#428 - CERN Physicist: "We Found Something That Shouldn't Exist" | Daniel Whiteson

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at UC Irvine and an active researcher at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. SPONSORS https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. https://upwork.com - Visit Upwork dot com right now and post your job for free. https://shopify.com/dannyjones - Start your free trial today. https://dupe.com - Stop wasting money on brand names & start saving with Dupe. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Daniel's latest book: https://amzn.to/4gE81II Daniel's podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daniel-and-kellys-extraordinary-universe/id1436616330 *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Particle-colliding physics at CERN 03:23 - How to detect & measure dark matter 08:46 - Best evidence for existence of dark matter 15:19 - Universe expansion is accelerating 24:52 - Theory that information has mass 28:13 - Conservation of energy debunked 31:53 - Dark energy is taking over the universe 36:23 - James Webb telescope finds early galaxies 42:17 - Black holes 48:36 - The biggest mystery in physics 54:54 - New ion drive propulsion technology 01:03:55 - Voyager satellites & the golden records 01:10:17 - The problem with Spielberg's Disclosure Day 01:15:20 - Earth satellites that pre-date humans 01:25:34 - Our incorrect assumptions about aliens 01:30:08 - How we might learn an alien language 01:35:40 - How AI is advancing science 01:44:35 - Nazi involvement in the Manhattan Project 01:51:11 - Privatization of space exploration 01:57:37 - Jim Gates' simulation hypothesis 02:07:12 - Supersymmetry in the universe 02:13:01 - Mysteries of consciousness 02:16:38 - Telepathy is physically possible 02:23:02 - AI consciousness will be indistinguishable 02:31:19 - The Genesis Project: AI Manhattan Project 02:35:18 - New technologies that will change physics research Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:01Danny Jones?

  Well, Daniel, it's a pleasure to have you here today, brother. I always like to have the big CERN guys in here to find out all the, I love all the CERN conspiracies. So it's always good to get some of the guys who have boots on the ground in that place and on the show.

• 1:14Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know how big I am at CERN, but I've been to CERN, I work at CERN, I love CERN, so happy to talk about it.

• 1:19Danny Jones?

  How'd you get involved in working with CERN?

• 1:21Speaker 03

  Well, I've always been doing particle collider physics, like smash protons together, see what kind of stuff you can make, you know, learn about the universe. That's the best way to figure out like, what is the universe made out of? Just by smashing stuff together and seeing if something new comes out. To me, that was always the, the best way to answer like the deepest questions, like what's the universe made out of? So I did my PhD outside Chicago at Fermilabs, Tevatron, used to be the biggest collider in the world. And then CERN built a bigger one. So we all moved over there. You know, the whole community moves to follow the biggest accelerator in the world, because the bigger the accelerator, the higher the energy, the more you can explore what the universe is

• 2:03Speaker 03

  made out of. So I actually had one kid born in Chicago near that accelerator, another kid born in Geneva near that accelerator. So I've been following particle colliders my whole life.

• 2:13Danny Jones?

  That's incredible. So what, what kind of stuff were you specifically working on when you were at CERN?

• 2:17Speaker 03

  I was looking for dark matter. I was hoping we could figure out what is dark matter made out of? You know, we know that dark matter is out there. We know that it's matter. We know how much there is. We know roughly where it is, but we don't know what is it? You know, like, is it made out of particles? Is it made out of one kind of particle, two kinds of particles? Is it made out of something not particle at all, something totally new and weird that would blow our minds? And so we want to try to figure this out. And one way to do that is to try to make it in the lab. Like if we collide protons together, maybe sometimes those things turn into dark matter. And if so, we could find evidence for that in our collisions and, and learn something about dark matter as a particle,

• 3:01Speaker 03

  if it is indeed a particle. We don't know that.

• 3:03Danny Jones?

  So you're trying to make something you have no idea what it even is?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yes. And that's exactly, and that's the magic of colliders is you don't have to know what you're looking for. You don't have to know what's out there. You just smash the stuff together and eventually the universe will reveal everything it can make. See, the crucial thing about particle colliders is they're not chemistry. Like when you do chemistry, you have, you know, hydrogen and oxygen, you combine it, you get water. But you still have the hydrogen and oxygen in there. It's just like a rearrangement of what went in, right? It's like the same Lego bricks click together. That's not what happens in a particle collider. Particle collider, you smash them together, the bricks annihilate, they're gone, they turn into something new. It's alchemy, not chemistry. So it smashes together,

• 3:49Speaker 03

  it turns into this intermediate fuzzy state, and then it can turn into anything the universe knows how to make. So whatever's on nature's menu of stuff, you know, God's list, or you know, whatever the list is of the stuff the universe can make, the different kinds of particles that are out there, we'll see it at the Large Hadron Collider if it can be made. So we're like exploring the universe. As you say, we don't have to know what we're, what we're making in advance. We just smash it together and look to see what comes out. And if dark matter is real, and if it's a particle, and it interacts with our kind of matter at all, we'll see it at the colliders. So far, nothing. But that was my goal at first, is to try to figure out what is dark matter? Is it a particle? What kind of particle?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Is it 10 particles? These kinds of questions. Unfortunately, so far, we haven't seen any dark matter, which doesn't mean that-

• 4:39Danny Jones?

  It's electromagnetically indetectable, right?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Well, it is indetectable electromagnetically, which means that if we did make it at the collider, we wouldn't see it directly.

• 4:47Danny Jones?

  So how would you measure it?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, we would see it like bouncing off of something else. Like if you make dark matter and you also make something else at the same time, they go back to back. And then we'd see an imbalance. We'd see the thing that it was made with and not the dark matter. And we know that the collisions have to be balanced. And so if there's not a balance there, we only see one thing and not something else, we know something invisible was made. And so that's how we would detect the presence of something invisible. So it's a bit of an indirect search for-

• 5:17Danny Jones?

  Would there be any theoretically, any other way to detect dark matter or measure dark matter other than on the electromagnetic visual spectrum?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Well, we don't know. It's possible, right?

• 5:29Danny Jones?

  What is that mass?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Dark matter definitely has mass. That is the thing we know about dark matter, is that it's matter, and it has mass because it's giving us gravity. Like, we know that it's changing how galaxies rotate, it changed how the universe, the structure of the universe formed. Like without dark matter, we wouldn't have galaxies right now. It's the mass of dark matter that pulled together all the gas in the early universe to make galaxies. If there wasn't dark matter, we'd just have like floating gas at this point in the universe. Take like many more billion years to get galaxy, to get galaxies.

• 6:01Danny Jones?

  So this is the idea of the spin rate of the galaxy? When they measure it, they say that the, the center of the galaxy is spinning at the same exact rate as the outer rim. And they're saying that because dark matter is surrounding the galaxy and dark matter has mass, that's why it's flattening that rate. Because essentially, the, the center should be spinning a lot faster, right?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's one line of evidence for dark matter. And it's an important one, because it's one of the first ones we had. But it's also important to understand, it's not the only piece of evidence. It's not like, oh, we saw this and we fudged things to make it work. We have like nine or something independent, independent lines of evidence for dark matter. But the first one is really interesting, because, you know, they went out there and they said, let's look at galaxies. Galaxies are spinning. And think about what happens when you spin like a merry-go-round. If you put a bunch of ping pong balls and a merry-go-round, you spin it, what happens? Well, ping pong balls fly out, right? So galaxies are spinning. Why aren't the stars flying out into intergalactic space? Something's holding them on, right? Like if you're on a merry-go-round, you hold on, which is why

• 7:01Speaker 03

  you're not being thrown off the merry-go-round. So what's holding it on? Well, gravity. So then they go out, they measure, they say, is there enough gravity from all the stars in the galaxy to hold it together? We know how fast it's spinning. We know how many stars there are, we can add up all their, all their mass. And that's where the discrepancy was. They were like, wait a second, there's not nearly enough mass, not nearly enough gravity from the stars to hold it together. And yet, because it's spinning way too fast, but it's not throwing stars out into space. And so the answer is, there must be more mass in there, giving more gravity, holding the galaxy together, to keep it from throwing the stars out into space. So that was the first line of evidence for dark matter. But you know,

• 7:46Speaker 03

  that's one piece of evidence. And people might think, hmm, maybe you're wrong. Like maybe something's weird about gravity, or, you know, maybe something else is wrong. And so that wasn't enough to make people think, okay, dark matter is real. It wasn't until we saw it in many other ways that people were like, you know, it smells like an elephant, it leaves footprints like an elephant, it eats like an elephant, you know, all sorts of stuff, that maybe there's an elephant here. So we have lots of different lines of evidence. What we don't know, again, is what is it made out of? Is it a particle? Is it two particles? Is it 17 particles? And the challenge is that we know it has mass, we know it feels gravity, but gravity is not a great way to study something, because

• 8:28Speaker 03

  gravity's super duper weak. Like, think about how weak gravity is compared to magnetism. You have a fridge magnet on your fridge, it's tiny, right? But it's overcoming the entire gravitational pull of the earth. Tiny fridge magnet versus the earth, right? The earth is a huge mass, but gravity is so weak, that the gravity of the entire earth is feeble compared to like what a fridge magnet can do.

• 8:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  So gravity's super duper weak, which means, how are you ever going to detect dark matter using gravity if you want to see one dark matter particle? Like, what is the gravity from one particle? Basically, zero. You'll never study dark matter just with gravity, if you want to understand it at the particle level. We can see dark matter at the galaxy level, at the solar system level, right? Maybe even the planet level, but like particles of dark matter, we'll never study those with gravity. So to see dark matter as a particle, we need to have some other kind of force, some new kind of like dark force, that's helping us interact with dark matter. You're right, it can't interact electromagnetically, you can't see it, doesn't give off light, doesn't reflect

• 9:35Speaker 03

  light, but there might be some new kind of dark force that lets us interact with dark matter.

• 9:41Danny Jones?

  And what are the other compelling lines of evidence to you?

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:44Danny Jones?

  Of dark matter?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  So one of them is the structure of the universe. Like when you look out into the universe and you say, wow, we have galaxies, and we have clusters of galaxies, and we have super clusters of galaxies, and you ask, how do those form? You need dark matter to explain those. Like, without dark matter, there just isn't enough time to make all this structure. There isn't enough gravity from just the gas and the stars and the, and the planets to pull that stuff together. Like, it would take 50 billion years for that to happen, and we only have 14 billion. So there's not enough time for mass to pull stuff together without dark matter. That's like another line of evidence.

