes or the understanding changes, that means that therefore you're not worth listening to because you kind of changed.

[247] But actually what we're seeing is in real time is the evolution of understanding.

[248] That happens so much during COVID.

[249] It was like, okay, here's what we know now.

[250] And then that would change because they would gain more information.

[251] And then people would be like, oh, well, they're just giving us one piece of information and then negating it the next day.

[252] So I don't want to listen to any of it.

[253] And it's like, well, it's going to change with more intel.

[254] Exactly.

[255] I mean, we knew nothing about that virus.

[256] You go about two and a half years.

[257] It wasn't around.

[258] Right.

[259] You knew nothing about it.

[260] What you were seeing was science in real time.

[261] Yeah.

[262] And I have great respects, actually, for the scientists who had to speak.

[263] in the public arena, really unusually.

[264] They were having to speak describing research in real time.

[265] And you're right, people tend to switch off.

[266] And it's a weakness in our society because all the reliable knowledge we've obtained about the world has been acquired through that process of trial and error and of making a mistake and getting it wrong and then finding out that you're wrong and then improving your knowledge.

[267] We had a guest.

[268] They were arguing that we teach science incorrectly, at least here, I don't know how it happens in Britain, but the order that this person suggested is you should start with physics because physics then informs chemistry, and then chemistry then informs biology, or that physics creates chemistry and chemistry creates biology.

[269] Much as I would like to agree with you as a physicist, I don't think it's right, because the lines are very blurred.

[270] The point is that if you start with fundamental particle physics, let's say.

[271] So you say the world is made of these things, quarks and things, and then they make protons and neutrons.

[272] You've got no chance of explaining anything like a biological cell.

[273] Meaning there's something sexy or interesting enough?

[274] No, it's just too hard.

[275] You can't understand the cell from the point of view of the atoms within the cell.

[276] So biology is what you might call a higher level view, but it's a different process.

[277] We have nowhere near the understanding to understand something, even as simple as a single cell.

[278] from first principles, right?

[279] So the idea you've got a theory of everything that you should strive for, and from that we'll understand the human brain.

[280] It's complete nonsense.

[281] It's not possible.

[282] So I don't think it's right to say this science is more fundamental than that science.

[283] Same with social science.

[284] You can't say, well, social science is a property of things that are made of matter, and so therefore we'll start with atomic physics.

[285] But I guess the point that they were making is we start with basically the end result of all these things.

[286] We start with the animal.

[287] There's how you teach kids.

[288] And then you're going, oh, but you know, you have cells in your body.

[289] What are in the cells?

[290] DNA, what's DNA?

[291] Oh, DNA is chemistry.

[292] And then you learn chemistry.

[293] So you're just, you're going in that direction.

[294] I guess it's just what direction do you want to go in?

[295] See, I think the most important thing is the process.

[296] Let's say you want to ask the question how do termites get together to build the termite man. Then the process you go through is the same as saying, well, how do protons and neutrons stick together inside atomic nucleus, right?

[297] The process is that you observe and you come up with an idea, you check that against how the real world works and you modify your idea.

[298] And I think that's the important thing.

[299] So I don't care how we teach that.

[300] If there's one thing that I think I'd love more people to know, and probably everyone, ideally, in my ideal world, would be that process of acquiring reliable knowledge.

[301] Might not necessarily be right, but it's the best we can do.

[302] How do you do that?

[303] You know, that's why experiments are important in schools.

[304] And so I don't care what the experiments are.

[305] I don't care whether they're biology or chemistry or physics.

[306] It doesn't matter to me. I would also argue, though, that we are humans, and branding and packaging is relevant, right?

[307] So, of course, biology is a really easy for a stop because my kids love animals.

[308] So they start by liking a bear and they see a fish.

[309] There's some difference.

[310] Now I can get in a cold -blooded, warm blood, all these things.

[311] I don't think there's any real hook for physics.

[312] There's a sexy element of it to me that I think needs to be sold.

[313] that could excite people.

[314] I had no interest in astronomy.

[315] I took an astronomy class in college.

[316] My mind was blown because you like magic.

[317] Love it.

[318] The notion that everything we know virtually comes from looking at light is absolutely mind -blowing.

[319] And then when you go, well, how?

[320] How could I tell how far a star is away?

[321] What the star is burning, the distance.

[322] You get down into how many things you can learn from a big, of light.

[323] And that when you put it through a spectrometer, you can see that it's burning hydrogen or it's burning helium because those have a fingerprint of color when they burn.

[324] And then, oh, it's a little darker than it should be.

[325] Oh, it's redshifted, so it's leaving us.

[326] That's the fucking mind -blowing magic to me of astronomy.

[327] You're taking that little dot of white light and you're telling me everything.

[328] I think it's the way into physics for a lot of people.

[329] First of all, you have to understand that that is physics.

[330] Physics sometimes sounds like playing with a battery.

[331] Or math.

[332] A lot of math.

[333] much math.

[334] But you're right, you know, the idea that we can see light from very close to the Big Bang, 380 ,000 years after the Big Bang, for example, is a tremendous thing to say.

[335] People will argue, and I'm on Twitter and things like that, and people will say, well, how do you know about this Big Bang thing?

[336] The answer is because you can fucking see it.

[337] Right, right, right, right.

[338] Broadly speaking, because we can detect light from just very shortly after the Big Bang.

[339] You see the afterglow of it in the sky.

[340] That's astonishing.

[341] And if I could attempt the layperson that might understand, because maybe I have this wrong, but basically, we are looking at certain stars, and we know the distance of those stars.

[342] So we know that some of these stars are 5 billion light years away.

[343] So if you're looking at light that had to leave where it came from 5 billion years ago, and you know the universe is 5, well, it's not, what, 10 billion years is?

[344] 13 .8.

[345] So if you're looking at some source of light that traveled 13 .5 billion years to get.

[346] here, well, by God, you're looking at light that occurred right after the Big Bang, right?

[347] Yeah.

[348] That's bonkers, right?

[349] That's where I get fucked up.

[350] Okay, so let me ask you, because you're sitting here and you can tell me, the paradox that seems to be there is that 13, I can't use 13 .8 because we weren't here yet.

[351] But let's just say for shits and giggles, Earth was here.

[352] Now, when we're seeing light that's 13 billion years away, 13 billion years ago, we were way closer to that, right?

[353] because it emanated out from this big bang.

[354] So if we rewind 13 billion years ago, this light that we're saying took 13 billion years to get here at the speed of light, we would have been right next to it, in which case it would only been 10 light years away.

[355] There's a lot to unpack there.

[356] One thing is, so you can ask, for example, you can see light, like you said, from the most distant galaxies from which the light has been traveling over 13 billion years.

[357] So we have images of galaxies.

[358] There's one called GNZ -11, right?

[359] Which is one of the oldest ones.

[360] It's in the so -called Hubble Deepfield image And it's over 13 billion years of light travel time First of all you could ask where is that now Right Now I can't remember the exact number But it's something like 40 billion light years away Because the universe has been stretching So the light journeyed How do we know that?

[361] It's because the light has been stretched The red shift The way that I like to think about it Is that the fabric of the universe itself is stretching And the light travels through it And it stretches and stretches and stretches Can I do an auditory thing?

[362] Because I think this is what broke through for me. Was your car is coming at you, right?

[363] And it goes, Mm -hmm.

[364] Every time you hear a car approaching, the sound is a little higher pitch.

[365] The second it moves away from you, it's a little lower pitch, because now the thing making the sound is moving away and the sound is getting to you a little bit slower, but as it was coming at you and making the sound, it had its speed plus the speed of sound, so it sounds a little higher pitched.

[366] Am I doing that justice?

[367] Yeah, there's another bit, though.

[368] It's not quite, that symbol.

[369] But just to get your notion around red shift, blue shift.

[370] But the reason it's not quite like that in cosmology is because if you try to work out the recession velocity of that thing, how fast is it going away from you, that galaxy from which the light took 13 billion years to reach us.

[371] Now it's receding far faster than the speed of light because of the stretch of the universe.

[372] And so those galaxies, if something happens now, and now, if the experts are listening, it's hard to define now in cosmology, right?

[373] You can do it.

[374] You can actually say, when was everything the same temperature in the universe?

[375] How's it cooled out?

[376] Whatever.

[377] But if something leaves from the galaxy now, it'll never reach us.

[378] Those galaxies are what's called beyond our horizon.

[379] And actually that horizon, because our universe is accelerating in its expansion, that horizon's closing in, in a sense.

[380] This great, wonderful vision of these galaxies, millions of galaxies that we can see with our telescopes, one by one they're going beyond the horizon.

[381] They're dropping off.

[382] And in the future, you end up with a sky that's devoid of galaxies because no light can reach us.

[383] They're too far away, and they're receding from us too fast.

[384] Although it's a long time, we live in a kind of a golden age when we can do cosmology and look out and see the galaxies.

[385] The only galaxies we'll be able to see in the far future are the ones that are stuck together with us, the local ones.

[386] Our closest one, Andromeda, the closest big galaxies coming towards us.

[387] That's going to merge with ours.

[388] Basically, we'll be in a sky where there's only one galaxy to see.

[389] Oh, my God.

[390] This is crazy.

[391] I'm so disappointed in us as humans, and this makes me so proud of us.

