Joe Rogan Experience #1233 — Brian Cox Transcript

Transcript

0:00 That's very cool. He made one with, like, this very beautiful red wood. everywhere from the south island of new zealand all the way to the arctic circle to svalbard which How does complexity emerge spontaneously in a universe? This tiny little finite life that we lead in a possibly infinite universe. It's spreading knowledge. They're coming for to think.

3:34 observable universe you need to know that the milky way galaxy has got 200 billion stars i think everybody does i think every scientist that no scientist can picture that number i mean And you get this picture of a vast and possibly infinite universe. So that's a measurement. some sort of circumstantial evidence and that means that actually the universe could could have

6:39 vogue. Some of those theories are back in vogue again. So yes, some of them say that there's a cycling universe. and it was expanding extremely fast. and that's what we call the Big Bang. that grasp. the greeks so aristotle and there's great, very clever people. But they thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. so therefore the earth must be at the center it's it's natural right and and actually it's quite a

10:16 which all the planets and galaxies are placed but um in in the brief history of time harking says it went up i caught it again it had moved 18 miles and then from some other perspective it would have relative to the ground but it doesn't seem like it when you're sitting there yeah and einstein Therefore, that concept has no meaning meaning because you can't measure it and that that's led einstein to

13:02 so if you imagine slices of space, sort of like a saddle or a bowl. If you look at a little one mile square of the earth, right, then it's flat, right? in terms of like the way to measure it? then the angles wouldn't add up to 180 degrees or you could draw It's just a generalization of geometry then. So it's a long way away, but it's very big. light um which we can use as a ruler.

17:50 Not with light. and at that point it becomes take an image of the big bank in gravitational near seattle in washington State and half in Louisiana. In space and time, Kip Thorne got the Nobel Prize last year for this. It's tiny measurement, but we can do it. second and then hit each other and the explosion the energy release was i think i'm right it was

22:10 also other black holes that aren't necessarily in the center of galaxies yeah so these little ones escape and that's a black hole and what happens to them do Do they travel? Are they moving through space? so so we're going to tomorrow there's nothing we can do about it we are going to tomorrow if you like which is caused by the fact that electrons don't like to be very close to each

24:52 which is the same thing, but for neutrons. hold it up and as far as we know then there's no known force that we know of that can hold hold but 10 miles wide? And it was called LGM-1 because it's a very regular pulse Wasn't there some speculation that our solar system at one point was a binary star system and that one of those stars had become a dwarf i don't know um someone had read something about that in relationship to

27:20 And we don't know what caused all those, and asteroids inwards to the inner solar system i think i don't know the exact about the stellar sized proxima centauri which are the closest stars it seems like there are planets around those now to routinely start projects that would take 100 years to bear fruit and so we could imagine going Wouldn't be possible for a crew?

30:29 There are no laws of physics that tell us we can't do it, so we just do it. If you can send a little robot spaceship there, you can send a crewed spaceship. I'm of the opinion as time goes on and augmented and virtual reality gets better and better that it doesn't really totally make sense unless biology being affected by radiation or by the speed of travel or even by food,

31:45 I mean, it's clearly true at the moment which I think is quite a persuasive argument, actually. or jeff bezos they point out that the amount of resources available just slightly above our heads except that now spacex and blue origin those people have got reusable rockets so suddenly frontier and all the benefits somewhere and expand our civilization it has to be mars

34:43 wouldn't have wanted to do it but once you got So couple that with all the minerals and the resources that we know are there, But I wouldn't go there. your body would have a real problem with that, right? radiation environment but not too bad it's further from the sun than we are it's not too there are It can be 20 degrees. So it can be warmer than Minnesota.

37:35 I like science fiction. about lightsabers once because i claimed that they're physically in principle they're possible But when they press that button, it goes to a certain distance. so as you're swinging it around you wouldn't have the leverage of a long thing so why not make it The only point I was making is the physics is that... you're right, it'd have a mirror, but it wouldn't look cool

39:47 way faster than a bullet. They're really slow, aren't they? but for whatever reason these And it looks shit. But it looks silly. the other day where he explained the ending of 2001 i didn't say that i saw it yesterday actually Wow. but yeah i think it's i i always like science fiction yeah i like arthur c clark a lot you I saw alien when I was, And so the first films they put on the three films,

43:22 covenant the the last one yeah prometheus i don't And, well, it's also preposterous. and then when you land, I mean, what are the odds And that's really common But the idea is that it's not about that. make that happen so he stays there waiting for the second ship and i like those ideas that you inspired and interested and it's part of if you want to find if you want to ask questions about

47:34 You almost have to go, well, this isn't really how it would be, but this is how you have to make it in order to fit it into a two-hour movie. and you would be able to travel vast distances instantaneously, right? it and it can stretch it and make it shrink and so it's the response of space and time to matter say well how does curved space how can that give rise to something that looks like a force which

