my 2 friends, Professor Adam Frank and Professor Naayesh F. Shorty of respectively University of Rochester and Perimeter Institute, University of Waterloo. How are you boys?

Doing well.

Yeah, I'm doing great. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Smoke's not too bad for you guys, I hope, on the East Coast. You know, we're usually the ones with the smoky forest fires, but you guys have all the fun this summer, it seems like. We're enjoying a characteristic day here in Southern California.

It's been clear for a bit. It was, it was a couple weeks ago that we had the smoke, so right now it's okay.

Well, the reason we're here today is because you guys are 2 of the most interesting, um, not only scientists and what you do, but you guys see it as your mission, perhaps the way that I do, that we scientists have a moral obligation to share what we do with the public because they pay our salaries. I don't even care if you're privately funded like I am, pretty much. We're all serving at the, you know, kind of gratitude or gratitude towards the public, and they're our boss. And you guys in particular do, you know, heroic work in communicating real science without pulling punches to real people without dumbing it down. And I just wanna acknowledge you guys for doing that. And maybe just start with that. What do you think about this statement? I'll start with Nayesh. I feel like what we do as scientists is important, but sometimes it's not significant.

In other words, I'm searching for some ancient photons. Maybe they'll be, you know, important to understand the primordial universe. Niyash, you also study the primordial universe, but also high-energy particles, forces, and fields. Adam studies the existence of life throughout the cosmos. None of these things affect, you know, Joe Six-Pack here, you know, in El Cajon, or Joey Bag of Donuts over there in Rochester or Toronto. So what do you see as our obligation, Niyash? And then Adam, what is our obligation as citizens Well, that's an excellent question.

And it's— I want to say that we are kind of like the canary in the coal mine that we— I mean, the society is this huge, humongous thing that operates and requires a certain set of skills. And in particular, we need to kind of foresee what's, what's coming down the road, how we could survive things like catastrophes, pandemics, climate, uh, climate catastrophes, all sorts of things, bad things that could happen. And also the good things can potentially happen— artificial intelligence, uh, technology. All of these things are things that, I mean, the society needs. But to get there, to avoid bad things and get the good things, there is a method to it, right? You have to learn from your mistakes and build upon your successes. And really, if you want to summarize this, this is the scientific method, right? You want to learn from experience and build upon that. You don't repeat your mistakes, build a model, a model that works. If the model doesn't work, you modify it, you find a better model.

If the model works, you fortify it and you kind of make it better and better. And that's what science does. My idea is that what we do, even though we look at very abstract things, is that we are really perfecting the scientific method in the corners that are— it hasn't been really pushed and explored before, in places where the scientific method may not be developed yet. But then when we develop it, it's ready to be used. It's something that everyone else can plug and play for their Nintendos or for iPhones. Eventually, that's going to come down the line. But somebody should start basically developing this method somewhere. And I think we are kind of the pioneers that are doing it for the first time.

Yeah, you just left off the highest form of technology, which is the podcast, right, Adam? Adam, you, uh, and I, I want to recognize, uh, you, you've, you've been writing for longer, uh, than either Naish and or myself in the public and communicating for some, for some, uh, just incredible content that you put out. Um, but you too are also a working practicing scientist like Naish, and, and I'm curious how you divide your time. You just received an enormous and well-deserved grant from the Templeton Foundation. to really explore these ideas that I quite frankly think you are one of the major expositors of and certainly among the best. So how do you view your time between splitting it, you know, between popularization, shall we say, communication, which is a form of scientific marketing? I think it's good to be honest about it.

Sure.

And it redounds to our benefit, but it should redound to the public's benefit. So how do you divide that? 'Cause I know my first book was being written, I asked my department chair, who's the son of a Nobel Prize winner, Nikolai Basov, co-invented the laser. I said, you know, so I get some time off, I'm writing a book, right? And Dmitry, his son, said, no, but we will try not to punish you for writing a book.

That's an apt way of putting it. Yeah.

How do you view your kind of— how do you break down your time? Take me through a day in the life of Adam Frank, Professor Adam Frank. Yeah.

You know, I find them very— they're interwoven, right? And, you know, I've I always tell young students, doing this kind of science communication is super important, but it's more important that you have your scientific career, right? I mean, especially when you're young, is that your first job is to produce new knowledge, and then your second job is to talk about it. So, I just— but what I find is that my popular— the stuff I do popular is usually a reflection of what I'm doing research anyway. I mean, in order to understand what I'm doing in research, I'm constantly thinking about it. And I'm, I'm just— there's a voice I have, you know, the Jersey voice or whatever, that I'm kind of translating. So for me to understand it, for me to understand— I'm going back to general relativity right now to do some stuff. And, uh, to understand it, I just have to put it into language that makes sense to my 14-year-old self, you know, in Newark, New Jersey. And so then that just becomes part of the writing. So I find them— very, you know, they link up.

And then, of course, you know, this thing that we're dealing with right now in the United States with the science denial, which the insane levels of science denial, you know, I'm a patriot. I, you know, the countries that have the highest levels of prosperity, you know, are always those that embrace science. And you can see over time how that changes is like, you know, if you were interested in science in the 1500s, you went to Italy. If you were interested in the 1700s, you didn't go to Italy anymore. And, you know, the things that are happening to American science right now are just sort of, you know, so are just mean that, you know, it's going to be somebody else in 100 years, not us. And so I feel a real responsibility to like, you know, sort of— and I know you do as well. I've seen some of the stuff you've done like with the moon landing ridiculousness. I feel like that's real responsibility.

Yeah, there's, there's— it's so much easier, you know, Brandolini's Law, the production of bullcrap is 100 times easier than the refutation of it. So the world is filled with unrefuted bullcrap. Um, but But today, I think what I'd love to talk about, we could talk for hours about Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and undermining science. Maybe that'll be a different stream. But today, I think what really kind of rankled me a little bit is a couple of surveys, one done by your co-guest today, Naya Shaikh-Shorty, who had a book out last year that was one of my most favorite episodes, certainly my favorite book. One of my favorite books is in the back shelf in the background behind the bokeh. And it was about the war, the battle over the Big Bang. And he didn't stop there.

