Will We Ever Find a Theory of Everything? Brian Keating & Curt Jaimungal

Experimentalists are kinda like exterminators. Our job is to kill off the bugs, skin theories, and destroy theories that don't comport with evidence. We're not required to create new theory, and also look, what are the limitations of experiments? So most of our time is looking for ways to prove ourselves wrong, which is Feynman said is the job to not be, to not be fooled.

First of all, let's get get through the questions 1 by 1. What are your goals? Explain to the audience what you do with your channel, what your goals are as you as a professor for your life.

Yeah. So, my basic dictum in life is that it's incredibly short, and you have to make the most of it, and you have to do everything you can until we invent time travel. We have to do everything we can in order to make each moment as meaningful as invested in with meaning as possible. And so I do that in in different ways, different habits, rituals, practices. But one thing I've always wanted to do is to write a book and leave a legacy as a as an author. And I've learned so much from other authors that I wanted to start something, especially during this time of COVID, to give back to people that have been my silent mentors or distant learning mentors, namely folks like, as you mentioned, Michael Shermer has been on my podcast. We've had people like, we we had David Kaiser, a very famous and and well known physicist, all the way down to people that have influenced my life personally that haven't written books, such as Jim Simons who we had on the podcast for Father's Day. And, again, following Carl Sagan's dictum that books are magic, books are proof that human beings can work magic.

You have an author's voice, possibly a long dead author from communicating from 100 or maybe 1000 of years ago in the case of you know, I read a lot of the bible and and things like that we can get into. And, how it influences me is, you get to create this sort of, artificial I call it artificial wisdom. We hear a lot. I'm sure you've had a lot of contact with people that study artificial intelligence. What I'm more interested in is artificial wisdom, namely, how can you accrue wisdom without going through all the experiences that other brilliant people have gone through. So I love to, read books. I love to write books. I'm thinking about my second book now as we speak and putting it together based on a lot of the interviews and, things that have emerged from the conversations with these luminaries that I'm really fortunate to talk to.

How are you defining wisdom in artificial wisdom?

So artificial wisdom is just kind of a playoff on artificial intelligence, namely that, that you have bang awful lot of knowledge that's available to humanity through theory, Wikipedia, the Internet, etcetera. But, and in fact, I remind people that the word science in Latin means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to synthesize fat pieces of knowledge in a way that we don't know but may be uniquely human. And I think synthesizing it to avoid we we I'm also a private pilot. I fly tiny little planes. And one of the things we say is, you have to learn from the mistakes of others because you won't live long enough to make them all yourself. So that's sort of the, you know, kind of the 10,000 hour rule applied to pilots, which I think is one of Malcolm Gladwell's examples of of, you know, truly outstanding pilots are those that have obtained 10000 hours.

And you can only get that far if you've done things and benefited from others' wisdom. The situation that they've been in so that you don't have to go through it. So it's not just about knowledge. I mean, I think Derek Sievers once said, you know, if it was all about knowledge, we'd all be billionaires with 6 pack abs. There's an abundance of knowledge. Wisdom is synthesizing it, distilling it, and catalyzing the many disparate pieces that you get into some coherent form of of of life message or with or vision, which is what I try to maintain.

Have you heard of John Varecki?

No. I haven't. Who's that, Curt?

Cognitive science from U of T. So plug plug there. Because I also interviewed there's 2 interviews with him on my channel. Oh, cool. He extensively studies wisdom from a cognitive science perspective. I think he made

Yeah. I would definitely like to. Yeah. Okay. Maybe we'll get in touch. You'll help me get in touch with him.

Them. Now you mentioned that the mind might not be the human mind might be uniquely predisposed or capable of wisdom that is the distilling of so much knowledge down to something that's practical, which implies a goal, and then we can talk about what where do you get those goals from later when we get to the biblical section. Do you happen to do you think that the mind can be mechanized? That is what I mean is that a machine can simulate the mind.

Yeah. So I've had some conversations with people about this. And, actually, the most interesting people I've talked to are people, in the realm of music and the arts. I I interviewed a a controversial, but interesting very interesting person named Zubie. He's a musician in the UK, that, he does a lot of, rap and improv based rap music. He's also very knowledgeable about, jazz, etcetera. And I also interviewed a very my one of my best friends, Stefan Alexander, who's a professional jazz musician, but also professor of theoretical physics at Brown University where I went to grad school. And, these two gentlemen have the idea that music can be synthesized and it can be made by computers, but there's something uniquely, almost almost endemic to human beings that allows for sort of what what Stefan calls this path integral approach, where the mind is exploring and seeking out ways to minimize a quantity we physicists call action, and he's doing doing it in a way that a computer can solve, you know, theoretically bang reduce what's called the Lagrangian or solve this action principle, the integral of Lagrangian.

But, but it may not be able to create that idea, you know, the the notion of an artificial physicist, that Max Tegmark, who is also a friend and colleague, has proposed. You know, the ability to replicate the laws of physics merely based on computing power seems dubious to me. I'm not saying it's impossible, but, these metrics that we have are often superimposed upon biases that the individuals who program the artificial intelligences, the machine learning algorithms, unconsciously or sometimes consciously bestow upon that. So the Turing test, you know, is a classic definition. It turns out, you know, Turing Turing almost inadvertently came up with it or he he wasn't necessarily thinking about it the way that we think about it now, but he was so prescient that he really presaged the fact that, yeah, this question of whether or not a computer and artificial intel general artificial intelligence could mimic a human being is is certainly a very, very interesting topic to me. And, I've actually talked about it, recently with, who did I talk about this week? I think it was, it was James Altucher who's, like, a pundit, blogger, prolific podcaster, Arthur, and and he was saying theory, yeah, like, the Turing test, you could think about it being passed right now. Like, sometimes, I give a I give my, my iPad to my to my I have young kids. I'll give an iPad to them, and I'll play with it.

And then they'll come back to me, and later on, they'll, like, swipe my face like they're trying to change the page on my face. You know, unfortunately for them, it doesn't change the way I look. But, but it made me theory, like, could you could the Turing test be kind of age dependent? Could you could could the Turing test be, passed already for very highly intelligent, animals Clarke, like bonobos or or what have you? In other words, that you could actually pass it already or young children. So a young child wouldn't know if it's their dad talking to them or an artificial intelligence. So I I those are very fascinating questions. I don't know, however, again, what is the impact? Because I don't I'm not an expert in this field. But what is the uniquely human aspect of intelligence that proves so, resistant to perfect mimicry and I e the turn test? I just it's not something I personally, you know, investigated very deeply, but I think it is a very important question.

