Joe Rogan Experience #1631 — Brian Greene Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day What have we been around for, what, 300,000 years, 400,000 years? if I'm walking down the street and I'm thinking about quantum mechanics, I'm thinking about, by recognizing that every day phenomenon is a small slice of the way the world is actually you try to think like what is the best way that people are going to absorb these ideas because

3:34 People are very curious and interested in what physics has found. and, and, and I, I don't, I don't fault people for that. These ideas are difficult, right? And so there is a sensibility of that sort, and kind of apologized and said, you were right. but they claim to be like, what is it, a thousand-year-old? It's just more you hear quantum mechanics is weird, and then you hear something else

7:18 that we can test in the laboratory. But there is such a chance in every moment, Yeah, totally. What are you saying? Spooky action at a distance. I see it in the mathematics. That's the point. And ultimately, I say the reason I believe the math is the math makes predictions Perception and understanding, yeah. and then they separate, they can no longer be thought of as independent or autonomous. I mean, the very basic quality of autonomy,

12:08 Now, he saw that in the mathematics. So this is no longer an idea that's abstract. Well, so if you're going to allow for the most exotic possibilities, do think this, then quantum entanglement is in some sense less weird because what happens is that in one world, are not limited to where they are applied. Our experience is, look, if I do something to this

15:12 So the idea is that there's multiple versions of you and multiple versions of everything that you've experienced. All the things you see that you consider to be Austin, Texas or the United States or the world itself. throughout all of time. So in some sense, there's an unending number of realities that are in the Every outcome does happen. Don't try to understand it.

17:39 That's all that you should ever expect to do. and do the math yeah those guys they're not going to help me like that i'm not going to be able to right question to ask. You've encountered wormholes, they're actually right next to each other. And then when you do something on one and it affects and things that we don't truly understand, but that you can show mathematically

21:07 But we're beyond that. of these discoveries are, it really makes you think like what are we going to be are going to start to create the new things that we're going to try to understand as we So that's the concept of using these principles and this understanding of quantum mechanics terraforming new worlds or creating parallel universes. But there's a pattern that we

24:28 Now, we can manipulate the quantum world what will it be? Well, I think we're going to come to a time when we understand That's starting to go into crazy land, the woo that we were talking about before. A black hole is a weird region of space-time. a little baseball or a little billiard ball, totally inaccurate. It will not allow you to And so that's a key example of quantum mechanics transforming the world as we know it. And right now, there is work

27:52 even if it's 13.7 billion light years away, But we're within the fabric of space-time itself. How is that done? will travel arbitrarily far apart if they don't encounter anything else. How so? happening in one universe. You've split it across many universes. So in some sense, calculation here or there. So it's basically substantially increasing the places where

32:36 So you have one bit that's either a zero, another bit that's either a one. So an electron has a spin, like a little top, and it can either spin counterclockwise, that we call spin up, or clockwise, that we call spin down. You know, if you see some of these things, they look, I've heard them described, and it's not a bad description, it's sort of like chandeliers.

34:30 the user. For quantum computers, you've got to make sure that all these qubits are working together How far away are we from implementing quantum computing in daily life? we will never have these things in daily life. They'll always be highly specialized, you drop your phone and it's fine. And so there are those who say that we will So I'm skeptical whenever I hear people say never, never, never.

37:05 it down the line and not have to start the calculation from scratch. We understand what's going on. virtually impossible to do in any reasonable period of time. There's an algorithm that people to happen. You know, a student of mine actually works for a company that generates quantum How did it do it? trying to mimic quantum mechanical behavior. And that's why people have become so excited about it.

41:25 involved. You know, if you play it correctly, you'll always have a draw, right? But in chess, can come up with novel, innovative ideas. That's kind of how we define ourselves. And so when a for a computer to get to our level of cognitive power and beyond. And I full well anticipate that there will be the artificial systems that say to us, I don't know that for a fact. You, I assume, are making the same assumption about me. How do we

44:11 crisis and and there's a real inner world happening in there what other conclusion could you draw And if you took into account like a computer, They could figure out a way to do things that are uniquely moving to us. And it's going to... but they don't have teachers that can give them the corpus of knowledge going back hundreds of You know, artists maybe learned about the work of Rembrandt or Picasso, you know, the masters.