I would've taken a year-long sabbatical, but Nayash is more energetic and vital than I ever am. So he did a survey along with Phil Halpern and a few others that we'll talk about. And it was sort of— I have to be honest, it was somewhat shocking to me. And I did use the highest form of communication besides the podcast is the tweet, the X post. And I took to X and I wrote in my newsletter an article about it and how, you know, it was— some of it is shocking. And I don't wanna review— I don't wanna do a spoiler alert. I want everyone to read Nayesh's wonderful paper that he wrote with his colleagues. But first, Nayesh, I wanna get your reaction to some of these things.

We're gonna be talking about like what I call faith in the physicist. So how do we get meaning? How do we find meaning in a universe that seems to be cold and indifferent and maybe lifeless, although Adam is much more of a life maxer than I am, certainly. I'm a life maxer. I want to take these 2 different views. And as I say at the bottom, I might not survive the hour between you 2 brainiacs, but there's one view that science are very logical. We're data, we're Spock, we're very cold and calculating. We apply the scientific method, we act rationally, we don't allow faith or belief or anecdotes to enter into the fray. On the other hand, some view physicists as human beings.

Yes, it's true. As they say, how do you know a physicist is outgoing? Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. But they do. We have the same kind of proclivities. We have beliefs. We have talismans. We have superstitions. And I think to deny that is not really, A, engaging with scientists as they are as human beings, and B, kind of putting on this hopelessly, you know, burnished hagiographic halo.

So let me start with you, Adam, that which ones of these views do you think is true, or is it some sort of mixture, or do you have a third view? Where do you view what scientists do versus what we believe?

Well, you know, I completely agree that, you know, the job of science is not to believe things, but to sort of construct arguments based on data and theory that allow us to have public knowledge. That's what science really is, is about public knowledge. And I think some of the things that we're going to talk about here point to something in particular in physics that has happened over the last 60 years or so with— and I want to make this very clear— with a very small branch of physics.

Right.

You know, a lot of when we're going to be talking about string theory or everything, that's a tiny branch of physics, which really has gotten itself, because of the lack of data, it all comes down to technology and the lack of data, has gotten itself into a position where it is very driven by belief. It is, it is because of its nature, it has divorced itself from, you know, experiment. And experiment is what keeps our feet to the fire. So I think in that case, we can have this conversation about what's happening. But in general, I think what has made science and physics so successful is that in general, across all of its fields in general, is that there's a very tight coupling between whatever theory you want to have, whatever belief you have in your theory, and then having your theory get its butt kicked by new data. And I've had that experience. It's a very humbling experience. It's a very useful experience to have.

So, you know, science is— we all have, and this is something to come to later, physicists and science in general has— there are metaphysics, there are philosophical backgrounds that are often not spoken of or not acknowledged. And that's been a big part of my work recently in some of the philosophical work I've been doing. But, you know, the belief itself, like, yeah, it's absolutely important for physicists to be really quite honest about when we're engaging in belief and our willingness to have our beliefs dropped by the role of experiment. Mm-hmm.

Ayesha, do you feel like we're in an anti-scientific age, perhaps because of the natural human propensity to believe things without evidence? Or do you think that science can save us from this kind of demon-haunted world that Carl Sagan, who's every bit Adam's kind of predecessor, Adam's filling Carl's shoes very nicely, Do you think that we live in an anti-scientific age and that it's sort of always been thus, or do you think there's something unique about this time period and do we have a role to play in that?

I mean, I think I consider myself a scientist and I think we definitely play a role in this. Now, whether the current times are more anti-scientific than in the past, it's really, I mean, a tough thing to say given, I mean, This is a very hard historical kind of question and requires, I mean, careful examination. One can kind of look at anecdotes here and there and say, maybe in some sense things get worse, some other things get better. We have certainly advanced in knowledge. That's for a fact. We know more than we used to do. So in principle, if we could make more informed decisions, that's our prerogative. We can make more informed decisions.

We have to develop the technology and methodology really to do it, to find how a society can behave more rationally given the vast amount of understanding that we've gathered across, well, across the board about ourselves, about societies, and about the cosmos. Now, that being said, scientists are humans. So this cartoon of separating scientists into It kind of, whenever, when you start talking, remind me of The Big Bang Theory, not just because I also, the name of my book is Big Bang, but it really kind of pushes that cartoon to the extreme to say that, okay, you have this scientist like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory who is like a perfectly rational scientist. And it kind of then push it far enough, you see how ridiculous this is, that you cannot be perfectly rational as a human, that such a thing doesn't exist because humans are humans. So, yeah, absolutely. We have human tendencies. And as much as we want to divorce ourselves, or if— I don't think necessarily many smart people would want to divorce themselves from human tendencies. And we are humans after all.

And these human tendencies, the ones that driven societies for thousands of years, all sorts of religions and beliefs and cults and of all sorts and kinds. They are there and they play a role in how science works, but it's not the only thing, right? So the social dynamics, that part of humanity is there, but there is experiment. And that's, as Adam and you were highlighting, and I definitely a big fan of that, experiments. And it's really just the humility, if you want to say, the humility that you could be wrong. You could be proven wrong one way or another. That's the important thing. That's kind of what helps us get along, right? If we don't have the humility of accepting defeat, then we're going to— defeat of our ideas, anything basically— then we're going to keep fighting, right?

Yeah.

And then that's what's kind of what's different is that maybe in the olden days, then we didn't have really humility of accepting that maybe some of our dogma were not were not right. So we kept fighting for it. And I think what's modern about science is that we have the humility of accepting maybe we have these grandiose ideas about nature or life or anything, but we can put them to the test. And if the tests disprove them, then we accept that and move on. So I think that's the difference. And when we can Well, if we put that in front of our mind, that these tests are necessary and part of progress, then I think we can do better than we did in the past.

I think the, you know, part of the reason, in addition to my affection for you guys, intellectual affection, my man crush on your minds, shall we say, is that you guys both, you know, aren't afraid to wrestle with these questions that I think a lot of our colleagues are. To be honest with you, Very few of my colleagues will talk about these things. Very few of them write books. Very few of them go on podcasts. And that's not to say that they should do more or less or whatever. It's just an observation. And I think, you know, to some extent they view what we do, or I'll just speak for myself, as unserious. And yes, you should be doing only the science and you should pay professionals.