• 10:23Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Another one is that we've seen light from the very early universe. This is called the cosmic microwave background light.

• 10:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  It's like a baby picture of the universe. You know, 14 billion years ago, almost, the universe was filled with hot, dense plasma, and it was glowing like the center of the sun, and it was giving off light like the center of the sun. And when that light was emitted, it was also almost immediately reabsorbed, just like at the center of the sun. Like, if you give off light in the center of the sun, it doesn't make it out to the surface, it gets reabsorbed. Same thing happened in the early universe. But the universe was cooling, and it was expanding. So at some point, it went and became transparent. And so light could fly through the universe. And that's the oldest light that we can still see. The light from when the universe went from being opaque to being transparent. Those photons are still around.

• 11:15Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  That's called the cosmic microwave background light. And when we look out into the sky, we can see them. We can see them in this direction, we can see them in that direction, we can see them in every direction. This is the discovery in like 1965 of this light from the early universe. It proved to us that the universe used to be hot and dense. And the reason this long answer to your question about dark matter is that there's evidence in that light for dark matter in the early universe. Because there are ripples in that light. It's not like equally hot and cold. If you Google CMB light, you'll see this weird map with like, blue spots and red spots.

• 11:49Danny Jones?

  Is that what you were just showing?

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the famous map.

• 11:52Danny Jones?

  Is that the, is that this?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that one right there, exactly. And so, some spots of it are a little more intense, and some spots are a little bit colder, so hotter and colder.

• 12:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And those correspond to places in the universe that used to be more dense or less dense. So you're looking at like a map of the early universe of where there was more stuff, and when there was less stuff, or when the plasma was hotter or colder. And that contains evidence for dark matter. Because how those ripples existed in the early universe, like where places were more or less dense, and how things sloshed around, was affected by dark matter, because dark matter has gravity.

• 12:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  And we can see evidence for that. And if there wasn't any dark matter, the CMB light would look very, very different. So that's like another completely independent line of evidence for dark matter. And there's several more. So, you know, people say, oh, dark matter is a fudge factor. Dark matter is-

• 12:44Danny Jones?

  A fudge factor?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. People complain about that, or they say, you know, this is scientists just trying to make their equations work, or whatever. And, you know, I think there's, there are some fudge factors in science. Usually they're like placeholders, who are like, we don't really understand this yet, let's just put in a number and then we'll figure it out. But dark matter's not like that. Dark matter is something we're fairly confident in, it is real, it's out there, it's matter. We just, again, don't know what it's made out of. Like, if you zoomed in on dark matter-

• 13:13Danny Jones?

  How do we know it's a particle?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  We don't. We don't know at all that it's a-

• 13:17Danny Jones?

  What else could it be? What are the other options?

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so-

• 13:20Danny Jones?

  Do we even have any way of conceptualizing this in our little monkey brains?

• 13:23Speaker 03

  We have a lot of blind spots. Like, you know, you might ask, well, if we don't know it's a particle, why is Dana looking for it as a particle?

• 13:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  And you know, this is the process of science. It's like, okay, here's a really big, hard question. What is most of the universe made out of? Who knows how to even begin? Well, you begin by doing like the simplest thing. Like, well, let's just assume it looks like the kind of other stuff we've seen. Maybe that's right, and we'll find it. Maybe that's wrong. And eventually, we'll have to back up and be like, well, that didn't work, let's try something different. And it's hard. It's hard to think outside the box and be like, what if it's not a particle? What else could it be? You know, imagine matter where if you zoomed in on it, it never changed how it looked. Like, currently, we have matter, and if you zoomed in on it, you see atoms, right? You see structure. You know, water looks smooth, but when you zoom in on it, you see, eventually, you see little

• 14:14Speaker 03

  molecules of water. What if there's a kind of matter that wasn't like that? That no matter how much you zoomed, it was always smooth. And that's like, far out from anything we've ever seen before. But there's a danger in extrapolating from what we've experienced to what we don't know. Like, we've studied matter for 1,000 years, but we've only studied this little slice. Atoms, the kind of stuff that we're made out of, me and you, and ice cream, and lava, and stars. That's a little slice of the universe, it's 5%. So to then say, well, maybe the rest of it is also like that, you know, that's a, it's a big guess. On the other hand, it's, it's all we know. So it's hard to think outside of that and

• 14:56Speaker 03

  be like, hmm, maybe it's some other new thing. I personally hope it's something totally crazy. Something that when we figure it out, we're like, that can't be possible. Because those are my favorite moments in science, you know, when the universe confronts you with its weirdness. When it's like, your little monkey brains thought it worked this way, but actually, it's this other secret way.

• 15:19Danny Jones?

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• 15:57Danny Jones?

  raw mushrooms themselves. Just go to amentara.com/go/dj and use the code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. Again, A-M-E-N-T-A-R-A.com/go/dj and use the code DJP22. What was like, for you, the biggest kind of like, moment where it was like, holy shit, this changes everything?

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think the discovery that the universe expansion is accelerating, that was a mind blowing moment for me, and I think for almost all of the community. Because, you know, until then, we knew the universe is big, we knew it was filled with galaxies, and we knew those galaxies were moving away from us. But the question was, is there enough gravity in the universe to pull those galaxies back into like a big crunch? Or is there not enough gravity, and things are just going to drift away forever? Those are the two hypotheses people were thinking about. And we wanted to know, like, what is the future? Are we headed towards some crazy, you know, cosmic crunch, which would seem insane? Or are we going to drift away forever? And those are the two options people were considering.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  And so they went out to measure it, to see like, well, let's look through the history of the universe and see how it's been expanding. Is that expansion slowing down, or is it mostly continuing? And what they found was a total surprise. They found that it wasn't slowing down at all, it was accelerating. Which wasn't even in the realm of possibilities. It wasn't like, one of the things people were considering. It was a complete surprise. And the universe was like, secret option C, you know, things are very, very different from what you imagined. And so the whole community had to be like, what? But look, this is what the data say. And you have to follow the data, right? Dogma, mainstream narrative, all that stuff, out the window. When the data tells you, you're wrong.

• 17:43Danny Jones?

  And what was the consensus before that? And what year was that? Did we actually find this discovery?

• 17:49Speaker 03

  This is like 2001, I think.

• 17:51Danny Jones?

  2001. And what was the belief before then?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  I think the prevailing consensus was that there wasn't enough stuff in the universe for it to slow down and turn out into a big crunch. Things would just slow down forever, but never come back. Right? Like, the two options were, you know, we had the Big Bang massive expansion, but things were slowing down.

• 18:09Danny Jones?

  Everything eventually will like, stop to a standstill.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I think people thought it was just going to drift forever and never turn around. Slow down gradually, like somebody's hitting the brakes, we're never going to actually like, stop and go into reverse. That was the other option. So those are the two options. Is are we going to reverse into a big crunch, or just sort of gradually drift, slowing down forever? And then they discovered, oh, we're not going to do neither of those, we're going to speed up, right? Instead of, how much are we braking, and are we going into reverse? The answer is, no, we're hitting the gas pedal. Something out there in the universe is speeding up all the galaxies. It's insane idea. It's insane realization that-

• 18:47Danny Jones?

  I saw, Steve, I think I sent you an article about this recently, didn't I? I was looking up, I texted you an article about this. There was something recent that I saw pop up in the cosmology, on a cosmology website. This, is this it?

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:02Danny Jones?

  The debate over whether the universe is really accelerating is reignited. When was this published? Go up to the top. August 30th?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  30th.

• 19:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, yesterday. Holy shit, okay. Go down.

• 19:17Danny Jones?

  So zoom in, the controversy over one of modern cosmology's foundational ideas has been renewed with the new research that points to critical issues in a recent analysis defending the view that our universe is expanding. Last year, a research team in Yonsei University in South Korea presented new findings that challenged the longstanding view about the universe expanding. Following a new analysis of type Ia supernova, these stellar explosions hold a significant place in the modern debate since measurements of their brightness have helped measure the apparent expansion of the cosmos. Uh, what are they saying here?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  So they're talking about the way that we discovered the universe expansion was accelerating, which is this special kind of supernova.

• 19:58Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Supernova are super cool.

• 20:00Danny Jones?

  It's not there, Steve? Go up.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Supernova are super cool because there are these massive explosions, like stars collapse due to gravity.

• 20:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  And then they bounce back and they're momentarily like brighter than a whole galaxy. It's insane. And there's a special kind of supernova, type 1A. When you had like a pair of stars and one of them collapsed, but didn't go supernova. And then later it steals more mass from its neighbor and so that it can collapse and go supernova. So it's a special kind of thing and it happens in a very predictable way so that if you see a supernova, you can tell, you can calculate how bright is that supernova? And that's important because that tells you how far away it is. Cause if you know how bright it is at the source and you measure how bright it is from Earth, you can tell how far away is it so that we can get this sort of reduction in brightness? Like, you know, if some, if I hold a light here and I'm one meter from you, it's bright. And if I walk away 10 meters, it's dimmer.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  And so if you knew how bright the light was for real, you could tell how far away I was by measuring how bright.

• 20:59Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  And that was the real challenge before that is how do you measure how far away a galaxy is for real?

• 21:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  So type 1 supernova are how we measure distance to those galaxies. And then we look back through time and we see how have the distances to galaxies been changing? And that gives us the history of the expansion of the universe. And so this was the key to this, to that dark energy discovery is a team at Berkeley and a team in Australia to figure out how to spot this and make this measurement. And so these guys are like, wait, what if you're wrong?

• 21:30Danny Jones?

  They're saying based on, uh, the team argued that the type 1A supernova are affected by their age, a factor that resulted in biases in past cosmological measurements. After correcting for this, the team's new results shook the world of cosmology as they implied that the cosmic expansion, uh, scientists have long observed may have already transitioned from acceleration to deceleration.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  So this is science at work, right? People said, look, we saw this stuff from supernova. We think it's, it means that the universe is expanding and accelerating and that's crazy. And so it deserves scrutiny. And so people said, well, what if you're wrong?

• 22:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  What if this assumption that we know how bright the supernova is, um, based on whatever measurements is wrong? That could be changing our assumptions about the distance. And so we could get everything wrong. And so these guys found, you know, a potential mistake and there's a discussion about it. And you see even.

• 22:27Danny Jones?

  Scroll down, Steve.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Below in that same article, there's folks are like, hmm, actually we think that this isn't an issue. And this is why we measure stuff and then we cross check. And you always want to have like two or three independent lines of evidence that something is happening before you really believe it.