I was reading recently Mind Machines and Girdle by Lucas. Have you heard of that paper? I've heard of it.

Yes. I haven't read it.

He says that a mind that a machine can simulate any aspect of the mind, but not every aspect, and that seems like a contradiction. But you can also think of it like a machine can simulate any natural number, but not every natural number.

Right. And it can do things better than human beings. Right? I mean, you know one of the you know what one of the best uses of a quantum computer is that a classical computer can't model. Right? That's a quantum computer. In other words, a quantum computer is the ideal device, if you will, technology to model quantum processes, Lagrangian, Hamiltonians. The question is, as you say, you know, because it surpasses any human being or any conventional silicon computer or whatever classical computer, does that mean it could do so in every field? It's it's hard to say yes. I guess that paper you're saying argues no.

Yeah. And it says that we need to make a delineation between superiority and equivalence. So a computer can be much better than us, and and it is in various aspects, but it doesn't mean it's equivalent. And he gives an in principle argument for why it can't be using Girdle. Well, if it's a formal system that's consistent and sound, then it can there are statements that it can't prove to be true, but we can see when we stand outside the system that it's true. And just based on that alone, there's a difference between our minds and machines. Have you studied much of Godel's incompleteness theorem?

I I've I I wouldn't say I've studied it. I've familiarized myself with it in the following sense that I believe that, that physicists have a deep, envy of Godel's incompleteness theorem for the following reason. It's very hard to find statements about physics itself that come from within physics itself. In other words, it's very hard to say what constitutes physics, what constitutes scientific methods. Some as as in your fellow Torontonian, or I guess he's in Waterloo, but Lee Smolin, who's a very good friend of mine, he'll be on the podcast soon. He and I have chatted about this. He actually doesn't even believe that the scientific method is is is resilient, you know, as a as a truly, a definable conjecture. In other words, he argues, you know, with the kind of Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, simple statement of what the scientific method is.

He argues based on, a book that I can provide for you guys later, but, there's arguments against the existence of even the scientific method. So now once you have this and you try to equate it and you try to ask, like, am I wasting my life? Like, I'm building this huge observatory with 300 of my most brilliant colleagues in the world. Is it just a waste? Because, ultimately, it's tantamount to astrology. Now I think I could make very strong arguments that it's not. However, as we will get to, certainly, there are aspects of this of this pursuit of studying the early universe that some claim are tantamount to astrology or tantamount to, you know, phrenology or something like this that we are doing what's that?

How so?

So we can get into that one with regard to string theory, the multiverse. I saw you wanted to talk about that. We should definitely get into that. But just finishing up on because you asked me about Girdle. So what's important about Godel is that it shows you the limitations of the mathematical, the mathematical construct that human beings have invented and discovered. Now I say that because Jim Simons and I had a wonderful conversation. I asked him, is mathematics invented or discovered? And he said it's both because the only way to find out what is new is to discover something. And when you discover something new, like the Chern Simons relations and differential forms, etcetera, When you do that, you learn new things and you, in some sense, invent new technology literally.

I mean, there are people that say that effectively, Chern Simons can be used to derive the Einstein field equation. So, you know, did Einstein, you know, discover that or, you know, did he invent it? He used tools in mathematics that had never been used in physics. So getting back to Godel, I think that physicists would love to have a similar statement, even though some mathematicians, my friend, Bang Levin, who was on the my podcast, I haven't released her episode, but she wrote a great book called The Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. It's about Godel and Turing and this fictitious relationship between the 2 of them in Vienna.

A fictional book.

It's a it's a fictional book. Yeah. So she's a she's an amazing writer. She's written bang selling nonfiction books about LIGO and about, about She's

a physicist as well?

She's a yeah. She's a chair name chair professor at Barnard College at Columbia University. Yeah. She's amazing. I would love to connect you with her, but she she writes fiction, and this book is this is this fictional kind of character of how they both, you know, were led to basically take their own lives and and what happened, how they did so. 1 did so, via ingesting a poisoned apple, and one did so by starving himself to death. And, and just theorists the amazing connections that she draws, it's been called, like, Maria Popova. It's her one of her favorite books of all time, and she's, you know, one of the most brilliant people.

Anyway, getting back to Godel. So I would say, I wish that there was, and I think many physicists wish that there was something besides Popper. You know, Popper, we can get into C, conjectures. Effectively, we don't have a hard and fast mathematically consistent rule, at least within the realm of self consistency that that girdle the lineates. We don't have something that tells me cosmology or, you know, a condensed matter physics is a waste of time because it's it's it's logically as equivalent to or not, to some other branch of of, you know, what we bang consider metaphysics or nonphysics like astrology. So is cosmology like astrology? We don't have as cleanly divided demarcations between those despite what most people think coming from popper. My thumb is very busy right now holding up good old Albert, but if yours is free, please go ahead and hit that like Brian. And don't forget to subscribe.

It really helps us with the algorithm.

You're an experimentalist. The audience might not know that. Well, we'll know from the introduction Yeah. Which is different than most of the people that I talk to. I talk to theoretical physics. Yeah. And and and that puts you in a unique perspective. Many theoretical physics, including Penrose and Feynman I mean, Dyson believe that that that Godel's incompleteness theorem has something to say about our ability to come up with the theory of everything if theory and the existence of one as well.

Mhmm. So whether or not we can find it and whether or not exist is are 2 different topics. Well, what do you see as an experimentalist, Godel's incompleteness theory implications for physics itself?

Yeah. So, you know, I've had on Penrose. I had on Dyson many times, and and Penrose many times, and Martin Reese and I have have had wonderful conversations as well. I would say that exactly as you know and, you know, you're the first person that ever noticed this. I I don't know if you use, like, metrics with your podcast, Kurt. Like, I always if I ask somebody a question, they say, I've never thought of that before, or I've never been asked that before, or they sit there like this. That's a sign of a good podcast. Okay? So I wanna give you that little metric, that little, what do they call that? KPI? Key performance.

Oh, cool. Okay.