[392] The new bit of astronomy that's just here now is what's called gravitational wave astronomy, which is for the first time in human history, we have a second way of looking out into the universe.

[393] And there are ripples in the fabric of the universe itself, so -called gravitational waves, that were detected only recently.

[394] A friend of mine, the great Kip Thorne, got a Nobel Prize for essentially working out the theory of and then helping get built the gravitational wave detectors.

[395] So they're the things that are detecting, for example, the collisions of black holes.

[396] And ultimately, those things, if we build a big enough one, which would be in space rather than on Earth, those things will detect the ripples from the Big Bang itself.

[397] Oh, my God.

[398] So we can see further back in time.

[399] Is this because a black hole doesn't emit any light so we can't examine or learn anything from it, but it's bending the light traveling to the universe around it in a way that we can learn?

[400] So we have one image, which is, in radio waves, actually, of a black hole at the center of a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light years away.

[401] And that one is 6 billion times the mass of the sun, that black hole.

[402] If you've seen Interstellar, it's one of my favorite films, that black hole was simulated.

[403] Kip Thorne actually helped write the code, simulated using Einstein's theory.

[404] So it's not an artist's impression.

[405] And the image we have, which is a bit blurry, admittedly, of the one in M87, looks like that.

[406] Oh, really?

[407] classic interstellar image of a black hole.

[408] Yeah, warping everything around it.

[409] Yeah.

[410] We discovered this principle during a total eclipse because we knew where a star should be, but then the star was in a little bit different place, and what we concluded was the sun itself was warping that light.

[411] It was one of the measurements that was made by Eddington, I think it was, that first confirmed that Einstein was on the right track with his theory of general relativity.

[412] But general relativity, 1915, I was published.

[413] You know at school we learned it's a force between things.

[414] There's two massive things.

[415] under the force between them and there is.

[416] The moon and the earth.

[417] But actually Einstein proposed that it's not.

[418] What it is is the response of things like you and me and the moon and stars and planets to the distortion of the fabric of the universe.

[419] So stuff, anything, matter, energy, stars, planets, distort the fabric of the universe and curve it and bend it.

[420] If you say why is the moon orbit in the earth, Einstein will say it's going in a straight line over a curved and distorted fabric.

[421] Oh my God, I didn't know that until just now.

[422] This is so thrilling.

[423] I was curious how the fuck gravity was not Newtonian.

[424] That's why light bends.

[425] That's what you're referring to.

[426] Why would light bend if you're Newton because light has got no mass, so why does it feel?

[427] Right, because for regular theory of gravity, the Newtonian law of gravity would have said it would need mass to be pulled by other mass, right?

[428] And you can kind of budge it and say, well, equals MC squared and things.

[429] But actually, you can see if what really, is happening is things are responding to the curvature of the fabric of the universe, then a light ray responds in the same way as anything else.

[430] Like I said, I've got a tennis ball in my hand and a laser, so you imagine that in the room that you're in there, and I fire the laser and I drop the ball.

[431] Actually, if the earth were, I'm going to say it, if the earth were flat, right, so it isn't, but if the earth were the light would drop and hit the ground at the same time as the ball.

[432] It falls at the same rate.

[433] It's just that light's going so fast that by the time the ball's hit the ground, it's gone.

[434] Right.

[435] Because it's going at 196 ,000 miles a second, so it's missed the earth.

[436] It does fall at the same rate because it's going through the same curves.

[437] The same warped fabric.

[438] Oh, my God.

[439] And it's space and time as well that are warps.

[440] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[441] What's up, guys?

[442] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

[443] And let me tell you, it's too good.

[444] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[445] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[446] And I don't mean just friends.

[447] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[448] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[449] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[450] We've all been there.

[451] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[452] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing.

[453] but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery, like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[454] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[455] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

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[458] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[459] Also, Einstein predicted, and now we use it in our technology, so GPS for satellite navigation, for example.

[460] It turns out that time passes more slowly for someone sat close to something like the earth than it does for someone at a higher altitude.

[461] You're out of the warping.

[462] What?

[463] Let's spend a minute on that.

[464] Okay, so time, the oldest version I remember is that at one point, they had two atomic clocks.

[465] They cannot be made different.

[466] And they sink these clocks and then on one of the missions up to orbit, they put the atomic clock.

[467] It's partner on there.

[468] And when it returned to Earth, it was off.

[469] Oh, you mean was not matching?

[470] Was not matching any longer.

[471] And in fact, it was earlier.

[472] Let's say they were set to 12 exactly.

[473] and they brought it back at one exactly.

[474] Well, the one that went to space says 1259 instead of one.

[475] So they prove that this is true.

[476] Yeah, and it's not something to do with the clock.

[477] It's time.

[478] So the clock's measuring time correctly in its own frame of reference where it is.

[479] But time is passing at different rates.

[480] It's one of the things that I teach at Manchester.

[481] You'll make this kindergarten level.

[482] This is Einstein.

[483] This is back in 1905, so -called special relativity.

[484] His theory is about the distance between events.

[485] So it's a big deal there.

[486] You have to kind of unpack it.

[487] There's an idea that an event is something that happens in space and time.

[488] So it happens somewhere and somewhere.

[489] So I click my fingers.

[490] And another event would be click them again.

[491] Einstein introduces the idea of a distance between those events in space and time.

[492] So it's not just a time difference and the distance in space between them.

[493] It's a mixed up kind of thing.

[494] And the distance between them, you have to say, what path do I take between those events?

[495] And if I carried a clock along that path, then that would be.

[496] be the distance, right?

[497] So that's the time.

[498] All at the speed of light, that's the constant.

[499] So, like, let's say that I set off now and I leave here and I fly to New York and fly back again.

[500] One event is a same bite.

[501] Yeah.

[502] And the next event is when we come back and shake hands and go, hello again.

[503] So there's two events.

[504] The distance that I have traveled between those two events is different to the distance you have traveled.

[505] Right.

[506] Which is kind of obvious in a way.

[507] But actually, that distance is measured by a clock I carry with me. That's the key thing.

[508] that's the great insight of Einstein.

[509] So if we synchronize our perfect watches now together and then I go off to New York and back, it's not surprising that my watch will have measured a different time difference than yours because all it measured is the distance we've traveled between those two events in space time.

[510] Wow.

[511] And that's it.

[512] That wouldn't happen though here.

[513] You have to leave.

[514] Oh, no, no, it would happen.

[515] It would happen if I left here and I went to the shop.

[516] It was.

[517] But it would be the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest difference.

[518] And that's because the actual space difference between what you two did in that time.

[519] No, it's to do with the fact that space and time are kind of mixed together.

[520] And so the thing that really matters, right, Einstein discovered, is the distance in space, time between events.

[521] And that's different for different people because they take different paths.

[522] And the distance is measured in seconds.

[523] So that's why time runs at different rates.

[524] I think I can think of an analogy, which is a star emits light, and it emits it at a time, right?

[525] And it can either travel straight to us or it can travel through the path of the sun, which has this great bend in gravity.

[526] And so when it arrives, it will arrive later than the one that went directly there.

[527] There's some more stuff going on.

[528] Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

[529] You could spend 400 hours on just this.

[530] I'll give you one crazy thing.

[531] The last crazy thing I was like, if you ask what the distance between events is at the time that passes for the light beam, from the perspective of the light beam between being emitted in the Andromeda galaxy, let's say, and received and hitting your eye Here, that's an event.

[532] That distance for the light beam is actually zero.

[533] So no time passes for a light beam, which is really, that's kind of a weird thing to say.

[534] Whenever they talk about if a human theoretically traveled at the speed of light, no time would pass.

[535] No time would pass.

[536] Right?

[537] And then the people on Earth where you departed from would all have gotten old and died.

[538] Yeah, so close to the speed of light, that really works.

[539] So if you go off in a rocket, you know, 99 .99 % the speed of light or something and then come back to the Earth.

[540] You can come back at any point in the future.

[541] You could come back after 100 years or 1 ,000 years or 10 ,000 years or a million years.

[542] Just because you're taking actually a shorter path between those events, which is you leave on Earth and you're returning, it actually turns out to be shorter.

[543] So if you go flying off close to speed of light and come back, your watch might have said I've been gone three months and you get back on the Earth and 10 million years.

[544] can the past.

[545] Oh my God.

[546] So you can time travel into the future by doing that.

[547] Okay, so, yes, our current physics says you can time travel into the future.

[548] I'd put it stronger than that, because it's relativity, so we're pretty damn sure that that's true.

[549] Okay, so yes, I'm just, I'll say no one's done it, but so theoretically...

[550] No, we are doing it.

[551] Obviously, we're doing it now, right?

[552] We're traveling into the future at one second per second.

[553] And it's certainly true that the GPS satellite is a good example, actually, because time passes at a different rate on the satellite to us.

[554] So it's gone into the future at a different rate.

[555] That's what that means, right?

[556] Time's passing at a different rate.

[557] And he actually turns out to be about 30 ,000 nanoseconds per day.

[558] A nanoseconds a thousand millionths a second.

[559] Wow.

[560] But the reason I say it like that is because light travels one foot per nanosecond, give or take.

[561] And so 30 ,000 nanoseconds for the GPS system is a 30 ,000 feet position problem.

[562] Okay.

[563] If you don't correct for it, you'd rack up tens of thousands of feet per day error.