• 22:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  And the case of the expansion of the universe, the type 1A supernova tells it's happening and there are other independent lines of evidence that this is happening. So I'd be surprised if this was overturned, but you know, anything that if the data.

• 22:57Danny Jones?

  Overturned?

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I'd be surprised if we learned later, oh, the universe expansion is not accelerating if that was wrong.

• 23:05Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  It could be like, you never know, and you gotta be.

• 23:08Danny Jones?

  Isn't this saying, so this is in layman terms, this is essentially saying that, uh, from the way we're measuring how the universe is expanding, it's too hard to know because of how far away the shit we're measuring is?

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And we don't know exactly how far away those supernova are. This is what they're saying.

• 23:29Danny Jones?

  I see.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  They're like, actually you could be making a mistake in those.

• 23:32Danny Jones?

  So this isn't even making a whole new claim. This is just pointing out one like pillar of evidence that the people are using.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 23:40Danny Jones?

  Trying to show some nuance or some questioning that evidence.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  And it's good stuff. Like this is what you should be doing.

• 23:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  You should be checking things from all angles. And if it's true, it should hold up, right? A true story survives scrutiny from many directions and an illusion doesn't. And so this is why we do this. And this is why this is out in the open also. I love that this is out in the open, you know? It's like people are like, no, you're wrong. And then other groups like, actually we think we're right and let's discuss it and debate it. Um, you know, you see a lot of stuff online about, you know, science protecting dogma. But I think this is a great example of how like, actually when we don't know, we say we don't know and we talk about it and we argue about it and then eventually we figure it out.

• 24:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  And sometimes we yell at each other, but that's the process.

• 24:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, science is run by a bunch of human beings with egos.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Well, science is a human endeavor like everything else. And so there's politics, there's egos, um, there's incentives, but in the end it's, it's by people for people. And mostly it's just curious people trying to figure out how the universe works.

• 24:40Danny Jones?

  Right, right. So how long were you working at CERN trying to find a black hole? Or not a black hole, dark matter?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Dark matter. Yeah. Um, so I worked on dark matter for about 10 years.

• 24:51Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  And we came up with lots of new ways to like, look for dark matter. Maybe it's looking this way, maybe it's that way, maybe it's this other way. We didn't see anything. Um, and eventually I was like, I don't think we're going to see anything. So let's move on, look for something else. Uh, they're still doing it. There's still, you know, more data, more data. You can always find something. Um, but I got interested in other stuff. I'm more interested now in like finding surprises. Like maybe there's something in the data, not even dark matter, something else new and crazy. You know, the dark energy example is an example of that, one of those moments in science when you're like, what?

• 25:26Danny Jones?

  Dark energy?

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, dark energy, the expansion of the universe. Um, and that's what I got into science for, you know, it's like to have some moment of eureka where you're like, oh my gosh, we thought X and it turns out to be Y. And so right now me and my team, we're looking for surprises. We're looking for something totally unexpected in our data.

• 25:46Danny Jones?

  Right. My favorite theory about dark matter is, uh, the one from Wheeler. Are you familiar with that one? Uh, where I think he believed dark matter was like a computational cloud of data, like ones and zeros.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 26:00Danny Jones?

  Um, and, uh, it's kind of like a fun little analogy he uses that I think actually somebody, we had a computer scientist in here, um, Roman, you know, Lepowski, whatever his name is, I forget, can't pronounce his last name. But he, after we got done with the show, I pitched this to him and he's like, he blew it out of the water. Like I was like, fuck. But it's still fascinating to think about. Basically the idea is that he, I think Wheeler was the one who thought that dark matter could have been like computational cloud, um, that's a data storage type thing because using the analogy of like a hard drive, like a brand new hard drive.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:37Danny Jones?

  Uh, is all ones are all zeros, very low entropy. Then you record data on it and it becomes high entropy, right? So now, you know, it's got all these ones and zeros, which mean nothing to us until we plug it into a computer and then, you know, we see it on a screen and then it gives us meaning. But from a, from a strictly, uh, mathematical viewpoint, it's just ones and zeros and it's higher entropy. So what happens when you, when you erase that hard drive or you take all the data off the hard drive and you completely wipe it clean? Well, it's going from chaotic, high entropy to back down to low entropy, all ones are all zeros. So, uh, from the laws of thermodynamics, that energy can't be created or destroyed and it's also interconvertible with mass. That means you had mass on the hard drive theoretically, right?

• 27:22Danny Jones?

  So that mass has, that energy or mass has to leave the hard drive and go out into whatever.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 27:28Danny Jones?

  Dark matter? And there was somebody who came up with a theory that if you weighed all of the hard drives in the world right now, including all the data centers and everything else, you would have, and you may have heard this before, I don't know, uh, you would have, if we had, we don't have measurement devices that are sensitive enough, but if we could, all the data on every hard drive and server and NSA server across the face of the earth would be like less than a kilogram.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:53Danny Jones?

  Or something like that. 50 grams. What? 50 grams. 50? Depending on how it's measured, the data in the world would, uh, weighs either 50 grams, the weight of a strawberry. Okay. Well, this was, this guy said this year, decades ago, so.

• 28:08Danny Jones?

  Anyway, so 50 grams. Basically, his point was like, but with the exponential growth of technology and AI and supercomputing and all this stuff, it's not a linear acceleration every year. So every year, it's like it's compounding the amount of data that's being stored and you know, what they're doing with all these data centers now, who knows what it's gonna look like. So like, eventually, all that stuff's gonna create a massive, lots of mass on the surface of the earth. So he was using that analogy to say like, you know, what if what was in that hard drive was dark matter? You know, it's just an interesting thought experiment that can probably be easily debunked by somebody smarter than me.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I think that people don't agree necessarily whether information has mass because, you know, the difference between entropy and energy, right? This organization of ideas and stuff can give you entropy, but that's not the same as energy. And it's energy that gives you mass. So I think there's some debate there. But also, you touched on something else. I, you know, I hope maybe we could talk about, which is conservation of energy. As you say, like, energy can't be destroyed or created. But actually, we've discovered that's not true, right? That conservation of energy is something people assume and talk about, and it seems obvious. But what we've discovered is the expansion of the universe tells us that energy can be created and destroyed, and it's happening all of the time.

• 29:32Danny Jones?

  What, like black holes?

• 29:34Speaker 03

  No, just like, as the universe expands, dark energy is this substance in the universe that has constant density. So, you know, like, if you have 10 ping pong balls in a volume of space, and then you increase the room, but you don't add anymore ping pong balls, the density goes down, right? Increase the volume, you don't increase the mass, density goes down. That's what matter does. And, but dark energy, this thing that's accelerating the expansion of the universe, that acts differently. That has a constant density. So you increase the space, it's like you get more ping pong balls to keep the density constant. Nobody knows how this happens, or why it happens, or what dark energy is.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  But the thing we know about dark energy is it has constant density. So what happens as the universe expands? More space comes with more dark energy. That's more energy. So the amount of energy in the universe is constantly going up as it expands, because every new chunk of space that's created comes with new dark energy. So-

• 30:37Danny Jones?

  But we don't know what the dark energy is, or the dark matter.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  We don't know what it is. Absolutely. And energy is also being destroyed as the universe expands. Take a photon, like, we talked about these photons from the early universe.

• 30:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  When they were emitted, they were super high energy, because the plasma was super dense and super bright.

• 30:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  It was like 3,000 Kelvin. But as the universe expands, photons get redshifted, right? They get, go from blue to red, they get stretched out. But going from blue to red, going from blue to red means going from high energy to low energy. Like, a red photon is less energy than a blue photon. Where did the energy go when the universe expands and it stretches out all the photons?

• 31:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  All those photons from the early universe are now super duper low energy. Where did that energy go? Nowhere. It just went. So that's an example of the expansion of the universe destroying energy.

• 31:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  It can create energy, it can destroy energy. So, energy is only conserved in a universe that's not expanding, in a static universe. But that's not our universe. So we're not actually required to conserve energy.

• 31:42Danny Jones?

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• 32:52Speaker 03

  No, the laws of thermodynamics are still valid, but you know, there's always an assumption. When you say, "Energy can't be conserved or destroyed," that's like, assuming a closed system, assuming space is not expanding, and so, those assumptions that you don't usually mention, when you mention it-

• 33:07Danny Jones?

  But the assumptions are wrong.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, if the assumptions don't apply, then the rules don't apply.

• 33:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  And that's, that's another, like, amazing, like, wow, the universe is breaking the rules.

• 33:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's bonkers.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, you know, it's, it's not small. Like, the dark energy in the universe, it's like 70% of all the energy in the universe. 5% is atomic matter, 25% is dark matter, 70% of it is dark energy. So it's huge. It's not like a tiny little detail. And it's expanding, and it's taking over. Like, about nine billion years after the beginning of the universe, dark energy became most of the energy in the universe. And now it's 70%. And then it's gonna be 90%, and then 99%, because it causes the expansion. So as you have more dark energy, you get more expansion, which gives you more dark energy, which gives you more expansion. It's a runaway effect. So dark energy is just like taking over the universe.

• 34:01Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  It's crazy. Yeah, exactly.

• 34:05Danny Jones?

  So, this is a diagram that says, the, what, the contents of the universe, Steve? Scroll up, what's the top of it say?

• 34:12Speaker 03

  This is basically the energy density of the universe.

• 34:14Danny Jones?

  Can you go higher? Contents of the universe, okay.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  If you took like, a cubic light year of space, and you said, "How much of the energy in this cubic light year is due to atoms?" That'd be 5%. "How much of it is due to dark matter?" That's 27%. "And how much of it is dark energy?" That'd be 67%. So it's the energy density of the universe. But, you know, as the universe expands, these fractions change, because dark energy doesn't get diluted, and everything else does.

• 34:41Danny Jones?

  That's fucking crazy, dude.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  And that's actually another piece of evidence that dark matter is matter. Because as the universe expands, dark matter's density goes down. It gets diluted, just like matter does.

• 34:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, it does?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  It does. Dark matter does. Dark energy does not. These two things, they sound similar, dark matter-

• 34:59Danny Jones?

  Dark energy increases at the same rate.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. So dark matter is like, stuff, it's out there, we know what it is. We know that it's matter, we don't know what it's made out of, but it's definitely matter, and it dilutes as the universe expands. Dark energy does not dilute.

• 35:14Danny Jones?