So a good job there. So so almost no one has ever asked me, about the unique perspective that an experimentalist has on this. And I think it's it's it's, it's a little unfortunate because most many people see the theoretical physics, the Brian Greens, the Bang Brains, like I said, the Stefan Alexanders, Jim Gates, Lee Smollett. They see the those are physics. Mitch Okaku, they they see the those are the physics, and the the, you know, and the Brian Keating don't get the attention not I'm clamoring for attention of Brian Green, but the bottom line is they can work and I had this conversation with Eric Weinstein yesterday, just the 2 of us, you know, hanging out and chatting on the phone, and I was like, look, you know, an experimentalist, I can point to the key performance indicators that I achieved every day. I I keep a journal. I have, I I have, you know, metrics for what I wanna succeed in each day. Today's list, I could show it to you in my diary across the room.

You know, I talked to Kurt and and, you know, communicate new ideas. So, so I keep that. Now a theorist might have 1 or 2 papers in his or her career that and that's theory entire career. Now some experimentalists might not even have, you know, more than that in terms of one experiment. My some of my experiments last 10, 15, 20 years. The LIGO experimentalist 40 years from beginning to success, and we can talk about what that means, later. But, but, basically, an experimentalist has a certain Clarke that's ticking within his or her brain, and that clock is saying, what can I accomplish that will provide crisp new evidence that will reveal something new about the universe, that no one's ever known before so that my student can get a PhD or a postdoc or or I can get a a little, you know, continue the program of endeavor that I'm trying to achieve? And sometimes they're very big and sometimes they're very small, but on a daily basis, there's a clock ticking, tick, tick, tick. What did I get done? What aspect? Even if it's a simple thing, and that and that's where I think we have an advantage because, you know, as, Richard Feynman once said, you know, teaching is good for for physicists because most of the time, we're not productive coming up with QED or some new theory of physics.

So at least we feel like we accomplished something when we taught. I feel like that I get to teach and I get to learn, by experimentation every day, thinking about not exactly how to test whether or not the universe had a singular origin in the in in the big bang, which is theory important part of my overall mission. That's what I call the big picture strategic thinking of an experimentalist. What big questions do I want the answer to? Do neutrinos have mass? What are the masses of neutrinos? Is there, a CP violation in the early universe? Those are huge quest the tactical day to day activities that experiment does Clarke it's probably very different from what a theorist does. And I've written works with theorists. A lot of I do is is guided by theorists. But on the other hand, I could point to specific tactics every day that are metrics towards the ultimate strategic theory that I hope to achieve. And so I think it's a different perspective.

It's more practical. It's more it's sort of more, it's more quotidian, but on the same token, I think it's just as important as the theoretical guidance that we get. And furthermore, you can produce. I I feel like theorists are and I love theorists, but, you know, my father was a theoretical physicist. Yeah. So I'm gonna say this, no insult to all you, but phys theoretical physics are kinda like bosons, not bosoz. But you can create, like, a lot of them doing the same kinda cool stuff and but they won't be able to see if it's right or wrong until a fermionic experimentalist comes along and says that doesn't you know, we don't we don't play nicely. Right? We're not gonna just accept some theory because it's beautiful.

Ultimately, the experimentalists are the ground of physics because you can come up with ideas as as much as you want. And I think that one of the reasons why theoretical physicists get get much more play on in the in the public science is because I'd like to know your thoughts. I don't know if this is true, but this is what I theory. Is that they can be expansive and they can be mystical, but the experimentalist job is to be careful and say no. It's it's the

the Yeah.

That's right. Exactly right. Maybe. They they and that's more intriguing to the public because the experimentalist is to be fastidious and meticulous and exact and precise. Obviously, a mathematician needs to be that same way. You can make an analogy between theoretical physicist and math, but that's not

My my father used to say the same thing. He used to say, actually, you need to know you need to be better than a theorist because you don't have to create new theories. But if you don't understand how the theories work, you're you know, in his words, he say, you're just like a plumber, and I'm not disparaging plumbers. I love plumbers. My my cousins apply, you know, so don't take this the wrong way. But you're just, like, doing a technical task. You're not actually doing it for the right reason, which is to understand using the principle of right reason. What is the importance of this undertaking that you're that you're pursuing? So, you know, I always make sure my students my students spend almost as much time reading theoretical papers.

And in fact, as you just said, I I I will well, I'll make sure that they are in in, you know, inundated, deluged by dead theories, by theories that didn't work out because I think that causes them to acquire the very most difficult brains, which is good taste. How do you know a problem is worth working on? If it's gonna require, you know, a technology like I had on, James Beauchamp on Monday this week, is a great science. He's in particle fever. He's helped produce particle fever. He was in chasing Einstein, brilliant physicist. He's arguing for this future circular collider in Europe. He's, an experimentalist. And, you know, he's saying, like, my ultimate dream is like a particle accelerator at the diameter of the solar system, and and I think it's fun to hear it talk like that because it's it's science fiction, and it goes with my podcast theme at the Arthur C Clarke Center.

But, ultimately, what I'm concerned with is I've got, you know, hopefully, 50, 60 years left. I don't know how much, you know, I'll be cognizant and be able to understand it. I wanna know what I can accomplish that's practical, that's decisive, and that as you said, that I in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, I talk about how experimentalists are kinda like exterminators. Our job is to kill off the bugs and theories and destroy theories that don't comport with evidence. We're not required to create new theories, although I've worked to try to understand maybe phenomenology is the best way to describe it, and and also look what are the limitations of experiments. Don't forget, most of my career, I'm looking at noise. I'm looking at thermal radiation, which is basically like noise, which can be mimicked as the most highly entropic form of radiation that exists. How do you distinguish that, disentangle that from other sources of contamination, from the ground, which is a 100 times brighter, the sun, which is a 1000 times hotter? How do you go about doing that? And, so most of our time is looking for ways to prove ourselves wrong, which is Feynman said is the job to not be, to not be fooled.

I I think I did myself a great disservice when I was in university in in that I disregarded experimental physics. I despise my there's a second year requirement for experimental physics. And I just it was never explained to me why you add the error bars in in the way that you do. And I understand now it has something to do with Taylor expansion, but I never rocked it. I didn't understand it. Yeah. I didn't wanna spend the time to and I and I regret that because I think that as part of my mission is to come up with a theory of everything or integrate the other theories of everything or find the best candidate, I I see that as a as a large area that I'm lacking that would have significantly helped me.

