Joe Rogan Experience #1003 — Sean Carroll Transcript

Transcript

0:00 And five, four, three, two... You didn't know about this? Have you ever seen a doctor do that? Wonder I wonder about the provenance of this. Look at that picture. Yeah. Right. for weeks or months. We have this. Yeah. was three miles wide? I'm here for the truth. Sorry, they can. Is that what you're saying? No, the danger is something from far outside the distant solar system that we just haven't.

5:08 I forget which one it is that's there. Canary Islands are okay. And I was like, oh, there's too much moon out. Just looking at the visitor center, the sky is so magnificent at night. But it gives you a perspective that I think we're missing with our cities. And I'm the biggest booster of cities. dig up dinosaur bones, right? in the sky, and I think that's a shame.

8:03 And if you don't get vertigo, you're not doing it right. and figure out what ideas we have are right and which ones are wrong. And I love it when I get Right and simple and Neil deGrasse Tyson does a very good job of doing that with the cosmos He does a little because I've heard him give the exact same semi off the cuff. I think that's the subject of the next book that I'm writing, the book I'm working on right now.

10:18 we could be calculating some numbers right ego and knowledge it's always a those super smart dudes that are figuring everything out, they got all that stuff locked down. Okay, please. they are going to be judging you. competitive and egotistical and they want to do better than everybody else and prove that they're And in your field, there is a big issue, I guess, with people disregarding other people's

13:05 come in with their prejudices. And if you go and tickle their preconceived notions, they'll think Yeah, I mean, if I'm formally teaching a class, I'm standing up there in front of the lecture hall. Yeah, that's crucially important. where there is a difference between what the world is and what we see when we look at the world. And you can calculate the probability that you're going to at it it's in a superposition of both and you can

15:51 What? And somehow it's in both at once or something like that. There's a mathematical way that we have of representing the reality of it. that's when I got an understanding like oh okay well this is kind of horseshit and this lady is kind of a but when you look at an atom and realize that most of it is space like most of the things that we're looking at are

18:17 Privileging? Like white privilege or a different kind of privilege? There's empty space in between the planets. position, but what it is, is that cloud and people just can't. And so that's why they talk about But it's not what you see. So are we looking at things sort of in a very material sense, like this you know, this mug is ceramic, this table is wood.

20:45 into that language, whether it's far away or way back in time or very, very small or whatever. on television talking about the atom that. I mean, I have a point of view, and I actually believe in the many worlds interpretation But physicists contribute just as much, you know, not on purpose, but they allow, they open up the space for what the bleep do we know people to insert their woo in there because they're not doing a very good job of measuring up to the reality themselves.

23:09 What we need is to have the willingness to let go of our intuition a little bit, Did you try to explain to her that it's not true? And I ran into her at the comedy store and we were talking and she was explaining to me The idea behind it is, look, you're taking a bunch of people that are extremely successful, Yeah, like did you imagine that you were born with two legs?

25:33 certain way and your life will take on this incredible quality right yep and i think that uh Someone tells you a good idea or you come up with a good idea yourself. be told that there's this Yeah. Probability distributions. like this i get emails and letters and they have their own theories and the light just got tired And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to waste my time.

29:04 I had one tweet mentioning the phrase polite and you know them one way or the other. I tried to get him to explain gauge symmetry to me. That's okay. It makes sense that it would be now when someone boils it down to something if there's something inside them with that we can work with and try to work toward the truth. Right. It's all consciousness bringing the world into existence. He loves word salad. Yeah, that guy is the

32:30 You're like, what the fuck is this guy going on about, man? He probably wants to do well. He's probably not a terrible person. And I started going through it and I was like, I go, you know, this guy's crazy, right? Yes, that's right. It's not that hard. I would like to laugh, but there's another website that comes up with random physics paper titles

34:43 and a deep understanding of anatomy. When we explain it, we translate it. Right. You know, in physics, we have mathematical equations that are quite unambiguous as to what they say, why when you're describing where the electron inhabits, why is it a cloud? And then the leap is to say right? There's no way. make it point list and little dots and it really should be some smooth distribution this is well

37:43 Is the issue like making a visual representation of it, Right, where's that going? Where the hell's that?, exactly. But it's hard to draw them. Right. We're intuitive. And so if you talk about an electron, that's supposed to be a thing. But it's the truth. What do you think about the very uber bizarre theory that the universe is incredibly fractal in the sense that what we're looking at when we're looking at the universe is essentially some sort of subatomic particles for a much larger atom.