There should be like communicators or leave it to Neil deGrasse Tyson to do this or Bill Nye. I don't think that's true. I think the greatest scientists in history were all great communicators. They all interacted with the public who pays their salaries and so forth. But part of the reason I think is because of what you guys do. Adam, you're kind of focused on this interesting question of the existential behavior of life throughout the cosmos. And are we alone? And what is our future? And where do we go from here? And the work that you've done and how it informs maybe policy or thought, and as you said, and Niels, you're studying the biggest things in the universe, i.e., the universe, maybe other universes, multiverses, and the smallest things, particles, forces, and fields. Is that just because of— is that a selection effect, guys, because of what we study? In other words, if we were studying, you know, nemectic superconductor behavior and, you know, type 2 phase transitions, you know, maybe we wouldn't be doing this.

Is this a function of the subject matter? In other words, we have just great scripts and we're just kind of middling. I'll speak for myself again. I'm a middling actor that has a great script and is directed by Christopher Nolan. Where does this come down? I mean, should all of science kind of— would you write— could you envision a paper, a survey, Naish, about condensed matter physicists' attitudes towards Type II phase transitions? Or is it truly a universal interest and any sub-branch of science could engender the same passion?

That's an excellent question. And I mean, this question of where we come from and what underlies everything, this is kind of very, very basic to our quests for— I mean, there are some very basic questions that capture our imagination: where we come from, where we're going to go, are there others like us out there in the cosmos? And, and I, yeah, I don't know why. I guess it's why I don't care maybe as much about what type of superconductors are going to be the first that will be room temperature. Maybe I should care more about them. But I mean, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think if you do that survey, I mean, we've done like the survey that we did, we asked different questions and some questions many people don't have an opinion on.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And like, for example, I mean, like, there was one version of this survey. I mean, you may— as you may know, there's one big question in astrophysics, like, where did supermassive black holes come from? There are these huge black holes you see at the center of Milky Way. There are like some first black hole that's imaged has billions of solar masses. And it's a big mystery in astrophysics, like, what is the first black hole? we actually surveyed, like, people in a black hole conference, which were supposed to care about black holes. But a lot of people, I mean, a large fraction of them didn't really have an opinion about, okay, so are there— maybe there were primordial black holes, maybe there were, I don't know, direct collapse, or like first generation of stars. And, but many people didn't care about it. I mean, it's, it's a, I guess it's part of society that we have conversations about things that captures our imagination. And I suppose the thing that, are there others like us out there, or where we came from and where we're going to go, they're just ancient questions that we've talked about for generations.

And that's why that captures our imagination. And then everyone has an opinion about it then. Now, of course, some of these that we have answers for, like, the only question that basically we had, we had a consensus about is like, what is the meaning of the Big Bang? And that's the one that we have a lot of observations for. We have cosmic microwave background, which is the first glow of the Big Bang. And it tells us that the universe was much hotter and denser at early times. And that's, that's the amazing thing that even these things—

Most important features. That's how I pay the mortgage around the Keating house.

Yeah, exactly. Very important for all of us. And I think it's just that there is a lot of fragmentation and opinions, even on these big questions, but then they can be settled with observations. And that's the great thing about scientific method, that there might be a lot of disagreements, but we have a way to settle them. And in— for some of these questions, we actually find an answer, and then the community basically settles down on the experimental answer.

Adam, in both surveys that I wanted to talk about, the Vickers et al. Nature Astronomy survey from 2025, and Nayash and Halpern and the 2 other co-authors— I'm blanking on their names, but Nayash will tell us later— the word belief appears. To be honest with you, it appears early and prominently once in Vickers' survey on a professional astrobiologist and adjacent fields, belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life. And it appears only once in Nyesh's survey, the Big Mysteries survey. And that's around— it's actually the only place it appears. It says it does not necessarily imply belief in a physical reality. And this has to do with the Big Bang or physical realism. But my question is, to what extent should belief appear ever in a scientific survey? I joked that it's sort of embarrassing.

It's a question you shouldn't answer. To me, it was saying, Adam, do you believe in astrology? And a lot of people took umbrage at me and said, you're being overly pedantic. And professors, emeritus, distinguished professors around the world took umbrage and said I was manipulative and disingenuous and a lot of nasty things that are par for the course on public discourse. But tell me, Adam. along as an option that a scientist who's serious should even consider as a response to a survey like this?

Okay, first, if you don't mind, I'm gonna rewind a little bit to get to this question, because I do want to— I want to actually discuss the question that you asked right beforehand. And there's one thing about this survey that I think is important, at least for me, right, because it's going to separate the sort of belief from the not belief part. In many ways, a lot of the problems that are the questions that are asked here, to me, are very 20th century physics. They're not 21st century physics. They're 20th century physics.

Mm-hmm.

You know, sort of the emphasis on sort of, you know, what we call fundamental, you know, like this, you know, the theory of everything, you know, the black hole information paradox. These are problems that are sort of left over from a particular worldview that physics had in the, you know, second half of the 20th century about what was fundamental and what was important. You know, back in those days, You were taught that high energy was the highest field anybody could go into. Anybody who didn't go into high energy somehow wasn't good enough or whatever. And there was a residue of that that carried on that in a way sort of led the field into strange directions. Like, we can talk about string theory, for example, which I was around watching this from when I was a graduate student. It was one talk after the other about string theory. It's going to be great real soon.

And it just hasn't played out. It just has not been successful. It's done interesting things mathematically, but there's very hard to claim that string theory turned out— or the whole idea, the very idea of a theory of everything. Like, why is that? Who said that's the most important problem in physics? So I actually think that some of these problems really reflect a kind of culture of physics that was of a time. If you ask people, is gravity the most important problem in 1850? They were like, no, we're doing thermodynamics, and we just learned about electromagnetism. Physics is what physicists do. And I think the 21st century, there's a whole bunch of problems which are not on this list, which are going to be the central players for 21st century physics, like complexity theory, right? Complexity theory. Look, actually, here's an interesting thing.