Yeah. You know what? Scientists don't data analysis. Right. So what scientists and and it's not you know, I don't wanna, like, take the blame off you entirely because I you know, this is the first time we're talking, but but I do wanna say that we don't teach experimental physics properly, in my opinion. We teach it typically, we have a bang package experiment that we know works. How do we know it works? Because somebody won a Nobel Prize, you know, the Davis and Germer experiment, Michelson Morley, you know, so you can go through all these different Nobel Prize winning experiments, and then you get this, assumption that everything is, is essentially these neat little packages. And as I said before, what I spend most of my time looking for is noise, and a lot of experimentalists do this, but there's 2 different types of noise. There's the statistical noise that more and more experiments and more and more observations can reduce to, you know, almost negligible values.

And then there's a much more important class called systematic uncertainties, and those are the most challenging because they require as it's a huge theme of the book, losing the Nobel Prize, which I thought was a unique contribution because I'm not Brian Greene. I'm not Michio Kaku. I'm not Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm not a theorist. I'm gonna tell you why is it that certain people lost Nobel Prizes. Why did certain people win Nobel Prizes? And it comes down to understanding the fundamental difference of being an experimental physicist, which is you're always looking to prove yourself wrong, and furthermore, you're always trying to nail down these systematic errors. And to do so

generalize outside of physics?

It probably does. You know, it probably does because I think there's bias and there's systemic features of of other features of of in of inquiry, not just in the physical sciences. But people notice it every day. Like I said, in my book, I talk about, you know, if you have dirt on your windshield, you know, how do you know you have dirt? Well, you you you see a diminution of intensity of light or or whatever. I go through an example of that. And what do you do to get to get to see if, to see if you can make a difference and and get rid of it? Well, you, remove it by water, and then you do an AB comparison. So you're actually doing an experiment. You're saying what was the difference between before and after.

And in this case, we looked at, you know, we're looking at this light now. Is it brighter? Yeah. Now the light's brighter. Okay. So it had a difference. If it made it worse, if you wash it with concrete, you know, then it wouldn't get better. So, so thinking about things in terms of a systematic error is something that will require you to do another experiment. And in my case, with the bicep experiment and my colleagues, we failed to do a separate experiment by ourselves.

We tried to do it in different ways that I described in the book. I won't get into here, but we failed to do an experiment, which would have ruled out the ultimate source of the signal we Clarke were inflationary gravitational waves, which is cosmic dust in our Milky Way C. That required a separate experiment to get rid of, and now we all know that. And so now in the Simons Observatory pictured behind me here in the Atacama Desert of Chile and in the bicep array experiment, my colleagues are running at the South Pole, we now have the capability to measure not just the Nobel gold winning dust, gold, gold winning gravitational wave signature, if it exists, which we don't know, but also dust simultaneously. And you measure the cosmic signal plus the dust signal, then you measure the dust signal by itself, you subtract it from the cosmic plus dust, and what you're left with is cosmic.

Fascinating. Man

Yeah.

Is the okay. So in math and in physics, in in theoretical physics, there are seminal books, like, calculus on on manifolds. That's SPIVAK. That's mathematics. Then there's whatever. There's some books for, like, the the the facto text on quantum mechanics or quantum field theory. Is there you know, I I I I shouldn't have done this, but when I was younger and I was arrogant and I ridiculed experimental physics like Clarke a theoretical physicist would, they view it I'm sure you know this, and you must boil with hatred, but they view it much like engineering. Yeah.

And engineering is this is That's

what I said. A plumber. You know? No offense to plumbers, but, yeah, that's how way a lot of theorists view it. In fact, one of my friends, I won't say his name because he's a brilliant, he's a brilliant physicist, and there aren't too many in the in his department. You know, he said, like, okay. So what what you know, did you change a valve today? Like, did you do a carburetor tune up? And, again, he didn't you know, we're friends, but he come into the lab, and I'd be like, well, did you write the same paper again, you know, about about membranes and d Brian?

Mhmm. Mhmm. And so he's yeah. Go ahead. He's Arthur he's partly correct. It's partly some physical manipulation. But what I envy the most about your position is the understanding, the comprehension from various angles or from like, you have to know these theories inside and out to be able to predict to make an experimentalist to know what could be wrong.

You have to be passionate. I agree with you, Kurt, a 100%, but you have to have the passion that that's curious and that's meaningful to you. I have a lot of students, Kurt, that are preternaturally gifted at building things, tinkering things. I actually worked on an old 19 seventies rabbit, Volkswagen rabbit, you know, when I was in high school. It was my first car. It cost me, you know, less than my laptop cost me today. And I love that theory, and I love working on it and having a sense of satisfaction every day. I could say, oh, I tuned up the brakes or I lifted a suspension.

You know, I lifted it by a micron or whatever I was doing back then. And and the point is that you but that was because I had passion for it. Some of my students don't have passion. They don't they don't think about the big picture questions. A lot most of them do. Some of them are just really good. They can build in the clean room. They can build new types of detectors.

They love the pure technology. They are doing engineering. There's look. Behind me in this picture, you see these telescopes and it's hard to see, you know, over my shoulder, but there's, there are diesel generators. I have students that are, like, fascinated with the way diesel generators work. And if they didn't and they're physics, and they're doing logistics and what's called project management. It's so crucial, Kurt. But for me, that's not what really turns me on about physics.

It's understanding the theory that I could understand the way a 4 dimensional scalar field would operate over cosmic time and then say, to measure that, not only do I wanna measure that, of course, any, you know, red blooded, physics would wanna measure it, but I wanna understand what are the impediments to measuring it first. That's what makes so my friend Sabine Hassenfelder was on my podcast. She has this book lost C

to her tomorrow.

Oh, great. So she has her book lost in Matthew. Talk about it. She'll call her all litany. I've I've heard it before, and and I respect her. But I said one of the first things I said in my interview with her is I said, no experiment is not beautiful. Like, there's no such thing as even if you look at do you have you ever seen a picture, Kurt, of the very first transistor that, you know, Shockley and Bardem invented? It's like a, you know, it's like some some, silicon.

It's like a s'more.