39:19 No? But everything that we think we know about quantum mechanics says that things like electrons and quarks are completely featureless. subatomic realm that I see no way that we could be the same thing as the subatomic realm to some more than likely. Like the Matrix or whatever. But it could be a thousand years. It puts in some outputs. as human as we want them to be.

42:25 This motherfucker. I think there are people who make us think more deeply. The physicist had these way out ideas. Yeah, I think that's plausible. Yep. By the near term, we mean 50 or 100 years because they underestimate how little we know about how the brain works, how important it is for the brain to be in our bodies, right? Do you think that we have to absolutely understand the exact way that the human brain decades will have it all figured out and have downloadable consciousnesses is not realistic to me.

46:04 That was a complaint that's hilarious because the horse would't take me home all by itself. Was that a complaint? Yeah, that was a complaint. That's right. There are the problems that can be solved by things that we design are just a different set of problems than the thing that evolution naturally made us do, right? So the set of things that it is easy to design is just very, very different than what the brain

47:40 and how you walk around and you can multiply numbers as fast as you want to. That seems like very likely. I think it will be embedded eventually. Oh, yeah. And all of it is Bluetooth and all of it is location coordinated with GPS so that if somehow Her dilemma. that dude with his ears becomes first U.S. employee. Yeah, you know what else you could do?

49:51 They just walk up to the machine and get a snack. Another thing I wanted to talk to you about with quantum mechanics that came out of that movie, What the Bleep, that was very confusing to a lot of people, was the whole observer effect. And there's some sort of a physical interaction when you're measuring something. Well, I don't think there were battle days.

51:21 Okay. The way that you describe a system is different when it's all by itself than when it interacts in some interesting way with some other system. Maybe maybe if we're shitting on it. We will they get mad at us. We might get pulled Yeah. Okay, so give me some volume so I can hear what this dude is saying. wall. Places where the two tops meet are the highest intensity, the bright lines,

54:23 They're going quantum. We've got to do a little bit of commentary on it. Right. electron go through? Then it always says it goes through one or the other. It never goes through Why? There was no such thing as the answer to the question, did it go through one slit or the other? my favorite version of quantum mechanics, and it acts like a particle. whole universe the wave function of both the electron but also your camera and you and the

57:51 You screwed my head up even more. So by not understanding, I understand more. And especially with the limitations of language. Tried to have these kind of weird conversations with people like myself What a great attitude. It is understandable. therefore be outraged. quantum mechanics We want you to say, well, water is wet and oxygen is this. It's really the best way we have

1:01:39 They will say my job is not to understand the world's just to make predictions And you say, well, okay, why is it right? What was happening? What is the thing that is moving around? You get an answer. Right. And the answer is right. The answer is verified in experiments over and over again. Right. But it's, roughly speaking, going into the office or going

1:02:59 I've recently changed. Now I have an iPad Pro Yeah, while the screen is dark like this, you don't have to turn the screen on. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And where do you start from? Say you get Uh like like say you get to the cafe mm-hmm like what's your starting point well so for example lurking in the wave function of the universe? other how would i know that that was table like or how would i know in tables are not really what

1:05:25 Yeah. We think we understand that. And, like, supermassive black holes, is it still believed that they're in the center So what is the black hole? What is it? That's what gravity is. And he has equations that tell you how much space-time curves, etc. no, it doesn't look completely black. actual black holes we know about emit radiation so slowly there's no practical

1:08:20 is already true about general relativity, the curvature of space-time, and you may in fact be going into another universe By the way, the journey would not be pain-free when you went inside the black hole. so because Kip Thorne, who invented the idea, is my colleague at Caltech. So if you know, remember the movie or the book Contact? faster than the speed of light.

1:10:14 So he called up his friend, Kip Thorne, invent LIGO when they discovered gravitational the observatory, something he put together? Posted an hour ago. and this is a rumor. OK, that's that was the source of the gravitational waves that we saw. No, but it's very fast. are pretty darn black. Yep. Oh, yeah. some black hole remnant. being made out of We know that it happened.

1:13:47 But that's the kind of thing we would hope to be able to say someday I've seen that on drugs this thing. Yeah, you showing you take DMT you can see that. Uh-huh. So what is this? Stay inside, Rana. He's drawing fish. or using your regular telescopes, that would give you enormously more information. This is the actual gravitational wave from the early

1:15:40 that they said, well, Yes, right? that was orbiting it and they were trying to figure out if it was some space enormous space They just want to get people excited. So what you do is you get hits for your website. They're human beings. or we see something, how does that get processed? Do you have to go straight to President Trump So you might be able to keep your mouth shut if you're like, people can't handle this shit.

