April 16, 2020 • 45 mins
Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene’s new book “Until the End of Time” contemplates the entirety of human history and the known universe in a single volume. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe chat with the author about the cosmos, the human experience and science communication during a global pandemic.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're bringing you an interview with the physicist and
author Brian Green. This one was a real treat, except
(00:25):
we did have a major audio snag that did mean
that I was not able to be on the call
during this interview. So if you hear any kind of like, uh,
weird sound shenanigans going on in the moments my questions
come in, will be real with you, it's because I
had to go back and record them later. But Robert,
you you did me a great honor and asking my
questions for me during the interview. Uh, so thank you
(00:47):
for doing that. Uh, Robert, what was it like speaking
to Brian Green? I have to ask, Uh, it was
it was pretty great. I had. I had interviewed him
once before at the World Science Festival. The World Science Festival,
for anyone who who doesn't know and remember, is, uh,
is this awesome gathering of of minds that happens every
year in New York. But then it is then all
(01:09):
these different panel conversations about these mind blowing topics they
go out on the internet, um over you know, the
months to follow, and so I had I had talked
to him briefly about black holes, kind of a rushed,
uh you know, busy kind of interview, and that was
a couple of years ago. But this was this was
a lot more relaxed. Like I was talking from my closet.
(01:31):
He was talking from you know, I think a study
or or or some similar room in his own home.
And so it felt felt a bit more laid back,
uh this time around, though it was of course, you know,
disappointing we weren't able to have you in there as well, Joe.
But more to the point, Brian is just, uh, you know,
a brilliant mind. He's you know, one of the best
(01:53):
known proponents, if not the best known proponent living proponent
of superstring theory. Uh. The co founder of the World's
Fiance Foundation, UH, Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Department of
Mathematics at Columbia University in New York City, and he's
the author of several books, UM The Elegant Universe, in
UM The Fabric of the Cosmos in two thousand four,
(02:15):
Icarus at the Edge of Time in two thousand eight,
which is a children's book. Uh that that you know,
breaks down black holes for young readers. Uh, there's the
hidden reality parallel universes in the Deep Laws of the
Cosmos from eleven and then his latest book. Uh. One
of the main reasons we uh we we decided to
chat with him in this episode until the end of
(02:36):
time mind matter in our search for meaning in an
evolving universe. I really enjoyed this book. One thing I
was surprised by is how many subjects he gets into.
This book is about the idea of of finitude and
impermanence and he so he of course explores physics, you know,
the history of the universe and the future fade of
(02:56):
the universe, uh, in a physical sense, but he also
a lot of time talking about like the social sciences
and the humanities and our obsession with living forever or
or with impermanence and loss and uh. And I found
it a really interesting and actually kind of beautiful book.
Yeah I I'm gonna stress this again during the interview itself,
but if you are hesitant about picking up this book
(03:18):
because you're thinking, oh, it's it's a book by physicist
it's gonna be it's just gonna be a bunch of
physics stuff. It's gonna be about black holes. It's gonna
be hard to relate. No, no, no no, this book is
is very relatable. It's you know, what's somewhere in the
neighborhood of three hundred and something pages, but but covers
a lot of ground and a lot of relatable ground,
getting into you know, at times, how the how, how
(03:40):
the how our brains contemplate the cosmos, where religion comes from, uh,
you know, the the role of scientific investigation in our
sort of h quest to deal with the undeniable reality
of mortality in our lives. Yeah. He even gets into
realms like like philosophy, fee of mind and like you know,
(04:02):
the cognitive science of religion, which we've talked about on
the show a good bit and and uh and mythology
and all that. And I would say I was really impressed.
He does a really good synthesis of complex topics that
are outside his field. And um, I thought it was
just a really thoroughly informative and entertaining, uh journey to
go on. Yeah, And of course, if anyone out there
(04:23):
is is if you are familiar with the World Science Festival,
then you you you get it. You have a taste
of the sort of interest Brian has because you see
the sort of topics that are covered at World Science Festival. Uh,
the diverse array of individuals who are who gathered gathered
there to discuss these topics, and I think that's reflected
in this book especially, so highly recommend the book. It
(04:43):
is available now, I think in all formats you can
get a kindle edition. I think the audio book is available. Uh.
So it's a it's a great book for any time.
I think it's especially a good book, uh for our
current reality. Totally. All right, Well, without further ado, let's
jump into the interview. Brian. Your new book is Until
(05:05):
the End of Time, which is an incredible title because
there's this literal expectation of cracking open a book with
a name like that written by a noted physicist. But
there's there's also the personal aspect of that title and
the religious connotations of the phrase, you know, all of
which are a major part of the book as well.
How did all of this come together in your your
writing of Until the End of Time? Well, it's a
(05:27):
book that I've been thinking about in one form or
another for maybe thirty years, slowly gestating and really recognizing
the power of having a cosmic perspective where you see
your life as we all do in the everyday sense
of human experience, but you're able to tell a parallel
(05:50):
story where you recognize that you are part of this
grand cosmic involting that reaches back to the Big Bang
and goes as far as our equations can take us
into the far future. And the depth of perspective that
that can provide is I think quite gratifying, and that
really was the motivation for writing the book, So that
people can see their lives within a whole variety of stories.
(06:14):
The reductions to count, to the physicist, all the way
to the cosmological account of the astronomer. You eve a
wonderful interconnected tapestry of these subjects. But but I do
wonder did anyone try to dissuade you from writing a
book that covers ultimately the entirety of human history and
the known universe in a single volume. No. But the
usual reaction before had written the book was how many
(06:38):
volumes is it going to be? Is it ten thousand pages?
You know, there was a limit to the number of
words that anybody in a single lifetime will be willing
or able to read. Those sort of equips were quite common,
but the the idea of say a three hundred page book,
an ordinary length book taking on cosmology, the origin of
(07:00):
the universe, the origin of life, the origin of mind,
the meaning of consciousness, theorizing of language, the telling of stories,
the origin of myth, the origins of religion, how that
interweaves with human culture, creative expression, and then onto the
developments from today until time scales that are so fantastically
(07:23):
long that we don't even have names for the numbers
that describe the durations that we're talking about. Yeah, it's
a it's a hefty chronicle. But being able to sit
down and read it in three hundred pages, to me
was the point that you would be able to see
all of these unfoldings in a reasonable period of time
with minimal effort, and to recognize your place within it. Yes,
(07:46):
and I do want to stress to our our readers,
our listeners rather that it is a very very readable book.
It's just there's you know, it contains a dense amount
of information, I guess, but it is um uh one
never feels overwhelmed by all of this data. It's it's
presented in a wonderfully and at times personable way. Yes,
thank you. A core theme of this book is the
(08:07):
concept of entropy. Entropy is kind of the evil sorcerer
driving the magic of impermanence. And I think sometimes people
get confused when they hear about entropy as tending toward disorder.
You know, it's often defined as as the tendency of
things to move into disorder, because order and disorder seem
like subjective concepts depending on human judgment. And in the
(08:30):
book you have a wonderful way of explaining entropy in
terms of statistics. It's a way that makes clear how
it's actually an objective phenomenon, not depending on what feels
orderly to a human observer. Can you explain this here? Yes,
And the quantitative version of entropy does rely upon and
(08:51):
resonate quite strongly with the qualitative version that you just describe.
So roughly speaking, when we talk about entropyople're talking about disorder.
And the second law of thermodynamics is this idea that
things tend to go from order toward disorder. That's the
natural direction in which events unfold. And when you want
(09:13):
to make this more precise, because you're right when you
hear that, you're like, come on, physicists, you're talking about
like order and disorder. You know, there doesn't seem to
be enough rigor in that kind of description, but we
can make it quite rigorous in the following sense. When
things are highly ordered, if you arrange the ingredients, you
(09:33):
typically mess up that order. Right, If your books are
all in nice alphabetical order, someone comes along when you're
not looking and sort of rearranges a few books, it's
obvious that things have changed because they're no longer in
that nice orderly progression from A to Z. So that's
a situation in which there are very few rearrangements that
would leave the system unchanged, And that counting of the
(09:58):
number of rearrangements is what we mean by low disorder.