It looks like a s'more. It's got, like, a coat hanger and and some and some marshmallow. It literally looks like that. That is beautiful nonetheless because they took theory that they had and they made it work and they tested for these contaminations, impurities, systematic effects, and it is beautiful. All all experiments do what are called null test. You've probably heard of these jackknife theorists where you take a set of data. Look. I do the cosmic microwave background.

The cosmic microwave background doesn't know that the data that I'm analyzing was taken on a Tuesday. It doesn't care about that. So therefore, if I take data on a Tuesday, compare it to data on a Wednesday, and subtract it to, what should I get? 0. 0. Similarly, if I scan back and Arthur, when I take all the data and I bin it when I was moving the telescope to the left versus moving it to the right and I subtract them, what should I get?

That depends on that depends on spatial homogeneic. I can and I can never pronounce that. And then I saw I saw isotropic.

Well, the but we know that the cosmic signals themselves are homogeneous and isotropic. So any you're you're right. There could be deviations from the ground, from the telescope mirrors, whatever. I'm just being particular.

Yeah. Big understand what you're saying. Yeah.

So there's symmetries, and the symmetries are beautiful. What Sabine rails against is the reliance on symmetry to create new theory or to have guidance towards what we're doing in math. So I take issue with the fact that categorically saying beauty and symmetry and naturalness are are anathema to to to new physics. So you you know, I yeah. I'm sure you'll hear that. I'm sure you'll get into it, but the basic philosophy that I have is that all experiments are beautiful, And that her thing is that you should not be guided by beauty in theory, so maybe we don't agree disagree that much.

Are there books that are experimentalist books much like much like I was mentioning? There's the Sankar's Yeah. Quantum mechanics or so?

Well, you know, I I I didn't think that there were. And so my my book is, describes a lot about how a cosmic microwave background polarimeter works, how you measure, what polarization is using the

In the losing the Nobel prize book?

Yeah. So it's it's about how, a polarimeter works, what is polarization. It's the least well understood of all the three properties of light. I describe how that works. I describe how you can make your own polarimeter, etcetera. And so I give a lot of analogies. I talk about classic experiment, and I talk about in particular, there was a man named Edward Ohm, no relation to the Ohm of resistance fame, but he was working on the exact same telescope at Bell Labs that Penzies and Wilson were working on, and he did error analysis incorrectly. And because of that, he found that he had this persistent theory degree background that he could not get rid of, and he assumed that that error was due to, was due to this conspiracy of error bars co Keating together constructively, literally doing a mistake that my freshman in physics would get failure marks for.

And, and because of that, he had the data that that Penzias and Wilson would later get 4 years earlier. And so he is one of the Nobel Prize losers in the book. So I describe that. What does that mean to do a systematic error? How how do experimentalists build these things? Now there are good there are some books that talk about it. There's a book by John Mather called The Very First Light that describes Kobe. George Smoot wrote a book called Wrinkles in Time, also about Kobe, and they won the Nobel Prize in 2006. But, you know, they're they're I was one of the lacunae that I felt I could repair and make a contribution to with losing the Nobel Prize.

How about for these physicists who are 2nd theory? They're smart upper they're going into the upper Brian, and they wanna understand and they're theoretical physicists. And they want a textbook, like, that takes you from from knowing virtually nothing to how do you

Yeah.

What what are some experiment, and how do you do the or how do you perform the requisite analysis?

So Jim Peebles, who won the Nobel Prize last year at Princeton, is hopefully coming on my show pretty soon, and he's written a book called cosmology century, and it goes through he was part of the original, Penzias and Wilson competitor team at Princeton that lost the Nobel Prize back in 1960 and 78 when Penzias and Wilson did win it, but they were famously scooped, by and this was my graduate student's, adviser's graduate his adviser, David Wilkinson, and team and Peebles lost the Nobel Prize for the discovery missed out on discovering the CMB, by only a little bit to this other team led by Penzies and Wilson. Anyway, Jim Peebles has written a book called cosmology century, and he goes through a lot of the classic experiments and how we came, not just to know what we know about the CMB, which is very important, obviously, but also galaxy surveys. How did we start from 1900 knowing almost nothing if the universe was static, eternal, infinite, finite, whatever, to knowing so much about cosmology, the age down to the, you know, tens of 1000000 of years, the density down to, you know, fractions of a percent, the expansion rate, depending on who you talk to to either, you know, sub percent or 9%, and etcetera. So it's a fascinating book. It's brand new. And there's another book by, a colleague of mine in the Simons Observatory also at Princeton, named, Jo Dunkley. She wrote a book called Our Universe. And then another Princeton professor, Clarke you see it's kinda here.

Jo Dunkley? Joanne Dunkley.

Joanne. Okay. Okay.

The book called, cos Our Universe, and then Lyman Page also at Princeton wrote a book, just out now called, the little book of cosmology. And they're very accessible, especially to not the first one, Jim Peebles' book is more technical. You'll see Einstein equations. You'll see correlation functions. But but That's

in my book.

Yeah. I think I think you'll appreciate that book. Hey, friends. Just a short request to ask you to use your thumb while my thumb is occupied to leave a like on this video, and don't forget to subscribe. It really helps us with the algorithm. Now back to the episode.

So as a experimental physicist, what do you think is missing is needed for progress to be made on a new theory of everything or current theories of everything? Is it like I was asking you in the notes, is it something as as simple as a larger collider? Is it to build the collider in space? Is it not even the collider at all? Is it just analyze the cosmic background radiation with more resolution? What is it?

So, obviously, you know, I have a bias towards, 2 things. 1, things that I can contribute to, because that's where I'm putting my limited amount of of of attention. You know? You you have a limited amount of time, but you even have less attention that you can dedicate, right, to different things. And so what I feel is worthy of my attention and that of my, you know, 6 graduate students and 6, undergraduates and 3 postdocs, revolves around the CMB, but not only for studying the cosmic microwave background for looking for this potential signature of inflation, which would be this twisting, curling pattern of microwaves that were we claimed also as part of the bicep 2 experiment back in 2014. We declared we detected it, turned out we had to recant that claim. Not that we made a blunder or made a mistake, but but we met we attributed the source of the signal to an incorrect, to an incorrect piece of evidence. The, the biggest picture theory to me are to understand whether or not time is, had a beginning. And I think, you know, that has just tremendous implications for for not just me, but everybody in terms of philosophy, metaphysics, religion, if you believe.

