JRE 1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

classes ::: transcript,
children :::
branches :::

bookmarks: Instances - Definitions - Quotes - Chapters - Wordnet - Webgen

object:JRE 1216 - Sir Roger Penrose
class:transcript
link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA
The Joe Rogan Experience

Speaker 1: 00:00:02 - All right, here we go. Three,

Speaker 1: 00:00:07 - boom. And we're live. How are you sir? I'm fine. Pretty good. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. That's fine. My pleasure. Who roped you into this? Well, I think, I suppose James Tag Probably. I, uh, I'm a big fan of your work. I've read much of your work. I've seen many of your interviews and videos online. And, uh, one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about it I find quite interesting is consciousness and your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation, but that there's something more to it and what, what you think this more could possibly be from a scientific perspective, which is unusual because a lot of people have some theories about consciousness, but they're usually crazy people like myself. Well, I mean, we're all conscious and so we may have theories about it. Yeah. But now the ideas came by a somewhat roundabout route.

Speaker 1: 00:01:03 - Uh, I, I went to Cambridge do graduate work. It was mathematics. I was working on pure mathematical subjects, Algebra, geometry. But I thought, you know, we've got three years. I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting. So I went to three talks particularly, which had a big influence on me. One was a talk by Herman Bondi with uh, um, general relativity cosmology, wonderful tool with very sort of animated presentation, the Ad. And then there was a talk by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and histalk what he's completely wonderful talk to wonderful lectures as well, but they're completely different style. He was very quiet and precise in what he said and everything. Anyway, in the very first lecture he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics. So if you have a particle and it could be in one spot or it could be in another spot, then you have all sorts of states where it can be in both places at once.

Speaker 1: 00:02:06 - That's sort of strange, but you've got to get used to that idea. And he illustrated with his speech at piece of chalk and I think he broke it into two illustrates. It could be in one spot or in the other. And my mind sort of wanders at that point. I don't know what I was thinking about, but I wasn't concentrating. And about a few minutes later he'd finished, his description is explanation and I had some vague memory of something about energy, but I didn't understand what he said. And I've been totally mystified by this ever since. So I suppose if I had heard what he said, he would have said something to calm me down and I sort of accepted in one way or another. But as it was, it seemed to me this was a major issue. How on earth do you have things that don't behave according to watch porn?

Speaker 1: 00:02:52 - The mechanic says like cricket balls and baseballs and things like that. Anyway, that's two of the talks. The course was a course by a man called steen who talked on mathematical logic and he explained things like girdle's theorem and touring machines during machines being their mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based or computers basically. And uh, uh, the thing about girdles there and you see, I'd heard, I used to have a colleague when I was undergraduate in first of all, who was, who became a scientist later on. And we talked about, uh, logic and you know, how you could make these kind of mathematical systems, which worked out logic. And I'd heard about this girls there and which seem to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove. And I didn't like that idea, but I, when I heard the, when I went to this course by steen and he explained what it really says and what it says is, suppose you've got a method of proving things in mathematics.

Speaker 1: 00:04:06 - And when I say things, I mean things with numbers. That one famous example is fair Mars last year, uh, there's the Goldberg conjecture, which isn't yet proved that every, even number bigger than two is the sum of two prime numbers. This is sort of example of the thing. It's just sort of mathematical things about numbers, which you can see what they mean. Uh, but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue. But the idea often is in mathematics you've got a system of methods of proof. And the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer check. Whether you've done it right. So these rules, you know, they could be adding in B, it's the same as bna and things like that. And you, um, if you give you, you say to the computer, say, here's a Theorem, like Goldbar conjecture and you see whether it can be proved and you say, maybe I've got a proof and this follows the steps and you give it to the computer and it says, Yep, you've done it right.

Speaker 1: 00:05:15 - It's true. Or maybe it will say you've done it right and it's not true. Or it may not see anything but just go on forever. But these are the sorts of outcomes. And the point about it is that if you believe that these procedures do give you a proof, in other words, that if the algorithm says, yeah, it's true, then you believe that it is true because you've understood the, all the rules. He looked at the first one, so yeah, that's okay. You look at the second one said, mom, oh yeah, I see. Okay, that's great. And you go all the way down. And as long as you convinced all those rules work and if it says yes, that's something you believe. Okay, now what girl shows as he constructs a very specific sentence,

Speaker 2: 00:05:58 - a statement which is a number thing like, like we fair most lost their arm or something to think about numbers, which what he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things, then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true, but you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure. Now, this was amazing to me because it tells me that, okay, you cannot formalize your understanding in in a scheme which you could put on a computer. You see this statement which skeletal comes up with is something you can see on the basis of the same understanding that allows you to trust the rules that it's true, but that is not actually derived by the rules. It you see, it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules. And this to me was amazing and I thought, Golly, you know what's understanding?

Speaker 2: 00:07:05 - What does it mean? Is it something following rules? This is an algorithm. Well this more or less as, it's not an algorithm because whenever it was, there will be something that you could still see his true even though you don't get it through the algorithm that you had in the first place. So this was a lot of subtleties about this to people argue about endlessly. But it was pretty convincing to me that the shows that we don't think when we understand something, what's going on in our heads is not an algorithm. It's not following rules, it's something else. It's something that requires our conscious appreciation of what we're thinking about. I'm thinking it's a conscious thing and understanding is a conscious activity. So I formed the view that conscious activities, whatever they are, not just that kind of thing, but you know, playing music or we're falling in love or whatever these things might be on, not computations.

Speaker 2: 00:08:05 - There's something else going on. And then I thought, because I, you know, I like to think of myself as a scientist and I think that was going in our heads is according to the laws of physics and these laws of physics, um, pretty good. They seem to work well and the outside world. And so I believe that the laws that work in our heads are the same as those laws. So I began to think about it. Well, what about Newton's mechanics? Well, you could put that on a computer. What about Einstein's special relativity? You could do that. What about Maxwell's wonderful equations, which tell you how less electricity and magnetism operates and light and radio waves and all these things. That's all follows this beautiful set of equations that Max will produced. You can put that on a computer. Okay. Then you might have to about approximations and the, these depend on continuous numbers rather than discreet things, but I didn't think that's the answer then I thought, what about general relativity?

Speaker 2: 00:09:05 - Einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that. We are familiar now with Lego, this detector, which is detected black hole spiraling into each other from distant galaxy and how do we know that those signals are black holes, but well, because of calculations, people who put this thing on an algorithm and you know what those signals look like. So Einstein's general relativity. Sure you can put that in a coop on the computer. What about quantum mechanics? Well, there's the famous equation of Schrodinger which tells you how a quantum state evolves. You could put that on a computer too. It's difficult in many ways. There's many more parameters you have to worry about, but it's just this computable as these other things. Well, you see, I then remember direct lecture you see and how it is that these things that work in the quantum world don't seem to work at the level of classical big things.

Speaker 2: 00:10:05 - And it all depends on this process of what's called measurement in quantum mechanics. And the measurement process is something that you learn how to do, but it's not the Schrodinger equation. It's something else. And Schroeder himself was very intrigued by this fact that his own equation gives you nonsense and you the famous Schrodinger's cat where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time. He produced that in an example simply to demonstrate that roughly speaking, his equation gives you nonsense under these circumstances. So there's something else and the something else goes beyond our current quantum mechanics. And it tells you what happens when the quantum state makes a decision between, doesn't follow the Schrodinger equation of one thing or the other. No, everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics, but they think, oh it's what's called making a measurement and you're allowed to do something different.

Speaker 2: 00:11:03 - But that didn't make sense to me. And so I had the view that okay, there is a big gap and our understanding and if there is something in the world which isn't something you could put on a computer, that's where it is. So the view, I held that for a long time and uh, that there, there's something non computable, something beyond computation involved in our understandings of things. So that's a view of health for ages. I didn't do much with it. I just held the view until, I think there was a radio talk between Marvin Minsky and Edward, Fred, Ken, and they were explaining about what computers can do. And they were talking about, okay, you have a computer, two computers talking to each other over there and you walk up to the room and the time you've walked up the room to the computers, they have computed.

Speaker 2: 00:11:52 - Community communicates with each other more thoughts than the human race ever has done. You see? And I thought, well, I see where you're coming from, but I don't think that's what's happening in, in human communication. Human understanding is something different from what computers do. And consciousness is the key thing. Consciousness is something different from computation. So I've held that view. But then when I heard this talk by Minsky and um, and fred skin, I thought, well, I had ideas of writing a book some time, you a long time in the future when I'm retired. This is some while back I said, and I thought, well, maybe this gives you the focus. And so I wrote this book called the emperor's new mind, which was supposed to be saying, well, you know, we, uh, everybody seems to be thinking one thing, but yeah, the little kid notices that the emperor doesn't have any clothes.

Speaker 2: 00:12:48 - So it was the, uh, that theme of that story, which was the basis of the book. So I say, okay, maybe a lots of people think that, well, we're doing this computing, but if you stand back and you say, well, no, there's something else going on. So that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness. But I wrote this book thinking that by the time I got to the end of the book, you see, it was, it was a lot, a lot, mostly about physics and mathematics and things like that. But I was really aiming for this thing about what's going on and conscious thinking. And I thought, well, I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on. And by the time I get to the end of the book, uh, know pretty well what it could be. I didn't got to the end of the book and I just sort of tapered off rather than with something a little bit unbelievable.