Go look at the last 10 Nobel Prize winners. None of them are, you know, or virtually none of them are about these questions, right? Or not the— they're certainly not about, you know, black hole information paradoxes or string theory. You know, one of the most, you know, the 2024, I think it was, Nobel Prize was for artificial intelligence, a physicist, you know, Hinton, who worked on artificial intelligence. I think that life and complexity theory is going to be, and the nature of phenomenal experience, how does matter generate something that has phenomenal experience, that's going to be the central problems for physics in the next century. So just to make the connection out of belief, many of these problems fall into that category, a sort of narrow branch of physics that has been called— what used to be called high energy, now sometimes gets called fundamental, where we've just run out of data. We don't have any data. It's not clear when we're going to get data. And so then it starts becoming actually about belief.

You get sociological effects happening that, you know, whoever is thought to be the smartest guy in the room for 20 years becomes the one that everybody kowtows to, and that person decides research directions. And so that's where, like, yeah, you shouldn't have belief, and we need to recognize when we're being driven by those sociological factors. But again, most of physics is not there. But, you know, quantum information theory, complexity theory, exoplanets, you know, condensed matter. They're doing fine. They are very close. You know, there's no belief happening there. There is theory and experiment working together.

So I'm sorry if I went off on that.

No, no, that's excellent.

Yeah.

And I, you know, I don't pay attention to Nobel Prizes, Adam. I don't know if you know this. I hardly ever talk about it. Nayas, so if I were to ask you, you know, do you believe in astrology, which you didn't do, I'm not at all accusing you or Vickers at all, although it is in their paper. in the abstract, essentially. But, but tell me, if I were to ask you, you know, do you believe in the gambler's fallacy? Do you believe in astrology? How would you answer that? And how should somebody answer that, maybe, is a more important question.

Yeah, I guess I'm trying to get to the main theme of discussion. By the way, the co-authors of our survey, I just wanted to put that out there, was Matthew Rini and, and Michael Schreiber. They were actually from American Physical Society Physics Magazine. Now, I'm kind of torn here because on the one hand, Adam was attacking our survey.

No, I wasn't attacking the survey. I was just identifying that these questions, I think, are not— it's understandable why you chose those questions, but I just don't think those are the questions that are going to matter for the 21st century.

I mean, at some level, we get to decide what we care about. And I mean, there were 1,600 people who cared about filling the survey and they cared about those questions. Obviously, there are lots of others who don't. And then there are others. I mean, I care about lots of the other problems like complexity and AI and the future of physics. But yeah, so I mean, I think we all have the right to kind of have care about different things and then have opinions about them. The other question is the belief in astrology and such. I mean, anything.

I mean, this question of belief that we should, should we have it or should we not have it? It's a, it's an interesting one because Again, there is this cartoon of science, which is you have to be open-minded. And then it actually, it's funny when you start doing like statistics and data analysis, it comes back at you like with full force. There is this thing called Bayesian evidence or Bayesian analysis. And in it, basically, they have, you have 3 things. You have prior. You have the data or your likelihood. And then you have posterior. So prior is what you have without— before doing the experiments, what you think is a reasonable range of your parameters, your models, what models are reasonable, what models are not reasonable.

Likelihood is basically you do an experiment, you make a measurement, and then you multiply these 2, and then you get the posterior, which is basically the constraint. We said this model, your data prefers this model over that. model. And you may wonder, okay, if you, if you think about this, uh, ideological, uh, world in which you need to be open-minded, you shouldn't have any prior. And if you actually talk to anyone who does this, it's just meaningless. People talk about flat priors, that, okay, no, no model is better than any other model. But even that's a prior, right? You could like do the change of parameters and then you get a different— that means it's not— it's a different prior.

Yeah.

So, saying that you are open-minded or you have no prior is just meaningless. There is no analysis, there is no reasonable, sane statistical analysis that you could do that doesn't have a prior, and that's your belief. So, everyone brings their belief, and different people will have different beliefs and different prior. That's not a bug, that's the feature.

Yeah.

Right? The real thing is that they're all going to do the same experiments or different experiments, and at the end of the day, they should arrive— that kind of is going to narrow down their priors, and eventually the posterior, if you have good enough data, is going to be independent of the prior or almost independent of the prior. And that's the key, or that's the measure of the success, is that we have to be— when I say you have to be humble and you basically make yourself vulnerable your prior beliefs vulnerable to this invasion of data and in the incursion of experiments that could narrow down or push your prior to somewhere that data takes you. And then if your models are right, eventually different priors all converge to the same point, even though you start from different places.

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, I think that's the way science works. We have to admit that there are these beliefs, but also you have to be vulnerable, let yourself be judged basically by observations, and then hopefully those will correct your incorrect beliefs.

So there's a Nobel-winning economist, I forget his name, in the '70s or '80s, and he wrote, among many things— I don't think this won the Nobel Prize— but 2 rational actors, you know, using Bayesian reasoning, as Naish just explicated, they can't agree to disagree. In other words, you do get locked into an inevitable conclusion. It's like saying you can have your own opinions, you can't have your own data or facts, right?

Mm-hmm.

But in this case, it seems impossible. Not only is this a metaphysical or metapsychology question or sociological question, you're asking them these questions and surveying them properly, scientifically, rigorously, far better than a lot of the social scientists could do, right? I think it's fair to say you can crush them. But, but at some point, I mean, don't you have to say like, wait, you, you are answering a question which, for which, you know, you might have some, you know, notion or preference or taste. Like, I hate fish, guys. You know, everyone always says, have you tried this type of fish? Have you? I've said, what's the highest compliment you can pay to somebody's fish dish? It's that it doesn't taste like fish. You know what else doesn't taste like fish? A hamburger. You know, so I don't like fish. You're never going to convince me.

At what level does the— like, do you look at them and say, what the hell are you saying? Like, again, let's, let's use string theory. I, I don't want to dump on string theory. People think I'm like, oh, I'm just parroting these lines of these—

Let's dump on string theory.