1:19:12 us. Right. But that's a horrendously wasteful way to do interstellar communication. Right. Are you going to turn the telescope on for a month? or something like that than we're going to hear them in our telescopes. market. That alien market's a big market. They could be perfectly sincere, but look, Yeah, Edgar Mitchell was, he, I think he might have passed away recently.

1:21:16 and one of the episodes we did, Alien civilizations or they're not accurately reporting what they saw? spacecraft did enter our atmosphere and observe us and then take off, it would be quite fascinating Well, also the idea of physical beings on board this thing It doesn't need food. I would imagine it would be, obviously, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.

1:22:52 They would try to just take data, observe, maybe get some sort of a visual understanding. They should be here already, right? That's like, well, if there's us, then there's probably more. mutation, and it had to take place And it's also possible that we're – that life happens all the time, but it never becomes multicellular or intelligent, right? Like, that's what we think of as intelligent whereas

1:25:32 predators, and that was it, right? And so That's very strange also. And part of that is, you know, I think the response to that would be, well, Right. You know, like, there were psychic powers or aliens and when and they were offered, can I right? With no rational justification. But they, you know, it's in some sense innocent, bucks. But the randomness of it all is what gets people panicky, right?

1:29:22 Huh? that they don't understand very well. Corral it into existing only in this We want to have power or whatever. the struggle in these things as this guy is interacting with these things and you see the trouble... I tend to agree with There are only so many things that we do for which the worst case scenario is quite that We should plan for them.

1:33:35 else. And so I think that's a very sensible thing You know, again and again, we're coming to this theme that our imaginations are not quite up to the task. to recognize faces, and they're amazingly good. So we have programs like when you go onto Google being understands. Whoa. to innovate and to constantly create We don't, I mean, unless you're a classic car advocate or devotee, really what you want

1:36:24 It's like constantly improving and accelerating. And by buying this, and by this materialism that we all And that has this sort of recursive, of exploring the space Maybe human beings will just become more and more melded with But we would still recognize them as biological, but they might be very, very different than anything that naturally appeared through the

1:39:52 and try to like look at where we are now and set it 50 years ago, right? just because cars were different and so forth. doesn't mean that the changes cannot be eventually very It's not that far. If they live forever and everybody has four kids, we've got a real problem on our hands real quick. But I'm not going to live forever either. Could be. Meanwhile, they had some shitty

1:42:26 Oh, yeah. I'll remember what the population of Malta was in the year 1500. It could have got tagged with something else, No Stromus, yeah. What I meant was there's a white room that, I forget the actor's name, in the original Alien. Yeah. they had weird lights flashing in the cabin that didn't really seem to make a lot of sense, Might be sort of settled down by the neighbors that look like you're in an airplane.

1:44:34 I think we live in the only generation that's going to get repetitive stress injury from poking at our devices all the time. It's very old-fashioned, aren't you? I'm a crazy phone call person. It's really pretty interesting. That's amazing, right? but real-time in-ear translations in French, Spanish, English. That's amazing. What's the name of it? Wait, is Japanese one of them?

1:46:39 We are flying. Okay, that's a problem foreign government relations, and even not-for-profits working in remote areas. It'll eventually get smaller and smaller. and you could look at it. It's getting super slippery. Woo! I was like, what the fuck does that sign say? Right. We definitely have an advantage. I don't really care Because there's always this reaction that they have.

1:50:52 And by mistake, I had given too much. So I would say in French, I would say, you know, do you speak English? They always have this look on their face like, what time is it? Doing something you're not passionate about, unlike you with your legal notepad, writing you can do with that degree, and your chances No, the very, very good thing about academia is it's very clearly up or out,

1:52:30 If you get a PhD in physics from Caltech, you're not going to starve. Now, you are involved in a hard science, right? It wasn't quite. So that's a real problem for us. Really? But they can sort of get bullied into silence or just say, like, this is not worth it. at Caltech, I'm on the fourth Yeah. think that you know um honestly if i were giving advice to young women whose primary goal was to

1:56:45 physics you just want to make a political fuss wow that's unfortunate keep quiet yeah i mean i And so I think that it's kind of the job of guys to raise a little bit of a fuss about this. We don't want to believe this about him. their life. you know. Yeah, exactly. He just happens to be conservative and young and very articulate. abilities. Now, I think that you could make a very, very good case that his substantive claims

2:00:42 He's a world class economist. Is that possible? you can talk about quantum mechanics or the nature of the dark matter and discussions get very, very heated and emotional and people's jobs depend on it and the whole bit. But the idea that things go unchallenged is not, I think it was Rick and Morty recently that had a silly episode about dark matter.