[564] Because time's passing at a different rate.

[565] Well, because it's going 17 ,500 miles an hour, and we're going 1 ,000 miles an hour.

[566] Yeah, yeah, and at high altitude.

[567] Right.

[568] So it all makes a difference.

[569] Okay.

[570] We got a bit heavy there.

[571] No, I love that.

[572] I love it.

[573] So the only reason I set up that we know that you can time travel into the future, this is a thought I've had many times.

[574] I don't think we will ever discover how to time travel back in time because if we did ever discover that, surely someone would have arrived with a technology that would get us out of the climate crisis.

[575] Yeah.

[576] So the only two conclusions I have is either they died before they got that technology or that technology doesn't ever become possible.

[577] What do you think of that thought?

[578] It's a great question, actually.

[579] I mentioned Kip Thorne earlier.

[580] He wrote a great book called Black Hole's and Time Wharps, which was back in the 80s, I think he wrote it, but it's still a fantastic book.

[581] And he does talk about time machines into the past, which, in other words, way to talk about these things.

[582] They call wormholes, right?

[583] If you're a science fiction fan, you know about wormholes, which connect different regions of the universe to each other, and would allow you, if they existed, to take shortcuts.

[584] So it's like going from here to Sydney.

[585] We could drill a big tunnel, or we can go around the surface of the earth, or we can take a shortcut.

[586] But a shortcut in space and time does allow you to go back into the past, right?

[587] So the question in physics becomes, do those things exist?

[588] And the answer is, in Einstein's theory alone, they do, you can conceive of those geometries of spacetime.

[589] But the consensus is that even if you try to send one bit of information through anything, then you collapse them.

[590] So they're unstable.

[591] And fundamentally you can't traverse them or send signals through them.

[592] But it's still not 100 % been proved that that's true.

[593] Right.

[594] So Stephen Hawking once wrote a paper called the Chronology Protection Conjecture.

[595] Again, you guys have terrible branding problems.

[596] This conjecture was that whatever the fundamental laws of physics are that we don't understand at the moment, then they will prevent time travel into the past.

[597] But kind of the reason that you said that it's a paradoxical universe, and every indication is that that's true, it's getting more interesting now, because we could talk about it, but I do some work on black holes, and there's a lot of work going on on black holes at the moment, and in particular questions about what happens to stuff that goes in, does it ever get out again?

[598] And there are wormholes beginning to appear in the explanation.

[599] We now think, by the way, that everything that goes in, the information in it comes out again.

[600] So how does something get out of something that nothing can escape from, right?

[601] And it does seem like it may be that some kind of wormhole -like structures sort of open up.

[602] So it seems that they are possibly relevant to our understanding of the universe, but no one really fully understands.

[603] But if gravity isn't this force that one object with mass exerts on another object with mass, And the black holes, I understand it is, right?

[604] Once a star, it starts by pulling hydrogen together so forcefully that it creates helium.

[605] Then the helium pulls itself so hard, it starts fusing into carbon, ultimately diamond or something.

[606] It can happen.

[607] And then there's so much mass and so much force, it just collapses into itself.

[608] And so I've always thought of that in terms of gravity of mass. So now with what you just taught me, what's really happening is it's dividing the fabric so extreme.

[609] Exactly.

[610] Oh, my God.

[611] So then, yeah, what's on the bottom of the cone?

[612] Well, so it depends whether it's spinning or not.

[613] So let's take a non -spinning black hole, called the Swartzchild black hole.

[614] Carl Swartzschild, by the way, was the first exact solution of Einstein's equations.

[615] So Einstein published this theory, the fabric of the universe thing, general relativity.

[616] And just a month or so later, Karl Schwarzschild, who was on the Russian front in the war, the First World War, in his spare time.

[617] came up with the first solution to minus science equations.

[618] And it's the one that describes a black hole that's not spinning.

[619] And in there, the first thing you see is this thing called the event horizon, which everyone will have heard of.

[620] What is that?

[621] That's the point of no return.

[622] If you go inside, cross that bit of space.

[623] In there, what actually happens is this thing called the singularity, which everyone may have heard of.

[624] But actually, it's the end of time.

[625] Monica just grabbed her face for the list.

[626] In that black hole, you go in and the end of time awaits.

[627] So that's what it is.

[628] So it's a moment in time.

[629] It's not a place in space, actually.

[630] You know, you tend to think, I will go in and we'll get crushed to a dot in the middle.

[631] But really the right way to think about it is you go in and meet the end of time.

[632] You freeze?

[633] The way that works is that you talked about the distortion of space and time, as you rightly said.

[634] That's what's happening.

[635] And actually what happens from the outside point of view is that space and time swap roles on the event horizon.

[636] It's really kind of interesting.

[637] So space becomes time and time becomes space.

[638] So ultimately, what happens in the middle is that, it sounds like Doctor Who, right, if you watch that.

[639] In the middle, you get at the end of time.

[640] One way of thinking, why can't I get out?

[641] It's like I could say to you, run away from tomorrow.

[642] Which direction are you going to run to escape tomorrow?

[643] You can't.

[644] It gets weirder in a spinning black hole.

[645] It's called a Kerr black hole.

[646] That was the 1960s by the time the spinning black hole solution was found.

[647] It's 50 years later.

[648] I'll just say one thing to you.

[649] If the black hole existed forever, so it didn't form from a star collapsing, then the geometry inside has got an infinite number of universes inside.

[650] Isn't that weird?

[651] It's so curved.

[652] You just left me. The space time is so curved up.

[653] Yeah, so it's completely crazy.

[654] It's time of space.

[655] Your mom's your dad, your dad's your mind.

[656] This is fascinating.

[657] Oh, wow.

[658] I'm excited to hear you say that.

[659] Yeah.

[660] I mean, I don't understand any of it, but it's so fascinating.

[661] There's a great Indian mathematician, Chandrasekha.

[662] And he actually lived a long time.

[663] He died in the 80s, but he was around at the time as well.

[664] And he said this solution, these geometries inside black holes, which are just these perfect bits of mathematics.

[665] He said that it was like shuddering before the beautiful.

[666] Because this mathematics describes infinitely complex geometry inside the simplest of things.

[667] Okay, so the other thing I find really fascinating, and again, I learned this probably in that Oppenheimer book, which is, the days of six, speaking about physics, pretty much ended with Newton.

[668] Like, Newton could explain to you this law he's proposing in words in English.

[669] He probably wouldn't, though.

[670] I don't think he was very nice.

[671] He wasn't.

[672] He wouldn't have done this.

[673] And I'm glad he wouldn't have.

[674] He had bigger fish to front.

[675] But the point is, there's a bazillion, whether they're apocryphal or not, stories of Einstein trying to explain things.

[676] And he said, you know, one of the answers was, could you explain the theory of relativity?

[677] and he said, I can't because what if you didn't know what milk was?

[678] And I said, well, I went to this farm and had a great glass of milk.

[679] What's milk?

[680] Oh, it's white.

[681] Oh, like clouds?

[682] Yes, like, I don't know what clouds are.

[683] You just, you abstracted so much that you're no longer talking about anything.

[684] All of this stuff he's trying to relay to us doesn't exist outside of mathematics.

[685] All of these things are just incredibly complicated.

[686] equations that fellow physicists can look at and they read it, but English is an incomplete symbol system for us to comprehend what is being discovered.

[687] And can I just add, Oppenheimer's gift was he was one of the few physicists who was not a brilliant mathematician, but he was actually great at articulating in -language physics.

[688] And you know, he was the first, by the way, with someone called Snyder, to show that stars, under certain circumstances, would collapse to form a black hole.

[689] He did that before the war.

[690] Really?

[691] So he's a very, very famous paper by Op and Iron Schneider.

[692] They're one of the first papers on black holes, actually.

[693] But yeah, I mean, Newton would have struggled.

[694] If you really drill down, as you said, into Newton's Law of Gravity, it says, well, there's a force between these things.

[695] And you go, well, why is there a force?

[696] It seems that if you just move the sun away from the earth, if you could do that, then the force would change instantly, and is that right?

[697] And it's a quote from him.

[698] He said, well, ultimately, it's down to God.

[699] He bailed.

[700] He bailed.

[701] He failed.

[702] It's a model.

[703] It's a way of allowing you to calculate amazing things.

[704] I mean, Einstein's theory to this day, over a hundred years, is still describing the collisions between black holes that we see using these gravitational wave detectors, 21st century technology, and it's still getting it right.

[705] Is he the greatest?

[706] It's certainly one of, but you know, in social science and history, people object to the, they call it the great man theory because they're usually men in those days right.

[707] And I think that's right, standing on the shoulders of giants.

[708] I mean, Einstein was using mathematical tools that have been developed throughout the 19th century.

[709] And people say that his first bit, special relativity, that was 1905, that's equals MC squared.

[710] People say that was in the air, right?

[711] A lot of people were around that kind of theory at the time.

[712] But this theory of gravity that he came up with in 1915 that we've just been talking about, that I think most people that say just where did that come from?

[713] This story, and I think it's true because he told it was that he was looking at this man, this bloke, working on a roof from his office.

[714] And he was looking at him.

[715] And he thought, if he falls off the roof, then on the way down, he won't experience gravity at all.

[716] He'll experience it when he hits the ground, but on his way down.