46:59 All knowledge gleaned by any artificial being within the network will be immediately shared by every that dog knows it's supposed to lift its leg to pee on a tree, He's got it somehow or another in his system to bring lifting up the leg to pee is one example of that, but there are many other behaviors. I mean, So Newton's ideas and Einstein's ideas, we will continue to pass these ideas on, and I presume they're not going to be imprinted in anybody's DNA.

50:15 and going all the way back, island how much of the world would i be able to like recreate even how much of the world of physics And we all know about things that happened in an earlier age. easily to the point where we're at now where you have a phone in your pocket In fact, when I was a kid, not to bring up Star Trek again, To me, it was the computer that you could ask any question and it would give you the answer wow i was like that will never ever happen and here we

53:32 I always feel like I'm in the future when I can use Siri. Oh wait, do it again? Hey Siri, make a note. Yeah, it did hear it. Oh, wait a minute. Oh man. Hey Siri, make a note. Yeah, it's in settings. Here's Captain Siri. Hey Siri. There you go. Okay. Super helpful. Real convenient. I see it super helpful real convenient after that background on actor Anton Caridian Kodos of Tarsus IV, also known as Kodos the Executioner.

57:08 No positive identification. Before we go too far away, did you see, you were talking talking about this this is the very crude version of what you're saying did See if we get sued. So the way I read that they did this was they took MIDI files, That's with MIDI. You splice them together. Okay. Yeah, let me hear some of the Nirvana. That's why I didn't want to say it. But you had The Doors there too, right?

1:00:49 Let it go. to add to how good this sounds. i see i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing oh you're one of those It seems like it's inevitable. it just seems inevitable that we're going to one day be something unrecognizable. Yeah, of course. history. that maybe can eliminate some of the problems that we have. Or you'll be able to find mates easier.

1:06:05 of course i mean now we actually face this in a concrete way i mean do you allow an artificial You just go randomly running That's why I started hunting. Yeah. if you do it correctly it can be done you really do need to have some algae like we were talking depending upon like what your activities are that you enjoy sure what you're trying to do yeah yeah

1:09:37 no weird issues i'd pick them up take an egg touch them on the little head everybody was good like trick this dummy into breaking into that cage because he's so big he broke through the chicken though there's no rooster, because chickens lay eggs with no rooster and those eggs are like a long time and if you come anywhere near that they'll peck at you so you have to take them out of their little cage where they're

1:11:45 and the coyote tricked the dog into smashing this cage so me and the kids and my wife were playing Or a wrought iron fence, rather. Landed on the top that so the chicken could get, the And so he just used his paws and smashed a hole through the chicken wire And there were some chickens remaining. With fire, all of a sudden we could outsource digestion, cook the food externally so that we could have the amount of calories and nutrition that otherwise—

1:14:29 And computing, for sure, has the biggest ripple effect of our lifetime. But work over the last 20 years has established that when you have a black hole, actually only involves quantum mechanics. And the beautiful thing is the quantum processes in that quantum So there's this bizarre way in which everything that we know about in the world around us It will be the norm.

1:16:56 may bear a profound imprint of the language that we are developing to understand quantum that weighs 4 million times that of the sun. and you squash an orange down sufficiently small, it would become a black hole too with the density of air. whatever mass you want, is less than 2GM over C squared, thinking about gravity and not quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking came along in 1974 and started to inject quantum mechanics into our understanding

1:20:11 It seems to be the case. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey did a wonderful study of a vast number of galaxies. And I've seen these wonderful images where they put like a little red circle around all continue to suck in more material from the environment, they grew larger and larger still. going near the speed of light, billion year journey to traverse. It raced toward planet Earth. When it's about 100,000 light years

1:22:16 Planet Earth shakes the two detectors, one in Louisiana, the other in Washington State, And before the direct radio telescopic imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope that these stellar-sized black holes are actually out there. And then, of course, If those two stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, they can each collapse to a black hole. many people have in mind that black

1:24:20 mass M and a black hole of mass M, they exert the same gravitational pull. Okay, crazy when you say that a hundred billion suns and you have to wrap your head around the idea of a and you put your thumb on a nice clear night And it could be that it's infinite. of course, that leads people to You know, if a meteor hadn't slammed into the earth 65 million years ago, it'd still be the dinosaurs walking around.