Smolin has a great book on that. I don't know if you read it time really.

Yeah. So I'm I'm in the I'm in the middle of it. I was invited to a conference at Perimeter Institute near you, 3 or 4 years ago where I started to have conversations about him that could use the CMB to determine if there is a clock, a certain universal Clarke, and that universal clock might be connected to what we talk about in terms of CPT violations, CP violation, and that's using the properties of polarization as a sort of, detector of mirror symmetry. So we know that, something called CPT violation is respected, but we and and we know that CP violation takes place, but the kinda interface between the 2 of them can best be tested across cosmic scales. Because if there's a we know that whatever effect there is that breaks symmetry in the electromagnetism world in the sector that we call photons, that has to be incredibly small. But over cosmic distances of billions of light years of travel time, you might see the evidence for the rotation of polarization of both photons and some say even of gravitational waves. So there's a huge area of physics that's left to be explored, and that I believe will tell us a lot about the fundamental aspects of the of electromagnetism. And then if you do believe that there is a grand unified theory plus gravity, so a theory of everything, then you would have to argue that, if, if the weak force disobeys parity symmetry, then gravity must at very high energies.

And so where's the best place to look for gravity's behavior at very high energies, the big bang or a bounce? And that's, something proposed by my colleague, Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, that the universe is actually cyclical, that there was no big bang, that there's no single origin of time, that the universe undergoes a perfectly classical physics, bounces and and expansions over 1,000,000,000 of years, not just, you know, 1,000,000,000 of years. And, and this is, also related. There's related work by Roger Penrose, and you may know this conformal cyclic cosmology. So that's the biggest question you could possibly answer. Is time unique? Is it did it have a beginning? Is it a singular origin as as, you know, as people Clarke, or are there other, you know, aspects of of the universe that we can only study using the universe as our biggest possible accessible particle accelerator?

Do you think theory are in in principle limitations to experimental physics? For example, Lee Smolin said that you can't make theories about the universe from within the universe. I believe that's in Time We're Born. I don't know if you understand if I'm

Yeah. So I've heard him speak about that, and I think that's related to this book, which I don't wanna, break our conversation up to go look up this book, but he has his doubts about the existence even of the scientific method. So if the scientific method, which relies on hypothesis, kind of, you know, some kind of conjecture, some some crisp test, some ability to be proven wrong in the case of Popper, etcetera, then, yeah, you might you might think that if that isn't maintained, in other words, if you don't believe that that's the sine qua non of physics, of science itself, then, you know, then trying to rely on experiment to reveal something new is plagued and fraught with the very bias that you're trying to solipsistically, you know, eliminate, which is that you can learn something about the universe from within the universe. And and, you know, I think it's a fascinating question, and Lee is one of the most original thinkers I know. So it's not possible for me to ignore what he says. On a day to day basis, do I think that it's not possible to to learn about the universe? Of course not. No. I do.

I I believe we can learn tremendously about the about the, about the composition, the structure of the universe on a practical level. And so to be honest, I don't really concern myself so much of, like, these questions. The ultimate question, like, do I exist? You know, do I have free will? I actually don't personally find those interesting. I know you're interested in it.

Yeah. Do you forget about if you find it interesting. Do you happen to believe that you have free will?

I do. Yeah. In general?

I do. And how does that comport with your experimentalist reductionism? I don't know if you believe in reductionism, but it's

I don't I don't necessarily believe in reductionism. I I find all these things kind of again, so I participated with Stuart Hoffman, who is a good friend, not Stuart Hoffman, Stuart Hameroff at, University of Arizona, who runs a a science of consciousness seminar every other year, alongside Roger Penrose and others. And, actually, Noam Chomsky spoke with me a few years ago here in San Diego when I was here. And, you know, I became very frustrated and disillusioned a little bit because they couldn't even, like, say for sure what consciousness was, and yet they said they have a science of consciousness or they're working towards the science of con and I know Sam Harris is the hard problem. Until you understand so it's not so much that I feel if I can prove it or I feel like I'm a hypocrite because I believe in free will even though I am an experimentalist. No. It's more that I think the burden is on other people, who believe that there isn't free will and there isn't you know, there there is super determinism, and and I know people will just throw it around like the block university it just but there's no evidence for it. So I I guess the question is

I'll give you Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I'll play devil's advocate. Sure. Let's say you have free will. Okay. Well so that means you made a decision of your own choosing.

Well, what caused you to choose in that particular direction? And then if you say, well, I had some play in that. Well, then I asked what caused that. It's just what caused. Until you get to something that is outside of you, so big example, the initial conditions of the big bang maybe or your mother giving birth to you, which you didn't choose, how is it that you have free will?

I guess I would ask kinda like the touring like, how would you tell the difference? Like, if I did have free will, you know, you know, as they say, like, I have to believe in free will. I have no choice. But but the question of, you know, I I would say, isn't that is that the super, you know, the superset of all events that have taken place since the big bang? If you wanna say that that's deterministic when we know that there's certain quantum decoherent effects that cannot be modeled as as intrinsically being deterministic or could possibly allow for, for violations of certain Bell's inequalities. If you look at it that way, I guess it just then then it becomes very very too much too all encompassing. So, like, I I recount to somebody a couple days ago, like, when I was dating my wife, we went to an astrologer, and she knew I didn't believe in astrology and she wanted to have fun. So she said, go tell her, tell her about yourself and she'll predict your horoscope. And so I said, yeah. I'm Pisces.

I do this, that, and this. And she said, oh, it's gonna be good. You guys are gonna do this and and blah blah. And I said, is it is it really true that Pisces are born in September? I I forgot. Oh, no. You're born yeah. I'm born in September. Oh, you're a Virgo.

But don't worry. This everything I said is still gonna happen. So it's like, what was the what is the diff like, if everything is so all encompassing, then I guess the first

one is too, by the way.

Oh, you are? Okay. Well, Virgos are the ones in their right minds or I don't know. I I think, you know, it's

I think I think you're right. I think you're right. Well, well, I also happen I wouldn't say I believe in free free will, but I don't find the arguments against free will as particularly convincing. I just want to know what your opinion was. So is it your counterargument is that is the Turing test? How would you tell one way or the other? It's an experiment to this question.