  So if it's matter, wouldn't it be particles?

• 35:16Speaker 03

  We don't know, right? All the kind of matter we've ever seen is particles.

• 35:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  So maybe. But look at how small normal matter is. To say, "The rest of the matter should also be like this kind of matter," that's, that's an extrapolation, right? It's like saying, "Hey, I've only ever lived in Tampa, everybody in the world must be like people from Tampa."

• 35:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Like, you know, probably, there's something different. Probably, there's things to learn.

• 35:41Danny Jones?

  But dark matter's also all around us right now, right?

• 35:42Speaker 03

  It is, absolutely. We don't know for sure, but we think that we are in a dark matter wind. And like, dark matter's passing through us. Like, right now, in this room, there is dark matter, passing through us. We haven't been able to detect it, we've looked for it. We have these huge experiments underground, filled with like, tanks filled with, you know, a kiloton of xenon, waiting for the dark matter wind to bump into one xenon nucleus, so we can see it. Haven't seen it yet. But we do think-

• 36:08Danny Jones?

  This is a CERN?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Not at CERN, this one is in northern Italy. And there are other experiments around the world that are looking for dark matter passing through the world. There's several different ways to detect dark matter. One is-

• 36:21Danny Jones?

  So this isn't like, a money issue? This is just a brains issue? We need people to be more creative, to come up with different ways to measure, or theoretical creative ideas to detect dark matter?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. You know, it's, we tried the simplest thing, like, let's assume dark matter is a particle, because maybe it is. And let's assume it's one kind of particle. And let's assume it has a very simple interaction, and let's go look for it. And, you know, all of those are assumptions that could be wrong, but it's worth looking for, right? Like, if it is the easiest possible thing, it'd be a shame not to find it. So we've been doing that. We haven't found anything. And it's definitely time to think more broadly, like, okay, let's back up. Which of those assumptions was wrong? Maybe it's not particles, maybe it's many particles, maybe it's a new weird other thing. Definitely, we need more creativity. So there's a whole industry of people coming up with ideas for what dark matter might be. It might be this, it might be that, it might be the other thing. We

• 37:15Speaker 03

  definitely need creativity there.

• 37:17Danny Jones?

  And what, are you familiar with this thing that came out, I think in 2024, about the James Webb Telescope detecting something? It detected some sort of shift or something, where it said that these galaxies are too early? Are you familiar with that?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:34Danny Jones?

  This was, I think this was a paper that came out?

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the James Webb Space Telescope, awesome instrument, right? It's up in the Lagrange Point, looking out into the universe, and it's an infrared telescope. So it sees really, really old, or really, really distant light. Light that's been redshifted from the early universe. So like, Hubble can look out into the universe, but it sees visible light, like the kind of light we can see. So light from really early galaxies are really far away, is too red for Hubble to see. So that's why we had to build a special infrared telescope to see these things. And it lets us see earlier into the history of the universe. And so what they did is they looked for galaxies forming. Like, we think that the universe's history was like, a bunch of gas, and then gravity and dark matter pulled it together, and formed stars, and galaxies, and whatever. We have a whole story about how that might

• 38:19Speaker 03

  have happened. But we haven't seen a lot of that happen. And we could be wrong. And so James Webb went and looked, okay, can we see early galaxies forming? And it saw a bunch of stuff that was a surprise. Number one, which I think you're mentioning, is it saw galaxies forming way earlier than we thought. Like, it should take a while. You form stars, they get together, they pull together, the mini galaxies, other galaxies collide with that mini galaxy to make bigger galaxies. So you can predict, how long should it take to make big galaxies? But when they looked, they saw them much earlier than they expected to. So like, something's happening, right? Anytime there's a difference between, you know, your expectation and your reality, that's a moment to learn about the universe.

• 39:03Danny Jones?

  Is this it? No, this is 2026?

• 39:06Speaker 04

  There's, there's tons of articles, they all repeat the same information.

• 39:10Danny Jones?

  Okay, astronomers using the James Webb- Space Telescope have discovered that massive early galaxies contain far more small faint stars than expected, that hidden population, uh, hidden population could make some of these galaxies three to four times more massive than previously estimated. Uh, the finding makes it even harder to explain how enormous mature galaxies formed so soon after the Big Bang. It could also suggest that planets around low mass stars were more common in the early universe than scientists realized.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Super fun, right? That means aliens.

• 39:46Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, I love how they worded it.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what this means is, is that we don't know how galaxies formed as well as we expected, right? There's some surprise here.

• 39:56Danny Jones?

  Now, with this pushback, are like the timeline that we currently have of like the Big Bang?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  No, this doesn't change.

• 40:04Danny Jones?

  Or the age of the entire universe?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Probably not. We think we know when, uh, you know, when that CMB like happened and when the universe was filled with plasma. You know, we don't actually know, um, when the universe began. The Big Bang Theory doesn't tell us when the universe started. It tells us when the universe was filled with hot dense matter that created that early glow. We've seen that. We know that happened. Where that matter came from? What happened before that? Was it a moment before that? Was it a Billis second before that? Was it a million years? Was it a trillion years? We don't know. The Big Bang Theory often misquoted as saying the universe began with this singularity, this point exploding out into space. That's like a common misunderstanding of the Big Bang. It's not about the start of the universe

• 40:51Speaker 03

  and it doesn't tell us that the universe began in a point.

• 40:53Danny Jones?

  We just have a timeframe. We have an estimate of how long ago it was.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  We have an estimate of how long ago the universe was filled with hot dense stuff. Where that came from? How, what, what created it? What happened before that? We don't know. And the Big Bang Theory doesn't claim to know. There's a bunch of other speculative theories, inflation, cosmic cycles, whatever, that speculate about what might have happened. But the Big Bang Theory itself doesn't tell us how old the universe is. It tells us how long it's been expanding since that hot dense unexplained state.

• 41:24Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. I think a lot of the stuff could be us just trying to project things that we understand as biological life forms onto the galaxy and the universe, you know, like assuming that there has to be a beginning, middle and end like, like human life has.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly. Like, does there have to be a beginning? Like, that's a philosophical question and you argue both sides of it and, and smoke banana peels and convince yourself either way, right? But, um, we don't have evidence that there was a beginning. People often misunderstood the Big Bang as saying that we know that there was a beginning. It's not. We know that, we know something happened a long time ago. We know the universe was once really, really dense. We don't know that there was a beginning.

• 42:04Danny Jones?

  Right. So what is this, Steve?

• 42:06Speaker 04

  So this is related to, um, this is talking about the James Webb. This was post January.

• 42:13Danny Jones?

  23. Okay.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  And.

• 42:14Danny Jones?

  So within just the last two years, Big Bang theorists have had to push back estimate, estimated dates for the first stars by about 150 million years from 400 to 250 million years after the supposed Big Bang.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Supposed Big Bang. Okay.

• 42:31Danny Jones?

  Well, and the, and the, you know, the time scale of the universe, 100,000, 100 million years is not much, right?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is talking about like, okay, you have that gas. How long does it take for it to come together and make stars? When do they start burning? Um, because that's the foundation of galaxies. And we want to understand that because we want to understand like, you know, how did our universe come to look the way that it did? Could it have been something else? What does it tell us? And we want all the pieces to fit together into a story because we want to know that story. And if the pieces don't fit, it means there's something wrong. And there's lots of mysteries about that. Like, we don't know how supermassive black holes came to be at the, at the heart of galaxies and how they got to be so big so quickly. It's the same question.

• 43:11Danny Jones?

  So the heart of our galaxy is a massive black hole.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Absolute monster black hole. And the heart of almost every galaxy we've seen has a monster black hole in it. And some of them are like billions of stars worth of mass. Incredible, just enormous curvature of spacetime.

• 43:29Danny Jones?

  How big is the black hole at the center of our galaxy?

• 43:32Speaker 03

  I don't know that one off the top of my head. I think it's millions of solar masses.

• 43:36Danny Jones?

  Millions. So it's definitely bigger than our solar system.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yes. But it's small compared to the mass of the galaxy. Usually supermassive black holes, they're monsters, but they're like, you know, point one percent of the mass of the galaxy. So compared to like the whole galaxy of stars, they're pretty small, but they are big compared to one.

• 43:52Danny Jones?

  The mass of the galaxy.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  I think point one usually.

• 43:54Danny Jones?

  Point one percent. Wow.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  So it just, you know, there's so many scales to the universe that boggle your mind. The size of a supermassive black hole is huge. The size of the galaxy is even bigger.

• 44:05Danny Jones?

  Sagittarius A is the name of the milk, is the name of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and has a mass of about four million times the mass of our sun and a physical diameter of roughly 14 to 16 million miles. Geez.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. And the mystery is, how did these black holes get so big? If you take our understanding of the universe and you simulate it, well, you get black holes at the hearts of galaxies, but they're much smaller. Like, there isn't enough time for them to get so big so early, which tells you there's something we don't understand about the formation of the early universe. Something about how these galaxies got formed and how the supermassive black holes at their hearts got formed. There's some really fun ideas, like primordial black holes.

• 44:50Danny Jones?

  Primordial black.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Primordial, one of my favorite theories. The idea is very, very early in the universe, before we even had particles or before we even had like, you know, protons and electrons, everything was really, really dense. What if back then, way before everything, black holes were made? So before we even had like quantum fields and particles, those are primordial black holes and they could still be around and they could explain the dark matter. Like, it could be dark matter is a bunch of these super early universe black holes. And it could, they could have kickstarted the formation of supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies. This is like one fun speculative theory about, you know, how things could be the way, could look the way that they do.

• 45:33Danny Jones?

  And CERN was also studying black holes, right?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 45:37Danny Jones?

  So how the hell do you study? Well, when you want to, when you're at CERN, like dark matter is one thing. Then how the hell are you trying to, what specifically, I heard that they were trying to figure out what happens to stuff when they go into black holes. Is that right?