1:26:49 really change our sense of cosmic loneliness which is really where we're at at the moment Well, to my mind, that may revolutionize what it means to be a person. And it's going to have this refined capacity to look at planetary atmospheres. aliens right he was like every time a civilization encounters another civilization it's not good for when we had to worry about pirate ships pulling up through our docks.

1:29:50 then maybe it would be Or is it that there are many ways to get living systems and many ways to get intelligent living systems? I have to tell you, you know, because, you know, it's not that there can't be alien life. and making sure we don't blow ourselves up? expose people to things purposefully that I think puts us in a slightly funky context and brings us full circle, if space goes on infinitely far, which is certainly a real possibility, then you can mathematically argue that not only is there other life definitely out there, there are copies of us out there.

1:32:53 Similarly, you're going to have to come back full circle with the particle configuration if you go sufficiently far away. Infinite. The world just doesn't care. It is what it is. because we mean in the observable universe that we have direct access to, and these regions would be too far away. Yeah. That's all I'm doing. occurring not in a distance yeah but you're talking about it almost like in a sort of a

1:36:19 far, they may be connected. There may be a connection between those worlds. They may be the same ideas are us. And they are Yeah, but for any individual experience, as far as we know, each individual psyche traverses one particular trajectory through this reality. a universe where there are multiple versions of you out there in the wider cosmos. we wake up every morning is a reality that we've been experiencing our whole life you know we we shut off and we turn

1:39:05 No, Alzheimer's and yeah, it's, the moment sure i mean all life has some degree of memory, and I'm not saying anything other than that. Yeah. this search for purpose. And so that singular capacity of our brains to stand outside of the We're doing something. Materialism in general fuels innovation because materialism, it makes you want the newest, greatest things.

1:42:30 whether they're innovating personally or whether they're using their labor to fuel with the uh i forget the book yeah that does ring a bell i forget the book yeah That cooked food allowed the brain to grow. it goes off into space. But at some point, we'll fully be able to use the sun's energy. Maybe we'll a version where you'd have all these satellites in a spherical configuration around the sun.

1:45:40 anomalous astronomical observations might be an advanced civilization will. Then we'll control fusion on stellar scales, say through a Dyson sphere, and then we can keep on going. Do you ever contemplate what that looks like, I don't know. And I'm not by any means saying that we shouldn't try to have restrictions and controls that Yeah. What's his name?

1:48:37 And they did that to quite a few people, and a lot of them went mad. elements too like a very hateful like from the time he was young and was abandoned by his uh one who recognized that he was the author of the manifesto, because he knows how crazy psychedelics and maybe it was stories I didn't hear I didn't know about the Ted Kaczynski connection. But certainly there was this irrational paranoia that emerged, you know, I guess in the 60s and 70s and shut down what was incredibly promising research.

1:51:27 some additional substances, we can modify or enhance or enlarge the kinds of narratives that Without discipline, without... And then you've got what Johns Hopkins has done with psilocybin. car accidents, people, soldiers again, who've experienced head injuries, football players, And they were denied the use of them for decades and decades and based on ignorance.

1:54:18 tapping into some other deeper reality, or do you view it, again, as just some product for people who think that there's got to be another realm. The problem That's where it gets really weird. within our own subjective consciousness, In principle, you could imagine the world being constructed that way. Don't get me wrong. way versus stuff that's generated from the inner world itself.

1:58:08 I do, actually. And I think as I get older and I become more aware of my own finite nature, But I do have a hankering. And those were far more enjoyable and mind-expanding. understand the dosage based on your weight, based on how much psilocybin is in whatever substance And they have space weed that really fuck you up. then they have edibles which are a totally different animal because

2:01:45 the individual and guides them yeah on their journey oh yeah they have services like that And the richest experience you get is from layering all those stories on top of one another so you can see the biggest possible narrative of all. Now, if these kind of psychoactive substances can give you new stories that you wouldn't have access to through the traditional

2:03:14 Carl Sagan was a giant fan of marijuana. Paraphrasing. circles with all these musicians and artists and all these different people, because he Yeah, totally. his elegant use of the language to describe it in a way that was so inspiring and so it was so that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously dangerous world this is only one of many quotes that he's had on cannabis because this is not... Scroll up to the top of that.