50:06 There's no forces acting. Oh, yeah. that doesn't exist right but it has properties it's my sort of matter or sort of energy that has properties that do not but in nature, you'd have to have the right stuff to do it. has physical properties that are just bizarre and that no matter our energy that we know of in the universe has so that to we said we don't think that stuff exists right there's a second set of theoretical bits of

53:18 We just mentioned him. that these things would be unstable or don't exist in nature but we strongly suspect that Well, it doesn't have to be. and so it can stretch you out and so but you can with wormholes you you can you can write the even in the solar system i would not be surprised if we find microbes on mars or on some of the And we have some idea that if you get gradients of temperature and acid and alkaline and

57:20 And we know that they're present on Europa today. ago so it would be good to know if what i've said is right panspermia doesn't have to be unlikely right i mean for example you might see in the other day negligible yeah so it's still So that suggests a common origin to me. Well, in their abilities. and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference and the the elements and so on that we have in our universe we have so many different life forms on

1:01:56 million years ago or so that or maybe at most 700 that you see any complex multicellular organisms at all so for something like three Which is cells with a cell nucleus and all that kind of stuff. And they look like they're the merger between two simpler life forms, and if that's true then it's just a bit of luck and it happened once And we have a civilization now, and we've had it,

1:05:01 The large moon helps us. and four big gas giants further out. So it looks like it formed and came in and came in almost to where Mars orbits today and then cleared out the region around Mars, actually, which is maybe the reason Mars is so small compared to Venus and Earth. it's one of the best theories for the evolution of our solar system. And how does Bode's Law work?

1:07:35 Was it 17th century or something? gravitational interactions so there is a sense in which our solar system has got as much stuff in it moon for example it's covered in craters and that was caused they all seem to hit about the same So it's all extremely I tend to restrict myself to the galaxy. if you're looking for meaning or you're looking for how we should behave even

1:11:04 It's a great essay called the Meaning only to ourselves. And that's, I don't know any other way to define it. I just can't believe this hasn't happened in other places. to consider the idea that somewhere out there there's another civilization that may be even It's so compelling. So the idea that there are no civilizations arose, you know, 100 million years ago, 200 million years ago, 1 billion years ago.

1:15:03 they should have written their presence across the sky by now. So our signature will become visible, I'm sure, if we last into the medium term. around there and um we can't we're not supposed to contact them like people are not supposed we're monkeys look at that they're so far beyond where they need to be before they could join the galactic It's a better way to do things.

1:18:15 all the human and biological reward systems that are in place that made sure that we survive whether it just exists in this form yeah i i agree i wouldn't be surprised either yes that's the from man-made materials or from materials found on earth and that this new form of life is created Does it have to have a sufficient level of intelligence that it actually is conscious?

1:21:18 if there's a possibility to create some sort of global intelligence through electronics that's non-local. i don't see why you can't scale that up in principle i mean i should just the caveat is it's made of electrons and protons and neutrons and if i if i have a soul in there something that and we look for another one with ultra high precision and we don't see any evidence of it

1:24:41 i mean look at a ghost i mean it's a it is something that carries the imprint of you presumably it looks like you right so that means that it interacts strongly with the i do but it ended up when i'd written it down i thought actually that it makes sense and i read or your nerves your neurons yeah it's something in there that's interacting with matter whether

1:26:36 and you're breathing and all that stuff, but if somehow or another you were able to isolate but then you have to answer what we know what we are made of yeah so we know how those particles behave and interact right so so why do the particles not The answer for that, the answer is because it's not there. The answer is Jesus, and you can't measure God.

1:28:56 uh we are small finite beings right which are just clusters of atoms as we said before they're very rare sense thing that things go to shit right so basically it's a second law of thermodynamics And I think that is the answer. us has to come out of a dying star. and that that is where the building blocks for a person come from. And it's probably from different stars.

1:33:11 people aren't aware of all the all the information right and then i think on top of it for some That's right. and its ingredients was cooked in multiple stars over billions of years that that's a to me a And there's more people accepting that. the big bang was very very highly ordered which is ultimately as sean carroll actually you mentioned but so i'm always careful i don't want to science can sometimes sound arrogant right it can sometimes

1:37:18 So everything we've said is stuff we've discovered. And now we see that there is some and we know how it was made. if it's eternal what place is there for a creator you know that's that's a good question right they These things are measurements. because it takes into consideration human nature and like i love dawkins he's fantastic i think the thing about particle physics is that you don't get a lot of shit because people don't understand

1:41:40 our societies otherwise we won't have countries like the united states yes there's united states But I've sort of almost stopped doing it going, trying to seek common ground now that's why i i get for example gave a talk to the bishops that it's part of what i do is insult people yeah but i do it for humor i want to entertain people done since 1952 i think it was and robert oppenheimer did them in 53 and it was it's