Of, uh, of, you know, Sabine Hossenfelder or whoever, and I'm just parroting. No, no, no, I, I do want to— I have looked, I've talked to the, the most, you know, uh, the biggest participants in the field as I've tried to. I've had 26 Nobel Prize winners on the podcast, you know, incredible intellects. And when I talked to them, you know, the only coherent answer I ever got to the question of— and I think I told this to Nayesh on his podcast last year— to what experimental predictions could be falsified by string theory from Kamran Vafa. And he said, well, string theory predicts the mass of the electron. I said, oh really? It does? I didn't know that. And he's like, yeah, it has to be less than, you know, 10 to the 90th Planck masses and greater than 10 to the minus 27th. But You know, it's true, I guess.

But in the context of the string theory survey, there were many options for quantum gravity. It wasn't a string theory survey. It was about what are your opinions about quantum gravity?

Yeah.

And the one that got 18 or 19%, the largest ratio of the 2 named options, loop quantum gravity and string theory, was string theory. And then loop quantum gravity got evidence. And then there was a significant amount of people that said gravity is not quantized. And then there was an overwhelming number, but not the majority, that said, you know, there's no opinion. I can't answer that question. When you saw that, how did— let's be honest, how did you react to that? How would you answer that question, Ayash, first of all?

Well, I personally, I mean, I have like different eggs in different baskets, if you want. So yeah, I try to be open-minded, but really, I mean, there are lots of— my favorite, to be honest, is that violation of Lorentz symmetry. I think at some fundamental level that could be an idea. But there are lots of ideas out there, and I think we need to be open-minded. Am I surprised? I think I was surprised by, I mean, how small the percentage for string theory was. None of these models that we mentioned, these hypotheses, none of them have experimental support for them.

Hmm.

So in that sense, community is kind of right to be skeptical of all of them. I mean, everyone has their own favorites, but nobody has really— there's no consensus.

And is there— sorry to interrupt, Naish, but I think I made your colleague and friend Phil Hopper mad, you know, when I made a video a year or two ago about loop quantum gravity being— having evidence against it, not being wrong, but having evidence against it. I got nasty emails, you know, from my friend Carlo Rovelli, you know, my co-author or my co-narrator of Galileo's Dialogue audiobook. You can get that, uh, on my website for just, you know, 22 hours of listening pleasure. Um, but, but it kind of made them mad, I think. And, you know, Phil's never talked to me again, uh, although he didn't talk to me beforehand. But, but I'd love to talk to him about it, uh, because I think it's—

Yeah.

And Carlo, I should say, is coming back on the podcast. in a couple weeks. So, um, see, if he can forgive me, Naya, certainly Phil can forgive me. But, but here's the point, um, is there not evidence against these? You know, if there was some— if there's a claim, do you believe that there's life on Mars? And then we send rovers all over Mars, and Adam, you can, you know, chime in here too, uh, and we find there's no life on Mars, whatever that means, there's no life on Mars. And then you say, do you— what do you believe is the, is the presence of life on Mars? I mean, what do you say? In that case, you say, well, it's not— maybe it's mirror life and we can't detect it. Yes, you could say certain things, but at some level, if there's evidence, if there's some evidence against a model and there's no evidence experimentally for it, where does one go epistemologically? Naish, start with you.

Yeah, and I think this goes exactly in the direction of prior. I said that is that it doesn't go anywhere. Basically, if you say there is evidence for or against, that's That's only the likelihood, but then it depends on your prior. And if you have a strong prior that there is no life on Mars and you find some kind of marginal evidence, then it probably doesn't change your mind very much because you could interpret it in whatever way you want. If you have a strong prior that there ought to be life on Mars for whatever reason, I'm not sure why, then it's obviously— this certainly confirms your belief. You say, obviously, okay, there is evidence. So my prior, my belief was correct. And that's the thing.

This is why we need— I mean, I think the role of priors is it's not that we need evidence. We need evidence that is more decisive than your priors, than your prior beliefs. And if we don't have that, then it's not going to move anything, right?

So, Adam, how do you work at the different— I have on screen different levels of confidence, you know, 4 levels, evidence-based, metaphysical commitment that you don't need. Maybe it's called philosophical abduction, not alien abduction that you're more familiar with. Then there's like a working assumption. It works, shut up and calculate, right? And then there's faith, basically religious faith, that's not conditional on evidence, and you're not gonna convince me to become a Jehovah's Witness tonight, but maybe there's some reason, good reason, I should switch teams or something. something. So it's not which one is legitimate, but how do we not, you know, kind of, you know, congratulate ourselves too much that we are these walking Wikipedias, dispassionate, you know, rational actors, when it's like— like Naish is clearly pointing out, it's inevitable we'll have priors. But I kind of feel like that's, again, massaging terms to make us feel, oh, we're not— we don't have faith, Naish, we just have priors. And I mean, yes, but, but is there also another, you know, another dimension at play, Adam?

Well, I think what really matters is that, as Nyasha was talking about, the humility, right? I mean, the difference between all 3 of the ones you were talking about and science is that scientists are willing, when confronted with data, you know, that, that goes against their cherished theory— they should be, this doesn't always happen— But they should be willing to be like, okay, I was wrong. I mean, that was the genius of the discovery of the scientific method, because human beings were very easily fooled. We fool ourselves very easily. And it was the development of science and this idea of public knowledge, of a way that we could all sort of share in the creation of knowledge and the validation of knowledge, that we would have a method that would allow us to recognize, like, Oh, we were wrong. So I don't think like there's any problem with saying scientists have belief. Like, well, I had a theory for a while about how jets, you know, these, these long beams, these hypersonic beams of plasma were created around young stars. And I worked on that for like 5 years and it turned out I was wrong. Right.

And I certainly believed in it. I wouldn't have worked on it if I didn't believe that there was something useful about it or that maybe this might be right. But when it came time to see that the data showed—

Right.

that there was a problem, then you step away from it. And that's only my point. So, so please don't say I was— I'm— I was not criticizing what you've done. I mean, this is— it's a great, um, the, the, the survey is great. My point was that there, there are, you know, the, there are a bunch of questions there. And I'm really speaking more to sort of how the public views physics in particular, because you have people, um, uh, uh, like Eric Weinstein and everything. There's this there's this conspiracy physics thing going on now that, oh, physicists, they're just lying to everybody and physics has stalled. This whole idea that physics has stalled, where really it's this one branch because of the lack of data.