2:06:13 Oh, no, for a book he wrote in it. Huh. No, it's not the best argument, it was misguided right it was a misguided war yeah i mean in fact i think new york just legalized And it's not toxic and it doesn't kill anybody. but again, the biological variability of people, It just doesn't make any sense. I don't. Yeah. it's done yeah in terms of like the impact that it's had on the businesses and then in turn the

2:09:41 Well, that sounds like a great thing, though. hankering to come back to civilization i'm sure yeah i'm sure but ultimately i think when they We ate every meal together, first couple months yeah we said we were gonna do that movie night somehow it like never fully I think it's his best movie. You watch it going, Jesus! It's about a guy who's a hardcore gambling addict who, you

2:12:11 They don't have some crazy message to them. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. No, no, no. expose my kids to different things yeah Yeah, sure. But limited. And then once we moved to Texas, this year has all been in school. Like, what's going on? So we tested her and like,ingo she had covid and then uh Presbyterian Hospital. And they asked me, you know, where have you been? I said, China,

2:15:14 My wife keeps telling me I should just out of curiosity. we've done it with them and their their antibodies are pretty low i see and they and without the the vaccine no vaccine yeah yeah no jamie's like fucking bulletproof with it he's got that day she's wrecked she's like oh because your body's like overwhelmed with so your immune system is overwhelmed and that's what develops is the uh um resistance to these uh allergies but that night

2:16:58 they're worried about. So that, I mean mean it wasn't available right I mean, because it is a thing that a person can avoid. That's all well and good, anything that he said everybody was like well fuck whatever he said you know like if that wasn't the It's interesting. the study of yeah absolutely i mean it's not as though the kind of science that we do is

2:21:25 They would never know the difference. quantum physics. It's just esoteric. It's just these guys and women who want to understand strange things about particles. I'm interested in the ideas and the insight. accept. I mean, it's tough. I mean, certainly, as you're saying, you know, books and lectures, which feels abstract and difficult, without it feeling like school.

2:24:18 is focused on assessment. Like, what do you think could be done to make it more exciting for kids? We're one of a handful of groups to create a virtual reality experience for middle school kids using the 5G network. or else it goes crashing into the star. Yeah, that's what I wanted to get to. right? You're just measuring it. Sure, totally. I wish I had an answer for you, and that would be part of the development process, you know, to try to find a way.

2:28:14 and it's a real well-developed system 20 years from now, say, and they do it from a really young people took umbrage with was the dr. quantum yeah tune actually those were it put it in a bit more of a narrative. Again, going back to evolutionary psychology, governed by this equation, whatever, if you can put it into a story-like environment, where you kind of have to understand what's going on

2:31:25 kind of give them these little hurdles that they have to solve in order to advance. to have an intuition about that weirdness, like maybe firing a laser down a street but the street is now angled and curved because of the high speed Our journey is helped along incredibly difficult to code right like a virtual reality thing like what kind of a timeline are you

2:33:43 Yeah. Well done. And using these controllers, you can grab hold of those little dust particles and rocks. You know, and as the planet goes into orbit, There you see a black hole. That's the way to do it yeah that's gonna get one of the first ones of those it could probably expand like if you can get it to the point where But it seems like it's not impossible.

2:36:12 You know, this was all done on a machine that would require a couple thousand dollars for you to invest in the computer and the headset. And about a minute or two in, And it was the disparity between her sense of movement in the real world and her sense of movement in the virtual world. Well, my wife similarly will close her eyes if ever there is any strobing of that sort.

2:37:41 So for kids, you just have to be careful that you're not creating something that, you know. For my wife, center into a seizure space, but for other people, it does make them feel sick. so that the environment appears around you I didn't want to get on it because, again, if I get sick on Staten Island Ferry, if I way, if anyone feels sick or panic, there's the escape button at the top.

2:39:59 And I'm the sole person who walks out of the thing because I couldn't handle it, you know. That's the newer one. I don't know if they still have a theme park down there. Like for the kids, just hang on. It's my pleasure. everybody Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Appreciate you, man. Thank you. Bye, everybody. you