Exactly. And and and isn't it I'm a I'm a pragmatist, Kurt. You know? At the end of the day, you know, what I'm concerned about are are things that I can get a crisp answer to. So I don't believe I'll ever get a crisp answer to that, nor do I and you could ask me about God. And I don't think I'm gonna have, like, some answer about God or the existence of God, but I think, you know, I think a place for a physicist, especially an experimentalist, is to be agnostic, but actually agnostic, which means, like, if you just don't go to church or you don't go to synagogue in my case, you go to the same you know, you do you have the same religious performance as as Richard Dawkins. Like, there's no functional delineation between you and Richard Dawkins. I actually had this conversation with Freeman Dyson before he passed away, you know, because he said he's an agnostic. And I said, well, what church do you go to? He goes, I don't really go to church.

I said, so, oh, so you go to the same church as Richard Dawkins. And he's like, cognitive dissonance a little bit. So, I what I what I look at is behaviorism. So how do I behave? And if I knew that everything was controlled, by, you know, the initial condition state, if there was a big bang, which we don't so I I guess I I think about it in terms of what is the pragmatic day to day implication of this? Does it does it have any bearing on me, individually?

So Mhmm.

In the case of free will, I don't think it does. I don't think I'll behave differently and treat my kids you know, my one kid hits another one. I say, oh, well, you didn't really have free will, so I'm not gonna be no. Of course, I'm gonna punish them, or or make them understand and apologize. I'm not gonna lay it off. As as some people like Michael Shermer, I've had this conversation. You know, he basically is much more libertine about this. On the other hand, if God exists, that's a much bigger question.

Right? As and I'm not saying I'm not I'm not saying if I believe or I don't. As I said, I'm a fully practicing devout agnostic, meaning I go to services. I I I I read and I learn. I taught myself Aramaic so I could understand the arguments of the 2nd holiest book in Judaism called the Talmud. I learned that age 30. It wasn't easy. And I study it on a regular basis because I wanna take it theory. Because if God exists, that would have a if you knew for I I don't know your religious beliefs and it almost doesn't matter to me.

But if you knew like, I asked Sean Carroll this question. I said, you once you you know, what is the probability the multiverse is true? He said 50%. And I said, what's the probability that god exists? He said, less than less than, 5%.

Right. Right.

Right. He didn't say 0. So Yeah. Imagine now that means he's open. He is a brilliant man. So I could tell him I could let's say I provide evidence, whatever, some miracle that he can't dismiss, and then he believes it. So he would change his life. I know that he would.

Even though I don't I don't think he thinks the probability is even that high, by the way. But but it it was a good sound bite. We had a good conversation about it. But do you know what I'm saying, Kurt? The bottom line is I am concerned with things that will impact my life as a behaviorist. How will it change my behavior? How will I change my treatment of the poor, the sick, my wife, my kids, you? How will I change my behavior is much more influenced to the good, I would say, by wrestling with the question of whether or not god exists. Whether or not it does exist is an important question for that reason because if the answer is yes, it would have huge implications. And even Dawkins has said, like, he doesn't rule it out. So, so but free will, if you told me that, you know, everything is super deterministic, it wouldn't change how I operate on a daily basis.

You mentioned if the big bang happened. Now you also said earlier that we have science, and I think it was Jim Peebles' book that goes over how you how we even know about what an instantaneous amount of time after the infinite infinitesimal amount of time after the big bang. Okay. Well, but that's after the big bang. That's presupposing the big bang. So

Not necessarily. So yeah. So I always used to say, if I could ask God if God exists, you know, what what happened? One question. I'd say, what happened on the Tuesday before the big bang? In other words, you know, Hawking used to say it doesn't make sense to ask what predated the big bang.

Right.

I don't think that's actually correct, because you can have many, many legitimate scenarios in which time is cyclical. It's just there's possibility for that. And and if that happens, there's a perfectly great explanation for what happened on the Tuesday before the big bang. It was a fiery hellscape of collapsing, you know, all the material energy and and and properties of the of the universe that preexisted. Again, I'm not stating I believe it. I'm just saying it is a well posed question. Now can a theorist and bang experimentalist work together as Paul Steinhardt, and and his collaborators are working? And in part, the mission of the Simons Observatory is to falsify his hypothesis. So you cannot falsify the Big Bang hypothesis as such.

In other words, the Big Bang would be an aspect of a collapsing universe scenario called the cyclic universe. There'd be the equivalent of a hot, dense, and, again, another, you know, shout out to Sean Carroll. He says a good thing, which is that the big when you say the big bang, you're really talking about a period about a minute or 2, from the from time backwards to a minute before this event when our extrapolations of classical physics would imply a singularity. It's basically the end of our of our knowledge or the beginning of our ignorance, he calls it. So the big bang is really a shibboleth. It's a it's a shortcut. It's a it's a code word for where does our ignorance stop. And our ignorance stops about a minute afterwards when we start making, we start synthesizing the very first elements.

I happen to think that our ignorance is is is so far greater. And I do this thought experiment where it's like imagine you're a few 1000000000 years from now. Maybe maybe 90,000,000,000 or whatever whatever order of magnitude. And then and we're on Earth, and we have our sun. But we look out and we and the galaxies are moving so far away that we'd see almost nothing. But we wouldn't we wouldn't know that anything else existed. Right. Okay.

So that's just a few 1000000000 years from now given, presuming our current theories of general relativity and cosmological expansion are correct. Okay. Well, what about now? Why do we think that we're in such a privileged position that we have so much knowledge to even think that we're on the we're 1% of the way there to a theory of everything, for example. By the way, what do you think of Eric Weinstein's theory of everything?

So he and I are very close, collaborators, friends, and and we talk about this a lot. I've encouraged him, to to really start thinking about ways that we could revive both the, both the kind of excitement and the sociological milieu that happened before 1974 in physics. And that's the period of time that Sabine and and Eric and others have claimed that was, like, basically the end of physics. Like, there haven't been new discoveries or predictions, which I argue with, both of them on my podcast. But, but as but, essentially, they want he wants to recreate the urgency of the Manhattan Project, of the MIT Arthur laboratory, of the World War 2 generation, of the Shelter Island generation, post World War 2 when physicists were chauffeured around by C service agents, because they they contain within them, national secrets and national treasures. He wants to recreate that, and, and I'm hoping to, you know, engage with him as an experimentalist. I'm not a mathematician. I do understand some of the math that goes into it.