On the contrary, if those books, if they're all just
kind of, you know, thrown in a heap on your desk,
someone comes along and they rearrange the disordered mess. You'll
never even know that they were there, because that rearrangement
and a whole host of other rearrangements leave the messing
(10:19):
looking heap of books looking like a messy heap of books.
So in that case, there are many rearrangements that leave
the system looking pretty much unchanged. And so what we
physicists do We simply count. It's accounting exercise. Give us
a system, will count how many rearrangements of the ingredients
leave it looking the same unchanged, versus how many leave
(10:40):
it looking changed. And a disordered system high entropy means
there are many rearrangements that have no impact. An ordered
system low entropy means are very few rearrangements that leave
it looking the same. That's how we make it precise.
Why is it that seemingly orderly structures like stars, planets,
and life forms are not violations of the universe's tendency
(11:03):
toward disorder. Yeah, that's the big that's a big puzzle,
and it's certainly an issue that I spend some time
on in the book because it's one of the critical
questions to ask and one of the important questions to answer.
And here's how the answer goes. This law of thermodynamics,
the second law that says that things go from order
(11:25):
to disorder, says that in an overall sense, if you
look at the entirety of a physical system, or let's
just be grandiose, the entirety of the universe. Over time,
the entirety will go from order toward disorder. But that
does not prevent little pockets of order from forming here
(11:45):
and there, so long as in the process of those
orderly formations coming together, they release enough heat and waste
and disorder to the environment to compensate for the order
that happens in that local environment. And stars are the
perfect example. You've got this gas, it's floating in space.
(12:08):
Gravity has the capacity to pull things together, and as
the gas comes together, it ultimately ignites nuclear processes because
it becomes so hot and dense through the gravitational pull,
driving it into an ever smaller region of space. And
that actually is an orderly configuration. But in the process
(12:28):
of that orderly configuration forming, heat and light is given
off by the birth of the star, and that heat
and light spreads to the wider environment, injecting disorder into
the surroundings. And that disorder in the surroundings compensates and
more than compensates for the order that's formed in the
(12:50):
star itself. And I call this the entropic two step.
What it is, it's kind of a dance. Right, you've
got order happening here. Right, you've got disorder happening here.
And if they choreographed their dance in the right way,
then the overall entropy goes up, even though you can
have orderly structures form in the process. Now, some of
(13:11):
my favorite passages in the book concern it's core contemplation
of impermanence. Specifically, when you get into into discussions of
consciousness and the human experience and religion, you write that
you're you remain partial. To Stephen J. Gould's take that quote,
all religion began with an awareness of death. Can you
expound on this, well, Religion is this wondrous, really human
(13:39):
construct that allows us to cope with some of the
most difficult of challenges that we face. In the most
difficult challenge of all is the realization that we are impermanent,
the realization that we will all die. And early on
religion came up with a number of very powerful ways
(14:05):
of dealing with that singular realization. I mean, think about it.
There are species on the planet that react to death,
elephants more, and they're dead. But I don't think that
their elephants that are walking around saying, Wow, I'm going
to die one day, what's the point of being here?
And then what's it all about? I don't think that
they take it in in that way, while we humans do,
(14:26):
and so religion came up with or provided us a
number of ways of dealing with it. I mean, you know,
if you don't view death as the end, if you
view death as a stepping stone to another existence, another life,
well that certainly is is something that is deeply consoling,
right if you think of death as one of a
(14:48):
cycle of births and deaths and rebirths, so that again,
it's just part of this ongoing cyclical process that ultimately
will take it to some promised state of being, some
state of calm, nirvana, whatever you want to call it.
That's another powerful way of dealing with this realization. So
(15:09):
within almost every religion is some means of coping with death.
And that's why Stephen J. Gould described religions as originating
in the realization of our own mortality. And to me,
it's a very powerful tool that some rely upon in
order to cope with a devastating recognition of mortality. And
(15:34):
do you see that as part of the the human condition?
Reflected in the pursuit of science as well. I do
in a different way. We scientists are are driven to
understand where we came from, how we develop, how we evolve,
how the universe will evolve, or driven to find the
deep laws that undergird existence and look. Different scientists will
(15:57):
do this for different reasons, but I can speak personally.
I am driven at a fundamental level by the recognition
of the finite time that I have here, and I
deeply want to know as much as I can about
how I find myself in this predicament at all, and
I want to understand, and it's a beautiful story when
(16:19):
you understand it, how the big bank gave rise to galaxy, stars, planets,
and ultimately life. I deeply want to understand how life
emerge and how consciousness flourishes within certain of those living systems.
I mean, we are conscious beings and that's where our
footprint in reality has it's it's it's impact right without
(16:43):
consciousness says, as a number of great thinkers across the
ages have said, You've got nothing, and so deeply understanding
the sequence of events that led us to this place
where we can look out and wonder and ask questions
and and experience each other and experience beauty to me
(17:03):
in the brief flash of time that I have here,
I want to understand that as fully as possible. So,
you know, there's this wonderful sociology social anthropologist Ernest Becker
who had a great impact on me back when I
read his work, and I guess it was the seventies
and eighties, a long time ago now. And you know
he said in a book called The Denial of Death
(17:24):
that all of human activity can be traced to trying
to cope with this realization that we have these minds
that can soar to the edge of the universe, and
yet after a century we are put into the ground
and we're turned into dust. That is a stunning collision
(17:44):
of perspectives, and we struggle to make sense of it.
All right, we need to take a quick break, but
we will be right back with more. And we're back
in chapter seven, Brains and Belief. You follow the evolution
of religious thought and you compare it to scientific investigation,
specifically mathematics and physics. Could you speak to the basic
(18:08):
similarities as you see them, between Eastern religious cosmologies and science,
as well as where the often popularized similarities end. Well,
that's right. So a lot of people are fond of
citing parallels between insights that emerged from Eastern religions, Eastern philosophies,
(18:30):
and things that have emerged in science, and in fact,
in the book I describe a little bit of how
you know, My older brother is Hari Krishna devotee and
has been for decades, and certainly in the early days
of his involvement in that practice, when we would talk
(18:52):
about work I was doing in cosmology or physics, it
was not infrequent for him to say to made, we
already know all that you know. It's in this or
that Vedic text, which I found both curious and frustrating
at the same time. And when I followed some of
those through I understood where he was coming from. There
(19:15):
is a resonance of of language and perspective that you
do find between some of the things that we seek
and some of the things that have been sought after
by thinkers throughout the ages. We asked similar questions. In science,
we answer those questions with mathematics and with experiment and
(19:35):
with observation, and that's the way in which we feel
that we're making progress. And we can write down an
equation that can predict things about the universe that happened,
you know, billions of years ago, and then we look
out in the night sky to see what we think
should be the remnant of those processes from thirteen billion
years ago. And when we see those things out in
(19:56):
the night sky today, we say, wow. We we we
seem to understand something may not be the full truth,
but we're heading towards truth. And and the issue with
Eastern philosophy and Eastern religions is much of it emerges
from introspection, from an inner journey to understand the human
(20:17):
reaction to the universe. And so the barometer of of
success and truth is quite different. The barometer of truth is,
you know, does it feel right? Does it seem that
this gives me a better sense of how I fit
within the wider world. Those are important questions, but they're
different questions from the ones that we answer, or at
(20:38):
least try to answer in science. And I would stress
right here, and this is vitally. I think both are
crucial to having a full experience of the world. If
you stop with understanding the objective world through the language
of mathematics and observation and experiment. That's all that you do.
You've cut off the dominant thing that makes us who
(21:01):
we are, which is our inner world, our inner experience.
So I think you really need to blend the insights
from all of these perspectives in order to have the
fullest experience of reality. In one of the early chapters
of the book, you mentioned as an aside that physicists
use not just what they know, not just proven theories
and mathematical reasoning to drive their research focus, but also
(21:23):
what you call a hard to describe intuitive mathematical sensibility. Now,
I know you say it's hard to describe, but can
you talk anymore about this kind of physicist's intuition. Yeah,
I thought I was getting myself off the hook by
objecting the hard to explain there, But but I'll do
my best. When you're trained in the language of mathematics,
(21:45):
you acquire a sense of which mathematical sentences are good,
ones are sharp, ones are effective, ones are economical, ones
are beautiful, ones are elegant ones. It's like in England,
it's like we all are trained in a natural language.