Speaker 2: 00:13:37 - And that was the end. Now you see, I hope that this book would stimulate young people to get interested in science and that sort of thing, that mathematics. And that was fine. And when the book was published, I didn't get letters from young kids. I got letters from old retired people who, the ones who'd had the time to read my book. Okay, well that was a little disappointing, but okay, I'm glad the old retired people like my book. But the other thing was I got a letter from Stuart Hameroff and this letter said more or less, I think you don't appreciate that there's something else going on. Not Neurons. I mean the neurons, I could see you couldn't isolate the quantum effects and that the, you get the what's called an environmental decoherence would happen and you get no way of keeping the quantum state to the level that you need in this picture.

--- MICROTUBULES
Speaker 2: 00:14:28 - So I really, I didn't have it, but Stuart Hameroff pointed out to me these little things called microtubules and he'd built up a theory that microtubules are absolutely fundamental. The consciousness. He had his own reasons for believing that I had never heard of them at that time, but then I checked up, you know, I get lots of letters from people who maybe don't make sense sometimes the letters and this one I thought, well this is another one. Then I realized these microtubules are there and they looked like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics up to a level where you could expect the the quantum state to sort of collapse. That's the terminology. People using quantum mechanic micro tubules are inside brain neurons. They are indeed. And this is a recent discovery for them. No, they're actually in lots of cells.

--- STRUCTURES OF MICROTUBULES
Speaker 2: 00:15:22 - You see, people often complain, oh, they're in your liver too, not just your brain. So why isn't your liver conscious and all that. But it has to do with the organization of them and the nature of them, the particular kind of microtubules, how they're, how they're arranged, which is different in the brain. How does it vary in the brain compared to other cells? I think one big difference, although not Stewart emphasizes, there's so much, there are two kinds of microtubules. They're the ones who have a lattice and the bead lattice and the a lattice ones are, they're very symmetrical ones. There are tubes and they look the same all the way around. They've got a very beautiful arrangement of these proteins called Tubulin and they make a very nice arrangement, which is connected with fibonacci numbers and things like that. So they look a bit like for cones, but there were powerful.

Speaker 2: 00:16:06 - They're not, they don't, um, take her off. But um, the thing is in the brain, I think most of microtubules are probably what I be lattice ones. And they're don't have so much symmetry. They've got like a sort of seemed on the one side and they're very important in transporting some substances around cells and so on. And Microsoft was all sorts of things. They don't just do what what stuart and I think they may be doing in the brain. So the idea is that in the brain they're organized differently and probably the ones that are important have a lattice ones, which is a very symmetrical ones. And for a long time people couldn't see the difference and um, cause they look very similar. Um, and they may well be the ones that have to be in pyramidal cells as a particular kind of cell. So you know, one of the things that interested in me a lot is how it is that not all parts of the brain are the same in this respect is that you've got the cerebrum, this is the part at the top and divided down the middle on that.

Speaker 2: 00:17:11 - When you see brains, that's what you normally see with the convolutions in, in the, in it, but right underneath and at the back there's a thing called the cerebellum, which more it looks more like a, like a ball of wool or something. And the Cerebellum, and it may still be argument about this, but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious and it has comparable number of neurons, far more connections between neurons and the cerebrum. And it's what takes control. And maybe when you're driving your car and you're thinking about something else and you, you don't, you're not thinking what you're doing because it's unconscious. And the unconscious control, you know, a pianist who was very expert and moves the fingers around and plays a note with a little finger, that pns doesn't think, well, I've got to move that muscle this way and this bone that way and so on.

Speaker 2: 00:17:59 - And it's, it's all controlled unconsciously. And a lot of this unconscious control is done somewhere else in the cerebellum when you, when you get really skilled. So, uh, it seemed to me, okay, you've got different kinds of structures different, and it could well be that these pyramidal cells, which have a particular organization of microtubules, are the ones that were, that consciousness is really coming, coming to light. Mainly, I don't know. There's a lot which is, which is not known about this controversial and all sorts of things, but the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently. So it's not just how many neurons, how many connections are there because there are more in the cerebellum, so it's not that same else. Do they know this from observing the brain through Fmr dry or something like that during particular activities? Like Ah, I don't know. I would imagine he partly just examining it went from dead people and looking at brains and trying to estimate how many neurons their own it.

Speaker 2: 00:18:56 - Right. But how would they know what, which partial, which is consciousness. It's pretty mellow. I don't know that they do know that when I guess, but the, the cerebellum, there is a bit of an argument about that I think whether it's completely unconscious or not, but it seems that actions that, that are carried out by the cerebellum. You don't, you're not aware of what you're doing. But I mean it's, you know, if he had the tennis player who has to think very carefully about whether with tilt the ball now that the control of what you're doing, so the overall control, it's probably done with the cerebrum, but the cerebellum is controlling the detailed motions, how the fingers move and all that kind of thing. And then you'd make sure that if you play your thinks going to hit the ball down down the line there and then the, the rest is done under the control of an unconscious procedure.

Speaker 2: 00:19:50 - I mean, I may be simplifying, but you're saying, so you're saying that there's, we don't totally understand, but we know that there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different activities and some activities don't seem to be conscious. Yes. Yes. I mean, I think it's probably the case. No, I'm, I'm maybe, I don't know. I shouldn't make a statement and I don't really know, but certainly there are lots of different parts of the cerebrum which maybe, which maybe not conscious too, so I'm not saying that the whole thing is capable of being conscious. It's, they seem to be differences in different parts, but are you convinced that microtubules are responsible for consciousness or it's a primary theory? I think they're the one of the best candidates. I you see, I don't think it's only microtia. I Dunno. I'm not sure what Stuart Hameroff view on this is.

Speaker 2: 00:20:43 - He certainly thinks the micro g was exceedingly important in consciousness and I think he's right. That's the feeling I get and he's done a lot of work on trying to find a what? Anesthetic gases. It's an important, one of the important ways you can tell things about conscious and most of it you can't, it's just hearsay. What does it vary? It is, but one of the important ways you can tell something about consciousness is what turns it off in a reversible way. In Stuart's job is, do you know he's an anesthesiologist? He puts people to sleep well, I think he would complain if I say putting it to sleep because under anesthetic is actually different for sleep, but you make them unconscious in a reversible way. You want to make sure you think you can wake them up again. And a, it's obviously a very skills thing, but I guess a lot of his colleagues might be a skilled at doing it, but don't.

Speaker 2: 00:21:37 - They asked the questions about what they're actually doing from the point of view of the biology and the physics and so on. So it still, it was really interested in that question. Partly I think the thing is like, oh my tosas cell division and he was very struck by the way that the chromosomes or lion lion up and that there's these microtubules which pulling them and they're really a big part in, in, in, in the structure of cells and how they, how they behave and so on. But why they are consciousness. Well, I guess it was an experience with, with um, putting people under anesthetics and the fact that the gases which put you to sleep, and there again, I shouldn't say to sleep, but put you on the anesthetic. I'm very unconnected chemically. They're different kinds of things be yet they still seem to have the same effect and to understand what it is that they affect is, you know, there's a lot of his interest is to do with that.

Speaker 3: 00:22:35 - So just by putting someone unconscious and registering what parts of the brain are no longer active, this is what they're using to sort of reverse engineered by turning those parts on. That's what enables consciousness is this,

Speaker 2: 00:22:50 - well, I think it's probably a simplification of what's going on, but that's, that's a good, uh, first first step. Yes.

Speaker 3: 00:22:58 - Consciousness becomes as a subject, it's very, it's, it's very susceptible to woo. Right. Indeed. I guess it's one of those weird ones where people want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness and they start, it gets,

Speaker 2: 00:23:16 - yeah, it's a murky area and there's no clear borderline with cc student runs these consciousness conferences and he's very broad minded. He has people all sorts of different views like the ones you mentioned, and it's not necessarily his view, but he likes to get a broad perspective on what's going on. I, I, I'm a bit more narrow minded than he is on these matters.

Speaker 3: 00:23:37 - Yeah, I am too. I'm very skeptical because I just, I understand the inclination that people have to lean towards the woo then it's very fun. Yes. It's for

Speaker 1: 00:23:46 - whatever reason people are inclined to lean towards, do you ever see, you saw that movie, I don't know if you saw a, what the bleep do we know? Oh yes, I did not go. That kind of stuff. That was a little worrying to me that yes, yes, indeed. Now that did worry me. Yeah. Well, it's uh, it's just, you know, it was written, the movie was made by a cult leader and now it gets a little squirrelly. Right. You're absolutely right. And I, I, as I say, I was distinctly, I'm sure you were a lot of people that I know there were like yourself, we're worried, but it's, this is something that everyone contemplates. Like what makes you conscious? What is the soul? Is it a real thing? What is, what is your consciousness? Is it simply just your own biology trying to calculate your environment and looking out for his best interests and trying to procreate and move forward with the, the genes that had has, or is it something almost mystical or far more complicated?