And there's, as I said, there's sociological reasons that has in some sense stalled and their belief or these other sociological factors that don't have anything to do with getting your butt kicked by data that has allowed it to sort of morph in strange directions. And string theory is just I think the poster child for that. But in most branches of physics, there's a very short distance between having a theory and having an experiment. It's like 4 or 5 years maybe. So that's why it's okay to talk about physicists having a belief, but it's the willingness to drop that belief when you're confronted by actual data, when the world allows you— we allow the world to speak for itself.

So we'll get into the Astrobiology Survey later, but I do want to focus on NIASH's survey with APS Physics Magazine, you know, first because we have one of the lead authors of it and certainly the most familiar amongst the 3 of us. And just to summarize that I have on screen here, 1,675 respondents, 10 questions on the deepest open problems, although Adam is arguing, you know, maybe there are other open problems that weren't addressed and maybe that has some subtle effect that needs to be disambiguated. I don't know.

Yeah.

And there was only one answer that cleared 2/3, you know, kind of agreement, which is amazing. First of all, I mean, it's brilliant. I don't know how you had the time to do it with all the other stuff that you do, but there's— it's really revelatory and it's important to do it. You know, the study of physicists is important. You know, it's just like the study, you know, ornithology is very important to birds, but they don't know it. You know, the birds don't know that it's important to them, but it is, right? So, you know, what does it mean to be settled or, you know, to have consensus. Um, Naish, what does it mean to you that, that these questions of, of what answers are most presented as by textbooks most often as, as accepted— what does settled mean? I mean, do you, do you believe, you know, what is, what is, what is truly settled science? Or, you know, as it's said on Twitter often, you know, the whole point about science is that it's never settled.

Yeah, absolutely. There's That's an excellent question. And indeed, science, and in some absolute sense, is never settled. But then there is progress. And usually when I teach like astronomy, or anytime usually I talk about science, I have this kind of a flowchart where like how a scientific theory is born. And you start from a hypothesis, you make a prediction, you test that prediction. If it's successful, You kind of, then you go back, make another prediction. If it's not successful, then you throw out the theory or you modify your hypothesis and so on.

So that is, I mean, that is how, at least a cartoon of scientific method. And I think the idea of success is that basically the more you go through these cycles of kind of tests and revision, the more mature your theory is. And it turns out that there are some, some theories are, are very mature, like many— the theory of superconductivity, the hyper— the semiconductors, the neutrino physics and oceanography, lots of things. And Big Bang is among them, as is, I don't know, theory of evolution to some extent. There are lots of fossils that we've seen. And so many of these are very much settled. They have gone through these cycles of verification and testing. many, many times.

Others haven't gone through them. And I think, in fact, in our book, we have a chapter we call the Religion of Science, Science of Religion. And we are kind of distinguishing between what could be a proto-science, which is kind of a belief. That's exactly what Alan was talking about. It's kind of a seed, like a hypothesis you start from, and you take it serious. It's kind of like your baby that It's your responsibility to help that baby grow. But, at some point, when it's a grown-up, then you cannot just keep feeding them forever. At some point, then they have to kind of live on their own.

Tell that to my teenager. Tell that to my teenager. Yes.

Or my 30-year-old. Cross my finger.

Eventually. But, if things work out, if things go right, then they should do their own, become independent. Right? That's your responsibility. But I kind of lost my train of thought.

I think you're talking about maturity and then, you know, the sign of maturity.

Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of— that's the idea is that we have to push our ideas. We have some responsibility to them. But then unless they actually go through these cycles of tests and verification, then they're not really a theory. And then that's kind of how you build consensus. The more someone's idea goes through these cycles, the more people kind of start relying and trusting. It's like building a credit score, right? The more you borrow, the more you pay off your loans, the higher is your credit score, right?

But is there, you know, what's called in Christianity and other economic sciences, for example, the Matthew effect? You know, the rich get richer, the consensus gets more entrenched. The, the, the, you know, Eric Weinstein's actually right, you know, that this, this is— there, there are forces. And Adam, you, you know, unknowingly, at least at some level, agreed to, as I say, to some extent with what Eric has asserted to me and many. And I always push back on Eric. He's a friend of mine. But, but, you know, that, that the tastemakers— and even in the design of Anayasha's survey, you know, it didn't include certain things, and it does include things because there's the kingmakers and the tastemakers. And there's a lot of anti, you know, kind of consensus thought. And it goes like this, you know, the peer review is corrupted, you know, peer review is horrible, tenure is doing this and that, string theory supersymmetry has done all this bad stuff and it's corrupted the field or it's tainted the field in some sense.

And then, you know, there are these notions of, well, what should replace it? And then you and I and Naeesh get, you know, 1,000 emails a month about some theory that's, you know, submitted to us. Uh, and, and I actually take those ideas, by the way, and I have monthly office hours, but you have to pay money to be a part of it. I'm not going to review your theory for free. I've got 100 other people's theories and they all think they're right, right? They all know that they found the secret and that they'll share the Nobel Prize with me but not the money or whatever. Uh, so I make them pay and a lot of them do, God bless them. And we'll be doing another live stream for office hours soon. But anyway, guys, how do you dis— you know, distinguish— how do you disambiguate between you know, the kind of, that's just your theory, that's just your opinion, and, you know, 97% of people thought, you know, thalidomide was good for mothers to take, you know, during pregnancy, and, and they're saying the same thing about global warming or dark energy and, and so forth. How do you know when to distinguish the kind of science populism versus the legitimate critiques of things like peer review, predatory journals, p-hacking, and tenure, which I think has some negative externalities?

Yeah.

So anyway, I would say, you know, I mean, this is where I really push back against the Weinstein thing. It's like, sure, first—

Weinstein. You got to say Weinstein. Just remember, Einstein, Weinstein, not Jeffrey Epstein.

Yeah, thank you. Okay, okay. I got issues. Uh, you know, I think like, you know, that's not— it's like, that is certainly not true of the vast majority of physics, right? That is true of this one tiny subdomain of physics where there hasn't been— and there are 2 things happen. There's been no experimental way to validate these theories experimentally. And it's true that there was— it was super hyped, right? We had lots of books about it. There was lots of, you know, it became a sort of self-devouring media machine. And so there, you know, there's a story there as well.