I mean, you and I both speak English, maybe speak
(22:06):
other languages too. But in English, we can recognize those
sentences that are are special. Right. We can reach Shakespeare
and we recognize what a turn of phrase that was
in king Lear, Or we can read Whitman and say, Wow,
what a collection of words to put together in that
(22:27):
line of that poem and say leaves of grants or
whatever it is that moves us. Similarly, we can do
that as as scientists, as as mathematicians. And what we
have found, and this is the danger this is the
danger zone. What we found over the years is that
those mathematical sentences that have the cleanest, most economical, widest
(22:51):
explanatory reach, with the fewest number of assumptions, the fewest
number of instructions, other sentences that you need to combine
the with to make sense of them, they seem to
be the mathematical sences that describe reality. And why I
say that's dangerous is because it could easily be that
our mathematical aesthetic sensibility changes over time so that those
(23:18):
sentences and math that have proven relevant to the world
are the ones that strike us as beautiful and elegant.
It could well be this feedback loop, and so you
have to be very careful using this approach in trying
to go forward and understanding things. But when you're doing
your cutting into research at the frontier of understanding and
(23:40):
you don't have experiment, you don't have observation yet to
guide you, that mathematical aesthetic sense is what we often
do make use of in order to go forward. So
you've at times described yourself as a reductionist in common usage,
I think this label is often a pejorative. It's um
(24:00):
It's what you call somebody when you mean that they're
ignoring important qualities, nuances, or context in the course of
explaining something. Obviously you don't mean it in this pejorative sense.
So what is the scientific project of reductionism and how
does it influence the way you see the world. Well,
the project is quite straightforward. It's attempting to reduce reductionism,
(24:22):
trying to reduce all physical phenomenon, matter, and the processes
that happen in the world, reduce them to their most
fundamental ingredients, the most fundamental constituents, and the fundamental laws
that govern how those constituents interact with each other, how
they come together into larger agglomerations that ultimately yield structures
(24:42):
like stars, desks, planets, microphones, computer screens, and everything else
we experience in the world around us. Now, you're right,
the phrase reductionists is often used as a pejorative, and
the reason for that is partly maybe one of our
own making. Sometimes we scientists, when we speak of reductionism,
(25:04):
we end the conversation with the reductionists perspective, as if
that's all you ever need to know to understand the
deep qualities of reality. What we really mean by that,
or again, maybe I should speak for myself. People have
different views. What I mean by that is the reductionist
account the ingredients and the laws provides the rock bottom
(25:27):
substrate on which reality is then built. And I fully
do believe that everything, people to planets are nothing but
collections of particles, large collections governed by physical law. But
I also saying, exactly the same breath, with the same
level of intensity, that you need to invoke other layers
(25:51):
of description that are more appropriate to the kinds of
questions that may interest you at other layers of reality.
So the chemist comes along and says, yeah, you physicists,
you talk about those fundamental particles, but I want to
talk about things that the level of Adams and molecules. Fantastic.
The biologists comes along and says, look, your physicists, you
chemist assured, but I want to talk about things at
(26:12):
the level of cells and organelles and the processes that
are underlying life. And yes, that's the right language and
the right level of description to use. And the psychologist
comes along, and the neuroscientist comes along and says, I
want to understand things at the level of human experience,
like what's happening in the brain, and so those are
(26:33):
the ingredients, and that's the language that those scientists and
those thinkers will use. And then the philosophers and the
humanists come along and they say, great, you physicists and scientists,
you talk about the underlying structure, but I want to
talk about things like human reflection and love and grief
and and achievement and aspiration and and all those things
(26:55):
that occur up here at the human level, and you
should use that language, and you should describe reality in
those terms. It wouldn't make any sense to talk about
the experience of grief at the level of atoms, molecules, particles,
and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, right, You wouldn't gain the
(27:15):
kind of insight that you want. But the point that
I make in the book is that these stories are
not distinct in the sense that the physicists reductionist account
threads through all of those stories, and it can give
you surprising insights even up here at the human level.
I would never want to use it as a substitute
(27:38):
for Shakespeare, or for Rembrandt, or for Picasso, the or Beethoven,
the kinds of creations that deeply affect us as human beings.
I don't want to describe that in terms of molecules
and atoms, but in principle you could, and that, in
principle can give you some insights into particular the issue
of free will and so so there are connections between
(28:01):
these stories. But if you leave out the upper levels
and you focus solely on the reductions account, you deserve
to use it as a pejorative because you're missing out
on so many other qualities that are better described in
different languages. Let's talk about entropy in the long term
fate of the universe. What is the fate ultimately of
(28:21):
beings that can think, well, it's a question that we
can address, at least under the assumption that our current
understanding of the laws of physics and our current understanding
of the matter that makes up reality, that that is
a good description that will continue to hold arbitrarily far
into the future. If it doesn't, then then radically different
(28:44):
things might happen, but we'll be shooting in the dark
with our current level of understanding to conjecture what those
alternative futures might be. So if you grant me that
that I can use my current understanding of things to
go forward, then you can show that rough by about
ten to the fifty or so years from now. It's
a big number, right, We're now about ten to the
(29:06):
ten years from the Big Bang, and that difference of
forty is in the exponent so it's not forty more years, right,
it's multiplying it by tent at the forty, which is
a huge factor. So very very far in the future.
You can argue, as actually Freeman Dyson, great physicist, once did,
that the process of thought considered to be a process
of computation, and that's really what each individual thought is.
(29:29):
It's taken some inputs and it's yielding some outputs. That
physical process necessarily is an entropically increasing process. Second, thermodynamics
which means it necessarily yields waste heat, and that waste
heat needs to be admitted to the wider world. And
we do that all the time. Right, if you had
(29:50):
a nice infrared camera on me right now, in my head,
I'm thinking hard to answer your questions, and you'd see
the this heat coming off of my head. Right, we
know that like the military infrared goggles, you know of
that imagery that that you can see that heat emanating
from biological source. Now in the far future, you can
argue that the universe at some point will not be
able to absorb that heat. It will be kind of
(30:11):
stuffed with as much as it can hold. And at
that point, if a thinking being thinks one more thought,
it will not be able to admit the heat, so
it will burn up in the tropic waste generated by
the very process of thought itself. So that's the sense
in which thought will come to an end under the
(30:32):
assumptions that we're making. Thought is not something that will
be able to last into eternity. And does that does
that change the way you or or affect the way
you view the you know, our current lives. So does
that make what we do, you know? Pointless? Or does
it make what we do more beautiful? I know you
get into this a little bit in the book. I do,
(30:53):
and in many ways it's the main point of the
whole narrative is to address that question, because a natural reaction,
certainly is, you know, if it's all going to go away,
if matter is going to disintegrate, if everythinking being will
ultimately I think it's final thought, then what's the point
(31:16):
of it all? Because I think many of us, and
certainly I, for a long time, even if implicitly, imagine
that the importance of a life or thinking personally in
my own life is that I'd leave some kind of mark,
some kind of legacy, either through my family, my kids,
(31:37):
or maybe through my work or through some kind of
interaction that would continue to ripple through the unfolding of
the future, having less and less impact over time, but
nevertheless still having an imprint out there, even if just
in some modest implicit way. But if there's no thinking
(31:59):
beings left in the far future, like like, what's the point?
And I went through a dark period in my own
life coming into terms with this question, but ultimately had
kind of I don't I don't know what the right
word is and epiphany, uh, a spiritual moment. I'm not
(32:19):
sure what the right language is, but there was a
moment when I kind of shifted my perspective radically and
quickly to the recognition that it's actually more powerful to
recognize that we have this little cosmic oasis in the
unfolding of the universe in which living beings and thinking
beings can exist. It's as if the universe rises up
(32:42):
for a brief moment and is able to look around
and contemplate itself, and we are the beings that allow
that contemplation to take place. And when you do that
contemplation and recognize that you are the result of quantum
processes stretching back to the beginning each you which that
could have turned out like that way instead of this
(33:02):
yielding a world in which we would not be here.