Speaker 1: 00:24:42 - Maybe even instead of the word mystical might be tainted maybe something far more complex than we're currently able to understand? I think to some extent I would agree to it because it's any different, I need to have some internal perception of the external world and yeah, have to think abstractly and all these things, it's totally different from a way a baseball runs through the air. And what, what makes it spin and different than every other conscious animal? I'm not so sure about that. No, I think the difference isn't that big. I mean, okay, we, you know, we use language to a degree. I mean, some animals use language to some kind of degree. There's a huge difference in degree. I agree with that. But whether it's a difference in kind, I'm not a total sure. Um, you know, you watch these nature movies and I remember seeing one about elephants and this was about how the elephants were.

Speaker 1: 00:25:42 - They always, uh, they're always led by a female elephant that's not relevant to the story. But they were trying to go from a to B, I don't know, maybe what it was. And they thought that was a whole herd of them then would be doing that. But then at a certain point they made a detour and they went off to a place where the leader of the elephant herd, her sister had died and that the bones, the tusks I suppose with their bones anyway with that and the elephants picked him up, handed them around and and seem to caress them and move them around and then they went back and joined to the the route that they want. Now what does that tell us? There's something going on which is not just some machine behaving like a robot. There's some, some feelings that that we can appreciate. I mean another one I remember was one with these, a punt I African hunting dogs and the dogs. You see there's a route where some antelopes we tend to go and had to go across the river and when they got to the point where the crossfit and that slow

Speaker 2: 00:26:44 - down and, and make their way to get across. Now these hunting dogs, you could see them, I think it was taken from the air and they would go along towards this place where the river was and then they would break into two. So half of them would go one way towards the, and they would hide just where the river starts and the other half would go and chase the antelopes. They'd gone bark and make an awful noise chasing them right there. And then the other ones were pants on them. I mean there's something there which is, you know, there'd been working it out between themselves. How's it doing? Commute communication of some kind. Yes. And I think there is, what will you call understanding. Okay. It's a more primitive level and then human understanding. But nevertheless there was something, there's no sort of clean dividing line in my view it's, it's, it's pretty continuous.

Speaker 3: 00:27:35 - Yeah. And this exists in wolves as well, so very, very similar behavior. And they do seem to have not just verbal but nonverbal communication. They seem to have some understanding of what the task is and what their roles are in the task. And even though there's not as many variables maybe as human life there, there definitely seems to be a conscious awareness of, first of all, their, their position in the hierarchy of the tribe of the pack, but also their, what their objective is. This, this is not a selfish objective. It's a group objective and they operate as a group and they do move like those African dogs you were talking about.

Speaker 2: 00:28:15 - Yeah. No, it's fascinating. I love that. Yeah. And there's a lot of indication that we're certainly chimps and elephants and things in dolphins. You, we know about them, but I imagine it goes quite far down, I should think. How much have you studied a Octopi? They're fascinating. Yeah. Yes. No, I haven't. There's a new book about them, which I haven't gotten the chance to read yet. I wanted to read it. I think they're, they're highly intelligent.

Speaker 3: 00:28:40 - Yes, yes. Yeah. I've only different really paying attention to them for a few years. I have a, a good friend. My Friend Remy Warren was doing a television show, um, called Apex Predator. We studied the way different animals hunted and he started studying the way octopus and um, uh, cuddle fish and all these different, yeah, different, uh, Octopi and what the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual, they'll, they'll not just to look, but the texture of their skin instantaneously and how this is not really understood how the, not only how they do it, but how they know what they're, what's below them, what they're copying. Yes. That they somehow or another can figure out how to blend in almost perfectly with their environment. It's amazing isn't it? They also can open jars and they can climb out of tanks. There was one guy had a, he had a camera on his tank because he had two tanks and one of them had very expensive tropical fish and the other one had his octopus and he was

Speaker 1: 00:29:42 - trying to figure out what was happening to his expensive tropical fish. We put a camera on it and the octopus was climbing out of the tank, walking across the ground, climbing into the other tank, killing one of the fish, eating it, and then going back into his tank. Yes. Yeah, that's heavy. Well, there's one I saw, but I think I heard the description or I read it. I think I read it about some experiments on testing the intelligence of octopuses or, and they had a, a little thing they had to pull the chain and then open a door and get food out. And this octopus was thinking then I'm getting fed up with this thing and so yank the chain. It came right off and then it rose to the top and started to squirting all the people in their white coats. So I know that was pretty good.

Speaker 1: 00:30:26 - You know, there's something else going on that Justin is something going on. Absolutely. Now when you, if you weren't pressed for tea to figure this out in some sort of a, a paper that you had to display in front of scientists. If you were, you were like, you're trying to figure out like what do you think it is? Like what, what do you think consciousness is where you say, I mean to, it's going too far to think, you know, I know that the answer, is there anything of course. I just think that this issue of having some kind of quantum state, which preserves itself up to a certain level and the microtubules at least suggested something where you could isolate them from the outside and the symmetry of these things is important. And there are other structures. I suspect it's not just microtubules. I suspect there are these um, classrooms, these are molecules which inhabit the synapses.

Speaker 1: 00:31:27 - And um, and the thing about these ones is that they're incredibly symmetrical. They're like a soccer ball. You know there you have these pentagons and excellence and each vertex you've got a protein, it's called a [inaudible] and they joined themselves along the edges of the, of the pattern of the soccer mom. Okay. But it's just the, it's just a substance. I mean it's made of these proteins and what are they doing hanging around in the synopsis, I dunno, but they, the symmetry has a key role. There's a thing called the young teller effect in quantum mechanics, which tells you that when you have a highly symmetrical structure like that, then there can be a big gap between the lowest energy level and the next one. And there can be information in this lowest energy level, which can be shielded from the higher energy levels. So this is a sort of the suggestion that some kind of quantum phenomenon is going on in the serious way.

Speaker 1: 00:32:26 - And there's a lot to understand there. I mean synopsis themselves, that kind of strange things. You might think if you were going to build a brain, why don't you just sold a little wires together, the connections, you see what you're doing. Having this thing with all the chemist chemicals transferring this information from one side, I don't know, but it's something very needed for by the system and it's all tied up with these classrooms there and and Cytoskeleton structures, which microtubials I one of the main constituents. So you see, I don't know that there's a lot to learn, I'm sure. So it seems like there's a, a bunch of different factors. There's the biological understanding of the brain itself. Yeah. And then there's the understanding of the actual nature of cells and of reality itself that this is being more illuminated by science with every new discovery.

Speaker 1: 00:33:16 - You know, we're getting a better understanding, deeper and deeper as to the very nature of matter and of of the, of these structures themselves. I think it is getting deep into the end of the way the physical world operates and things we don't understand about it just yet. Yes. I mean the biology is one side of it and not, you know, coming as an outsider, I get struck by seth and things. I'm going to be quite familiar with the fact that the right signs of the cerebrum controllers, the left hand and the left hand, the right hand, but then you look at this and it's not just that. What about the soles of your feet right at the top. What about your eyes? They signals right at the back you can think this is the most ridiculous construction you you're going to do the worst possible place.

Speaker 1: 00:33:59 - Yes. There must be a reason and the cerebellum is different cause cerebellum is the left side controls the left side and the right side. The right side. Did this something going on which involves these signals getting, having to cross each other or whatever it is. I Dunno. Well we'd like to think that there's a reason but then we look at other biological life forms and they look kind of preposterous. Like a platypus. For instance. You look at that and go, what is that? It was out of the experiment. Is that a prototype that just ran wild in Islam as well? I get it. You got to think of it in terms of natural select shoreham source. Yeah. I guess the circumstances though, I don't know. In Australia, wherever you find it must be specific. I guess the a lot of that was because they were isolated from, from the rest of the, so you get sort of strange animals in Australia and in New Zealand where a lot of isolation from, from the rest of the evolution.

Speaker 1: 00:34:55 - So they did their own thing there. Yeah. Marsupials which is intriguing, isn't it? Well the, the, the, the phrase quantum is another one that's fraught with woo indeed. Right. And some people like Deepak Chopra and the like, they love to use that word because as soon as you use that word you could kind of get away with almost anything afterwards. Yes. I have to say I have quantum mechanics is a strange thing and it's, I saw the blame me for certain things I don't want, I don't want to be unfair here. I'm not saying no as I blame it. It gives some people have the impression, okay, the fact your theory doesn't make any sense. That's nothing against it. You say crazy things.

Speaker 2: 00:35:38 - Quantum mechanics is crazy. So we wanted to except some other crazy theory. Of course quantum mechanics has the virtue of that. It does agree with an awful lot of experiments. It gives you a huge insight since the things that that one didn't have before. So just the fact that it's crazy isn't, isn't enough to, to make, to make it something you should study seriously.

Speaker 3: 00:35:58 - Well, um, well it's very, very difficult to understand even for people who study it. Yes, indeed. So for someone like myself, I'm trying to pay attention to this without devoting my entire life to it. And it gets, it's becomes a big problem because there's, yeah.

--- QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY
Speaker 2: 00:36:15 - Yeah. Are there too, I in one of my books had tried to explain there are actually two mysteries in quantum mechanics and they get muddled. One of them is the whole subject is pretty crazy. Yes. But it's coherent and it makes sense. And if you study it properly and you say, okay, that, that makes sense. And this includes things like non local effects where you can have two things now they know eating thousands of kilometers apart and you can see these quantum entanglement effects. Yes, there they are still in some sense connected with each other even though they're that far apart, which is pretty amazing. That's baffling. That's baffling. But that's part of the comprehensive or part of quantities. It's muddied up because there's the other part which has to do with this collapse of the wave function and standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense, but people get them muddled in my year you think because this doesn't make sense and that's, well it's all a bit crazy and so anything crazy is, is is up for grabs, but it seems to me that quantum mechanics, the things which are crazy and they do hang together and the theory works and you understand that that's fine, but the things which involve the collapse of the wave function, that's not fine because we don't have the right theory.

Speaker 2: 00:37:29 - That's why it doesn't make logical sense because it's not the right theory yet. That's my view. I mean, I'm a minority and saying this, most people who study the foundations of quantum mechanics, they, well, we haven't got the right interpretation right yet. We have to think when it means and so on. They don't think, well, hmm, maybe it's not quite right. Maybe there's something when this affects get big enough, something else comes in and we need a new insights and new theory. So that's what I think

Speaker 3: 00:37:58 - now in something like super position where something can be both still and in motion at the same time. As soon as you say that. Yeah, to the common person like myself, my brain glazes over and uh, my eyebrows raised up and I go, okay, what does, and then you're talking about entanglement things hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart that are somehow or another interacting with each other in a way that we don't totally understand. Or we don't have a theory that absolutely explains in a concrete way

Speaker 2: 00:38:26 - when it does, as long as you don't get to the measurement, the measurement entanglement part is pretty well understood. But the measurement, the measurement part is not be seen as the puzzles

Speaker 1: 00:38:36 - about the entanglement is when you come to the measurement, you make a measurement over here and the measurement over there and they can be, well now a thousand kilometers apart. The record was only 143 or something. It's a little while ago. Wow. That's, it's a, it's a long time, a long distance, but there's hardly any movement of material. So the thing that you see in the scheme I have, which involves the collapse of the wave function involves certain amount of displacement and mass. Now, if it's just photons that's light and these experiments tend to be just light, then there's no mass displacement in the state. And so sure what quantum mechanics says is fine by me. Okay. It's hard to get your mind around and I certainly agree with that, but it's logical. It's not logical comes apart. But when you worry about the measurement issue and the collapse of the wave function and portal, Schrodinger was very upset by this quite right. Yes.

Speaker 3: 00:39:35 - Now when you discuss consciousness and the mystery of consciousness and then you take into account some of these characteristics that are being displayed in the quantum world, do you think that perhaps some of them are interchangeable or, or similar to consciousness itself, that there is some sort of a connection that human beings share and some, some strange, unique and miss or not, not understood way yet? I think one of the

Speaker 1: 00:40:07 - careful about these things and sometimes do well, even Niels Bohr who is one of the founders of these ideas, um, and so, uh, he tried to make a philosophy out of quantum mechanics and what do you call it? So complimentarity and so I think that's going a bit far. I don't really see cause there's no evidence for it. I don't think so. I think it's a bit misleading that one, you can see analogies between things, but I don't see myself that that should be taken much further than that. But I, you know, maybe there's more there,

Speaker 3: 00:40:44 - but you're open to the possibility should new information.

Speaker 1: 00:40:47 - Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it comes to things like, you know, when people talk about it entanglements and things quantum states can spread to long distances, does that mean that human beings minds can stretch to long distances and so on. So the people will raise questions like that? I don't think so. Myself. I think that's, that's pretty farfetched. But you, you know, you might worry. Well it could it be that there some quantum state which is shared between different individuals. It's hard to see. That could be, unless they were, well I meant if they're identical twins, I suppose they were once in one cell at one time, but you'd have to preserve that information all the way through. And I just don't see how that can happen. So I'm not a fan of trying to use quantum ideas

Speaker 2: 00:41:34 - sort of directly and say human behavior or something. I think the, those analogies are pretty far fetched, partly because the sorts of mathematics you use in quantum mechanics, there's very specific to quantum mechanics and doesn't really apply to macroscopic behaviors. So, as I can see, is this

Speaker 3: 00:41:56 - thing that is, uh, that your ax asked about most often?

Speaker 2: 00:42:02 - You mean in my research all together or just amongst the common people? Like myself, it's only one of them. But you see, it's slightly misleading when you're thinking about what my interests are because I had this, as I say, the, I explained more or less the history of ideas there and I did write a book or at least another one after that too. In fact, I guess I've written three books about that time. That one was taken down lectures and so on. Um, but it's not what I do mainly, right. Main research is, is, is um, cosmology. Uh, well thing is this area called twists the theory but necessarily go into that. But it's meant to be foundational. Quantum is a foundational physics, not necessarily, but general relativity. I mean the, I guess the work I did originally with people paid attention to is in, in general relativity and black holes. What a black hole is, why we have the idea that they're there at all, that sort of thing. I worked on that one point.

--- COSMOLOGY
Speaker 3: 00:43:01 - Cosmology as a whole is one of the most terrifying concepts to me because I just, when I start thinking about the size and scale of everything, I get to a certain point and my brain just shuts off. There's not enough juice.

Speaker 2: 00:43:18 - Well, it's pretty huge. One is has to think on a pretty huge scale, but it's like so many things you, it looks sort of mind boggling at first and then when you get used to the idea, you can sort of play around with the ideas and maybe forget how much bottling it should be.

--- SUPERMASSIVE BLACKHOLES
Speaker 3: 00:43:34 - I was watching a documentary around supermassive black holes and they were discussing how the size of this was, I don't know if this is still a current theory. This documentary was a few years old, but they were saying that the, there's a supermassive black hole inside of every galaxy that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy. And that they, there's the, one of the theories was that inside the supermassive black holes could be an entirely different universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies each with their own black holes. And then it's

Speaker 2: 00:44:04 - infinite. Well, you see, I have a fairly, an idea which I think the mainstream does still regarded as a bit crazy, but not like that. I don't think you're going to have much fun inside a black hole. Nobody's in there. Uh, not, not much. Well, you could have a really big black hole and there's a lot of time in there who really big one. If you, if you were in a space ship, you could, you could have a few parties before you can get hour. Yes. But I'm not sure

Speaker 1: 00:44:32 - I recommend it. Um, no. Uh, yeah, I'm in black holes are remarkable enough. But I mean the thing I did, which was in 1964 and the publish under 65 which to show that black hose, well I'm using a terminal knowledge that wasn't around at that time that the black holes collide. It was co gravitational collapse. You see the, this, the history went back to originally I guess Chandra Sekhar Indian scientist when he was not quite 20, I think, I can't remember. He's 19 or 20. And he was going to England to study physics, astronomy and so on. And he worked on this problem about what holes white doffs apart. These are the, is very massive stars, the companion of serious, serious as a white dwarf. And he was doing calculations to find out whether they, uh, what the interior has a very particularly as struck structure of matter.

Speaker 1: 00:45:32 - And he came to the conclusions if they had a bigger mass than a certain amount, which is about a bit less than one and a half times the sun's mass, they wouldn't build a home selves apart. And so they would collapse and he didn't speculate on what had happened. He just, one is less there. Some very modest comment he made is one, we are left speculating on possibilities or something. But then that was in the 1930s, I guess round about 1930 and much later, just before the war. Um, cinema one 90 13 at west, they're a bit later, I guess 1939, there was a paper by oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame and Schneider, which is a student of his Hartl and Snyder. And they produced a model which was, uh, a solution of the Einstein Equations, which describes a cloud of dust which collapses and becomes what we now call the black hole there.

Speaker 1: 00:46:36 - This was the first clear picture of collapsed to a black hole. Now in their picture, they made two huge assumptions, but one of them is does the material, that means it didn't have any pressure. And so you could imagine when it gets close to itself, it might would push away if it had pressure on it in any way. But this was just dust. That was one thing, but more important that the model was exactly symmetrical. So it was just very clear, symmetrical all matter, falling in the dust particles would be focused right into the central point. And so it's not so hard to believe that you get a singularity where the density goes infinite, the curvatures go infinite and your equations go crazy. So at that point, when the dust reaches the middle point, okay, it's not so surprising because it's a very contrived situation.

Speaker 1: 00:47:26 - So I think a lot of people thought, well, perhaps we shouldn't take it seriously. They, I think they weren't sure. But then there was a paper by two Russians caulk flattened lifshitz and the Kolodny cough. And they seem to have proved that you didn't get singularities and the general case that somehow it was swirl around and switch out again. You see? So that was a possibility. And then there was this discovery, I think in 1962 when Martin Schmidt to Dutch astronomer. Okay. Dutch American, I think where he was living there at the time, I don't remember, but he observed, became what we call the, the first quasar. So this was an object of which was irradiating an awful amount of energy, far more than an entire galaxy. But it seemed to be a very small thing. It couldn't be much bigger than the size of the solar system if even that big, because it variations in brightness indicated that the, it's the speed of light could size of it had to be comparable with the same speed at which the variations in, in, in, um, in Brighton this came about.