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Well, we were hoping to create black holes because we wanted to observe them disappearing. So one of the central mysteries in physics right now, like the biggest question in physics is quantum gravity. Like, we have a theory of general relativity that explains the big stuff, how the universe behaves and gravity. And then we have quantum mechanics, which explains the small stuff, you know, particles and stuff. But the two are very, very different. One assumes that like the universe is classical and smooth. The other one assumes the universe is discrete and made out of pieces. And nobody's been able to bring them together. And one place when you need both of them is inside a black hole. Because a black hole has super duper gravity, so gravity is important, and it's super duper compact, so quantum mechanics

• 46:33Speaker 03

  is important. So they disagree about what's going on inside a black hole. And if we could see a black hole and study it, we might learn how to develop a theory of quantum gravity. So we were hoping to create black holes and then watch them evaporate. So you might have heard of this famous thing called Hawking Radiation, that black holes aren't actually totally black. They glow. There's these fields near the edge of the black hole that because of the distortion of spacetime, they have a faint glow, a very, very faint glow. But the cool thing about Hawking Radiation is that the bigger the black hole, the more faint the glow. So the smaller the black hole, the brighter the glow. So if you have a black hole and sitting out there in space and it's really, really big, it's going to

• 47:17Speaker 03

  glow really faintly and it's going to shrink because that glow is sapping its energy. So it's shrinking really slowly. But then as it gets smaller, the glow gets brighter. And it gets smaller, it gets brighter, smaller, even brighter. And eventually it's going to disappear in a flash, a really, really brilliant flash of light.

• 47:33Danny Jones?

  And what happens if you're close to that black hole?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, you get fried. Yeah, absolutely. Not recommended.

• 47:39Danny Jones?

  So I got to imagine there's some planets that are pretty close to that black hole. Like, if you look, like the way we look up and see our moon, they could probably see that damn black hole like in the sky.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it would be very fast at the end. And, um, but we've never seen this happen. You know, we've looked out into space to see, can we see black holes evaporating? That would be pretty awesome. We've never seen one. And that's actually one of the biggest challenge to this theory of primordial black holes. Like, look, if there are black holes everywhere, we should see one evaporate sometime and we never have. So, but what we're hoping to do at CERN is make super tiny ones and see them evaporate.

• 48:14Danny Jones?

  What could go wrong?

• 48:15Speaker 03

  There was a lot of hoopla about this, right? Like, do you guys know what you're doing? Is this really right? And, you know, people took that seriously. And the truth is that it's, if it were dangerous, the earth would already have been destroyed by a black hole because collisions like this happen all the time, every day already, naturally. Like particles from space. Space is not empty. It's filled with high speed particles shooting at us all the time.

• 48:42Danny Jones?

  Cosmic rays?

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Cosmic rays, exactly. Which is why if you go out into space, or even if you fly in an airplane, you're exposed to radiation. Space is filled with dangerous radiation. And it's really high energy. It's much higher energy than any collisions we make at CERN. Like, much, much like a thousand times more energy. So if colliding particles made black holes which could eat the earth, it would have happened already. It would have happened yesterday. It would have happened a week ago. It would have happened a billion years ago. So we're pretty confident that these collisions, we're not risking the planet. But, you know, if we did make black holes, we would see these brilliant flashes of light as they evaporate. And then from the patterns of that light, we might learn something about what's inside of them. And we could confirm, oh, Hawking Radiation is real. It's just a theory right

• 49:28Speaker 03

  now. And, and see that.

• 49:30Danny Jones?

  So the idea of general relativity and, um,

• 49:40Danny Jones?

  Quantum mechanics. We're trying to, we've been trying to reconcile those.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:43Danny Jones?

  And the theory that we're trying to come up with, or the theory that what we're trying to fit into the box of quantum gravity.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 49:49Danny Jones?

  Is the answer to that equation.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:52Danny Jones?

  Cause if we know they're both there.

• 49:55Danny Jones?

  You know, what would happen if Einstein knew about this stuff? Would it change everything he did? And this is, this is one of the, this is one of the things I've heard Eric Weinstein talk about. He talks about, uh, we've been working on trying to unify this theory since, for like 70 something years, right?

• 50:17Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 50:17Danny Jones?

  So he, he rants and raves about, and this is way above my pay grade. So I can't say whether he's right or wrong, or whether anyone's right or wrong. I just find it interesting. He says that for 70 years, thousands of people have been spending billions of dollars trying to figure out how this works and it's been stagnant for 70 years.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Well, a lot to say there. I think it's one of the biggest mysteries in physics, right? Like, how do we understand the universe? We want one explanation. We don't, you don't want two explanations because sometimes they disagree. So that's incoherent. You can't have like.

• 50:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Two theories about the universe to make different predictions because something is happening. So we want one coherent explanation. Neither of these work. General relativity predicts things that quantum mechanics disagrees with. Like general relativity says, you have singularities. Quantum mechanics says, you can't. Right? General relativity assumes that particles move through space smoothly. Quantum mechanics says, no, they don't. So they're just incompatible. We want one theory.

• 51:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  As you say, that's quantum gravity. Problem is, nobody's been able to come up with a theory of quantum gravity that works mathematically. It's not easy. Gravity is really complicated. Quantum mechanics is really complicated. Putting them together, definitely a big challenge. People have been working on it for a long time. There is one theory that works. It's called string theory. It's a theory of quantum gravity. It works. I mean, in the sense that like, it doesn't mathematically explode. Some theories, when you try to put them together, generate nonsense. Like if you say, hey, um, how much gravity should I feel near a black hole? It says infinity, or zero, or negative seven, or just like nonsense numbers. It's not easy to put together a theory of gravity that predicts anything that's not nonsense.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  String theory is one example. Problem with string theory is, is very hard to test. It's like, you know, can we prove the string theory is right? Not today. So there's been a lot of criticism of like, well, you guys came up with string theory, but we still don't know if it's real. And, um.

• 52:19Danny Jones?

  When was that first come up with? When is string theory first?

• 52:22Speaker 03

  String theory first came as an explanation for forces between particles inside the nucleus. And then they were like, oh, that's not going to work. Let's ditch it. And then folks in the eighties, or I think it was the seventies, came up with it like as a explanation for everything. And then Ed Witten, super smart dude in Princeton, realized, oh, I can put it all together into this beautiful package. And, you know, the mathematics of it are really beautiful and gorgeous. And so people got excited and it was the first time people had a theory at all that worked at all. So it felt like really exciting. But you know, there are opposing theories. There's a theory called loop quantum gravity that says, maybe all of space time is built to these pixels and, and, and that's how things work. And there's other theories, like Eric Weinstein has his own theory of how the universe all works.

• 53:06Danny Jones?

  I feel like everyone has their own theory of everything.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Everyone has their own theory. And there's something that's.

• 53:12Danny Jones?

  His is called, uh, what is his called? Geometric unity or something?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Geometric unity, yeah. And something that's universal among scientists is everybody feels like their theory doesn't get enough attention. And you know, as a scientist, I have lots of ideas and I'm always pitching them to the government or funding agencies or whoever, and they're always getting turned down. And I'm like, man, that was a good idea. And they said, no. And that's a constant feeling of rejection in science. It's like.

• 53:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  It's like being a screenwriter or a novelist. Like you write a bunch of stuff, you love it. You're like, my stuff is great. And then you send it off to.

• 53:45Danny Jones?

  Trying to get the studio to send you a bunch of money.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Jerry Breckheimer. And they don't read your script. Or they read it and they say nah, or whatever. It's a constant feeling of rejection. And so it's universal. And so it makes sense that people are frustrated. Like Eric Weinstein doesn't feel like his theory has gotten enough attention, which is confusing because it's gotten more attention than almost any other theory.

• 54:03Danny Jones?

  Certainly has.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  I mean, you know about it. It's like.

• 54:05Danny Jones?

  It's very popular.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. Not many theories of quantum gravity discussed on Joe Rogan, et cetera. And so, and this is, this is criticism of stagnation, you know, that you hear a lot about, which I think is, I don't know, I think it's PR nonsense. We've made a lot of progress in fundamental physics over the last 70 years. You know, we just haven't gone in a direction some people think is exciting. And that's fine. We can all disagree. I think this is exciting. You think that's exciting. Let's agree to disagree. You know, we gotta spend the money somewhere. We need a process for figuring out how to do that. We have a process. It's open. People can participate. Everybody's going to disagree about where the money is spent.

• 54:46Danny Jones?

  Starting and running a business is a big deal. And what really surprised me was how much easier Shopify made this whole process. We use Shopify for our merch store and recently revamped the whole thing with fresh new gear. And from day one, it felt like the tools were simple and easy instead of feeling like I was wasting time learning a new profession. The design part was way easier than I expected. Shopify templates and AI tools helped us get the storefront looking clean, professional and real without needing to touch any code. And once people started buying, the shop pay feature made checking out a breeze. And if I ever hit a wall, Shopify has sidekick. It's their AI tool that helps you troubleshoot, build and keep moving instead of wasting hours figuring out a problem. For us, Shopify handles all the technical stuff so we can actually focus on making cool merch. All you need is an idea and Shopify can handle the rest.

• 55:30Danny Jones?

  If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head on over to Shopify.com/dannyjones to start your free trial today. That's right. Start your free trial at Shopify.com/dannyjones. S H O P I F Y dot com slash Danny Jones. One of the things for me that just blows my mind is we haven't come up with a better way of propulsion. We've been blasting chemicals at the back of, you know, exhaust pipes and jet fuel and jet engines for, since, how, whatever, how it's been to like 80 years or something crazy. And we went from, we went from the civil war to detonating, uh, fusion devices in like

• 56:14Danny Jones?

  less than 80 years, but we can't figure out a better way to propel rockets.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:19Danny Jones?

  We're still, you know, blowing shit up. So like, to me, I feel like that is one of the most boggling things to me with, you know, the evolution of physics and all the money that goes into science and all this stuff, you know?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, people are working on that. There's ion drives, which are super cool. They're very different from chemical rockets and they're much more efficient and they use a much smaller amount of fuel. So you can like get from here to Mars on a few kilograms of fuel instead of, you know, kill a tons of fuel or tons of fuel, probably.

• 56:49Danny Jones?

  An ion drive.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:51Danny Jones?

  With ion wind? Like using ion?

• 56:53Speaker 03

  So basically what you do is you have, um, you have, it's like a little particle accelerator and you just throw ions out the back. So you speed them up in a little gun with electric fields and you shoot them out the back. Like, how does a rocket work? You throw stuff out the back. Like if you're in a rowboat and you have a bunch of rocks in your boat, you throw them out the back, you move forward by conservation momentum.

• 57:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  You're pushing stuff out the back. Chemical rockets have fuel which you burn and it has propellant which comes out the back. But an ion drive says, let's separate those. Instead of having the fuel store the energy and also be the thing that goes out the back, let's just throw little particles out the back.

• 57:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  And then have a separate way to make the energy, like maybe a nuclear reactor, maybe so, maybe solar power, maybe something else. And so, um, it can be much more efficient that way. But it can provide the same amount of thrust. So it's like a very gentle kind of push.