You recognize it's astonishing that we are here, against astounding odds,
we exist. And it's even more than that we are
these special collections that can think and reflect and we
can we can do things right. We can have these conversations,
we can join into powerful coalitions that can do things
(33:26):
that the individual would be unable to write. We can
build the pyramids, we can we can write Beethoven's Ninth
sent And if you allow us to take credit as
a species, right we we can figure out the equations
of quantum mechanics, the equations of the general theory of relativity,
allowing us to figure out all these qualities of the universe.
(33:46):
And to me, that just fills me with gratitude for
being here at all. So, rather than sort of looking
to the future or looking to some deity to bestow
meaning upon us, we recognize that we are empowered to
find our own meaning. That's the only place that meaning
is going to come from. And when we do come
to terms with what matters to us in the here
(34:09):
and now, it's a more powerful version of meaning because
it's organic, it comes from ourselves. We manufacture it, for sure.
But how wonderful that we can manufacture it. How wonderful
that the collection of particles can ask these questions and
come to answers, even if our presence in the universe
(34:29):
is fleeting. It's such a powerful sentiment, such a powerful
view of things. I mean, it's for the century, but
but but even like specifically to what everyone is going
through right now, I think, yeah, for sure, I mean,
we are in an astonishing, devastating, painful, tragic era right
(34:52):
now that we hope will pass, of course, but I
do find solace in taking this cosmic perspective. It doesn't
take away the pain. Nothing will you lose a loved one,
Nothing will take away that pain. Time can sometimes heal,
but nothing can or should take away that pain. But
(35:14):
if at the same time you can take a step
back and see the cosmic perspective, recognize that there is
this little piece of the cosmos that we inhabit in
both space and time, and how wondrous that is. I
think there's a degree of solace. Doesn't take away the tragedy,
(35:36):
but there's a degree of solace that that can provide,
which I think is quite powerful. All Right, we need
to take a quick break, but we will be right
back with more than and we're back now. You're, of
course the the co founder of the World Science Festival, uh,
something that I look forward to every year, Such a
wonderful collection of great minds coming together to discuss sign
(36:00):
centific topics. Um. But of course you had to make
a very understandable call to cancel the live portions of
the through event this year. Can can you touch on
on what the current or emerging plans are for for
online presentations. Well, the idea is to see this as
(36:21):
both the challenge and an opportunity for the Festival to
create a new kind of program And what really distinguished us,
say thirteen years ago when we began the Live Festival.
At that time there was not as much live event
focus as there is today, and we were kind of
(36:42):
a pioneer in taking ideas that are normally viewed as
sort of abstract and not for general consumption, and through
the clever and powerful production techniques of Tracy Day, the
other co founder who really cut her tea fin some
of the best broadcast television you know, from Nightline and
(37:05):
programs on CNN and things of that sort, to take
those techniques and to create live programming that people would
totally be immersed even if they had no background in
cosmology or neuroscience or astronomy or you know, personalized medicine
or you know, topics across the board. So now we're
changing gears and trying to find a new way of
(37:28):
doing digital programming that will inject that same kind of
creative focus to bring these intellectual ideas out to the public,
and you know, independent of the current crisis. We began
this already, so we feel like we're well equipped to
do so. We had I don't know if you saw it,
but last maye we had a special on PBS. It
(37:49):
was our first broadcast special. It was a live theatrical
exploration of Einstein's discovery of the general theory of relativity.
And you know, we seemed up with some of the
greatest artists in the live theatrical space, together with great
performances on PBS, to film in a manner a live
(38:10):
presentation that would work on a two dimensional screen and
through interesting visuals and through a powerful musical score, and
through taking the ideas of general relativity and making them
widely accessible, I think we've created a very different experience
of einsteience discovery. So that's the direction that we're head.
Not with that level of production for every event that
(38:32):
will put online, for sure, but that's our thinking to
inject a new level of creativity into online programming dealing
with scientific subjects. That's awesome because that's that's that's one
of the things I really love about the world Sciencestful
every years that you you know, you you bring in art,
you bring in music, and then in terms of the
all these great minds that come together to discuss it,
You're you're bringing in you know, scientist, biologist, physicists. You know,
(38:56):
you're bringing in occasionally philosophers or even the fel Gen
thrown into the mix to tackle these these you know,
at times just staggering questions about the cosmos and the
human condition. Exactly right, Yes, that's that's the philosophy, you know,
to to bring together great thinkers that done often talk
to each other, and to structure the conversation in a
(39:18):
way that the novice can feel that they're part of
the exploration. Now you you launched a web series on March,
I Believe Your Daily Equation, which is available via World
Science Festival dot com but also the World Science Festival
YouTube page. Can you discuss your inspiration for this series
and and just tell us how it's been going. Well,
(39:38):
it was just a lark off the top of the head.
We're having a conversation one day about you know. Typically
World Science Festival programs involve a lot of productions. It
takes a long time to create them. And I said, well,
now there's an opportunity to go to the other direction.
What if I just turned on my my webcam thing
(39:59):
and just each day talk about a new equation and
we're like, yeah, sure, why not go for it? So
so that's all it is. So there's literally no production.
I film it right here and each day I just
think about, Hey, what what equation would be kind of
fun to describe to somebody who likes the ideas of
(40:20):
science but math is not really their thing, but they
might get a kick out of seeing the actual symbols
that are behind the scenes and gaining a quick understanding
of what they are. So we started with equals MC squared.
How could you not? So I sort of explained that,
and then did a bunch of equations in relativity time
slowing down lengths being contracted for an object in motion,
(40:44):
and uh, then I've moved on to quantum mechanics. So
I've been sort of doing the very basic equations of
quantumic acts and I find it fun, and you know,
the audience that is sticking with me, You know, daily
equation is not exactly the title that may appeal to
the mass of public out there, but there are there
(41:05):
are people for whom that idea is a kick and
I think we're all just having a good time, and
it's a sense of a little sense of community, a
sense of a small group of folks who come together
each day just to put the news to the side,
put all the difficult stuff to the side, and just
think about these simple, beautiful equations that touch on things
(41:27):
that transcend all of us. Yeah, that's great. We we
do really need content like that right now. Um On,
on the other hand, do do you feel that the
world's current struggle with the pandemic do you think it's
had it's it's it has sharpened or is sharpening the
public's appreciation for science and the importance of science communication. Well,
(41:47):
I'd like to say yes, but my experience is that
even in the face of great tragedy, when it passes,
people tend to revert to their more conventional ways of
thinking about things. And it is awful that we have leaders.
And this is the main thing. It's all of that
(42:09):
we leaders who for the past number of years have
been casting aspersions on science, detegrating scientists, and substituting opinion
for observation, fact, data, and analysis. That I hope will change.
But the easiest way to change that of course is
a change of leadership, because most leaders of the world
(42:34):
recognize the power that science provides us for figuring out
the right path forward on a variety of issues that
will determine our fate. And it's just tragic that there
are leaders who don't think that way. All right, Well,
the book is Until the End of Time. It's it's
out now, and yeah, I just want to just drive
(42:55):
home just how how wonderful this book is. We're just
really thrilled to help, at least in some small way,
boost the signal on this one that you know, let
our listeners know that they should they should check it out.
It's just it's just really excellent. Thank you, Brian. Thanks
for taking time out of your data to chat with me.
This has been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Enjoyed
it all right, So there you have it. Thanks again
(43:18):
to Brian Green for dropping by the show to discuss
his new book, Until the End of Time, Mind Matter
in our Search for Meaning in an evolving universe. It's
it's a brand new book just came out here in
available I believe in pretty much all formats right now.
So if you want to listen to it, if you
want to read it, uh digitally or in a physical copy.
(43:41):
You should be able to get your hands on it. Yeah.