Speaker 1: 00:48:35 - So it seemed to be an object that was enormously energetic, producing more energy than a whole galaxy and varying with such a degree that it must be fairly small. And this raised the question of whether it was small enough to be what we now call a black hole. In other words, it's, um, there's a thing called the short, short radius. Schwab shocked was the man who first discovered the solutions of Einstein's equations, which described this spherical body, but he didn't extrapolate it inwards to what's called this horizon. We call it horizon now. It used to be called the Schwartz at singularity and people began to realize that it wasn't really a singularity. It's my something you could imagine falling through. I guess it was in the Metro who first made clear that clear, but not many people paid attention. But that was the idea of a black hole.

--- QUASARS
Speaker 1: 00:49:29 - And it looked then is that these quasars could be having some back hole in the middle of them. And I remember John Wheeler who's at Princeton, then very distinguished scientist and he got where you worried about these things and he talked to me and he were right about it. And do we believe, is there a singularity in the middle of the, we believe Lifshitz and Claton and coffee, they sort of swirl around and bounce that. What are we supposed to think? So I started thinking about this problem and since that time, well you see either people, when he wants to solve the Einstein equations, either you make a lot of assumptions and it's a symmetrical like, like the open home is slotted model. You assume it's got very special properties and then you can maybe solve the equations. But only very, very special cases and the computers weren't powerful enough to tell you very much about what happened.

Speaker 1: 00:50:19 - So I started thinking about this problem and realizing that I'd have to think about it in a different way. And so I used ideas, involve ideas from topology and things like that to show that there had to be a singularity in the middle, provided that the collapse had reached a certain point of no return, I guess to get some idea of, I dunno, it's just not too misleading. There's a mathematical theorem called the hairy dog theorem. Hairy dog pheromones. Yes. I mean that's just a jocular terminology, right? But you think of, uh, something which is topologically a sphere, that means you see it, you imagine a dog shape, but you could sort of move it around with a piece of plasticine until it looked like a sphere. It doesn't have holes in it. Okay. Forget about his digestive system. You see, you're thinking about the surface outside and then you're out.

Speaker 1: 00:51:11 - The problem is you're trying to comb the hair on the dog all the way around and the theorem says there's got to be somewhere where the hair, it doesn't lie flat and you try it on the sphere. There's got to be a point where with the hair makes a kind of singular point. So it's a bit like that. You have no idea where the singularity is, but you know from general, top logical reasons that there's got to be one somewhere. And that was the sort of argument that I produced. And uh, I guess a lot of people had little bit be trouble because they never seen this kind of arguing and a lot of people picked up on it and particular Stephen Hawking and uh, it became for a while, uh, many people working on it, I guess it's not so popular now because probably would run out of serums.

Speaker 1: 00:52:01 - The idea of a singularity or is when you see something like a, a quasar or the, the the center of a galaxy and we were talking a lot of black hole. When you say a singularity, what? What exactly are you do you mean by that? Well the normal expectation is that you have a place like in the middle of the Oppenheimer, that dust cloud, that a point there where the density becomes infinite and so the curvature of space time becomes infinite. So you have a place where the equations and run away and they go to infinity and you say well something's gone wrong. But maybe initially it was in these very symmetrical cases but but you could show by these indirect arguments that somewhere some of these got to go wrong. You can't continue the equations of Einstein and they got stuck right to the place where they go infinite or what in detail happens.

Speaker 1: 00:53:02 - The theorems don't tell you, they just say that something goes wrong and that's what we call the singularity and if a black hole is larger or smaller, the singularity remains constant. It remains in in there. It's remains in there but it's not measurable in terms of its actual size or whether you can measure size very well cause its size. That's an intriguing question. You might say the size is going to zero. Right, but it could be quite complicated in irregular. Not like the original opera. I miss every one of my soldiers. Even then the point is the wrong point of view but let's not go into that. Now there is something about the structure of these things. You can say they're not all the same. No the singularities and all of sudden, but the black holes are not all the same. They're not all the same but they this, one of the strange things about black holes is that if you let them settle down, they're not all the same to begin with but are not many different things they can settled into.

Speaker 1: 00:53:59 - They can have rotation, they can have a certain mass and the mass translates into the size of the diameter of the hole and you've also got a rotation so they can rotate and these are short sweatshirt found. The non rotating ones and it was roy and Australia and who first produced a solution for a rotating black hole rotating. Yes, a rotating one. But then you see the remarkable thing is that's what they settled down too. So there are good theorem this which tell you that the general black hole to be very complicated, fairly rapidly will settle down and become one of these care solutions. The rotating black hole. I remember when I first saw that documentary and I saw the, when they were discussing the, the shape of these galaxies and that the center of it had this supermassive black hole that was slowly devouring the galaxy.

Speaker 1: 00:54:51 - It is an unbelievably beautiful yet simultaneously terrifying idea is that there's this yes, infinite power in the center of infinite mass that's absorbing slowly but surely everything around it. But it's not an infinite mass. The mass is quite well defined and there's not infinite. But yeah, I always a good question. I mean if you wait forever, how much of the mass actually gets swallowed by the black hole? You see, I think the, the pictures to think not just the one galaxy but the cluster. You see our galaxy has this 4 million solar mass black hole and we are on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. And I don't know how long, but many book some time in the future. Yes. The black holes, we'll probably spile into each other and there'll be one big one. So it's definable mass, but in infinite density and that this point, which were, they were speculating that this could possibly in the center of the supermassive black holes, if you could go through that, there would be another universe.

Speaker 1: 00:55:55 - Well, you see that's speculation. So nice romantic thought. Ooh, is it more woo, I'm afraid. So it's also good though. Yes, I know what it's a shame for science fiction because it makes a nice thing that we try to make things more complicated than they are because they're so complicated as it is dark matter for instance, it, it boggles the mind that we don't really totally understand what 90 plus percent. Well, that's a good question. And what does that stuff, well, you want me to tell you my theory? Yes, please. Well, you see, it's part of a story, which I don't know, about 15 years ago, I must've years of passing back on, remember how long ago now? So I had this idea, you see, the universe as a whole is expanding now, um, early in the this century. Don't ask me dates again. Um, some people by observing Supernova supernovas saw exposing sauce very, very far away.

Speaker 1: 00:57:01 - They found out that the university is actually accelerating in its expansion. And some people found this very mysterious. On the other hand, it's in all the cosmology books because there is that expectation. You see, in 1915, Einstein produced his general theory. In 1917 he introduced what's called the cosmological constant. So you think of a, it was called lambda, you think of a, a v shape turned upside down, which is a member. And he introduced this term for the wrong reason because at that time people weren't, there was some indication in the universe was expanding but not very clear. An Einstein, uh, I guess maybe didn't know, I didn't believe it. And this, it, the couples observations hadn't yet come to make a convincing case of the expansion. So I saw, I thought, well, maybe the universe is static. It's kind of philosophically nice to think that it's sitting there all the time.

Speaker 1: 00:58:02 - And he couldn't make it do that. Uh, so he had to introduce this term called the cosmological constant and he did that and then not while very much longer after this Hobo showed the universe does seem to be expanding and Einstein regarded this lamb the term as his biggest blunder, which is an irony because it turns out that this term is probably the explanation for the expansion of the universe that we now see. So it's what people call dark energy. I don't like the term very much cause it's neither dark, no proper energy in any clear sense. But still that was not worry about that. It's a, it's an odd term. Yes, I think so. It's a little confusing cause it's dark matter as well, which is quite different. You know, I must be confused with the dark energy as it's called of the cosmological constant, which as far as we can tell, it is completely consistent with the observations.

Speaker 1: 00:59:04 - It's a positive number, very small, but it seems to be producing this expansion. And I'm quite happy with that viewpoint because it leads to a picture, which I've been trying to plug for awhile now, maybe up to 15 years. I can't remember. Um, the idea, I said it's hard to explain, but let me try. It came about because I was worrying about the remote future and I was thinking, oh, okay. When these black holes around, they swallowed up all the stars and they're just sitting around. And what's the most next exciting thing happening? Well, the hawking evaporation, they're going to radiate away. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes had this temperature extremely cold. I mean the, these enormous ones are absurdly cold, much colder than anything made on the earth. And uh, but when the universe expands and expands and expands, it gets colder than the black holes.

Speaker 1: 01:00:04 - And so those black holes become the hottest, hottest things around. And so they radiate away very, very slowly. This hawking radiation and that carries energy. And so they shrink and the shrink and the shrink. And finally they disappear with a pop. I said pop is probably a pretty big explosion, but, but I'm not that big from a cosmological astrophysical scale. So the disappear, well it may have been pretty boring when you're sitting around waiting for the black hole to go pop. But afterwards that's really boring. So this was picture I thought off and being rather depressed by it thinking that stats are that fate. You see the faith of all the interesting things happening. Ultimate fate is this unbelievably boring final state. Okay, this is an emotional argument but it gives me a bit of leeway. So I began to think, well it's not going to be us who are going to be bored because we're not going to be around the main things that will be around.

Speaker 1: 01:01:03 - We'll be photons and it's pretty hard to borrow a photon for two very good reasons. One is it probably doesn't have conscious experience, not about sure. So, but the other is more of the science point that they don't measure time cause the photon has no mass. It travels at the speed of light and the way relativity works, it means that clocks stop if you like. So if it had experiences it, the moment of its creation would be one moment and the next moment would be infinity. And so they're just zip up to infinity without noticing thing. Now she had been doing work on this kind of thing, thinking more about gravitational radiation and how you measure it's energy and things like that. And it was a very useful picture too. Squashed down infinity. A useful thing to think about here, if you seen these pictures by the Dutch artist Mc Escher, and there are those which are called circle limits and there's a very famous one with angels and devils interlocking and they get all crowded up until the edge.