• 57:49Danny Jones?

  It'd be very hard to get off the earth, right? But once you get into space, into space, that can be way more beneficial.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  So you use chemical rockets to get off the earth or you build your stuff in space.

• 57:59Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  That would be awesome.

• 58:00Danny Jones?

  Moon base.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Right? Exactly. And then you can just like fly to Mars with much less fuel. So that would be pretty awesome. And, and we have those technologies and like NASA has a mission to use ion drives to explore the solar system. So that's like something we built.

• 58:14Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, today. I don't remember the name of it.

• 58:16Danny Jones?

  So I had this gentleman on, uh, these two guys on the podcast a couple of weeks back, uh, who, one of them is the top guy at NASA in electrostatics.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 58:27Danny Jones?

  Um, he worked on, uh, the James Webb telescope. He worked on the, um, the space shuttle missions. He worked on the ISS, like a bunch of those legendary NASA projects. And he's got this side project he started in his garage that he's about to go full time on. He's about to quit NASA and go full time on this. And they're calling it Exodus. And essentially like high level view, I don't ask me any like details on it, but basically a high level is he's using electrostatic propulsion. And they've created a drive already, um, an electrostatic drive that can produce enough thrust to propel its own weight. So it's like one to one, essentially.

• 59:10Danny Jones?

  Not even close to being able to fight earth's gravity. But like they said, like, once they get into the vacuum of space, it'll be able to get to Mars in what, four days, he said?

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:22Danny Jones?

  Something like that.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Four days?

• 59:23Danny Jones?

  Four days, yeah. So he's partnered with another guy who has worked in the aerospace industry his whole life on the west or the east coast of Florida. He used to work for, uh, Blue Origin. And then this guy, Charles, he worked for NASA. He's worked for NASA like for decades. And, uh, they, they've literally been testing this in their own lab for years now. And they had like videos showing how it works and they explain, it's all like very open source on their website. And I was like, why is it NASA funding this? Like if I was NASA, I'd be giving you guys all the money. You know?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Well, four days would require huge velocities, which would mean really high accelerations. So it's hard to imagine how like a human would survive that, even if you could build this thing. Maybe for cargo, that could be very cool.

• 1:00:03Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah, for cargo. Yeah, human mind. We talked about it. It was like a four hour podcast. Don't remember everything.

• 1:00:11Danny Jones?

  Do you remember what he said, Steve?

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  I mean, it's really, it's just a bunch of modules that you stack.

• 1:00:16Danny Jones?

  So pull up their website so we can see what their, their description is. Yeah, so they said that they could, they could stack it up. They could, um, essentially from what they've already built, they could scale it up.

• 1:00:28Danny Jones?

  And they, they basically, they have the formula to do that. And now it's just, I think it's funding for them. So, okay, electrostatic, go up. What was that? You just had something on the homepage. Electrostatic propulsion systems that harness momentum in electricity.

• 1:00:43Danny Jones?

  Okay. And like give it the high level about.

• 1:00:50Danny Jones?

  Exodus is developing propulsion technology intended to create measurable force through controlled electrostatic interactions rather than expelling onboard propellant. Go down.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  No propellant, that's hard to do.

• 1:01:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What if propulsion system behave more like a light bulb than a fire extinguisher? Traditional spacecraft propulsion relies on chemical reaction that accelerates mass through a nozzle. Once it's stored, once the stored propellant is exhausted, maneuvering capability is limited. Exodus explores a different platform using interactions between electrostatic fields to produce momentum for spacecraft motion while drawing energy from electricity. Yeah, it's freaking wild. They have all these videos demonstrating this thing operating. It's pretty bizarre.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  I see. I mean, I've seen some claims of things like EM drives that have propellantless propulsion, but I've never seen actual experiments that are verifiable.

• 1:01:43Danny Jones?

  So you can find more of the videos, Steve. They got videos on the website. It's pretty cool.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:01:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's the podcast that we did. Keep going. Do they have any demonstrations? Try that one.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  This might be it.

• 1:01:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, try that. He probably, he probably gives a brief, brief explanation of what's going on in your language so you can actually understand it. Throw the headphones on, you want to hear.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  The major issue is conservation of momentum.

• 1:02:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, what do you got there?

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  There's something. There we go.

• 1:02:15Speaker 05

  Can you turn just about anything into an asymmetrical capacitor? Just use your imagination.

• 1:02:19Danny Jones?

  So this is Charles? He's the head of electrostatics at NASA right now?

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  It was this guy that led to the electrostatic pressure discovery force.

• 1:02:25Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  The reason why he did that is because I would put this guy into any kind of volume. This is one of the volumes. And we had many different volumes, different flasks and different ground planes. And then some cases, there was not a ground plane. Like for, for example, in this case, you're in a glass flask. So there's no ground plane. There's no conductive

• 1:02:55Danny Jones?

  Fast forward, see if you can find any videos of them operating.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  So I said, do I even need the current? Why am I still seeing this stupid force?

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  This is, this is the.

• 1:03:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's him explaining the module. Okay. Is there any videos of them actually using it, Steve?

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Copper foil tapes together with some wire or whatever, some carbon paper. It doesn't really matter. You just want them all to be.

• 1:03:19Danny Jones?

  Well, anyways, it works. They showed us videos. We can't find them right now.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Well, it's, you know, something we'd all love to have is a drive that doesn't need propellant. Cause as he says, once you run out of propellant, even an ion drive, you gotta bring along something to push back. You gotta like rocks to throw out the back of your rowboat. So it would be great. But you know, there's a history here of claims that don't stand up to scrutiny. Like they will EM drive. They've claimed to thrust and then when independent measurement doesn't support it. And then it turns out that most of the thrust was really small and within their uncertainties. So this would be cool if it was real.

• 1:03:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  But it needs like independent third party proof for like, yeah, somebody who doesn't have a financial incentive or whatever, personal incentive in it to measure it and say like, yeah, I see the same thing. So I'm all for it if it's real.

• 1:04:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I mean, like somebody working on electrostatics, I can't think of anyone more credible than a guy who's been the head of the electrostatic department at NASA for 30 years, you know? Like that guy's, that guy, I was, I felt like, you know, a caveman in here talking to that guy.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  But in the end, you know, it's science. So the data has to speak, right?

• 1:04:24Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  It can't be like, you have impressive degrees, so you must be right. It's like, sure. The data says yes, or the data says no.

• 1:04:30Danny Jones?

  Totally. Totally. And I think these guys are doing it, which is why they're making it open source. They're not keeping it a secret. So like everything is like completely laid out on their website and they, they demonstrate it publicly on video and all that stuff. So.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  That would change everything. But you know, even that would like maybe make it easier to explore the solar system a little faster, but it wouldn't solve the bigger problem, which is like, well, how do we get to Alpha Centauri? How do we get to the other side of the galaxy? Because we're still limited by the speed of light. You know, even if you can solve the propellant issue, how do you get us out of this little bubble of our solar system so we can interact with the galactic community if, if there is one? And that's the bigger problem that I think.

• 1:05:08Danny Jones?

  Well, we can, um, we can, we can communicate with those Voyager satellites that we just sent out there like in the seventies or something, right?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  We can talk to them.

• 1:05:18Danny Jones?

  We can communicate with them.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Danny Jones?

  And.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  But they've gotten nowhere.

• 1:05:24Danny Jones?

  How far out are they? Do you know?

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Like right at the edge of the heliopause. So like the place where the sun's radiation dominates. So, you know, they're nowhere near the next solar system. They've been going for decades.

• 1:05:35Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  And they're just like still in our neighborhood. I mean, they're far away. It's amazing. It's impressive.

• 1:05:40Danny Jones?

  They're out of the solar system, right?

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Yes. Which is incredible. But that's still nowhere on like a cosmic scale.

• 1:05:46Danny Jones?

  Can you find like a diagram? Oh, this is a, okay. Here's a video of their thing working.

• 1:05:50Speaker 04

  It's pretty slow because they only have like a, I mean, the modules need to be bigger and they need to be stacked more. This is just two modules, but it's doing its own thrust.

• 1:05:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And they, they actually built vacuum chambers that they put this thing inside, like legitimate vacuum chambers, and they, they show it working inside of a vacuum.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Well, that'd be awesome. I hope they figure it out.

• 1:06:09Danny Jones?

  But this thing, they have, they had the thing on the one end or whatever, and it's rotating it like super slow.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Danny Jones?

  Interesting. Can you find out like, show like, find a diagram where it shows how far the Voyager probes are? Like how far out of the solar system? I'd be very curious to see.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's the Voyager and there's the Pioneer.

• 1:06:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Those are like some of the most distant manmade items, which is really awesome.

• 1:06:35Danny Jones?

  We had Nadia Drake in here the other day and she was, uh, she was showing us all of the records, the golden record that they put on that thing.

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Danny Jones?

  And we were listening to it. It's hilarious. They were playing like sounds of the jungle.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:48Danny Jones?

  They were playing like the rainforest, the thunderstorms.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  What is an alien gonna make out of this? Seriously?

• 1:06:54Danny Jones?

  It just shows you like how much our understanding and like the evolution of our thinking has evolved since they did that, right? It's pretty bonkers. It's pretty wild to think about. So, okay, this is what, what are we looking at?

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Trying to find something that, that actually shows the distance.

• 1:07:10Danny Jones?

  So look, that, that shows it right there. Bottom left.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Measurements, bottom left.

• 1:07:14Danny Jones?

  Right. It doesn't really give you a context of like other.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  But it gives you a pretty picture of.

• 1:07:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  Well, there you see Pluto, right? And so we're definitely, they're definitely out past Pluto, which is really far away.

• 1:07:28Danny Jones?

  Right. So there's not really anything we can learn from it, right? Cause it's just like in the middle of a desert, essentially.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  Well, we can learn about, you know, what's going out on out there. We can learn about what cosmic rays are out there and all sorts of like interesting physics. I don't think we can learn much about aliens. And I think an interesting question is like, imagine aliens get the Voyager probe, right? Like or the Pioneer probe. Like they have that plaque on it that Drake and Carl Sagan designed. It's supposed to communicate like, we're human. Here's how we think about the universe. And trying to imagine like, what would it be like for aliens to get that? Could they actually understand it? And, you know, Drake and Sagan did their best. I think NASA only gave them like two weeks to design the first plaque. They did their best to try to communicate in a way that like is universal. But like,

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  if you call up like the Pioneer plaque, you see this, the diagram and.