I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too. Yeah,
and keep an eye on World Science Festival because, like
Brian said, they're gonna be busting out some some online
content this year. So the same sort of great discussions
that they've had in previous years they're going to offer again,
but of course, due to our current circumstances, is going
(44:01):
to be in a slightly altered form. In the meantime,
if you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever
you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
Just make sure that you rate your review and you
subscribe huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
(44:23):
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi,
you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your minds production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you
(44:45):
listening to your favorite shows has found by a bottle
prote
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're bringing you an interview with the physicist and
author Brian Green. This one was a real treat, except
(00:25):
we did have a major audio snag that did mean
that I was not able to be on the call
during this interview. So if you hear any kind of like, uh,
weird sound shenanigans going on in the moments my questions
come in, will be real with you, it's because I
had to go back and record them later. But Robert,
you you did me a great honor and asking my
questions for me during the interview. Uh, so thank you
(00:47):
for doing that. Uh, Robert, what was it like speaking
to Brian Green? I have to ask, Uh, it was
it was pretty great. I had. I had interviewed him
once before at the World Science Festival. The World Science Festival,
for anyone who who doesn't know and remember, is, uh,
is this awesome gathering of of minds that happens every
year in New York. But then it is then all
(01:09):
these different panel conversations about these mind blowing topics they
go out on the internet, um over you know, the
months to follow, and so I had I had talked
to him briefly about black holes, kind of a rushed,
uh you know, busy kind of interview, and that was
a couple of years ago. But this was this was
a lot more relaxed. Like I was talking from my closet.
(01:31):
He was talking from you know, I think a study
or or or some similar room in his own home.
And so it felt felt a bit more laid back,
uh this time around, though it was of course, you know,
disappointing we weren't able to have you in there as well, Joe.
But more to the point, Brian is just, uh, you know,
a brilliant mind. He's you know, one of the best
(01:53):
known proponents, if not the best known proponent living proponent
of superstring theory. Uh. The co founder of the World's
Fiance Foundation, UH, Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Department of
Mathematics at Columbia University in New York City, and he's
the author of several books, UM The Elegant Universe, in
UM The Fabric of the Cosmos in two thousand four,
(02:15):
Icarus at the Edge of Time in two thousand eight,
which is a children's book. Uh that that you know,
breaks down black holes for young readers. Uh, there's the
hidden reality parallel universes in the Deep Laws of the
Cosmos from eleven and then his latest book. Uh. One
of the main reasons we uh we we decided to
chat with him in this episode until the end of
(02:36):
time mind matter in our search for meaning in an
evolving universe. I really enjoyed this book. One thing I
was surprised by is how many subjects he gets into.
This book is about the idea of of finitude and
impermanence and he so he of course explores physics, you know,
the history of the universe and the future fade of
(02:56):
the universe, uh, in a physical sense, but he also
a lot of time talking about like the social sciences
and the humanities and our obsession with living forever or
or with impermanence and loss and uh. And I found
it a really interesting and actually kind of beautiful book.
Yeah I I'm gonna stress this again during the interview itself,
but if you are hesitant about picking up this book
(03:18):
because you're thinking, oh, it's it's a book by physicist
it's gonna be it's just gonna be a bunch of
physics stuff. It's gonna be about black holes. It's gonna
be hard to relate. No, no, no no, this book is
is very relatable. It's you know, what's somewhere in the
neighborhood of three hundred and something pages, but but covers
a lot of ground and a lot of relatable ground,
getting into you know, at times, how the how, how
(03:40):
the how our brains contemplate the cosmos, where religion comes from, uh,
you know, the the role of scientific investigation in our
sort of h quest to deal with the undeniable reality
of mortality in our lives. Yeah. He even gets into
realms like like philosophy, fee of mind and like you know,
(04:02):
the cognitive science of religion, which we've talked about on
the show a good bit and and uh and mythology
and all that. And I would say I was really impressed.
He does a really good synthesis of complex topics that
are outside his field. And um, I thought it was
just a really thoroughly informative and entertaining, uh journey to
go on. Yeah, And of course, if anyone out there
(04:23):
is is if you are familiar with the World Science Festival,
then you you you get it. You have a taste
of the sort of interest Brian has because you see
the sort of topics that are covered at World Science Festival. Uh,
the diverse array of individuals who are who gathered gathered
there to discuss these topics, and I think that's reflected
in this book especially, so highly recommend the book. It
(04:43):
is available now, I think in all formats you can
get a kindle edition. I think the audio book is available. Uh.
So it's a it's a great book for any time.
I think it's especially a good book, uh for our
current reality. Totally. All right, Well, without further ado, let's
jump into the interview. Brian. Your new book is Until
(05:05):
the End of Time, which is an incredible title because
there's this literal expectation of cracking open a book with
a name like that written by a noted physicist. But
there's there's also the personal aspect of that title and
the religious connotations of the phrase, you know, all of
which are a major part of the book as well.
How did all of this come together in your your
writing of Until the End of Time? Well, it's a
(05:27):
book that I've been thinking about in one form or
another for maybe thirty years, slowly gestating and really recognizing
the power of having a cosmic perspective where you see
your life as we all do in the everyday sense
of human experience, but you're able to tell a parallel
(05:50):
story where you recognize that you are part of this
grand cosmic involting that reaches back to the Big Bang
and goes as far as our equations can take us
into the far future. And the depth of perspective that
that can provide is I think quite gratifying, and that
really was the motivation for writing the book, So that
people can see their lives within a whole variety of stories.
(06:14):
The reductions to count, to the physicist, all the way
to the cosmological account of the astronomer. You eve a
wonderful interconnected tapestry of these subjects. But but I do
wonder did anyone try to dissuade you from writing a
book that covers ultimately the entirety of human history and
the known universe in a single volume. No. But the
usual reaction before had written the book was how many
(06:38):
volumes is it going to be? Is it ten thousand pages?
You know, there was a limit to the number of
words that anybody in a single lifetime will be willing
or able to read. Those sort of equips were quite common,
but the the idea of say a three hundred page book,
an ordinary length book taking on cosmology, the origin of
(07:00):
the universe, the origin of life, the origin of mind,
the meaning of consciousness, theorizing of language, the telling of stories,
the origin of myth, the origins of religion, how that
interweaves with human culture, creative expression, and then onto the
developments from today until time scales that are so fantastically
(07:23):
long that we don't even have names for the numbers
that describe the durations that we're talking about. Yeah, it's
a it's a hefty chronicle. But being able to sit
down and read it in three hundred pages, to me
was the point that you would be able to see
all of these unfoldings in a reasonable period of time
with minimal effort, and to recognize your place within it. Yes,
(07:46):
and I do want to stress to our our readers,
our listeners rather that it is a very very readable book.
It's just there's you know, it contains a dense amount
of information, I guess, but it is um uh one
never feels overwhelmed by all of this data. It's it's
presented in a wonderfully and at times personable way. Yes,
thank you. A core theme of this book is the
(08:07):
concept of entropy. Entropy is kind of the evil sorcerer
driving the magic of impermanence. And I think sometimes people
get confused when they hear about entropy as tending toward disorder.
You know, it's often defined as as the tendency of
things to move into disorder, because order and disorder seem
like subjective concepts depending on human judgment. And in the
(08:30):
book you have a wonderful way of explaining entropy in
terms of statistics. It's a way that makes clear how
it's actually an objective phenomenon, not depending on what feels
orderly to a human observer. Can you explain this here? Yes,
And the quantitative version of entropy does rely upon and
(08:51):
resonate quite strongly with the qualitative version that you just describe.
So roughly speaking, when we talk about entropyople're talking about disorder.
And the second law of thermodynamics is this idea that
things tend to go from order toward disorder. That's the
natural direction in which events unfold. And when you want
(09:13):
to make this more precise, because you're right when you
hear that, you're like, come on, physicists, you're talking about
like order and disorder. You know, there doesn't seem to
be enough rigor in that kind of description, but we
can make it quite rigorous in the following sense. When
things are highly ordered, if you arrange the ingredients, you
(09:33):
typically mess up that order. Right, If your books are
all in nice alphabetical order, someone comes along when you're
not looking and sort of rearranges a few books, it's
obvious that things have changed because they're no longer in
that nice orderly progression from A to Z. So that's
a situation in which there are very few rearrangements that
would leave the system unchanged, And that counting of the
(09:58):
number of rearrangements is what we mean by low disorder.