Speaker 1: 01:02:06 - They weren't. You've got to think about is that this is a kind of geometry called hyperbolic geometry and the angels and devils live in that geometry and the ones right close to the edge think they're the same size and same shape as the ones in the middle. Oh, are you good? Yeah. Great. Yeah. And so the idea is that if you look at it from the angels and devils point of view, that's infinity, that boundary. But from our point of view, we can look at it and we have what's called a conformal map. That picture is a conformal map, but that means is that little shapes are quite consistently drawn, but they can be big or small and you don't care about whether they're big or they're small. Small shapes are accurate or angles if you like her correctly drawn. So it's what's called a conformal map and that can form a map, describes infinity.

Speaker 1: 01:03:02 - Now you can do the same thing to the universe. When I say do it, I mean you can imagine it where this remote future, you can squash it down just like in the essure picture to a finite boundary. And as far as the things with no mass, they don't have a way of measuring how big or small it is. The maxwell equations don't know the scale, they don't care. It's that work just as well for smaller, so big, and you can stretch it in someplace and squash it somewhere else. As long as the stretching and squashing is isotropic. So just as much one way as the other way, which means more or less that you keep what I go. The light cones there, and that's not going to details here, but it means that that if you have things without mass and most particularly the photons, then that boundary is just like anywhere else and the photons goes zipping up to it and so you might think they got to have somewhere to go, okay, well that's a, you don't have to think that, but that was the point of view.

Speaker 1: 01:03:58 - I had the photons need the need somewhere to enter it in a way, but then where does it go? But then there's the other picture, which is the opposite. Then there's the big bang. Now you can do a similar sort of trick there, which is stretching it out and making it into a boundary and that can be done too. I played around with these ideas for a long time and the standard cosmology models you can do it with, but the more complicated cosmology models you might have one, which is very complicated, Big Bang. The general ones don't look like that at all, so you need to condition which tells you that the big bang was a very special kind that it was. It's all tied up with this thing called the second law of thermodynamics and there's all ties together with physics in a way, which perhaps we don't have time to talk about, but it seemed to me a really good idea to have the condition on the big bang that you could continue it in the same way I should say. The idea of doing this was a former student of mine, Paul Todd, who's a colleague of mine and he used this continuum, conform or continuation is, is a nice way of saying what the condition is on the big bang to give you what you want, but that's a huge condition, but it nevertheless, it's what starts our universe off in in a

Speaker 2: 01:05:18 - very special state, which is what we live off. In a way. It's the second law of thermodynamics needs that to get going. Anyway, I don't know if you want to worry about that. But anyway, the point was that it looks as though it's a good condition on the big bang, but it also should be conformally. Uh, like a boundary, which if you had no mass, you wouldn't notice it. Okay. You've got particles with mass running around near the Big Bang, but as you get closer and closer and closer to the energy goes up, the temperature goes zooming, zooming up these, zipping around at such a speed that the energy of their emotion is much bigger than the equals MC squared mass. Einstein's mass, the energy in the mass as a certain amount, but when they get so hot, you can forget about the mass. So they like photons behave like particles without mass.

Speaker 2: 01:06:16 - And so they're just interested in the conformal geometry. So the crazy idea I had, not just only you stretch out the big bang, he squashed on the infinity, but maybe our big bang was squashed down infinity of a previous Ian. So I'm saying our Ian began with a big bang, ended up with this exponential expansion. There was another one before us. They will be another one astros. There was another one before that and so on. So it's an infinite cycle of big banks. That's the picture and constant expansion to the point where there's no more energy and then somehow or another a big bang comes out of that. Yes, that's right. Well that's the tricky part that people have trouble. It's universally accepted that the big bang was an event. There's no pretty well universally theories that are attractive.

Speaker 2: 01:07:07 - I would say nothing terribly popular. There are certain ideas which say you can continue into the before the Big Bang Paul Steinhauser, what are they thinking? It's, it's, it has things in common with my model, but it's not quite the same. And, and you see it still is, he, there wasn't right not long after Einstein produces theory and this Alexandra Friedman who was a Russian mathematical physicist and he produced the first cousin cause mammalogy mammals. And one of these was the one which has sort of bounces and big bang. It expands, it contracts again and it bounces and conduct. And so that was the one of his models. The only trouble is if you put irregularities into these models, you get black holes and these black holes component and an incredible mess at the end. And that doesn't join onto a nice smooth, big bang. The next one.

Speaker 2: 01:07:58 - So you have trouble with those models, but still people take these things seriously. And as I say stanhart and tour, I kind of a model which is like that. So these are the things one has to think about. My own view is that they don't take into account the, the, the black hole problem, which is that, uh, my one gets rid of that because the black holes or evaporate away by hawking evaporation. And uh, so it's forms a model. I used to give talks about this feeling quite happy. Nobody would ever prove it wrong so I can go on and talking. Well that's a no, I wasn't quite happy with that. I thought maybe you could see signals coming through. So I had one idea about that, but more recently, and this is only just this year, um, I have to polish colleagues, that's Christoph Meisner and Pav on near [inaudible].

Speaker 2: 01:08:48 - And there is a Korean who works in New York or Daniel an and we, the four of us have a paper, which I think today or tomorrow will be the new improved version of this paper should be on the archive and this, the title of the paper is, are we seeing hawking points in the cmb sky? Now, what's a hawking point? You see, I talked about the black holes sitting the previous aeon two hours, assuming it's more or less like ours, there will be black holes in clusters of galaxies. Huge, enormous ones swallowing up, predict pretty well the whole cluster and what happens to the energy in those black holes? Well, it goes out in hawking radiation and it takes an age, ages and ages and ages, maybe 10 to a hundred year, Google years or something. Yeah, ages and ages, but all that energy in the picture comes up basically one point.

Speaker 2: 01:09:44 - Think of that as your picture and right at the very edge you see that an awful lot of angels and devils squashed together there so that the entire radiation from that single black hole will be squashed into that little point. Now where on the other side, what do we see? Well there will be a big release of energy at that point and that's what we call the hawking point and it spreads out. You see what we see in the cosmic microwave background. This is radiation coming from all directions and this radiation doesn't come from the big bang. Exactly. It comes from 380,000 years after the big bang. So there's a sort of last scattering surface where the photons which are trying to get out finally, finally can escape and we see them now that spread out from the hawking point to what you see and the cosmic microwave background in the last scattering surface is something of the diameter of about eight times the diameter of the moon.

Speaker 2: 01:10:50 - No bigger, no smaller. No, you wouldn't see the whole thing because our past cone, where were we? What we see is to cut across it. We don't see the whole thing, but we see probably most of it. So you could imagine something from about four to eight times the moon's diameter, which is a small region, which is highly energetic, more energetic in the middle. And it tapers off as you go to the edge. And we seem to see these things, the analysis that, um, that the polls, they have the techniques and the actual analyzing the data. This is the planck satellite data was done by Daniel Lan. And then we look at the data and we seem to see an effect which see what you do is you, we've got only one universe. That's what they're complaining about. So how do you know if something's real or not?

Speaker 2: 01:11:42 - Whether you make zillions of fake universes and you compare this with them. There's a lot of technique about how you do this. But, um, Daniel first did a thousand of these fakes and they were sort of two sizes of these. You look at these rings to see whether the temperature goes out from the outside to the middle. And there were two sizes, both within the size of the essay, about four degrees across the sky. And um, there was no evidence of them at all in the simulation. So this is a real effect. Okay. Then people were skeptical of this for one reason or another. So Daniel did another, well, 10,000 altoge ther, and you occasionally the one or two which do what, two or three, to be precise, where you see this effect in the simulations. But if you work out the probability that this is a real effect, you come up with a confidence level of 99.98% that this is a real effect.

Speaker 2: 01:12:41 - So we're waiting to see what people say about this. What are your thoughts on multiverses? Well, you see, this is different because this is the what? Sequential. Yeah. So I don't call it a multiverse. They each influence the next one. And so they're not independent worlds. Right. But in the, the, the possibility of Independent. Yeah. Well, you see, there are two reasons for believing multiverses. One of them is the quantum reason that maybe we have the shorting this dead and the livecast they in different worlds and they separate universes. I don't believe that argument. I don't think that's the right way to look at quantum mechanics, but many people do. And that suggests that you might have these multiple universities and some sense on attractive about that to you. It doesn't explain what we see. So he wanted a theory which explains the world we see and the world we see.

Speaker 2: 01:13:34 - You get collapse the state does. And to explain that, well it's only because we've drifted off into some world and another version of ourselves as drift into another one and some c one and the other side of the other and they're all in super position. It doesn't explain why you see one world and she has this kind of coherence. I mean lots of people try and there are many attempts at the sort of thing. It's, it's quite a widely held view and if you believe quantum mechanics, the collapse is not real and it doesn't happen. And all the alternatives, the dead cats on the cab coexists in different worlds. That's the interpretation. That's a view. I don't think that I want, I want an explanation for the world we live in. And you don't see cast different worlds with cats and well it's a long story, right?