[717] And of course, we know that now.

[718] If you look at astronauts in the space station, they're falling towards the earth with the space station.

[719] But it looks as though gravity's gone.

[720] And he realized that's really profound.

[721] It's called the equivalence principle.

[722] It's the heart of relativity that you can remove it by falling.

[723] That's a weird force.

[724] And that was his way in.

[725] So when you say the astronauts on the space station are falling, basically the space station is going 17 ,500 miles an hour, and it's falling at the exact same rate that the Earth is curving.

[726] So it's falling, but it just never hits the Earth because it's curved.

[727] Yeah, that's a free fall, it's called.

[728] Right.

[729] There's no perception of gravity.

[730] And it's really weird, because if you think then, so you say, well, so the astronaut has a coffee cup or whatever it is and let's go, it doesn't move.

[731] It stays there.

[732] Yeah.

[733] Einstein would say it's because there are no, forces acting.

[734] Gravity's gone.

[735] It's been cancelled by the falling.

[736] So why does everything stay where the astronaut leaves it?

[737] Because why not?

[738] There are no forces.

[739] Yeah.

[740] That's really deep.

[741] It can't break inertia because it's already...

[742] Yeah.

[743] Newton has an explanation for that.

[744] It's because there's different kinds of mass. The one that tells you what the force is between things and one is how hard it is to push things and they all cancel out.

[745] With black holes, it gets really interesting because you go across the event horizon if you free fall through.

[746] It doesn't seem to be there.

[747] We can talk about all that.

[748] That's kind of.

[749] called the information paradox and off we go, but we'll probably stop.

[750] But yes, to get to your point, Einstein was brilliant because he thought really simply.

[751] And he wasn't great at math.

[752] The math is difficult in general relativity.

[753] But the original thought is almost childlike, not childish.

[754] So what I said right, at the start is thinking, I'm not going to kid myself about this.

[755] There's something interesting about that.

[756] And I'm not going to let it go.

[757] He was a genius because he kept going.

[758] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[759] I often come across something where I go, I've heard the explanation, and for me, something's missing.

[760] There's a lot of ways that can happen, not just like in a physics sense, but just often I feel, hmm, something's missing from this explanation.

[761] I love that feeling.

[762] It's like very motivating.

[763] No, it's exactly the way to think.

[764] It means that you don't understand it, but that's fine.

[765] but often it means that the people who've told you that and don't understand it either.

[766] I don't know if this will annoy you, but this is my recent one.

[767] So I'm watching TV with my wife.

[768] The character's dying, she's young, it's sad.

[769] They're talking about where she'll go next, you know, will she live on and some other playing?

[770] And it just crossed my mind.

[771] We are very, very eager and open to imagining a life that doesn't end, whether that's in heaven, on an energy plane, whatever it is.

[772] That's a very easy concept for us to embrace.

[773] that we will continue on forever.

[774] And then I just thought, no one seems that fascinated with the fact that we didn't exist.

[775] Yeah.

[776] Everyone's comfortable with the notion that they didn't exist.

[777] For you, Monica, 34 years ago, you didn't exist.

[778] You're a peace with that.

[779] But the notion that you won't exist in 30 more years or 80 more years, that's a paradox.

[780] Bertrand Russell said something really similar, the great philosopher.

[781] So you're in great company with that thought.

[782] Oh, okay.

[783] He said a similar thing.

[784] He said, you know, the fact that I didn't exist before I was born hasn't bothered me in this lightish.

[785] So I don't know why people get hung up with death.

[786] Well, because we know biology.

[787] We know like how the start happened, but we don't have an answer to the end.

[788] I mean, people think they do.

[789] But even if you're an atheist like me, and sure, I understand the biology, this vessel will at some point stop functioning and going to the ground.

[790] But I can at least imagine that my soul, my spirit, my consciousness transforms into something.

[791] I can imagine that quite easily.

[792] I cannot imagine the fact that I didn't exist, that this soul that I think may go on in perpetuity wasn't here.

[793] So then 30 minutes later in the same show, I thought to myself, oh my God, maybe my parents didn't just pass on genetic material to me. Maybe I got their consciousness.

[794] Like maybe the spirit, the soul, the whatever I am, whatever is asking this question is actually what was passed on from my dad.

[795] And then I started thinking, Well, that's a little bit like reincarnation.

[796] If you think of reincarnation, you're going to come back and you're going to try again until you learn your lessons.

[797] I thought, well, this is interesting.

[798] My father learned some lessons.

[799] He passed on his soul to me, or an extension of his soul.

[800] And now I have a shot to take the ball from where he left it and learned some more shit.

[801] But he was still alive.

[802] Yeah, so it doesn't have to go away for him to ignite it in me, let's just say.

[803] We passed on information, didn't it?

[804] Probably the most cutting -edge way of thinking about reality in theoretical physics at the moment is about an information sense.

[805] Actually, space and time that we've talked about, we're now talking about them emerging from a deeper structure, which is more properly thought about in terms of information.

[806] So what you're saying is that, I think, is that it's true that your parents live on in you through the information.

[807] The DNA strand.

[808] Well, there's that, but there's also, you know, ideas and the way you were brought up and those things.

[809] That's the way I'd think about it.

[810] And it's actually quite interesting because I was thinking about what our responsibility should be, right?

[811] How do we deal with this fact that we live these finite lives?

[812] Yeah.

[813] It's part of the motivation for a lot of great and terrible things that we do as humans is trying to deal with that fact, isn't it, that we're finite.

[814] Our responsibility is to pass that information and indeed the world on to the next generation because of the infinite possibility that exists.

[815] This unbroken chain of life.

[816] But you have a son, right?

[817] Yeah.

[818] I imagine you're like me and you can imagine a future where you're lying on your deathbed.

[819] and you will look into your son's face, and you will actually, not your body, you'll go, oh, I'm still here.

[820] I try to define it if I had to, in terms of information, right, bits.

[821] So obviously there's a part of you in them in the sense that you've helped craft them.

[822] Yeah.

[823] And there is an element of your character in them.

[824] And I think that's actually not a trivial thing to say.

[825] It's an important thing to say.

[826] Because it can sound quite mystical, can it?

[827] But actually, if you follow that through, you think about what we're doing now, obviously as we speak, parts of the world is tremendously destruction, which we've seen every day on the news.

[828] The thing that really concerns me is that it seems that many of us don't realize that what you've said, it's almost the purpose of our existence.

[829] The purpose of our existence is to pass on.

[830] And I'll just add, I wasn't around my dad.

[831] I fight it, but our spirit is nearly identical, and that happened in the absence of him.

[832] I think that's why I'm even more inclined to believe that.

[833] What I would say is that we don't understand consciousness.

[834] It's the most complex thing in the universe, right?

[835] That's clear.

[836] And I think everyone would agree with that statement.

[837] Yes.

[838] I think it's a property of physical things.

[839] So it emerges from atoms, ultimately, in a very complex way that we don't understand.

[840] But I don't see anything there that suggests new physics, new laws of nature.

[841] Well, there is one new one.

[842] I imagine you grew up with Darwinian evolution and then perhaps Dawkins' selfish gene.

[843] That genome wasn't part of that conversation when I was going to college.

[844] So our recent discovery that the epigenome can also get passed on how you will read the DNA sequence, that's pretty mind -melting.

[845] That's like a new, whoa.

[846] It's a conflict.

[847] It is.

[848] And you're right.

[849] I mean, it's another example of what we thought to for earlier, that as our knowledge increases, than the world that we see is more beautiful.

[850] Bigger, more complex.

[851] But, I mean, I sense of recoil, as you can see, from the idea of something mystical.

[852] Me too.

[853] Well, I think what we're saying is we're putting it in the don't know box.

[854] Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[855] Just because it's a complex physical system.

[856] So I don't think there's anything mystical about it, but it's in that wonderful box that there's something we don't know.

[857] And I tend to stop there.

[858] People say to me, you know, what happened before the Big Bang?

[859] We don't even know if the universe had a beginning in time.

[860] Right, right.

[861] Because we don't know what time is, actually.

[862] So, you know, the fundamental level.

[863] Often people will go, so there's room for this, that, and the other.

[864] And I just go, no, I've just said I don't know.

[865] And that's got a full stop after it.

[866] I agree with you.

[867] There's a great deal, obviously, about consciousness we don't understand.

[868] Full stop.

[869] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[870] And then I'm stopping.

[871] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[872] We're getting into now, there's theoretical, but I push back heavily against the notion of no free will.

[873] The theory is if we knew the location, the speed, the everything to know about every atom, in the universe, some supercomputer would be able to predict what happens next.

[874] So ultimately, we could predict the future if all that info was known.

[875] So my first question is, do you think that's true?

[876] So in principle, that is one of the basic assumptions in physics.

[877] And I should say not to drag everything back to black holes, but one of the great mysteries with black holes, which has stimulated a lot of research, is that Stephen Hawking initially thought that black holes destroy information.

[878] If they destroy information, then what you said is not true, because we've lost information.

[879] So if there are objects in the universe that destroy information, which we thought black holes might be, then determinism is not possible there.

[880] Because you've lost, obviously, you can't even tell there was a black hole there because all there is is a load of radiation with no information about what it came from.

[881] Now, it turns out that by really strongly suspecting that's not right, we have been led towards what's called the theory of quantum gravity.