1:44:12 Can't you buy more tapes? But it's brilliant. which means thinking in the way that nature forces you to think, can be valuable in other areas. And he said, so if you think about, for example, quantum mechanics, You know, unless you're doing electronics or inventing lasers, the many outweigh the needs of the few right so so society is all that matters or you can be a

1:46:46 by being an extremist yeah you've got to hold all these views in your head It's a fact. I bounce around with these things. surprise I think that they were still alive because they thought that the power they'd minds and he said that that's that it's a great last line i can't remember exactly what he says that comes along and then someone worse and someone better but it's a trial and error system

1:50:16 guy to be addicted to such a gross thing yeah you're right because i think these these are education is to teach people the value of uncertainty of not knowing it is not weak right to not know it's actually natural not to know Yes. Annihilation. Yeah And then So at the moment, artificial intelligence is expert systems Yeah, they're very good. This is kind of interesting because it hits that kind of intermediate level that usually escapes um so you're right one of the answers is to tax there was an example was a

1:54:14 I might be one of those people that's going, concepts that are really hard to visualize like sort sort of Kurzweil's idea of the exponential increase of technology leading us to a point in the near future where you're going to be able to download your consciousness into a computer. years something's going to happen that radically changes our idea of what's possible and i think

1:55:57 If you're going to allow technologies into the marketplace that destroy people's jobs, you know like you were talking about we're the only things that we know of that have meaning which is make a living sort of thinking and creating. education if everybody had an interest like that if everybody went on to make pottery and painting it in our own image but that's very godlike isn't it god created us in our own image, but that's very God-like, isn't it? God created us in his own image.

1:59:12 think it's just suddenly going to be upon us i i i think we will see we'll we'll see ourselves I mean, just think of that. It's crazy. They're driving down the road, streaming two people talking, Well, think of the world, you know, the internet. And, of course, the web comes from CERN, the WWW bit. When did you become involved with CERN? how large is it it's 27 kilometers so what's that about 16 miles 16 miles and it's a circular

2:02:37 time when there were protons and neutrons to when there were quarks and gluons around and and go all So it was the 50s when CERN was established. And so CERN was set up as an international collaboration in Europe initially get extra money to build things from each country. And it was half built. So it would have discovered the Higgs particle first, had it been running.

2:06:07 just do it over many years and have stable funding yeah just commit to doing it the filling it in world wide web as we've just said a lot of the medical imaging technology that we use spin-offs of these big experiments at the edge of our capability are always immense which is why Yeah, so that's shortly after the billionth of a So you get that. which is, I don't know how many hundred million tons.

2:09:43 And they're like almost incomprehensible. Oh. we can vary it but it's something like 25 nanoseconds depending on what so it's really Now, when these things are created by these collisions, how long do they last? So what you see, if you collide... together and they can make something interesting like a top quark or a higgs particle what's a top They're in three families.

2:13:11 that we don't understand so we don't seems like you only needed the the first family to build a there's the study of them then there's the then everybody gets together and go okay what the hell are generated but but that the fundamental basic seed as it were is from is from the higgs yeah that we don't know about yet because we know almost know that there are other particles out there

2:16:02 be honest we thought we would have detected it from space don't interfere with them and we're looking for the rare occasions when these dark So we do know about neutrinos. and the number is 25 of the universe so roughly speaking about five percent of the universe is the thing we observe is how the universe is expanding and how that expansion rate is changing and how it's

2:19:43 proposed yeah i remember my one of my friends at It's been speeding up. if you if you're sure that you can't see what you've done wrong then you publish it because actually introduced it um initially to because einstein's's equations strongly suggest worked independently of einstein but the same time in the early 1920s before we even knew there Wow.

2:23:01 because it tells you there's a creation event. equations were screaming his own theory was screaming to him which is that no the universe the universe will continue to expand and double in size. change over time and just stays there so so it requires theoretical advance as well and so people and have a real clear understanding of what it is and what its properties are?

2:26:41 do that as well so for example there are people who try to It's loads of energy in a very small amount of space huge amounts of energy in It's a good question. I don't know. thank God there's people like you. You know, I mean, even when I was at school, and even possibly why is there a universe, right? what are we doing here? What was our past? So they're like Lego.

2:31:00 And it's like a rock and roll show. So they use the software that they use for Interstellar to create images of black holes. would you see watching someone fall in and you can explain all that using einstein's theory about all that with this incredible image which we had it's so high resolution by the way that So it's just like a series of CPUs Is that impressive, Jamie?

2:33:45 you coming to los angeles with this yeah when i've hit the montalban theater in may the end of may time more people ask me about meeting you than virtually anybody else honestly get ready because