Speaker 2: 01:14:27 - I mean it's clearly, it's a view you can hold to and if you don't want to monkey with quantum mechanics, it's where you lead. So that's, that's right. That's the alternative. I, they don't make a single try to change quantum mechanics at all. And then you are led to this multi world, many, many world picture. I think it even doesn't make that much sense. So you've got to be careful about it. That whether they are really like different, distinct worlds, I don't think it really, my view is it doesn't really work, but let me not try and attack that. And I think I have a different view, which is that the theory is not quite quite right. Right. And that, um, there is something which makes the collapse into a physical process. And, uh, the, there's only one world now the other many worlds view, which is comes from a different reason.

Speaker 2: 01:15:20 - And that is that that seem there seem to be various accidents, um, in, well maybe one of them being that the neutron is just slightly more massive than the Proton. That's one. There are lots of other accidents. We see that if they were a little different than life as we know, it couldn't happen. And so how do you explain this? Well, some people say, well, all these universes with different values of these constants all coexist. It's just we only see the one that we're in because the numbers come out right for us. So that's what's called an anthropic argument. Okay. I can see the argument. I don't like it much. It's sort of, I think we need a better explanation for why the numbers are what we see and so on. But that's that that one makes more sense to me than the other one.

Speaker 2: 01:16:09 - So I saw, I think maybe it has to take that seriously, but it's certainly not the view I'm presenting here with this picture. It's for someone like me. It's so interesting to know that there's still a considerable amount of speculation. Yes. Oh yeah. Well it's, it's, there's a lot of speculation, but a lot of it is pretty off the wall. And then a lot of people think mine are off the wall and see who's to say, okay, I'm, I'm no man, no. And so, okay. And I did think in decent things in the past, but you just didn't trust this abuse is nice. So I guess that's what people think. I don't know. But you see, if it was just me, I could understand that. But I've got these posts and I went an Armenian colleague who's done things on this two and a, it can't be that we all all off the rails I think. No, there's something out there. And now with their talking points, there's something people can really go out and look for and if they don't see you and something funny going on

Speaker 1: 01:17:10 - somewhere, if they do see them, there's something else going funny on which, which they'll have to think of another explanation unless it's my explanation. They'll have to think of a different view from the current inflation view, which is in real trouble with these observations as far as I can see. Do you anticipate in any foreseeable time in the future, uh, a better understanding of dark matter and dark energy or perhaps a better definition of what those things are? Um, yeah, we see, I think my, my own current view is that dark energy as it's called, is the cosmological constant. Now that's a lot of explanation if you'd like, because why is it, why is it that the value it has, why is it they're tall and they're certainly questions about that, which I agree with. Dot. Matta. I didn't go into this, but in the scheme of mine, it has to be there.

Speaker 1: 01:18:00 - When I say it, I mean that if you want the equations to make sense, which crossover from our remote future to the big bang of the next Ian, you have to have a creation of a dominant new material, which is scaler. And as I said, it doesn't spin. It's just ordinary particles and that they only interact gravitationally. And that's what we see. But the theory that I'm putting forward would make these things very massive there about what's called the planck mass. I don't know exactly cause there's some freedom in this. Something like the prank planck mass, which people describe as the massive of fleas. I don't quite know why they make it, but that's about 10 to the minus five grams. So you're looking at the 100000th of a gram. So it's sort of an appreciable size. It's not, it's not like basic particles in physics measurable.

Speaker 1: 01:19:00 - It's the sort of measurable thing you could imagine you could get that get hold of in some way, but that's huge for for a fundamental particle. So it's a, it's a wild idea from that point of view. But also they should decay and they should decay into gravitational signals, which may be, could be seen by Lego, maybe have been seen by lego and thrown in the rubbish bin because they'd be different types of signals from what people would expect. I wouldn't like to put my money anywhere there, but I'm lacking hoping that these dark matter particles are the ones that come from the theory that, that I'm putting forward. So that will be another consequence of this particular point of view. And they've observed, correct me if I'm wrong, entire galaxies that they believe are the consist of dark matter. There is Liz, let me see if I remember what it is. There's some galaxies the other way around, which don't seem to have any dark matter. There are other galaxies which have huge amounts. That's probably what you're referring to, whether they were only dot. Imagine

Speaker 2: 01:20:08 - you'd have trouble seeing them. Right because dot. Mazur off til he, it was just a measured thing. It may be, I don't know that one. It's quite possible. Yeah, I don't see why not. Um, they just have to have some reason why they clump together in this way. You see it's quite possible if galaxies collide, then when you see the stars tend to go through, so they would accompany with they'd company the dark matter, the dust and the galaxies tends to get stuck and stay where it is. So if two collide, then you'd have a big pile of dust in the middle. But I think the dark matter tends to carry on through with the stars. I don't know. There may be some process which could produce just islands of dark matter. I don't know.

Speaker 3: 01:20:54 - When you discussed the cosmos, maybe the single most intriguing possibility to us as human beings is what other intelligent life, if any, is out there. And how interesting is that to you because you spent so much time studying the fundamental particles of the universe itself. How interested are you in the possibility of other intelligent life forms or have you just like put that out into the, it's just so ridiculously unlikely or so far away from us that we're probably never going to make contact.

Speaker 2: 01:21:29 - Where do you see it's not? So there's this Seti program looking at to see where they can see signals from listening to civilizations. The problem there from my perspective is that although they might be out there, they've got to have had a real headstart on us before he would see them. They might have done so. But then I dunno, you see actually via, he goes to John, who's my Armenian colleague and who looked also for these ring shaped things and looked at them in a different way from the Polish people. But um, we seem to have seen something there. But we wrote a paper in which we speculated on beings from the previous Ian communicating with us. And the advantage there is that you're looking at the really advanced civilizations, really the, you see

Speaker 3: 01:22:20 - billions of years ago that they, their universe disappeared and then had to come back to a big bank statements and those could come through and somehow or another, those signals Romaine. It's conceivable. I agree. It's pretty far fetched, but you know, who knows what. So Ian's, how many billions of years are you talking about? Like the, the big bang. 14 billion.

Speaker 2: 01:22:45 - Yes. But you see that's way, way at the beginning in a sense or at three quarters of the way through. In another sense it depends on how you draw the picture in the sense of interestingness or

Speaker 3: 01:22:59 - formal picture. We are already three quarters of the way through. So 14 billion now. So we have

Speaker 1: 01:23:06 - how much content does he is you see the trouble is it's this a cheat to cheat the year count. It's as much as you like. It depends on the on on something else. The mass has to feed out and how you measure the time it becomes problematic and it's either infinity you see, which isn't much use or you might have different definitions of time, which depends on what particle you're using as your clocks and things like that.

Speaker 3: 01:23:33 - So are you essentially saying that it's entirely possible that we are the furthest in terms of our technological achievement and our understanding of the universe itself? It's possible that we're at the front of the line though there might be some other intelligent life forms in the universe, but they might be behind us.

Speaker 1: 01:23:51 - Well there would have been, I mean, I'm not saying they got through, you say, well maybe they have techniques for getting through, but that's, that's a bit hard to imagine. But, um, maybe information from them, mcgee it through and maybe you mean from the previous els? Yes. They might have got through like somehow or another survived. Yes. But it would have to be in the form of photons or something. The, I know you could, it's not, I'm talking about ridiculous speculators. Sure. In coding information. The photons. Yes. Yes. Wow. It's conceivable. I don't want to say that I see it happening or anything, but it's not out of the question that they could develop some technology which would get information, which might be them in some sense, uh, across, in the form of photons.

Speaker 3: 01:24:36 - But you're not optimistic about current intelligent life somewhere in the universe.

Speaker 1: 01:24:41 - Not too optimistic. Just because, um, well maybe it took us a long time to get going because the dinosaurs were there for a while and somebody might've got in there earlier and they're different planets and they could've got there quite ahead of us. It's, it's conceivable. I'm not going to rule it out. I just not terribly optimistic about it. No, I think it's worth doing. It's worth looking. Yes, but it's not something that you're really not servicing. I'm expecting. It's not so much. I be curious. Certainly then I'm not expecting it. I guess is it just because of the overall lack of real evidence and it's just not an attractive thing for you to pursue? It's quite attractive. It's short. You know? I've just been doing other things and I don't know there's enough to do in the world. I haven't really come to terms that very hugely.

Speaker 1: 01:25:35 - So I know there's this activity and I, I'd be interested to see if any kind of, you know, if this, there was this thing that came past that some people speculated was sent there by and different intelligence, which came quite close in our solar system. Oh, that was that strange looking. This trailer shaved. Yes, that's right. Yeah. I mean, I don't see any real reason to believe it's alien supposedly because of the way it was traveling though was the idea or something. I really serious about it. See what these people did suggest. It might be something sent by an alien civilization. So it's worth you if one could make connect with it in some way. But I don't know, I guess it's too far away now. He wants another thing that's so uniquely fascinating for us. The concept of sale of another of another life form out there.