[882] just in the last couple of years.

[883] So the answer to your question is, it's an assumption that has survived, even the fact that black holes are supposed to eat stuff and the end of times in the middle and nothing's supposed to come out.

[884] It actually turns out that's not the case.

[885] Information is conserved.

[886] But to me, the hiccup is, at least my understanding of quantum mechanics, is all of them are probability predictions.

[887] Yeah.

[888] They're not declaration.

[889] But the probabilities, it's evolved deterministically, which is probably too complex.

[890] There's a thing called the wave function, which is the description of something.

[891] It could be you, it could be a black hole, it could be the universe, it could be a single particle, it's a big thing.

[892] And broadly speaking, we think the universe has a wave function.

[893] So it's all those probabilities if you make a measurement.

[894] So you say, where is something?

[895] Then you're right, quantum mechanics will say it's a 20 % chance is over there and a 10 % chance over there.

[896] But that all evolves deterministically and information is conserved in that as that changes through time.

[897] There is a future where it's not a probability prediction, but it's an actual, it'll be here.

[898] This is a huge debate about the meaning of quantum mechanics, which is another thing.

[899] But broadly speaking, I think most people now accept this wave function, which is a collection of all the probabilities as reality, as the real thing.

[900] That's not everyone thinks that.

[901] There's still room for interpretation in the theory.

[902] But broadly speaking, a lot of physicists think that.

[903] So go to your point, we operate under the assumption, and it's a subject.

[904] does very well, even in black holes, that information is not destroyed.

[905] So, as you said, free will doesn't exist in that universe.

[906] Right?

[907] With the caveat, there'll be neuroscientists shouting at the podcast now, with the caveat that we don't understand what will is.

[908] Right.

[909] Right.

[910] So I'm being a physicist here.

[911] Everything we're saying, ultimately, too, you have to remind yourself is our human experience of all these things we're explaining.

[912] We're the observer.

[913] You know, it's really interesting.

[914] It goes all the way back to the start of what you said about what physics and chemistry in biology.

[915] And I'd said, you know, biology, we don't explain it in terms of fundamental physics.

[916] We might be in danger of making one of those so -called category areas here.

[917] We're trying to deduce things about our behavior, the human experience from fundamental physics about information theory and things like that.

[918] I'm just inclined to think us as animals, even if you know exactly my biochemistry at all moments and you know that I have this percentage of serotonin, this of dopamine, I still think, not a chance.

[919] I don't think.

[920] I don't think humans are predictable.

[921] I think you can say like 80%.

[922] I mean, some of it's about our experience though, isn't it?

[923] I've heard people say this.

[924] It's like, why do you care?

[925] If you think you have free will and you live your life and it really feels like you're making these choices, if it's true that some omnipotent being with this massive quantum computer could actually sit there and predict what you're going to be doing tomorrow, does that actually matter?

[926] I'm not sure it does, because we're talking about our experience, aren't we, and our emotional experience of living.

[927] It's true.

[928] If mine were scripted prior to my birth, and I found that out at the end, I certainly couldn't tell.

[929] I felt like I was making a lot of decisions and aiming my boat in a lot of directions.

[930] Yeah.

[931] I mean, we could then get into, there's all these questions about whether we live in a simulation, right?

[932] Well, that would have been my...

[933] We got to do maybe a part two if you want that.

[934] We talk about it a lot on here.

[935] We're pretty obsessed with the simulation.

[936] It's really becoming interesting, the foundation of these ideas, Because information theory, which is what we're really talking about here, quantum computing, how quantum information works, that's all being driven by two things, which is really fascinating.

[937] One is actually trying to build quantum computers, which are things that people have in labs, they will be very useful and we're trying to build them.

[938] The other thing is black hole research, which is really, it's interrelated in ways that nobody could possibly imagine.

[939] They're really similar questions that have been asked about information and how it's distributed in space and time.

[940] What is the hurdle with black hole research?

[941] Is it that it's not emitting any information?

[942] Or is it that we can't process the data we collect on it?

[943] It was really simple.

[944] It was Stephen Hawking made his calculation of Hawking radiation, which is the black hole.

[945] It's got a temperature, it radiates, right?

[946] Just like a coal, a hot coal.

[947] And that means that over time it'll evaporate away.

[948] And his calculation that he did, which no one could see anything wrong with for years, decades, said that the radiation that is left has no information, no structure that reflects what fell in.

[949] Now, in the last few years, it's been shown that there was something very subtle, extra, that he missed, not surprisingly, in his calculation, which does look like wormholes and things, are different kind of weird geometries of Space Time.

[950] But it ultimately seems that the information is coming out.

[951] But in a way that's what we call hugely non -local.

[952] So this information seems to be stored with no regard for distances in space and time and past and future and it seems to be there's a different description of the world.

[953] That's why you might have heard people say the world's a hologram.

[954] It turns out that you can write down, physicists always say in some sense and the reason they're saying in some sense is because the words aren't present yet and no one really has worked out what it actually means, this mathematics.

[955] So I'll say it though.

[956] Or it's kind of like saying it can be argued.

[957] Yeah, because it's like a conspiracy theory.

[958] People like to think it's because I'm struggling to explain it to me and more.

[959] It's not, it's because I don't understand it, and neither does anybody else, right?

[960] But in some sense, you can describe the world, and it would be this room now.

[961] So, for example, everything's going on in here and our conversation, all those things.

[962] You can describe it with a theory, some mathematics, that lives on a surface surrounding it, only that.

[963] The whole thing can be written in what we call a dual way, an equivalent way, as some other theory, which has not got space in it, really.

[964] It's just all this stuff, quantum mechanics, going on on a surface.

[965] And that's a hologram.

[966] Does that have anything to do with...

[967] We've got to talk about your live show.

[968] I'm sorry, but it's so rare to help.

[969] This is all, isn't it?

[970] Oh, okay, good, yeah.

[971] Okay.

[972] Because the thing I trip out on all the time is my understanding of an atom, right, is you have a proton and electron spinning around.

[973] So what you have the bulk of there in an atom is space, empty space, right?

[974] And that the wall behind you is 99 .99 % empty.

[975] Yeah.

[976] That's true.

[977] Yeah.

[978] Is that related to the hologram?

[979] empty or at all?

[980] It's saying that what we knew from way back in the 70s actually is that if you look at a black hole and you say how much information can you contain within it, then the amount of information in it is proportional to the surface area of the black hole.

[981] That's really weird.

[982] If you said in this room we were in there, if it was a library and we could fill it with books, how much information can you fit?

[983] And you'd say, well, it's to do with the volume of the room.

[984] It's how many books I can fit in.

[985] But at a fundamental level, it seems that nature says that's a vast overestimate of the amount of information that can be stored in this room, in this space.

[986] It's as if you can only paper the outside of the room with the books.

[987] And that's telling us something very, very, very deep about the structure of the universe.

[988] Was that being hinted at in Interstellar?

[989] They were like papering the walls.

[990] Yeah.

[991] And you hear this instead, they kind of hid it away, but it's still there.

[992] They talk about the quantum information in the black hole.

[993] But is the volume of this room, if we wanted to answer that, couldn't we say the amount of atoms that would fit in it?

[994] You're saying there's some smallest structure in the out of which reality is made that can store some information.

[995] Yeah, yeah.

[996] And it turns out that it is.

[997] So this room, I could tell you, the maximum this room could store would be if it was a black hole with the radius of this room.

[998] And the amount of information would be exactly equal to, actually, the surface area of the room in what's called plank units.

[999] So not the internal volume, but the surface area.

[1000] So it's like all the bits are tiles.

[1001] But only for black holes.

[1002] No, well, I keep saying black holes.

[1003] The reason it's important in this discussion is it's the thing that stores the maximum amount of information.

[1004] Because it has the most gravity?

[1005] Well, I mean, because we don't really know, actually.

[1006] Put it this way.

[1007] In Einstein's theory, the theory of space time, the geometry.

[1008] A black hole is described as pure geometry.

[1009] Nothing else.

[1010] So there's only space and time there.

[1011] And yet, it stores information.

[1012] So that should bother you because you go, what do you mean?

[1013] If there's only space and time, what's storing it?

[1014] And at some point there is no time.

[1015] Yeah, in the middle.

[1016] So what it does seem to be is the study of these things are telling us that space and time are made of smaller things, like atoms of space and time.

[1017] We don't know what they are.

[1018] We know how big they are, which is kind of interesting, this thing called a plank length, but we don't know much more than that.

[1019] So we're on the edge of this new understanding.

[1020] Einstein had this great saying.

[1021] And Sean Carroll, I think he spoke to Sean Carroll.

[1022] He's a great physicist Caltech.

[1023] And he wrote a book called Something Deeply Hidden.

[1024] And he was a quote from Einstein where he said, if you gaze at nature carefully enough, and you black holes are real things in the sky, right?

[1025] So you look at them.

[1026] Then you can glimpse something deeply hidden, which is the underlying structure of reality, basically.

[1027] And that's what these things are the tone.

[1028] So reality is weirder than we could have possibly imagined, is the point.

[1029] Reality is stranger than fiction, I say.

[1030] They do say that.

[1031] Interstell is interesting.

[1032] So it was written, you know, Kit Thorne initially came up with the idea.

[1033] It's probably two decades ago.