• 1:08:20Danny Jones?

  Well, it's bizarre looking.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  It's funny looking. It's got like naked people on it. And yeah, there it is. Yeah. And you know, the top left, for example, they try to communicate something about physics.

• 1:08:34Danny Jones?

  It's like a quasar or something, right?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So look at the top left diagram, the, the two, the two circles. What do you think that is?

• 1:08:40Danny Jones?

  Right. I have no idea what that is.

• 1:08:43Danny Jones?

  The aliens will be smart enough to find out, right?

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Maybe. Maybe Sagan was hoping that the aliens would think about the universe the way we do and that they would understand it. It's supposed to be a hydrogen atom on the left with the electron and the, and the proton are the two lines.

• 1:08:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  And what the hydrogen atom does is the electron has a spin and it flips and it happens constantly back and forth all the time. So if you're like an expert in hydrogen or you look at hydrogen, because the universe is mostly hydrogen, you might recognize this as a diagram intended to communicate what hydrogen is doing. And if you're an alien and you see this, you might be like, okay, these guys think about hydrogen. And there's a little one there between them. And it's supposed to indicate, we call this one unit of time. So it's like a cosmic clock. Like let's find a way to talk about time with aliens. Let's do it by identifying this basic natural process that happens very, very regularly. Maybe the aliens have found it too. And maybe we can use this diagram to like connect

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  to that idea in their brain. It's brilliant because you know, it's Sagan and Drake and they're smart guys, but it also makes a huge number of assumptions about how an alien mind might work, how alien physics might happen. And, you know, I think frankly, it's probably hopeless for an alien physicist to get this and be like, oh yeah, I understand what you're talking about. I mean, I actually showed this diagram to a bunch of physics PhD students at UC Irvine and asked them like, what do you think this is? And I gave them all afternoon. And they didn't come up with any ideas anywhere close to what Sagan and Drake were thinking. And that's like, that's the easy mode, right? These are humans studying human physics on earth with the same biological brain.

• 1:10:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  They couldn't figure it out. And so the chances that like an alien sees this and gets it, I think are pretty small.

• 1:10:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Even the golden record is pretty wild.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:29Danny Jones?

  You know, like to think that they, they even gives them the record needle to play the record so they can hear all the music.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  And I don't, I don't mean to criticize Carl Sagan. Like I couldn't come up with anything better.

• 1:10:39Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  I just mean to say that like, this is maybe an impossible problem. To imagine how aliens see the universe and to communicate with them without being able to sit across the table. Like if we had an alien here and we could talk to them, I think we could probably make a lot of progress. Like we could figure out, you know, how to talk about numbers or time or whatever. Cause we'd have like, we could point to things and we could build a common language. But if we're just like sending a message or getting a message, I think it's probably hopeless to decode what they mean or how they think about the universe. Though I'd love to.

• 1:11:12Danny Jones?

  What did you think about that Steven Spielberg movie that just came out?

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  Disclosure Day.

• 1:11:16Danny Jones?

  Cause it would know Disclosure Day.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, number one, it was fun. Like it's a fun movie.

• 1:11:21Danny Jones?

  Very Spielberg-y.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  Very Spielberg-y. Dude knows how to tell a story. But I thought it avoided really the hard question. You know, the movie was all about like, let's assume aliens are here. Let's assume the government knows about them and is hiding them. How would that play out if it was revealed? And it avoided the hard question, which is like, well, what does the government know? And should they tell us? You know, in the movie, they assume that if you release this information, it's dangerous somehow. That it would like cause chaos. And I don't know if I believe that. Like if the government announced tomorrow, oh yeah, by the way, we have aliens and we've been experimenting on them for 50 years. I don't think it would cause uproar.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  I think it would be like, oh, cool. Yeah.

• 1:12:09Danny Jones?

  Probably not now. It might have if you dropped it in the 50s or 60s.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Maybe, I don't know, but I think, I think that overstates it. I think.

• 1:12:18Danny Jones?

  I don't think that's their primary motive. If they were, if there is, if this is true, like his concept that the government is hiding this stuff and they have been doing this stuff. I don't think that the reason for them to hide it would be to keep people psychologically sound. I don't think, or like for chaos to, I believe there would be other incentives for them to keep it quiet.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  I guess so. I mean, I don't, I don't know. And I also think it'd probably be impossible for them to keep it quiet.

• 1:12:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Especially over 60 years.

• 1:12:46Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  I mean, we couldn't even keep nuclear weapons from the Russians for a decade. So now imagine like an even bigger secret for so much longer. I mean, I've worked on government projects, like I know it's impossible to keep things, to keep things that quiet. But it was a fun movie, you know? For sure.

• 1:13:05Danny Jones?

  So what is your take on this whole UFO, UAP nonsense? So you, do you take, give it any merit or do you pay any attention to it? Or are you too busy doing real stuff?

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Of course I pay attention to it because, look, I want to meet the aliens. I want the aliens to be here. I imagine there's some super advanced aliens out there and they know the answer to quantum gravity. They know how the universe started. They know how to build propellantless drives. They know how to build wormholes between star systems. And I want to know. I mean, imagine there's somebody out there that knows the answers to the questions like, how did the universe begin? What is it all made out of? And they just know and they could tell us. So yeah, I want aliens to be here. I want them to visit. But because I want it so badly, I feel like I have to be skeptical. Because you know, you can easily convince yourself of something you want to be true.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  You know, I'm losing weight or I'm good looking or like, you know, whatever. It's very easy to fool yourself. So I gotta be skeptical and none of the evidence that's out there to me is very compelling. You know, there's like these videos. I actually had a congressperson call me up, listens to my podcast and say he'd seen all the classified videos and he wanted to ask me some questions about the physics. Yeah, I was like, wow, let's talk. It was super cool. And he'd heard some crazy theories about wormholes and plasma orbs and whatever. And he wanted to know what I thought about it. And I was like, I'll tell you, but first you gotta tell me what you saw in those videos. And he's like, no, it's nothing interesting. Apparently it all just looks like the stuff that's out there. But.

• 1:14:38Danny Jones?

  It looks like what's out there?

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  It looked, so there's a few videos that are out there, like the Navy videos, like Tic Tac and Go Fast and Gimbal or whatever. And the rest of the stuff that they haven't released, apparently there's a lot of videos out there. There's a lot of videos that aren't out there. They haven't released them. And those apparently don't look like anything more exciting, which is too bad.

• 1:14:55Danny Jones?

  I'm very skeptical of those videos. We got satellites that can read the newspaper or somebody sitting on a bench in a park from outer space. Like, Kent, you're telling me this is all we got?

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they exist in this low information zone, right? They're like always fuzzy, always you don't quite have enough information. I don't discount Navy pilots.

• 1:15:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  They're awesome people. I'm sure they're telling us what they saw, but to me it's not enough to really believe it. I need physical evidence that we can study that independent people can measure and be like, yeah, this is not from Earth or something. Stories are never enough, right? Firsthand stories are never enough. Unfortunately, I gotta be skeptical. So I want them to be here, but.

• 1:15:31Danny Jones?

  The curious thing to me about those Navy pilots is that when they came down back to the aircraft carrier after seeing that stuff and they reported to their superiors, their superiors didn't seem surprised.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:15:42Danny Jones?

  I thought that was very strange.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I'm not an expert on psychology. It's complicated for sure. How people react to this stuff and how they report it.

• 1:15:51Danny Jones?

  It was all near, you know, training sites and it was all near big bases and in like active zones where they did, they did, they rehearsed missions and operations and stuff like that. So like, if something was being tested on our own equipment, that would be the ideal place to do it, right?

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  That's true. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But you know, we should be looking. We should be checking. There's been a lot of cool stuff. I don't know if you've seen the studies where they, where they have what they claim to be evidence of satellites orbiting the earth from before humans put anything into orbit.

• 1:16:28Danny Jones?

  Beatrice Villarreal, right? Yeah, she published a paper on this.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  It's called the Vasco study.

• 1:16:34Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Super cool, very creative. I love that idea, like really brilliant concept. And there's now like a lot of scientific debate about, you know, is there really a signal for it? Are they just smears in the plates or whatever? And people are digging into the details.

• 1:16:47Danny Jones?

  So the overall idea is that she found over a hundred thousand mirror like reflective objects in space around where satellites would be anomaly. These were anomalous and this was before Sputnik was even out there.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  Before Sputnik, so you would not expect any earth junk up there, right? And she sees a bunch of stuff that reflects like satellite. And then when it goes into earth's shadow, it doesn't reflect anymore.

• 1:17:12Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  Right? Cause you might say, well, how do you know it's not just a star? Well, if it's going into the earth's shadow, it must be nearby. And so that's the, really the key idea. Problem is that these are early, early plates. This is from the Palomar Observatory decades ago, and they took these huge, beautiful images. But there's a lot of crap in those images, you know?

• 1:17:35Danny Jones?

  A lot of what?

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  A lot of crap, like this, you know, there are photographic plates and there's dust and there's all sorts of artifacts. It's really hard to tell if what you're seeing is like actually something from space or like some fuzz on the telescope or some fuzz in, on the photograph. It's really hard to tell, it's a lot of noise. So she doesn't have.

• 1:17:54Danny Jones?

  A lot of people would scrutinize this though, like when she was getting it published? Don't you think this would be like the lowest hanging fruit of like, we need to eliminate this question right here? Like is it, could it be this?

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, people haven't really explored it before this because they realized how hard it was to tell the real stuff from the noise. So she doesn't have like, here's a bunch of crystal clear examples of something that can't be anything else. She has, okay, there's a huge amount of noise, but there's more than you would expect from noise. It's like a statistical argument says like, oh, there's more of these flashes on the plates than you would expect from just dust and from just, you know, fuzz on the photography. So it's like a statistical argument and some people say like, you can't know that. Like it's, there's too much uncertainty. It's just too much noise to pull this signal out of there. It's like you're listening to fuzz.

• 1:18:43Danny Jones?

  What year was that? What year? So this would have been what year specifically in the 50s?

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  I don't remember exactly. I think it was in the 40s.

• 1:18:49Danny Jones?

  In the 40s?

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  That these images.

• 1:18:51Danny Jones?

  The Palomar Observatory.

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't remember exactly the year.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  It says these plates span the 50s.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:18:58Danny Jones?

  They span the 50s?

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, so that's. Can you pull it up?