2:02:30 I think I know what you're talking about. Okay. ever seen ever, right? So all the atoms, all the stars, all the galaxies that we see in our telescopes, that's 5% of the mass. you know, Science Friday with Ira Flato, NPR show. anything about the universe. We didn't know the universe was expanding. formed and what its properties are and what impact And the nuclear forces are distinguished by being short range,

2:05:08 and you calculate how much of those should be left over from the Big Bang, or so would have said there's a 90% chance that WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, are the dark matter. through your detector and bump into an atom. You might wonder if you can Google. We live in a noisy environment. conclusion that dark matter is the preeminent mass of the universe like what what percentage

2:07:11 But I would say if five years from now we haven't found the WIMPs, then people are going faster and he said the only way for that to happen is if they're much more Wow. So that is the reason. Is there a possibility that some new discovery could happen or could come forth where you would re-examine this idea that there's some missing mass? There's always a possibility.

2:09:24 very hot and dense and it was glowing authority and say, trust me on this, I was totally on board with the idea that there was something wrong about gravity. of the universe is currently believed to be dark matter 25 25 yeah and i read once that they had You know because of its effects. And most of the mass in our galaxy is dark matter. can still see orbiting around. And that tells you there's some concentration of dark matter there.

2:12:24 it could be. So we're looking, we're trying to figure out which one is right what a weird thing to have But in most theories, there are dark matter particles passing through your body right now so with this wimps detection uh theory where they've developed these Now, the Big Bang one is another weird one. It's a reasonable possibility. so then you go to the cafe with your legal pad

2:14:48 of thing we're looking for now so the imprint the microwave imprint of the big bang this 14 And it exploded 14 billion years ago. This is this event. The Big Bang is – the phrase the Big Bang is used in two different senses. infinitely fast expanding, et cetera, et cetera. That's the Big Bang moment. And it is certainly through occasionally. And this bouncing universe idea that you were talking about with the two different universes hitting each other, that would be an

2:18:55 Yeah, it's a cool name. and there's another bounce, and this goes on an infinite number of times. You remember the past, but not the future. You make choices now that affect the future, what we call the arrow of time, right? You remember the past, but not the Lawrence Krauss was trying to explain to me the size of the universe and the age of the universe.

2:21:00 I fucked that up, I'm sure. They shouldn't say that. Okay. Right. And that's just because the universe has a beginning. It's a moment in time Okay. So if all matter is condensed into a very small spot, So... It's the relative size. Whoa. of billions of light years across call that the observable universe that's finite in size okay So you're talking about essentially like a pinky nail.

2:25:58 What is the largest? Oh, so invisible. What the Big Bang like? Why did the Big Bang take place? And then you're in one of these situations. Okay. just that everywhere every direction you go in would now be south. And I would come to the beginning and I would go like, but what if the universe had just chosen not to exist? Yes. and effects work themselves out over time. So that there was a time when there wasn't a Big Bang

2:30:09 it's it's such a complex discussion it's it's so complex that it's almost like infinite in universe that says, well, the universe started this way and then that happened, et cetera, Do you think that it's within the The Big Bang could be just one of these moments, one of these things that happens. Jeez. says the universe is the ultimate free lunch.

2:33:27 And what the math suggests is that there is energy in the gravitational field of the sun, Therefore, universes can have zero total energy. Free lunch, yeah. known universe and that there might be more than one universe right and the idea that this was all For the average person like But here, I can restore your if you look at the universe on very very small scales

2:36:04 the universe is also a very simple thing. It is complication and complexity. then the total energy in that thing minus the total energy in its gravitational field because And I think the answer is no. If anything, as time goes on, That's 1.4 times 10 to the 10 years. human beings and living creatures are temporary structures within it and the idea that it's all

2:40:01 But if we choose not to do that, And you have a perspective, an infinite perspective, as it were. It's going to take a while to process this one, man. Thank you so much. I recorded it not far from here. Excellent.