[1034] and it was made 10 years ago, right?

[1035] Yeah.

[1036] In that last 10 years since that film, there's been incredible progress.

[1037] So there are hints of stuff in that film.

[1038] But actually, we understand a ton more now.

[1039] In just in the 10 years?

[1040] In 10 years, yeah.

[1041] What's driving the understanding is?

[1042] It was thought, theoretical leaps that certain people have made.

[1043] And this holographic thing has played a key role in that.

[1044] Okay, so you take this show on the road, which I want to see.

[1045] You too.

[1046] You're in L .A. in June.

[1047] I watched a bit of it.

[1048] So you have this enormous backdrop behind you.

[1049] And you're showing us just the beauty, the magnitude, the scope of the universe.

[1050] So it's a very visual experience, yeah?

[1051] Yeah.

[1052] It was designed, I should say, the show in the UK, where I'm kind of better known.

[1053] It's designed for arenas.

[1054] So it goes into things like the O2 and Wembley Arena.

[1055] And so the screens are huge.

[1056] It was 30 meters by 10 meters or something.

[1057] It's vast, as big as much as you can fit.

[1058] in the O -T Arena.

[1059] 90 feet my 30 feet, yes.

[1060] Yeah, 100 feet wide.

[1061] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1062] And so it comes in four trucks.

[1063] It's back to rock and roll.

[1064] It's great, so I feel like a rock star.

[1065] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1066] It's like Led Zepp, touring in the 70s.

[1067] And so we're designed for that.

[1068] So in the US, all we do is we get as much of the LED as we can and cram it into whatever theater I think there's enough people in the US who know I am to come and see it.

[1069] It starts with that question I started with earlier, which is that was, it means to live a fragile, finite life in an infinite eternal universe.

[1070] And it goes through the history of the universe, history of life, where it's speculate about the probability life exists elsewhere, how many civilizations may there be, out there in our galaxy, for example, which is really important because I think it may be on average one for a galaxy, which is an extremely important thing to know, because if we mess this up, which is a strong part of this show, ultimately, if we mess this up here, We might be responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy forever.

[1071] Imagine we're the only place where atoms have come together to think, which is what we've been talking about.

[1072] And then we mess it up.

[1073] We just do it in action or deliberate action, Oppenheimer.

[1074] We just destroy it.

[1075] So there's an element of that.

[1076] Well, I like really quick.

[1077] It starts with enormous gratitude, which is like the probability of this conversation is in the billionth to the billion power.

[1078] How special and lucky are we?

[1079] There's hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, right?

[1080] Yeah.

[1081] And among those, we're the only one, probably.

[1082] It's a reasonable guess, given that it took four billion years, give or take, on this planet to go from the origin of life to anything that can write a symphony, right?

[1083] Or paints or have a conversation like this.

[1084] That's a third of the age of the universe.

[1085] You're right, there are 400 billion suns and countless billions of planets.

[1086] But how many of those have been stable enough for four billion years to allow this remarkable evolution from single cells to constantly?

[1087] consciousness.

[1088] It might be very few.

[1089] So that's a strong element of the show is trying to reconcile these ideas, because I firmly believe we're physically insignificant, obviously, as you just said, hundreds of billions of suns, trillions of galaxies.

[1090] Also, I think that we're remarkably valuable for the reason that you said, again, that we're very lucky to be here.

[1091] And I like the idea, and I explore this in the show, that somewhere in between those two ideas that seem not to fit together is the truth.

[1092] There's something in that grey no man's land or whatever you call it between ideas that seem to be contradictory, where the actual answer to what it means to be human lies.

[1093] Again, I say, I don't know, I mean, I'm giving it one of my jokes away, but I say to the audience, if I knew, right, I'd charge more for tickets.

[1094] I'd miss one of those guru people.

[1095] I'm not starting a religion of here, I don't know, right?

[1096] But what I try to do is show these wonderful images from the Hubble Space Telescope, Cassini Space Probe, and so on.

[1097] talk about black holes.

[1098] I have a beautiful simulation of a black hole that I use the code from interstellar actually.

[1099] But also, I'm trying to get the audience to come to their own conclusion about what all this means.

[1100] I have to imagine the visual aids help enormously with these very complex concepts.

[1101] It's not a lecture at these prices, I always say.

[1102] It's obviously it's a show.

[1103] Well, I think more of it is like when I was a kid, I would go to the planetarium in Michigan and see like the laser light show.

[1104] It's entertaining and visually spectacular because it's made for arenas, right?

[1105] So obviously, and there's a lot of music in it.

[1106] As I said, it's actually turned out to be mainly classical music.

[1107] And we've got a plan actually to do it with an orchestra.

[1108] So I can also do it, prog rock like crazy.

[1109] You know, not only content with four trucks, I want a 150 piece symphony orchestra as well.

[1110] Ultimately, you're supposed to think when you leave and just look at the world a bit differently and have an emotional response to these discoveries that we've made.

[1111] And that's what they demand.

[1112] Yeah, I just think the more often and you allow someone to point out how spectacular the whole thing is and you step out of whatever my daily fucking agenda is and my angst over every menial thing.

[1113] Like, to just take a second.

[1114] You get it when you stargaze.

[1115] If you're lucky enough to have gone on vacation somewhere where really, really, you get him, you know, the full brunt of the stars.

[1116] It's so pleasurable.

[1117] We just had it like a year and a half ago.

[1118] We were in Sedona.

[1119] Every night for two hours, we would lay outside.

[1120] I was getting pessimistic that I've been so over -stimulied that I'm ruined permanently.

[1121] And no, we would lay out there, and it's almost like you're just sucking up the radiation of the whole thing.

[1122] There's something connective about it that feels really special.

[1123] I don't know.

[1124] I hate to be corny about it, but it gave me meaning every night I did that.

[1125] Yeah, which is strange, isn't it, that contemplate in the infinite vast universe actually does, I believe, I agree with you, give you meaning.

[1126] You can understand the meaning of your life better, at least if you think about that.

[1127] Well, Brian, I appreciate that you're, I mean, again, I was critical of the packaging and branding of physics, but you're really doing everything in your power to make it exciting and sexy.

[1128] Yeah.

[1129] And I'm horny for it now.

[1130] So I applaud your effort, and I'm glad that there's a charismatic showman that wants to spread this perspective to all of us.

[1131] So awesome talking to you.

[1132] I need a nap.

[1133] Yeah, that was so, so fascinating.

[1134] I'm going to have to listen to it multiple times.

[1135] It makes me mad.

[1136] Is it making you mad?

[1137] Like, I'm like, I don't fucking understand.

[1138] No, I feel the opposite.

[1139] I feel like, wow, I don't know so much.

[1140] Okay.

[1141] Yeah, that's great.

[1142] I feel like I've just watched a Sean White snowboard.

[1143] And I'm like, not in my lifetime.

[1144] I'll never experience that.

[1145] That's out of the realm of my experience.

[1146] It's amazing.

[1147] To understand a black hole like you do, I can just immediately say, it's not in my lifetime going to happen.

[1148] But we got a little closer today.

[1149] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1150] So Horizons, a 21st Century Space Odyssey is the name of the live show.

[1151] The website is briancoxlive .co .uk.

[1152] I apologize, it's dot co .com, but we couldn't get dot com because someone had stolen it.

[1153] That's because the actor Brian Cox clearly has a live show.

[1154] I think he might.

[1155] Can I tell you the most embarrassing thing?

[1156] I look at my calendar and I saw a couple weeks ago, Brian Cox's coming in.

[1157] And my first thought was our stairs are really rickety down there.

[1158] And I know Brian Cox is an older actor.

[1159] And for two weeks, I've been fucking with those stairs down there, trying to make him more stable because I keep thinking, Brian Cox is coming and he's older.

[1160] And I can't risk him losing his footing.

[1161] And then I even said to them, I got to get Brian Cox when he's here to say, fuck off!

[1162] Yeah.

[1163] Do you want to do I love it?

[1164] And you know what?

[1165] I went for dinner with him once in London.

[1166] No way.

[1167] Just before the pandemic, like the February before it all hit.

[1168] And we went out for dinner.

[1169] And we went to this restaurant, and he'd got there first.

[1170] And he'd obviously gone and said, it's Brian Cox, right?

[1171] Fucking Brian Cockley.

[1172] And so they seated him down.

[1173] And then I came in.

[1174] And I went, it's Brian Cox.

[1175] And they went, oh, no. Who's the imposter?

[1176] But yeah, they thought, have we given him the other Brian Cox's table, and the Brian Cox is that?

[1177] This is a coincidence.

[1178] You weren't meeting one.

[1179] No, we were.

[1180] Oh, you were?

[1181] We'd arranged to meet.

[1182] So we kind of knew that this would happen.

[1183] What would have been great is if he had taken upon himself to make the reservation, right?

[1184] And then you called after him and you said, I want to make a reservation for two people at APM, Brian Cox.

[1185] Sir, you've already called and made a reservoir.

[1186] No, I promise you.

[1187] That's what they thought at the desk.

[1188] They were so, you could see the look on their face.

[1189] They'd go, oh, shit.

[1190] The other Brian Cox has got that Brian Cox's table.

[1191] What brought you guys together?

[1192] Just your names?

[1193] Because I'd meet a Dax Shepherd if there was a scientist named Dax Shepherd.