But other than that, that this never happens in physics. Peer— as you know, I've worked in a— I've worked in astronomy and now working in complexity theory.

I've worked—

peer review, it's imperfect, but it works pretty well, you know? So I just really don't see in any other field than this branch of sort of this one part of high energy, and it's not even cosmology because there's lots of cosmology which has huge amounts of data and you can easily validate your theory. So the idea that like this is some general problem with physics— now other fields have their— the p-hacking thing, other issues, but I'm talking about physics. Physics is on rock solid ground other than these particular domains. And what I think is going to happen in those domains is that eventually people are going to wander away from them. If you're a young student, you're not going to go into string theory or quantum gravity because there's nothing to be done there. You're going to go into the branches, you're going to go into quantum information theory, which is making quantum computers, or you'll go into large-scale structure in cosmology because there's huge amounts to do there. This thing will be self-correcting. So this idea that there's this huge problem with physics, I think, just takes one small subdomain.

And then where there is a problem with belief, and there is a problem with self-reification. But overall, physics is very healthy and is doing like crazy insane things. Look at what's happening with just exoplanets. Forget even astrobiology and the search for life. Like what we have discovered about other planets is phenomenal.

Naish, when you see these claims made by, again, a very good friend of mine, Eric. He spoke at Perimeter not too long ago. But you see Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, your neighbor there, and my good old friend, right? I mean, the trouble with— I mean, how big is it really? Can we open up the kimono? Can we agree, the 3 of us, to share our cabal and what we do together, that we only hire string theorists? I mean, this is kind of ludicrous. And I've pointed that out to Eric many times. As well as saying to him, which he hates when I say, you know, that peer review is the worst form of scientific generation except for all the others, you know, like aping Winston Churchill. Because I think it's incredible. And I think he peer reviews. I've told him, like, you get emails from people that have solved, you know, quantum gravity and that say you're wrong.

Are you not their peers? And, you know, so we argue like brothers. But let me ask you, Nayesh, when you hear these things, I mean, it's sort of ludicrous. I mean, you guys at Perimeter, and you're at Waterloo as well, but at Perimeter, put on the hat there. I mean, do you— what are the hiring decisions like? You know, what do you think about, like, do we need another ex-physicist? What kind of— do you get any mandates from above, you know, from, uh, research in motions, you know, trustees?

Or how does it work at a practical level in a theoretical physics department of highest Well, I mean, you know as well as I do, and I'm sure Adam does, that there's a lot of human dynamics involved. Now, I mean, I don't think there's a big conspiracy. But the fact that humans are humans, as you were saying, is— that is a fact. And the human dynamics groupthink does exist. And And it's inevitable. So this thing that it's only a problem in a small section, which is string theory, I mean, for one, I mean, there are always extremes. So I think there is a spectrum, and string theory or just quantum gravity happens to be, maybe by design, the discipline that's farthest away from the data. And whether such a discipline must exist, um, I mean, you would kind of say that there is also mathematics which has nothing to do with the data.

And it's a discipline. I mean, lots of people that spend time caring about mathematics that have nothing to do with data. And string theory is somewhere kind of, uh, I mean, one kind of one interpretation is that basically it's just a part of mathematics and then it doesn't matter what the data says, right?

Mm-hmm.

So they're just developing mathematical ideas and mathematical theories. Um, so I think it's somewhere in that spectrum. And then I think certainly as a physical theory, it's I mean, doesn't really belong, but as despite the name theory, but as a mathematical discipline, I think it could be as respectable of other mathematical ideas. So I think that's, that's, that's, that's the spectrum. And now in terms of the groupthink, I think it is, it is a real thing, whether you could call it a religion or a cabal. I mean, I think again, there is a spectrum, right? You have like small cults and groups and a bunch of people who have similar ideas. And I mean, that does form anywhere, like there are lobbies and parties and such. And then sometimes it gets bigger.

But I mean, really, there are kind of— when at the level of like Perimeter Institute or some other department here at University of Waterloo, yeah, I mean, there's certainly— there are some people who have strong opinions and those opinions tend to drive a lot of decisions.

Very good. Okay, I want to take some questions from the audience. Uh, just a reminder, you have to be a member of the channel, not subscribe, but you have to pay a nominal fee just because there's so many questions here, also on X and elsewhere. Um, so this question for Adam from, uh, my friend and longtime channel member Stephen Dedalus, who asks, what do you think of the famous words by Arthur C. Clarke? Okay, this is right up my alley. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Adam, my friend Michael Shermer has a corollary, which is that any sufficiently advanced technologies or aliens are indistinguishable from God. So maybe that's a parlay I could add in here.

What do you make of this? That this is really true. Do we put so much emphasis on technology, worshiping it, everything that's doing with AI, which I want to discuss towards the end of the conversation? What is, what is it like sort of the most magical thing that you find about technology? And is it really like playing the role of a god nowadays?

I, you know, it's a great quote, but I don't think it's true, especially in my role as an astrobiologist. You know, technologies leave imprints that are different from nature itself. So like there's this, you know, one of the big moves right now in astrobiology is to find agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with, you know, the things we've done or that how life evolved on Earth. And we're also now trying to do the same thing for technosignatures. And the way you're going to think about that is in things like network theory or information theory, you're going to look for signatures or imprints that sort of tell you that something is going on here that is not from the level below, right? If, if the biosphere is built on the geosphere and the technosphere is built on the biosphere, you know, things that couldn't happen, you know, at lower levels. So I don't think— I don't think— I think, you know, we— I think we'll be able to see advanced technology as a technology, as something, some kind of manipulation of the world that could not happen on its own.

And Naish, if I, you know, sometimes I ask you this question, uh, in the following way. If, if you had a monolith, if you had a a device not unlike that in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is where we get the podcast. The name podcast comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the name of this podcast. All podcasts owe themselves to Arthur C. Clarke, so I won't tolerate too much bashing of him.

I love Arthur C. Clarke, I'm just saying.

How can you not? Well, he had some problems too, but let's not go there. Nayesh, if you had a monolith, if you had a piece of technology and you could You could sort of do what Feynman asked, like, what is the smallest, shortest sentence that contains the most information about the natural world? Feynman said everything's made of whirling little atoms. What do you think is the most highly compressed piece of magical knowledge that you've learned in your career?