Speaker 1: 01:26:23 - Oh sure. Yes. Yeah. No you see there are lots of things I'm interested in the ones I talked to you about and perhaps some of the main months. Although the consciousness one is I'm glad that there are people doing it and you see this is one of the things, there's this institute that's that's being created using my name and uh, James Tag is involved with this, started it and I was quite, I'm not admitting them, worried about having my name attached to this thing when I didn't know much about it. But it seems to me a really important thing where you can deliberate purpose of it is to develop ideas which are make sense but are not mainstream. And one of these was the consciousness thing. So, you know, Stuart Hameroff is doing it, but it's not a activity that's being taken pot people researching it in, in detail in other parts of the world.

Speaker 1: 01:27:25 - So to have a place which supports that kind of thing is great and I think that's very good. But when I heard about it at first, I thought, well, most of my interests are on the physics side and not so much in biology, which I'm pretty ignorant about. And there are lots of ideas on that side, not just the cosmology, but ideas and building experiments which might detect the collapse of the wave function. And one idea to look at Bose-einstein condensates said, I have a colleague that's Yvette [inaudible] who I knew about and who had these ideas of how to use, um, Bose-einstein condensates to detect gravitational waves. And that's also very, you know, not a mainstream way of looking at it, but a very clever idea. And the Bose-einstein condensates because that's so quantum mechanical and they're so cold, they're almost virtually absolute zero. And they can keep external disturbances from causing problems and you can manipulate them in ways to make them in two places at once.

Speaker 1: 01:28:36 - People have done this kind of thing. And so it might well be a good way of testing the one, the Schrodinger cat thing. And we went, uh, whether the state reduction or the collapse of way function is a phenomenon in which is kind, which I hope might be like gravitational effect. And in, in that case, if it is, then that will be relevant to the consciousness problem. So all these things tied in various ways. And so the hope was that these things, which are, um, you know, could be supported. And I thought it was important because there's always the danger of such an institute being regarded as flaky, but he's doing weird things. Who Cares? So the important point from my perspective is that they should be things which can me and either now immediately tested experimentally or when a few years. So that things which are really, you can get your hotel, you can get and test them and see whether they're right or not.

Speaker 1: 01:29:35 - So this would be a protection against thinking of, well these, these crazy ideas that are being pursued, they have to be ideas which are capable of tests and have a reasonable chance of, of, of showing evidence in favor in their favor or against, you know, whichever would be interesting and important to know. So from the outside looking in, to me it's so fascinating to watch intellectuals as a, like yourself that are bouncing these ideas around that are possible but are not mainstream. And it seems to me that it's a precarious sort of tight rope walk. Like you don't want to say anything ridiculous that's not true. So he would love to say something that seems to be ridiculous but turns out to be in fact accurate and provable. And so that was this dance. I absolutely agree. Yes, that's absolutely right. And of course you've got to play with ideas which are on the sort of edge of what we know otherwise you're stuck with what we know.

Speaker 1: 01:30:32 - And these things will simply get channeled down the old roots and, and you, you need to be able to break, break free of those from time to time, but not in a, in a way which is too crazy to be examined. See whether there's truth in these ideas are not because of the synchronization that people have to go towards Wu or towards crazy ideas. It is important for the skepticism. Right. And it is important for the scrutiny. Yes. Oh absolutely. So there's real, it was real danger in that ledge. I agree. Well you see this is a strange kind of problem you see because with these observations, I'm not about, they're hawking points which I was describing, but the earlier ones about black hole collisions and my Armenian colleague and I had written a couple of papers on this and we hadn't gotten any response at all.

Speaker 1: 01:31:20 - And the Polish people and they'd written papers, two of them accepted by respectable journals. And I'm Chris, I've asked me, you know, what kind of responses you got and I say zero. And so I see him. What about you? How about what people respond to zero. So this is kind of spooky. You see, we've got these things out there in the literature, refereed a accepted publications and instead of people saying this is a load of nonsense, look, it doesn't make any sense for this reason and this disagrees with this observation and so, and that was fine. If I see that, I might be unhappy with it, but you've got something to work on and you say, oh, I see what's wrong. Something needs modifying here. Ah, that doesn't explain properly. That's what's needed or yes, no, you're, you're right. I had been abandoned this idea.

Speaker 1: 01:32:07 - All of these things come from criticisms and to have absolutely no tension whatsoever paid to these papers. Something I find spooky. Why do you think there's no attention paid? I don't know. I don't really know. I mean one of the things is there's so much information and that people don't have time. They've grown their own projects and they didn't want to pay attention and they think it looks crazy because it's too much outside the picture of the world that they have. And I think a lot of it's that and they maybe say, well look, I've been thinking, you know, I'm an old guy now and I maybe I did good things in the past, but um, maybe I've gone a bit off the rails, but I think that, you know, I've got colleagues, it's not just me and these respect to people who work on these things too. So I don't think that can be a complete explanation. Maybe it's part of it.

Speaker 3: 01:33:04 - Well, the sheer volume of papers that are published, it's got to be impossible to keep up with all that.

Speaker 1: 01:33:09 - I think that's a big part of the trouble because there are other ideas which, which to me look crazy and do other people don't look in ears. And as crazy as my idea as you see. So maybe that's why there's a lot of them have more attention page than the ones we, I actually, I'm curious to know whether the hawking points we'll take off or not.

Speaker 3: 01:33:27 - Well, I'm so happy there's people like you doing this kind of work. And then someone condensing it down to an understandable point that someone like me can absorb and just tried to get a better picture of this insane reality that we're living in. But it is pretty weird subsidies. And it seems like the more I talked to people like yourself and the more you study this, it doesn't get less weird. It gets more weird. Yes. I think that's right. Well, I don't know more information. It seems to be more fantastic. There's suddenly a lot of very weird things,

Speaker 1: 01:34:03 - but the point about them is that they got to make sense, mathematical sense. They've got agree with observation facts and that rules out. A lot of the really weird ones

Speaker 3: 01:34:16 - does. But even the ones that are observable and do adhere to the facts, they're so fantastic. It's so the, the reality, this is one of the things that's most frustrating about people's inclination to lean towards the Wu and I, I've been guilty of it myself and so attractive. But what's frustrating about it is that provable reality is so titanic Lee, bizarre. That's true. No, I agree that it's almost like why bother with the woo reality is you can make a good point in and of itself. You're absolutely right. No, it's very, very strange. Strange

Speaker 1: 01:34:53 - in quantum mechanics in so many ways is, but you see you got to, I think there's a little bit of a danger of separating the things which are, well first of all, it can be just wrong. Secondly, there are things which do require quantum mechanics to be changed in some way and there'd be other ones which are within quantum mechanics are just weird and that's absolutely true. There are these things which, which I believe have to be true as much as the Dib died in the womb. Quantum mechanics, people who follow the party lines and so on. Yeah, I mean these quantum entanglements, the fact that things can be whatever it is, a couple of thousand kilometers separated and yet know each other and a way. You can't explain that there are separate individuals. They behave as though they're one called the and tangled state. And you can make experiments which revealed that, I mean, it's was a John Bell who is an Irish theoretical physicists who really made it, made all this very clear. These things are real manifestations of the peculiarity of quantum mechanics and really out there in the world.

Speaker 3: 01:36:12 - Was it jbs Haldane it said, the world is not only queer than you suppose it's queer. Then you can suppose, all right, that's what this is, right? Indeed, yes. This is that kind of thing. Well, listen sir, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate talking to you and thank you for all your work and your, your contri bution to our understanding of what we're looking at here. What I hope it helps a bit, but it helps a lot. I appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Speaker 4: 01:36:48 - Hm.

see also :::

questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or
join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers

now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks

OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS

SEE ALSO

AUTH

BOOKS

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT

PRIMARY CLASS

transcript

SIMILAR TITLES

JRE 1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

DEFINITIONS

TERMS STARTING WITH

TERMS ANYWHERE

QUOTES [0 / 0 - 0 / 0]

KEYS (10k)

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

IN CHAPTERS [0/0]

WORDNET

IN WEBGEN [10000/0]

convenience portal:

recent: Section Maps - index table - favorites
Savitri -- Savitri extended toc
Savitri Section Map -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
authors -- Crowley - Peterson - Borges - Wilber - Teresa - Aurobindo - Ramakrishna - Maharshi - Mother
places -- Garden - Inf. Art Gallery - Inf. Building - Inf. Library - Labyrinth - Library - School - Temple - Tower - Tower of MEM
powers -- Aspiration - Beauty - Concentration - Effort - Faith - Force - Grace - inspiration - Presence - Purity - Sincerity - surrender
difficulties -- cowardice - depres. - distract. - distress - dryness - evil - fear - forget - habits - impulse - incapacity - irritation - lost - mistakes - obscur. - problem - resist - sadness - self-deception - shame - sin - suffering
practices -- Lucid Dreaming - meditation - project - programming - Prayer - read Savitri - study
subjects -- CS - Cybernetics - Game Dev - Integral Theory - Integral Yoga - Kabbalah - Language - Philosophy - Poetry - Zen
6.01 books -- KC - ABA - Null - Savitri - SA O TAOC - SICP - The Gospel of SRK - TIC - The Library of Babel - TLD - TSOY - TTYODAS - TSZ - WOTM II
8 unsorted / add here -- Always - Everyday - Verbs

change css options:
change font "color":
change "background-color":
change "font-family":
change "padding":
change "table font size":
last updated: 2022-05-04 11:41:09
234245 site hits