[1194] I'd totally have dinner with them.

[1195] Yeah, we'd have to meet your friends and he did it before.

[1196] The first time I met him was at an award ceremony and I was giving the award to someone in London and he was there and he jumped up on stage and took my place.

[1197] Oh, that's funny.

[1198] And so we'd met.

[1199] We have that here in the States.

[1200] We have John Favro and John Favro.

[1201] Do you know both of those John Favours?

[1202] Yeah, okay.

[1203] Star Wars John Favro.

[1204] And the speechwriter John Favro and Pod Save America.

[1205] Well, Brian Cox, the academic, the professor, the live performer who will bring to your, hopefully a town near you, horizons a 21st century space odyssey.

[1206] Go see it.

[1207] Get your mind blown.

[1208] Thanks so much, Brian.

[1209] Thank you.

[1210] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Badman.

[1211] Roland.

[1212] This is for Brian Cox.

[1213] My favorite actor, Brian Cox.

[1214] Let's give a little context.

[1215] Okay.

[1216] full gale force no no deluge it is very rainy in los angeles in like a michigan rain like big big heavy rain drops yeah a lot of precipitation and i had to drive obviously to the coffee i couldn't do my coffee walk so i drove too dangerous but there was still a line and i couldn't really park anywhere because there was just floods okay flash flooding that's right so i had to abandon ship but thank god miracle wabi wab had already had already gone tomorrow and already got coffee, so thank God.

[1217] I bet Wabi Wob.

[1218] I'm going to harken a guest.

[1219] Wabi Wob, do you feel energized when it's like this out?

[1220] Like, were you up and at them?

[1221] I like it, yeah, yeah.

[1222] Yeah.

[1223] Because you love Portland so much.

[1224] No. He does.

[1225] He does.

[1226] He loves Portland.

[1227] It's his favorite city.

[1228] But my guest was based on Chicago.

[1229] The only thing I don't like is we have a leak in our back shed.

[1230] So I get a little bit of anxiety every time it rains because I think it's going to ruin our floors and shoes that we leap outside sometimes.

[1231] I have the same.

[1232] So I have like total excitement because, ooh.

[1233] Something new.

[1234] A little dark, a little romantic.

[1235] And then yeah, wabiwob.

[1236] I started thinking like, whoo, it's going to be really flooded around the attic.

[1237] It's going to be really muddy for our gas.

[1238] That's going to be its own thing.

[1239] Yeah.

[1240] What's going to leak?

[1241] Same thing.

[1242] Newhouse.

[1243] Always finding out something's broke.

[1244] Sure.

[1245] Yeah.

[1246] Well, I'll add this to the mix because it's been absolutely showering pollen.

[1247] Yeah.

[1248] We have this epic oak tree, which is great.

[1249] It's the coolest thing about this whole place.

[1250] I don't know how many hundred -year -old it is, but it's enormous.

[1251] And then the eucalyptus, and they are just dumping pollen.

[1252] It's gathered in big, big, almost like piles of leaves.

[1253] And so my next thought was that rain is going to push all that pollen in all of the drains, and all the drains are going to back up, and there's going to be a flood.

[1254] But also it'll clear out the air.

[1255] It's been so allergy -ridden.

[1256] Yeah, so many allergens.

[1257] So many.

[1258] Too many.

[1259] And then, okay, last order of business.

[1260] I was a little bum, Big Brown isn't out front.

[1261] Big Brown's getting new lithium batteries.

[1262] Ooh.

[1263] Yep, which is exciting.

[1264] But Big Brown needed a wash, needed to rinse off.

[1265] This would have been an opportunity.

[1266] It would have to look stellar afterwards, but instead it's in a shop somewhere.

[1267] Dang.

[1268] I like that, too, that my car gets washed.

[1269] Yeah.

[1270] No, you guys, it leaves little dots.

[1271] If the sun comes out.

[1272] But if it slowly, slowly evaporates under the gray skies, it can look pretty pretty good.

[1273] Yeah, when it just does a little squirt here in L .A., it's the worst because all it does is like mud up all the dust on your car and then you have little mud dumps everywhere.

[1274] Yeah.

[1275] Jiblets, yeah, pooties all over your vehicle.

[1276] Oh, goodness.

[1277] Brian Cox.

[1278] Wow.

[1279] Will anyone make it to this, I guess, is the question, fact check.

[1280] Great question.

[1281] So this obviously was an interesting edit for me because I can't edit it.

[1282] Like, I can't take out anything because I know it's all very relevant.

[1283] Yeah, and also as not a physicist.

[1284] Like, you can listen to someone's story and go, oh, that part's irrelevant to them.

[1285] That's what I'm saying.

[1286] I don't know anything.

[1287] I don't know anything.

[1288] But it was also incredibly enjoyable to try to and to listen back for me. I enjoy it.

[1289] Yeah, and when you had a second round at it, did you find that you were digesting more this time?

[1290] Yes, I comprehended a teeny bit more, but it's going to come in small increments like that.

[1291] It's just incredible to be around a brain like that and to also think about the world in that way.

[1292] It's so cool.

[1293] Yeah, yeah.

[1294] It's so cool.

[1295] It feels like make -believe.

[1296] Like, it feels like Harry Potter.

[1297] I think so, yeah.

[1298] Time ends.

[1299] the middle of a black hole and it switches with space.

[1300] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1301] It's one of these things where I do question, is it even worth thinking about?

[1302] Well, I don't think about it ever.

[1303] So that's why it's fun to dip in.

[1304] I think if I thought about it every day, it would be too much.

[1305] Because it's unlike if you study, you know, if you're into measuring things and you're into chemistry, these are all things that you can kind of get your arms around here on planet Earth.

[1306] It's all very tangible.

[1307] and I don't think you can explore this topic without just where do we come from where are we going, hovering at all times.

[1308] I don't find that the most comforting line of thinking.

[1309] Yeah.

[1310] I mean, I'll get curious about it, but then I can see just driving me mad.

[1311] Right, exactly.

[1312] It's so implicit in the study of all this because the timeline's so crazy.

[1313] And you see a star that's billions of years old, like what?

[1314] It's very mind expanding.

[1315] But I enjoy it.

[1316] I do.

[1317] And a fun package.

[1318] came in.

[1319] Very fun, very delightful man. Well, we did talk about him being a keyboardist.

[1320] Yeah.

[1321] But he was in a couple of bands that charted in England, you know.

[1322] Yeah.

[1323] Yeah, so it's kind of fun that it came from a, you know, retired rock star.

[1324] Yeah, it is very cool.

[1325] He had such an English 80s rock star look.

[1326] He did.

[1327] We should have subtitles on this one.

[1328] Put him on, Rob.

[1329] Okay.

[1330] Whatever how you did subtitles in a podcast was while the person was talking there as someone just speaking loudly what they were saying.

[1331] saying it again, but with like a half second delay.

[1332] So it was just a mush.

[1333] Yeah.

[1334] Don't listen to this on double speed.

[1335] I know a lot of people like to listen to podcasts on double speed.

[1336] This should be half speed.

[1337] I can't personally understand how it's enjoyable to listen to things faster because I wanted to brush up on a book that I already love and have already read twice for a guest, but I found myself doing 1 .5.

[1338] That's about a max I can handle.

[1339] And so I thought while I was listening to it like I can get it but it's not enjoyable there's no space for my mind to implant myself into that thought yeah yeah to dance with it to play with it oh yeah how do you fucking even fact check someone well obviously I can't I couldn't fact check any of the science but I do have two facts oh my gosh well they're I mean you know they're stretches sure they're like slant rhymes you know A slant rhyme is where...

[1340] It's kind of a rhyme, but not.

[1341] It's like not really a rhyme.

[1342] A lot of hip -hop has gone in that direction, I've noticed.

[1343] Oh, yeah.

[1344] Or another tactic used, which wasn't prevalent when I was a kid in the 80s, run DMC, all those groups.

[1345] You just say the same word a bunch of times, too.

[1346] And like multiple sentences with the same word.

[1347] Oh.

[1348] So it's not a rhyme.

[1349] It's the same...

[1350] Oh, ma 'am.

[1351] I'm going to have to make one up, if you like.

[1352] But I didn't come with who did this dance, and my life isn't about a dance.

[1353] and I was, you know, and they'll just say the same word.

[1354] This is kind of common place.

[1355] And I've noticed it and I thought, well, that's maybe kind of the kind of rapping I could do.

[1356] You just did it.

[1357] Yeah.

[1358] Oh, my God.

[1359] Thank you so much.

[1360] Monica showed up in Stripes.

[1361] My favorite movie is Stripes.

[1362] I love two draw lines.

[1363] That was good.

[1364] That just gave me a little PTSD because at UCB, or an improv class.

[1365] A warm -up is Beastie rap.

[1366] Oh, what makes it beastie?

[1367] I think it's called Beastie.

[1368] Oh, hold on.

[1369] It's not fully.

[1370] It's real life.

[1371] America, can you hear?

[1372] I'm going to turn my microphone towards the ceiling.

[1373] Holy cow.

[1374] Oh, my God.

[1375] This is actually kind of a ding, ding, ding because the earth.

[1376] The earth.

[1377] The Earth and the universe.

[1378] Yes, and rain.

[1379] Yeah.

[1380] That's right.