On the contrary, if those books, if they're all just
kind of, you know, thrown in a heap on your desk,
someone comes along and they rearrange the disordered mess. You'll
never even know that they were there, because that rearrangement
and a whole host of other rearrangements leave the messing
(10:19):
looking heap of books looking like a messy heap of books.
So in that case, there are many rearrangements that leave
the system looking pretty much unchanged. And so what we
physicists do We simply count. It's accounting exercise. Give us
a system, will count how many rearrangements of the ingredients
leave it looking the same unchanged, versus how many leave
(10:40):
it looking changed. And a disordered system high entropy means
there are many rearrangements that have no impact. An ordered
system low entropy means are very few rearrangements that leave
it looking the same. That's how we make it precise.
Why is it that seemingly orderly structures like stars, planets,
and life forms are not violations of the universe's tendency
(11:03):
toward disorder. Yeah, that's the big that's a big puzzle,
and it's certainly an issue that I spend some time
on in the book because it's one of the critical
questions to ask and one of the important questions to answer.
And here's how the answer goes. This law of thermodynamics,
the second law that says that things go from order
(11:25):
to disorder, says that in an overall sense, if you
look at the entirety of a physical system, or let's
just be grandiose, the entirety of the universe. Over time,
the entirety will go from order toward disorder. But that
does not prevent little pockets of order from forming here
(11:45):
and there, so long as in the process of those
orderly formations coming together, they release enough heat and waste
and disorder to the environment to compensate for the order
that happens in that local environment. And stars are the
perfect example. You've got this gas, it's floating in space.
(12:08):
Gravity has the capacity to pull things together, and as
the gas comes together, it ultimately ignites nuclear processes because
it becomes so hot and dense through the gravitational pull,
driving it into an ever smaller region of space. And
that actually is an orderly configuration. But in the process
(12:28):
of that orderly configuration forming, heat and light is given
off by the birth of the star, and that heat
and light spreads to the wider environment, injecting disorder into
the surroundings. And that disorder in the surroundings compensates and
more than compensates for the order that's formed in the
(12:50):
star itself. And I call this the entropic two step.
What it is, it's kind of a dance. Right, you've
got order happening here. Right, you've got disorder happening here.
And if they choreographed their dance in the right way,
then the overall entropy goes up, even though you can
have orderly structures form in the process. Now, some of
(13:11):
my favorite passages in the book concern it's core contemplation
of impermanence. Specifically, when you get into into discussions of
consciousness and the human experience and religion, you write that
you're you remain partial. To Stephen J. Gould's take that quote,
all religion began with an awareness of death. Can you
expound on this, well, Religion is this wondrous, really human
(13:39):
construct that allows us to cope with some of the
most difficult of challenges that we face. In the most
difficult challenge of all is the realization that we are impermanent,
the realization that we will all die. And early on
religion came up with a number of very powerful ways
(14:05):
of dealing with that singular realization. I mean, think about it.
There are species on the planet that react to death,
elephants more, and they're dead. But I don't think that
their elephants that are walking around saying, Wow, I'm going
to die one day, what's the point of being here?
And then what's it all about? I don't think that
they take it in in that way, while we humans do,
(14:26):
and so religion came up with or provided us a
number of ways of dealing with it. I mean, you know,
if you don't view death as the end, if you
view death as a stepping stone to another existence, another life,
well that certainly is is something that is deeply consoling,
right if you think of death as one of a
(14:48):
cycle of births and deaths and rebirths, so that again,
it's just part of this ongoing cyclical process that ultimately
will take it to some promised state of being, some
state of calm, nirvana, whatever you want to call it.
That's another powerful way of dealing with this realization. So
(15:09):
within almost every religion is some means of coping with death.
And that's why Stephen J. Gould described religions as originating
in the realization of our own mortality. And to me,
it's a very powerful tool that some rely upon in
order to cope with a devastating recognition of mortality. And
(15:34):
do you see that as part of the the human condition?
Reflected in the pursuit of science as well. I do
in a different way. We scientists are are driven to
understand where we came from, how we develop, how we evolve,
how the universe will evolve, or driven to find the
deep laws that undergird existence and look. Different scientists will
(15:57):
do this for different reasons, but I can speak personally.
I am driven at a fundamental level by the recognition
of the finite time that I have here, and I
deeply want to know as much as I can about
how I find myself in this predicament at all, and
I want to understand, and it's a beautiful story when
(16:19):
you understand it, how the big bank gave rise to galaxy, stars, planets,
and ultimately life. I deeply want to understand how life
emerge and how consciousness flourishes within certain of those living systems.
I mean, we are conscious beings and that's where our
footprint in reality has it's it's it's impact right without
(16:43):
consciousness says, as a number of great thinkers across the
ages have said, You've got nothing, and so deeply understanding
the sequence of events that led us to this place
where we can look out and wonder and ask questions
and and experience each other and experience beauty to me
(17:03):
in the brief flash of time that I have here,
I want to understand that as fully as possible. So,
you know, there's this wonderful sociology social anthropologist Ernest Becker
who had a great impact on me back when I
read his work, and I guess it was the seventies
and eighties, a long time ago now. And you know
he said in a book called The Denial of Death
(17:24):
that all of human activity can be traced to trying
to cope with this realization that we have these minds
that can soar to the edge of the universe, and
yet after a century we are put into the ground
and we're turned into dust. That is a stunning collision
(17:44):
of perspectives, and we struggle to make sense of it.
All right, we need to take a quick break, but
we will be right back with more. And we're back
in chapter seven, Brains and Belief. You follow the evolution
of religious thought and you compare it to scientific investigation,
specifically mathematics and physics. Could you speak to the basic
(18:08):
similarities as you see them, between Eastern religious cosmologies and science,
as well as where the often popularized similarities end. Well,
that's right. So a lot of people are fond of
citing parallels between insights that emerged from Eastern religions, Eastern philosophies,
(18:30):
and things that have emerged in science, and in fact,
in the book I describe a little bit of how
you know, My older brother is Hari Krishna devotee and
has been for decades, and certainly in the early days
of his involvement in that practice, when we would talk
(18:52):
about work I was doing in cosmology or physics, it
was not infrequent for him to say to made, we
already know all that you know. It's in this or
that Vedic text, which I found both curious and frustrating
at the same time. And when I followed some of
those through I understood where he was coming from. There
(19:15):
is a resonance of of language and perspective that you
do find between some of the things that we seek
and some of the things that have been sought after
by thinkers throughout the ages. We asked similar questions. In science,
we answer those questions with mathematics and with experiment and
(19:35):
with observation, and that's the way in which we feel
that we're making progress. And we can write down an
equation that can predict things about the universe that happened,
you know, billions of years ago, and then we look
out in the night sky to see what we think
should be the remnant of those processes from thirteen billion
years ago. And when we see those things out in
(19:56):
the night sky today, we say, wow. We we we
seem to understand something may not be the full truth,
but we're heading towards truth. And and the issue with
Eastern philosophy and Eastern religions is much of it emerges
from introspection, from an inner journey to understand the human
(20:17):
reaction to the universe. And so the barometer of of
success and truth is quite different. The barometer of truth is,
you know, does it feel right? Does it seem that
this gives me a better sense of how I fit
within the wider world. Those are important questions, but they're
different questions from the ones that we answer, or at
(20:38):
least try to answer in science. And I would stress
right here, and this is vitally. I think both are
crucial to having a full experience of the world. If
you stop with understanding the objective world through the language
of mathematics and observation and experiment. That's all that you do.
You've cut off the dominant thing that makes us who
(21:01):
we are, which is our inner world, our inner experience.
So I think you really need to blend the insights
from all of these perspectives in order to have the
fullest experience of reality. In one of the early chapters
of the book, you mentioned as an aside that physicists
use not just what they know, not just proven theories
and mathematical reasoning to drive their research focus, but also
(21:23):
what you call a hard to describe intuitive mathematical sensibility. Now,
I know you say it's hard to describe, but can
you talk anymore about this kind of physicist's intuition. Yeah,
I thought I was getting myself off the hook by
objecting the hard to explain there, But but I'll do
my best. When you're trained in the language of mathematics,
(21:45):
you acquire a sense of which mathematical sentences are good,
ones are sharp, ones are effective, ones are economical, ones
are beautiful, ones are elegant ones. It's like in England,
it's like we all are trained in a natural language.