You're putting me on the spot now. What is the most magical thing? I mean, if I suppose the thing is general relativity, the fact that gravity is geometry, I mean, I don't think I can think of anything more magical than that.

And even though it has these lacunae, these, these, these, you know, gaps that we don't understand, but that's where the fun is, right, guys? When you guys have your students, you don't say like, work on the solved thing. Like when you see there's a flaw, there's something wrong. I always say flaws lead to new laws. Like if you find something Because the steady state had all these flaws, my late, great officemate, Jeff Burbidge, hated the Big Bang. Anytime someone would come to speak and say the words Big Bang, he'd say, harrumph. He would literally say harrumph in a British kind of accent.

Okay.

Once I heard him, when I showed him what bolometers look like, he said, that's so cool, that's awesome. But that was about as far as I could get. When we learn that, you know, these things were taken for granted, the universe, you know, I always say if you put a ping pong ball with the year on it, uh, back to 5000 BC, you know, when the Zoroastrians and the— and others were, you know, just developing science, you said, what is the model of the universe that you believe in, to the physicists of the time, right? And I actually would have said steady state or cyclic or whatever. And now we know it's very different. Uh, but that's only in the last 100 years. It's quite amazing, right, that, that we've done so much, and maybe that's why the public expects us, A, to produce technology on demand, like, you know, kind of slot machines that pay out Nobel Prizes, or they expect us to be infallible. And I think, you know, what I see in your kind of taste— both of you guys have exceptional taste as physicists, for coming on the right podcast, of course— but also in what you choose to do.

Thank you.

Like, Naishe, you could do a million other things. You could be making 10 times what you make, you know, working in private industry or some hedge fund somewhere, right? But, but when you think about what you want to do, you only have this limited amount of time left. What is going to be your focus? Has this survey affected you and made you maybe reevaluate? What do you want to do? What are the remaining mysteries that you feel you could do? Because we only have finite energy, attention, and resources. Well, has it changed you at all?

I mean, you're kind of Touching all the pain, pushing, pointing to the pain points, basically.

That's my job.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, yeah, maybe I should let go of everything now and switch fields. But I mean, let me tell you something. I'm actually very excited about AI and how it's going to revolutionize how we do kind of science and humanity in different ways.

How so? Say more about that. How are you using it on a daily basis? And Do you use it for research or is it just like a super secretary?

It's very much— I've kind of used it as like anything, like a super secretary, a student, a colleague, like any kind of— well, not necessarily. I haven't used it as a plumber yet, but almost all the other things that I will probably soon, but not yet. But I'm really excited about how kind of it's organizing, it's organizing knowledge in a much more systematic way. And I feel— and it's progressing so rapidly that I mean, I suppose it could be scary that at some point it gets out of hand. That's obviously the doomsday scenario. But I'm much more excited that, I mean, because we are at the end of the day, our job as scientists to organize knowledge, right, to make sense of data, right? And AI, it can deal with data much better and, and kind of find patterns much faster than we can. And I'm, I'm kind of excited that it's gonna start making connections that it was just maybe in 100 years won't be possible for us, but it's gonna start doing it. So I'm excited about that.

And I mean, this survey just says that we need We need a break. We need a savior. I don't know. In a good day, maybe AI is that savior. Maybe we managed to fail each other, but maybe AI will save us. Maybe that's a good place to end. I don't know.

All right. Well, on that note, I would like to both thank you and give you both an opportunity to let people know what you're working on, what you're excited about. Adam, you've got a newsletter and a new grant, and I'd like to hear more about that very briefly before we wrap up.

Yeah, so the newsletter is called Everyman's Universe, and I cover all the kinds of things I'm interested in from the physics of life, you know, sort of philosophy, even, you know, human spirituality, you know, climate change and the human future, all that kind of stuff. And then, yeah, this new work we're doing on the physics of what we call the physics of agency, because to me, you know, what's interesting to me about the survey, and again, I thought the survey was beautifully done, very expertly done. But what it points to, to me, and this is the role of AI, is that really the most important question in science and physics right now is why is life different? The machine metaphor for life on multiple levels fails. It just, we see this all the time. And this grant that we're doing is to really understand from a physics point of view, clearly life is made out of stuff, but it's not just stuff. Something else, something else, which is really more on probably the level of causality or organization We need new, truly new ideas about the physical world to embrace life. So that's super exciting. I'll be covering that in the podcast— not the podcast, the newsletter.

Also, we do have a podcast with Marcelo and Evan Thompson, my co-authors on the book The Blind Spot, called Life, the Universe, and All the Rest. So that's also—

Yeah, it seems like the convergence of chemistry, biology, and complexity is something that really hasn't been approached. And as you said, it seems like you're taking a panoptics and optic approach to it, from everything from the building blocks of, you know, information and complexity all the way up through, you know, the highest form of life, which is of course the podcast. So, and the newsletter, uh, both have, uh, well, Nayesh, we gotta get you a newsletter, my friend. You, you're too interesting.

You gotta start one.

Too many things, too many things. But maybe I get one of my AI agents to start a newsletter.

Yeah, that's right. You can't spell, you know, Nayesh without AI, right? Well, gentlemen, thank you so much again for what you guys do in the, you know, pencil and paper, but also for what you do with your voice and your platforms. I think it's incredibly important that we have people at the top of their craft, doing things for the sake of, you know, heaven or the sake of humanity, which is what we owe people as citizen scientists, you know.

Yeah.

2 different countries, but one major worldview, which is to promote good science and be honest and have integrity. And I just appreciate you guys and what you do, and I thank you for coming on. We'll have to do a part 2 and maybe bring some other guests into the conversation as well. But thank you guys for staying up. on a late afternoon post-doing. I mean, you guys had a full day before you. I'm still in the middle of my day. You were on PhD committees, both of you guys, making me feel like I'm a slacker.

But, but, you know, we do have the best, as I said, 3-hour-a-week job in the world. The hardest, but also the best. Thank you guys so much. It's been a real honor and a pleasure.

Thank you. It was a real pleasure. This was really fun. Thank you both.

Thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your night.

Bye.

Take care. See ya.

Bye.