[1381] And the law of gravity.

[1382] Yeah.

[1383] Ooh.

[1384] I don't know if I buy it.

[1385] I mean, I learned it, and I was excited because I had a real -time learning moment.

[1386] Yeah.

[1387] About that objects don't exert force on one another, just one object's bending the fabric.

[1388] Fabric, yeah.

[1389] But what's weird in that, oh, God, I had a, I ruminated on that a bit.

[1390] And I thought, well, the only thing that's curious about that is, okay, so I can understand that the earth is creating this divot.

[1391] and then so all the fabric around it is slanted towards that divot.

[1392] So then the moon is rolling into it.

[1393] But again, doesn't for rolling to exist, you still need gravity?

[1394] Yeah, yes.

[1395] So I don't know why just the fabric is sloped in a way that brings things around it.

[1396] That's basically centrifugal force or the opposite of that.

[1397] Oh, I know.

[1398] I'm sorry.

[1399] Never mind.

[1400] I can't answer.

[1401] But later, I left the interview feeling so good that I finally understood that.

[1402] And I was laying in bed and I said, well, that still seems.

[1403] seems a little out there to me. But, hey, they know, I'm sure.

[1404] I don't.

[1405] I don't.

[1406] Fact number one.

[1407] So Brian May from Queen also went into physics.

[1408] Right, right, right.

[1409] As a side hustle.

[1410] Yeah.

[1411] And Brian Cox, same name.

[1412] That's confusing.

[1413] Right, two Brian's.

[1414] He's on a show.

[1415] He helps with a side show in England.

[1416] And Brian Cox said that it's one of the longest shows ever.

[1417] Right, right, right, right.

[1418] So then I looked up longest running British television programs.

[1419] Oh.

[1420] And Horizon, the one that he's talking about, started in 1964 and is still going.

[1421] Holy smokes.

[1422] Yeah, 58 years.

[1423] Oh, baby.

[1424] Mm -hmm.

[1425] But it's not the longest.

[1426] Oh.

[1427] The longest is Lord Mayor's show.

[1428] It has been running 77 years.

[1429] Oh, my God.

[1430] What is it?

[1431] Just simple drawings?

[1432] It is.

[1433] One of the best known, oh, fuck, annual events.

[1434] Okay.

[1435] Well, okay.

[1436] It's still listed.

[1437] In London, as well as one of the longest established, dating back to the 13th century.

[1438] The 13th century?

[1439] I guess that's when it first.

[1440] That's fucking 800 years old.

[1441] A new Lord Mayor is appointed every year, and the public parade that takes place as his or her inauguration ceremony reflects that this was one of the most prominent offices in England.

[1442] Okay, so that's more of a ceremony.

[1443] Now let's look at...

[1444] Oh, your vision is on here is three.

[1445] Hey, can I just interrupt for one second?

[1446] Wouldn't it be spectacular if you're like, you're in your car, you're listening to us, chit chat about this and that, and we're like, oh, the rain, it's so charming.

[1447] You're starting to hear it.

[1448] Like, oh, wow, I can actually hear it.

[1449] And then what if it was just growing and growing up?

[1450] And then the listener heard a huge collapse and the ceiling came down on us.

[1451] Actually, that's a ding, ding, ding for our next fact check.

[1452] Oh, my gosh.

[1453] Yeah, that's an Easter egg.

[1454] Ooh, okay.

[1455] Join us for the next fact check.

[1456] Oh, not the next fact in this fact check, but the next fact.

[1457] That's right.

[1458] The next fact check.

[1459] Okay, great.

[1460] So that was a fact.

[1461] Great socks.

[1462] Thank you.

[1463] Oh, wow, I'm jealous of those.

[1464] Thank you.

[1465] I'll get you some.

[1466] Wowzers.

[1467] They're floral.

[1468] Oh, my gosh.

[1469] Also, if you want to listen to Oppenheimer's lecture at Colorado University, it is on YouTube.

[1470] Oh, I should listen to that.

[1471] It's 59 minutes.

[1472] So I was going to play it.

[1473] but I'm not going to.

[1474] Sure, that's crazy.

[1475] Will you send it to me right now?

[1476] I will.

[1477] As a text message?

[1478] Yeah.

[1479] Yeah, we're going to hear some creaks, some...

[1480] And then...

[1481] Oh, God.

[1482] Oh, God.

[1483] Put him some plastic off in the fucking recorders!

[1484] Oh, no. Then that's the end.

[1485] That's the end of our show.

[1486] Who publishes that episode?

[1487] A firefighter.

[1488] I'm going to send you something else to.

[1489] Posthumously.

[1490] Oh, my God.

[1491] I think I'll likely be okay in the corner here.

[1492] Yeah, you're protected.

[1493] We're right under the A -frame.

[1494] You'll be crushed by those beams.

[1495] Yeah, the beams are going to take us out.

[1496] Oh, but upside.

[1497] So long ago, there's two skylights in this attic, and it would just blast ultraviolet rays on me, and it was too hot.

[1498] So I covered them long ago with aluminum foil, as if this were a drug den.

[1499] So there is a shot that when everything collapses, the aluminum foil, will capsulate, will encrust, will come over the microphones.

[1500] Oh, wow.

[1501] And so it'll keep them dry.

[1502] And so for the firefighter, again, these are yours.

[1503] Finders keepers, losers, losers, enjoy your very expensive mics.

[1504] Or maybe the aluminum foil will save us.

[1505] Oh, we'll cower under it.

[1506] And it'll be a new physics law, like that is, I don't know, I don't know, a knowing.

[1507] Unknowing.

[1508] Although Monica's law definitely sounds like one of those terrible laws.

[1509] Like Murphy's.

[1510] No, no, no. Murphys law is great.

[1511] I'm talking more like Monica's law, legislation to protect other women who might get hit by illegal aliens driving drunk.

[1512] You know, they name them after a woman or a girl quite often.

[1513] That's right, because I want to elicit some sadnesses.

[1514] Yeah, Monica's law will be a law.

[1515] They'll make it a capital offense to host a show.

[1516] in a space that you're not having tested for structural integrity biannually.

[1517] Okay, that sounds good.

[1518] To prevent this from ever happening again, because it's such a tragedy.

[1519] I think it's probably going to be something like it's a capital punishment to have mice.

[1520] Oh, in a tenants, like if you're a landlord.

[1521] That's right.

[1522] To allow mice to just run free and not act as quickly and swiftly as possible.

[1523] to eliminate those pooh -boos.

[1524] And that would be a capital offense.

[1525] Capital crime with the death penalty.

[1526] Did you see that cute arm cherry direct post?

[1527] It was this tiny mouse drawing or like animation of this tiny mouse pooping and then vacuuming up this poop.

[1528] Oh, you're kidding.

[1529] Yeah, it was so cute.

[1530] I didn't see that.

[1531] Monica, what if this is what your mouse looks like?

[1532] I want to see that.

[1533] Vacuuming out of poop.

[1534] Let me see if I still have it.

[1535] Oh, my God.

[1536] Send that along.

[1537] Oppenai or what a mixed what a mixed bag That was it obviously we're all over the place But that's life That's what we learned That is that is The weather's all over the place The storm is passing The next fact check's gonna be great you guys Oh Just come back for that Come back Well they weren't here for this one maybe Listen to this six or seven times I'm going to I really Oh I loved it I really enjoyed it I enjoyed sitting in it And I really enjoyed listening back I did I agree whole chunk of time where I was like, I'm just listening.

[1538] Yes, I loved it.

[1539] But I do, I'm going to forecast, ding, ding, ding, dang, that many of the comments will read, I made it seven minutes, how boring, you know?

[1540] Okay, let them.

[1541] I hope you choke on your textbook, you fucking nerd.

[1542] Oh, no. I used to love you now.

[1543] So I got a comment the other day.

[1544] It was like, you lost me to Rogan.

[1545] It's just a weird thing, like, as if I'm somehow, just.

[1546] competing for listeners also that it's in either or.

[1547] It doesn't have to be an either or.

[1548] Whatever.

[1549] I just thought it was funny.

[1550] If you're going to do that which is fine, I encourage it.

[1551] No, I don't.

[1552] Don't talk to my friend like that.

[1553] Okay, but do an obscure one.

[1554] Absure.

[1555] Obscure.

[1556] So go like, you lost me to Teddy Cheats.

[1557] Then we're like great for Teddy.

[1558] Great for Teddy, but now what would happen, this is why it would be more effective is that I would now have to go into my podcast browser and type in Teddy Cheats.

[1559] I want to know who I've lost his customer to.

[1560] What is he slinging that tastes better?

[1561] Yeah.

[1562] And, you know, it could be really fun of Teddy Cheats.

[1563] He was like one of nine listeners.

[1564] Oh, my God.

[1565] We would probably find out he was Teddy Cheats.

[1566] Oh, that would be smart.

[1567] Yeah.

[1568] A lot of smart moves to make.

[1569] Was it, was it Rogan that wrote it?

[1570] Oh, boy.

[1571] Love you.

[1572] Love you.

[1573] If that second fact check doesn't materialize, it's because we passed in this Good night.

[1574] Good night.

[1575] Oh, wow, bro!

[1576] Put some plastic on everything.

[1577] Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[1578] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[1579] Before you go, tell us about your stuff.

[1580] by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.