I mean, you and I both speak English, maybe speak
(22:06):
other languages too. But in English, we can recognize those
sentences that are are special. Right. We can reach Shakespeare
and we recognize what a turn of phrase that was
in king Lear, Or we can read Whitman and say, Wow,
what a collection of words to put together in that
(22:27):
line of that poem and say leaves of grants or
whatever it is that moves us. Similarly, we can do
that as as scientists, as as mathematicians. And what we
have found, and this is the danger this is the
danger zone. What we found over the years is that
those mathematical sentences that have the cleanest, most economical, widest
(22:51):
explanatory reach, with the fewest number of assumptions, the fewest
number of instructions, other sentences that you need to combine
the with to make sense of them, they seem to
be the mathematical sences that describe reality. And why I
say that's dangerous is because it could easily be that
our mathematical aesthetic sensibility changes over time so that those
(23:18):
sentences and math that have proven relevant to the world
are the ones that strike us as beautiful and elegant.
It could well be this feedback loop, and so you
have to be very careful using this approach in trying
to go forward and understanding things. But when you're doing
your cutting into research at the frontier of understanding and
(23:40):
you don't have experiment, you don't have observation yet to
guide you, that mathematical aesthetic sense is what we often
do make use of in order to go forward. So
you've at times described yourself as a reductionist in common usage,
I think this label is often a pejorative. It's um
(24:00):
It's what you call somebody when you mean that they're
ignoring important qualities, nuances, or context in the course of
explaining something. Obviously you don't mean it in this pejorative sense.
So what is the scientific project of reductionism and how
does it influence the way you see the world. Well,
the project is quite straightforward. It's attempting to reduce reductionism,
(24:22):
trying to reduce all physical phenomenon, matter, and the processes
that happen in the world, reduce them to their most
fundamental ingredients, the most fundamental constituents, and the fundamental laws
that govern how those constituents interact with each other, how
they come together into larger agglomerations that ultimately yield structures
(24:42):
like stars, desks, planets, microphones, computer screens, and everything else
we experience in the world around us. Now, you're right,
the phrase reductionists is often used as a pejorative, and
the reason for that is partly maybe one of our
own making. Sometimes we scientists, when we speak of reductionism,
(25:04):
we end the conversation with the reductionists perspective, as if
that's all you ever need to know to understand the
deep qualities of reality. What we really mean by that,
or again, maybe I should speak for myself. People have
different views. What I mean by that is the reductionist
account the ingredients and the laws provides the rock bottom
(25:27):
substrate on which reality is then built. And I fully
do believe that everything, people to planets are nothing but
collections of particles, large collections governed by physical law. But
I also saying, exactly the same breath, with the same
level of intensity, that you need to invoke other layers
(25:51):
of description that are more appropriate to the kinds of
questions that may interest you at other layers of reality.
So the chemist comes along and says, yeah, you physicists,
you talk about those fundamental particles, but I want to
talk about things that the level of Adams and molecules. Fantastic.
The biologists comes along and says, look, your physicists, you
chemist assured, but I want to talk about things at
(26:12):
the level of cells and organelles and the processes that
are underlying life. And yes, that's the right language and
the right level of description to use. And the psychologist
comes along, and the neuroscientist comes along and says, I
want to understand things at the level of human experience,
like what's happening in the brain, and so those are
(26:33):
the ingredients, and that's the language that those scientists and
those thinkers will use. And then the philosophers and the
humanists come along and they say, great, you physicists and scientists,
you talk about the underlying structure, but I want to
talk about things like human reflection and love and grief
and and achievement and aspiration and and all those things
(26:55):
that occur up here at the human level, and you
should use that language, and you should describe reality in
those terms. It wouldn't make any sense to talk about
the experience of grief at the level of atoms, molecules, particles,
and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, right, You wouldn't gain the
(27:15):
kind of insight that you want. But the point that
I make in the book is that these stories are
not distinct in the sense that the physicists reductionist account
threads through all of those stories, and it can give
you surprising insights even up here at the human level.
I would never want to use it as a substitute
(27:38):
for Shakespeare, or for Rembrandt, or for Picasso, the or Beethoven,
the kinds of creations that deeply affect us as human beings.
I don't want to describe that in terms of molecules
and atoms, but in principle you could, and that, in
principle can give you some insights into particular the issue
of free will and so so there are connections between
(28:01):
these stories. But if you leave out the upper levels
and you focus solely on the reductions account, you deserve
to use it as a pejorative because you're missing out
on so many other qualities that are better described in
different languages. Let's talk about entropy in the long term
fate of the universe. What is the fate ultimately of
(28:21):
beings that can think, well, it's a question that we
can address, at least under the assumption that our current
understanding of the laws of physics and our current understanding
of the matter that makes up reality, that that is
a good description that will continue to hold arbitrarily far
into the future. If it doesn't, then then radically different
(28:44):
things might happen, but we'll be shooting in the dark
with our current level of understanding to conjecture what those
alternative futures might be. So if you grant me that
that I can use my current understanding of things to
go forward, then you can show that rough by about
ten to the fifty or so years from now. It's
a big number, right, We're now about ten to the
(29:06):
ten years from the Big Bang, and that difference of
forty is in the exponent so it's not forty more years, right,
it's multiplying it by tent at the forty, which is
a huge factor. So very very far in the future.
You can argue, as actually Freeman Dyson, great physicist, once did,
that the process of thought considered to be a process
of computation, and that's really what each individual thought is.
(29:29):
It's taken some inputs and it's yielding some outputs. That
physical process necessarily is an entropically increasing process. Second, thermodynamics
which means it necessarily yields waste heat, and that waste
heat needs to be admitted to the wider world. And
we do that all the time. Right, if you had
(29:50):
a nice infrared camera on me right now, in my head,
I'm thinking hard to answer your questions, and you'd see
the this heat coming off of my head. Right, we
know that like the military infrared goggles, you know of
that imagery that that you can see that heat emanating
from biological source. Now in the far future, you can
argue that the universe at some point will not be
able to absorb that heat. It will be kind of
(30:11):
stuffed with as much as it can hold. And at
that point, if a thinking being thinks one more thought,
it will not be able to admit the heat, so
it will burn up in the tropic waste generated by
the very process of thought itself. So that's the sense
in which thought will come to an end under the
(30:32):
assumptions that we're making. Thought is not something that will
be able to last into eternity. And does that does
that change the way you or or affect the way
you view the you know, our current lives. So does
that make what we do, you know? Pointless? Or does
it make what we do more beautiful? I know you
get into this a little bit in the book. I do,
(30:53):
and in many ways it's the main point of the
whole narrative is to address that question, because a natural reaction,
certainly is, you know, if it's all going to go away,
if matter is going to disintegrate, if everythinking being will
ultimately I think it's final thought, then what's the point
(31:16):
of it all? Because I think many of us, and
certainly I, for a long time, even if implicitly, imagine
that the importance of a life or thinking personally in
my own life is that I'd leave some kind of mark,
some kind of legacy, either through my family, my kids,
(31:37):
or maybe through my work or through some kind of
interaction that would continue to ripple through the unfolding of
the future, having less and less impact over time, but
nevertheless still having an imprint out there, even if just
in some modest implicit way. But if there's no thinking
(31:59):
beings left in the far future, like like, what's the point?
And I went through a dark period in my own
life coming into terms with this question, but ultimately had
kind of I don't I don't know what the right
word is and epiphany, uh, a spiritual moment. I'm not
(32:19):
sure what the right language is, but there was a
moment when I kind of shifted my perspective radically and
quickly to the recognition that it's actually more powerful to
recognize that we have this little cosmic oasis in the
unfolding of the universe in which living beings and thinking
beings can exist. It's as if the universe rises up
(32:42):
for a brief moment and is able to look around
and contemplate itself, and we are the beings that allow
that contemplation to take place. And when you do that
contemplation and recognize that you are the result of quantum
processes stretching back to the beginning each you which that
could have turned out like that way instead of this
(33:02):
yielding a world in which we would not be here.