You must know that he is, you know, universally looked upon in the physics community with both with both, skepticism because he hasn't published anything. Although, if you join my if you go to my, my YouTube interviews with him, I've done 2 now. And in the second one, I I have actually downloaded his slides from his Oxford talk in 2013. 1 of my undergraduates digitized them. And so if you sign up for my mailing list at Brian, I'll send you a copy of his lecture notes from that, lecture in 2013. That's about as close as we got right now, because he's in that making hay phase, Kurt, which I'm sure you've been in a state of flow where you're actually incur you're just producing great content for your film, for your, for your research, for, the other projects for this YouTube channel, and you're just singularly focused on this thing and it obsesses you, and you wanna learn more about it before you then take these tentative furtive steps to publication. So I would say I said he's looked upon simultaneously with skepticism, but also dismay because he's a great communicator of science, And he believes, as he said in my podcast interview, that, physicists are the worst at PR, that have ever existed because we have the greatest material. And instead, we just keep regurgitating the same double slit experiment, the wormholes, multiver you know, when we have the hot brains.

Yeah. I'm not saying if I

I I 100% agree with Eric Weinstein on that. It's it's incredibly, incredibly boring that oh, yeah. It can be up and down at the same time.

Exactly. So there's a limit to that. So I but but then he'll go on Joe Rogan and obviously,

I'm referring to superposition to that.

Yeah. And, he'll go on Joe Rogan show and 6,000,000 people will watch it and, you know, that's 6,000,000 people that will be, potentially, there's some kid out there who, like me at age 12, didn't have podcasts back then. But, but we'll theory. Well, that's really cool. I wanna learn about I used to read Isaac Asimov, not his science fiction books. He wrote a tremendous amount of nonfiction in science, chemistry, the history of chemistry. I devoured it at age 12. Flatland, the book Flatland, have you ever read that book, Kurt?

No. Oh, you got it. I heard it. I heard it mentioned. Love it.

It has it's, it's by Ed, Edward Abbey, in the late 1800, Victorian England, and it's it's actually like a commentary on racism, which is really fascinating, but but it also talks about what it's like for a 2 dimensional creature to visualize the 3rd dimensions. And in so doing, it helps you visualize what the 4th dimension might look like to a 3-dimensional creature. You have to read that. So that was an that was a foundational book in my education. You asked me about books earlier, but that's one of them because I started thinking geometrically. And there's always the siren song of thinking geometrically that leads you to beauty and symmetry and everything else. But in my case, it actually led me to, like, well, let me think about things that I can't access with experiments. So the most important experiments are called Gedanken experiments, thought experiments.

Einstein was the greatest experimentalist of all time in that sense because that's what led him to create theories of relativity in both both theory, general and special. So I hope that kids out there will take what Eric's doing seriously. I am trying to encourage him to actually I've actually invited him. I'm on record multiple times. I'm the only physicist in the world, apparently, which is sad to me. That's invited him to be a scholar in residence here in San Diego and and work on, on actual experimental predictions and tests for geometric unity, which is what he calls his theory of everything. I've also had on Steven Wolfram on my podcast. I've also encouraged him to look for, you know, ways that we can collaborate together to think of ways we could test it as an experimentalist because, again, I am obsessed with time.

TikTok, TikTok, and I'm I'm obsessed with the brevity of life and how short a period of attention span we have to make discoveries, and so I don't wanna waste my time. But if there are potential avenues, like, Eric could be correct, could be wrong, Paul Steinhardt could be correct, could be wrong with regard to the bouncing models that he's proposed, Stephen Wolfram could be right, could be wrong. So I'm actually talking later today about ways we can get the whole physics community together and kind of like a shelter island or revival of of the theory of everything, studies, maybe through, Zoom, maybe through a webinar, something like that, and thinking really big to attract the greatest minds to attack this problem and rejuvenate, as Eric says, this rock star status that physicists used to have in the in in the 20th century.

Is there much movement on that, the this Manhattan physics experiment? Or is it right now, it's just conversation between you and Eric and maybe 2 other people, and it's over Zoom?

I'm I'm sort of inspired by in part by by David Kaiser, my friend at MIT, who who wrote a book recently called Quantum Legacies about the the aftershocks of the World War 2 projects and when physicists were chauffeured around with, you know, bodyguards and, and also by Eric. So now we're thinking about it. We we we have kicked around some ideas for an hour or 2 yesterday. I'll I'll I'll let you know when if if we can actually put together. That would be the dream, like, the Solvay conference. You ever seen that picture of, like, Marie Curie and Niels Bohr and Einstein? I would I would be taking the picture and putting it on Instagram. I wouldn't be actually in the picture. But the point is, let's get let's get the most creative people together, but we can't ignore funding.

We cannot ignore basic research funding, and that's what's so exciting about partnering with the Simons Foundation. They really primarily support non application driven science, mainly math, computer science, computational biology, astrophysics, and now the Simons Observatory pictured behind me to look at potential resolutions and answers to, you know, the greatest questions of the human mind.

Tell the audience where they can find out more about you and what you're up to.

So I'm doing a lot. You asked me in the notes. We didn't, you know, fully or in the beginning. My mission is really to communicate, you know, what I wanna Brian maybe I have a kindred spirit with you. It's kinda like the Joe Rogan of science. Like, I wanna do stuff, and it doesn't have to be restricted to science. There are people like we mentioned Dave Rubin. Zubis is, gonna appear soon.

Michael Shermer. They're not scientists per se, but but but, basically, theory have an affinity either for science fiction, which I claim allows you to do thought experiment. And so we talk about, things that revolve around academic freedom, and in the case of my podcast, which you can find on YouTube at doctor Brian Keating, d r Brian Keating, and, you can find me on Twitter and my goal is to really have incredible conversations that stimulate me, to think about the future legacy that I wanna leave, on Earth, which is, which is to have this, impact on gleaning wisdom and communicating a vision for curiosity, for wonder, for imagination, and and that's part of, you know, this tripartite vision that I have, for my life. So, yes, long story short, find my podcast on doctor Brian Keating on YouTube. Hopefully, you can link to it, and I'll link back. And, and then I'm on Twitter, doctor Brian Keating, Instagram, same theory. And I have a mailing list where I send out things like, personal notes and book recommendations from people like Jim Simons to Eric Weinstein, etcetera.