You recognize it's astonishing that we are here, against astounding odds,
we exist. And it's even more than that we are
these special collections that can think and reflect and we
can we can do things right. We can have these conversations,
we can join into powerful coalitions that can do things
(33:26):
that the individual would be unable to write. We can
build the pyramids, we can we can write Beethoven's Ninth
sent And if you allow us to take credit as
a species, right we we can figure out the equations
of quantum mechanics, the equations of the general theory of relativity,
allowing us to figure out all these qualities of the universe.
(33:46):
And to me, that just fills me with gratitude for
being here at all. So, rather than sort of looking
to the future or looking to some deity to bestow
meaning upon us, we recognize that we are empowered to
find our own meaning. That's the only place that meaning
is going to come from. And when we do come
to terms with what matters to us in the here
(34:09):
and now, it's a more powerful version of meaning because
it's organic, it comes from ourselves. We manufacture it, for sure.
But how wonderful that we can manufacture it. How wonderful
that the collection of particles can ask these questions and
come to answers, even if our presence in the universe
(34:29):
is fleeting. It's such a powerful sentiment, such a powerful
view of things. I mean, it's for the century, but
but but even like specifically to what everyone is going
through right now, I think, yeah, for sure, I mean,
we are in an astonishing, devastating, painful, tragic era right
(34:52):
now that we hope will pass, of course, but I
do find solace in taking this cosmic perspective. It doesn't
take away the pain. Nothing will you lose a loved one,
Nothing will take away that pain. Time can sometimes heal,
but nothing can or should take away that pain. But
(35:14):
if at the same time you can take a step
back and see the cosmic perspective, recognize that there is
this little piece of the cosmos that we inhabit in
both space and time, and how wondrous that is. I
think there's a degree of solace. Doesn't take away the tragedy,
(35:36):
but there's a degree of solace that that can provide,
which I think is quite powerful. All Right, we need
to take a quick break, but we will be right
back with more than and we're back now. You're, of
course the the co founder of the World Science Festival, uh,
something that I look forward to every year, Such a
wonderful collection of great minds coming together to discuss sign
(36:00):
centific topics. Um. But of course you had to make
a very understandable call to cancel the live portions of
the through event this year. Can can you touch on
on what the current or emerging plans are for for
online presentations. Well, the idea is to see this as
(36:21):
both the challenge and an opportunity for the Festival to
create a new kind of program And what really distinguished us,
say thirteen years ago when we began the Live Festival.
At that time there was not as much live event
focus as there is today, and we were kind of
(36:42):
a pioneer in taking ideas that are normally viewed as
sort of abstract and not for general consumption, and through
the clever and powerful production techniques of Tracy Day, the
other co founder who really cut her tea fin some
of the best broadcast television you know, from Nightline and
(37:05):
programs on CNN and things of that sort, to take
those techniques and to create live programming that people would
totally be immersed even if they had no background in
cosmology or neuroscience or astronomy or you know, personalized medicine
or you know, topics across the board. So now we're
changing gears and trying to find a new way of
(37:28):
doing digital programming that will inject that same kind of
creative focus to bring these intellectual ideas out to the public,
and you know, independent of the current crisis. We began
this already, so we feel like we're well equipped to
do so. We had I don't know if you saw it,
but last maye we had a special on PBS. It
(37:49):
was our first broadcast special. It was a live theatrical
exploration of Einstein's discovery of the general theory of relativity.
And you know, we seemed up with some of the
greatest artists in the live theatrical space, together with great
performances on PBS, to film in a manner a live
(38:10):
presentation that would work on a two dimensional screen and
through interesting visuals and through a powerful musical score, and
through taking the ideas of general relativity and making them
widely accessible, I think we've created a very different experience
of einsteience discovery. So that's the direction that we're head.
Not with that level of production for every event that
(38:32):
will put online, for sure, but that's our thinking to
inject a new level of creativity into online programming dealing
with scientific subjects. That's awesome because that's that's that's one
of the things I really love about the world Sciencestful
every years that you you know, you you bring in art,
you bring in music, and then in terms of the
all these great minds that come together to discuss it,
You're you're bringing in you know, scientist, biologist, physicists. You know,
(38:56):
you're bringing in occasionally philosophers or even the fel Gen
thrown into the mix to tackle these these you know,
at times just staggering questions about the cosmos and the
human condition. Exactly right, Yes, that's that's the philosophy, you know,
to to bring together great thinkers that done often talk
to each other, and to structure the conversation in a
(39:18):
way that the novice can feel that they're part of
the exploration. Now you you launched a web series on March,
I Believe Your Daily Equation, which is available via World
Science Festival dot com but also the World Science Festival
YouTube page. Can you discuss your inspiration for this series
and and just tell us how it's been going. Well,
(39:38):
it was just a lark off the top of the head.
We're having a conversation one day about you know. Typically
World Science Festival programs involve a lot of productions. It
takes a long time to create them. And I said, well,
now there's an opportunity to go to the other direction.
What if I just turned on my my webcam thing
(39:59):
and just each day talk about a new equation and
we're like, yeah, sure, why not go for it? So
so that's all it is. So there's literally no production.
I film it right here and each day I just
think about, Hey, what what equation would be kind of
fun to describe to somebody who likes the ideas of
(40:20):
science but math is not really their thing, but they
might get a kick out of seeing the actual symbols
that are behind the scenes and gaining a quick understanding
of what they are. So we started with equals MC squared.
How could you not? So I sort of explained that,
and then did a bunch of equations in relativity time
slowing down lengths being contracted for an object in motion,
(40:44):
and uh, then I've moved on to quantum mechanics. So
I've been sort of doing the very basic equations of
quantumic acts and I find it fun, and you know,
the audience that is sticking with me, You know, daily
equation is not exactly the title that may appeal to
the mass of public out there, but there are there
(41:05):
are people for whom that idea is a kick and
I think we're all just having a good time, and
it's a sense of a little sense of community, a
sense of a small group of folks who come together
each day just to put the news to the side,
put all the difficult stuff to the side, and just
think about these simple, beautiful equations that touch on things
(41:27):
that transcend all of us. Yeah, that's great. We we
do really need content like that right now. Um On,
on the other hand, do do you feel that the
world's current struggle with the pandemic do you think it's
had it's it's it has sharpened or is sharpening the
public's appreciation for science and the importance of science communication. Well,
(41:47):
I'd like to say yes, but my experience is that
even in the face of great tragedy, when it passes,
people tend to revert to their more conventional ways of
thinking about things. And it is awful that we have leaders.
And this is the main thing. It's all of that
(42:09):
we leaders who for the past number of years have
been casting aspersions on science, detegrating scientists, and substituting opinion
for observation, fact, data, and analysis. That I hope will change.
But the easiest way to change that of course is
a change of leadership, because most leaders of the world
(42:34):
recognize the power that science provides us for figuring out
the right path forward on a variety of issues that
will determine our fate. And it's just tragic that there
are leaders who don't think that way. All right, Well,
the book is Until the End of Time. It's it's
out now, and yeah, I just want to just drive
(42:55):
home just how how wonderful this book is. We're just
really thrilled to help, at least in some small way,
boost the signal on this one that you know, let
our listeners know that they should they should check it out.
It's just it's just really excellent. Thank you, Brian. Thanks
for taking time out of your data to chat with me.
This has been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Enjoyed
it all right, So there you have it. Thanks again
(43:18):
to Brian Green for dropping by the show to discuss
his new book, Until the End of Time, Mind Matter
in our Search for Meaning in an evolving universe. It's
it's a brand new book just came out here in
available I believe in pretty much all formats right now.
So if you want to listen to it, if you
want to read it, uh digitally or in a physical copy.
(43:41):
You should be able to get your hands on it. Yeah.
I really enjoyed this one and I think you will too. Yeah,
and keep an eye on World Science Festival because, like
Brian said, they're gonna be busting out some some online
content this year. So the same sort of great discussions
that they've had in previous years they're going to offer again,
but of course, due to our current circumstances, is going
(44:01):
to be in a slightly altered form. In the meantime,
if you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever
you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
Just make sure that you rate your review and you
subscribe huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
(44:23):
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi,
you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your minds production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you
(44:45):
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