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  It was in the 50s because another fascinating claim is that these things coincide with nuclear tests. Which is like, what?

• 1:19:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right. Oh, okay. So zoom in a little bit. Two new peer reviewed papers catapulted the mid-century astronomical archive into global headlines when Dr. Beatrice Villarreal of Vasco Project at the center of a debate about UAPs disappearing stars and whether historical records contain real physical signals or a long chain of misleading artifacts. Brief starlight transients on a 1950s Palomar Sky Survey plate appears to cluster in time around nuclear testing and also track in a weaker way, the day to day volume of UAP report. Oh, interesting.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Danny Jones?

  I didn't know that part. The claims are provocative. The data set is old and the stakes are high and the real story is less about certainty than about what it would take to turn a weird archival signal into a reproductible present day measurement. Well, that's very interesting that, because all of the UFO accounts and testimonies coincide with nuclear tests.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:20:14Danny Jones?

  Going back to Roswell, which was on the site of a nuclear testing ground. Like that's where they were literally testing the first nukes is right where that Roswell thing was.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that was actually Alan Magordo in Mexico. Yeah.

• 1:20:25Danny Jones?

  Right. Right. So there seemed, and then there's been dozens and dozens of people who have gone public at least who work at nuclear sites, who claim seeing these things, like top level people who have their fingers on the nuclear button. You know, and they're not, these aren't just kooks. Like these are people who are in charge of, are we going to go into global thermonuclear war or not, right?

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Serious people for sure.

• 1:20:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Danny Jones?

  And that's one of the craziest things. There was even a, um, there was a great video that James Fox put in one of his documentaries where essentially, but you could probably find a section of it cut out specifically on YouTube where it shows a map of the, of the whole world. And it shows on the bottom, there's a timeline and it shows the date of every, every nuclear bomb being tested around the world. And then it also shows recorded UFO sightings that were reported by people or by military or whatever. And the correlation is astonishing.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Danny Jones?

  And it shows you the date of like all the nukes that are being blasted. And it's just like, it's so crazy how correlated they are and how the UFO sightings match up around nuclear type, nuclear sites or nuclear tests.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. You gotta be careful with correlations though, right? Correlations don't prove causation, right? There's like correlations between how much people use the Netscape browser and like murder rates. And like, obviously there's, you know, one Netscape doesn't cause murders. So you gotta be really careful about correlations. And that's the thing about this study about the flashes, the transience and nuclear testing. Like, is there, is a correlation enough to prove that there's something real there? And there's some, another guy published a paper reanalyzing and saying, she measured it wrong. And if you measure it correctly, the correlation goes away. So there's like a vigorous debate about these things. And I think it's exciting and it's interesting. I'm glad that these papers are being published and it's out there in the open.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  You know, people arguing about it scientifically. I think there should be less like stigma about talking about UAPs and aliens. Like, we should treat it like a scientific question. And because I think it's exciting and we should have answers to these questions. And we should do it through open scientific discussion and the data should be out there for everybody.

• 1:22:41Danny Jones?

  Steve, did you find that map, that animated map of the nuclear, nuclear detonations?

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  No, I'm still looking.

• 1:22:46Danny Jones?

  Okay. Yeah, it's, it's, it's super curious, right? Like, doesn't correlation isn't equal causation, but it's very interesting. Like, why? Why are all these UFO sightings happening around nuclear sites? And like, seem to be correlated with nuclear, nuclear detonation. That's when we first started seeing them, right? It was around Nagasaki and when we bombed Japan. And like, the history of that is just-

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  UFO sightings are also correlated with other stuff. Like, if you look at the worldwide map of where UFO sightings happen, it's mostly like in the United States.

• 1:23:22Danny Jones?

  Is that true?

• 1:23:25Danny Jones?

  Huh.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you know, there's like a-

• 1:23:27Danny Jones?

  I thought there was lots of them. I've been, I mean, I've heard of tons of them being, but yeah, I guess you're right. But we also live in the United States, right? So we see more US news.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know. I've, I don't, I don't, I don't know. I've seen these plots that show that where the UFO sightings happened and they're clustered in the United States. And so this makes you wonder like, how much of that is a cultural phenomenon? And how much of it is, you know, we're seeing something out there?

• 1:23:52Danny Jones?

  It's definitely right. The cultural phenomenon aspect of it is huge.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Danny Jones?

  And you can't deny that, right?

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  And I'm not an expert in this stuff. So yeah, I'm totally just an amateur.

• 1:24:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah. As am I. But it's just very, yeah, it's true though. Like it's that, how much does that distort? You know, how many, how many times were people claiming they got abducted by aliens when they were just, you know, having a schizophrenic break or something like that? Or saw a movie, had a bad dream or whatever. Like, there's so many, so many moving parts to this phenomenon. And the thing about it is that it's like, it's, it's God for atheists, right? People want to, they, they use aliens and UFOs to fill that God-shaped hole in the brain.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:24:34Danny Jones?

  Right? Because it's one of those things we don't know the answer to.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:37Danny Jones?

  It's one of the biggest questions of the universe. Are there aliens? Are we alone?

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:24:41Danny Jones?

  So people, people find meaning in that stuff, right? And it defines, it becomes their identity and they become obsessed with it. And, you know, it's just like, it's one of those things that we may not, in our lifetimes at least, find the answer to. Like, is there a God? Are aliens real? And, you know, what is consciousness? What happens when we die?

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:25:00Danny Jones?

  It's one of those things. It's like, I can't imagine what it would be like if that question did get answered, you know? Cause we would just find the next crazy fucking thing to chase.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  Well, you can think back to like, early times, you know, like, what did cavemen and cave women think when they looked up at the stars? They had no idea what those things were. And, you know, we can't imagine what it was like to be them, to be so clueless about the nature of the universe. And that's the incredible thing about science is that we knock down these questions. Like, some of these may not be answerable. You know, is there a God? We don't know. We might not never know. Maybe not a scientific question. But some of these, like, how did the universe begin? What's it all made out of? You know, are we alone? These are questions we could get answers to, like scientific, like reproducible, objective answers to. And then people in a thousand years will look back and be like, what was it like to be those dudes and not know whether we're alone? How could you survive

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  being so clueless about the context of your lives? And to me, this is what's so exciting, is that there's so much science left to figure out. Like, we have understood like the tiniest fraction of the universe. And what's left are huge, like, context-defining surprises. You know, probably when we figure out the deal with aliens, it's not going to be what I think, or what you think, or what some guy in a farm field in Iowa thinks. It's going to be something so bizarre and alien, nobody imagined it. Cause the universe is going to surprise us. It's gonna be like, secret option C, right?

• 1:26:28Danny Jones?

  Well, one of the things is like, I think the idea that if there were aliens, they're gonna be these bipedal hominids with forward-facing eyes.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:26:36Danny Jones?

  Is crazy.

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  With like a croissant on their forehead.

• 1:26:37Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Like, what is the chances? And a planet that has totally different gravity, totally different atmosphere, maybe even a fucking water world, who knows, that they're gonna evolve to look exactly like us.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. We're again extrapolating from our experience. The way we're like, hey, maybe dark matter is made out of particles. It's the same mistake we've been making forever, which is like, put ourself at the center of the universe, assume that we are alone. Like, these kinds of things are, are moments when we discover that we're unusual, or not unusual, or typical or not. And those are the really exciting times in science. And, you know, one thing is like, what is their biology like? As you say, do they have legs? Do they move the same way we do? But to me, are another really interesting question, which touches on this business with the pioneer plaque, is how do they think about the universe? You know, I have this fantasy that aliens come and they tell us about the universe and they tell us about quantum gravity. And, you know, you see this in sci-fi all the time. You know,

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  like, aliens come and we make contact via math or whatever. And then we are talking about physics. But I think it's probably gonna be much harder, because I think probably aliens, the way they think about the universe is probably really, really alien in ways we can't even imagine.

• 1:27:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  The way we can't imagine their biology, or their culture, you know, or their perspective on anything.

• 1:27:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it probably won't fit into our framework of how we view the world and the universe, right?

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  And it'll, it'll teach us something about the assumptions we've been making. Because we are always making assumptions based on our experience without even knowing, without even really realizing that we are. Cause we don't think that there are any other options. And then when we discover the universe is different from what we expected, that's when we realize we were making assumptions and that they were wrong.

• 1:28:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  You know, for example, we could meet the aliens and we could discover, oh, they, they do science, but they don't use math. Like, maybe their science is not like built on mathematics at all. Maybe mathematics is part of how we think about the universe, not part of the universe itself. Or maybe aliens don't even do science, right?

• 1:28:35Danny Jones?

  They're probably not constrained by auditory language, verbal language that really constrains our thinking and our imagination and the way our brains work. Maybe they have like a telepathy.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  Right. And think about how much faster you could make progress.

• 1:28:46Danny Jones?

  Using emotions to communicate or, or something that we can't even comprehend.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Or if you weren't forced to like, take your ideas and compress them into sound waves to transmit them to another brain. If you could just be like, brain, brain, brain, brain, brain, think, think, think.

• 1:28:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know, maybe that'd be better. Maybe that'd be worse, because then everyone would know what you think.

• 1:29:03Danny Jones?

  That's one of the, that's one of the downfalls of, like, one of the biggest pitfalls of human, human interaction is the communication gap, right? Not just like us sitting across the table, using our native language to communicate ideas and stuff like that. But like, the way technology is evolving here, it's, it's separating that. It's pushing humans apart. And it's letting us communicate via like texting on a phone where you can't really convey-

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  Emotions.

• 1:29:28Danny Jones?

  Emotion, or like, the, the volume, or like where your inflections are and all that kind of stuff. So, and then you wanna throw gasoline onto that, put it on social media where now everyone can post a tweet about something and like, it's crazy.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  It hurts themselves a different meaning with different cultural assumptions, different context, right? And so now try to imagine communicating with aliens. And that's why I was saying earlier, like, you send the pioneer plaque to aliens, there's no chance they're gonna figure it out.

• 1:29:58Danny Jones?

  Online shopping has become ridiculous. There's a hundred different variations of every single product. And the prices get so insane, you just end up getting frustrated and wanting to throw your laptop out the window. And then when you finally find something you love, but it's too expensive, maybe you start to wonder if there's an alternative for a cheaper price. And that's why I use dupe.com all the time. You can take basically anything you're thinking about buying, paste the product link into dupe, even upload a photo, and it searches for similar products at different prices. I mean, look at this array of masculine comfort. Where else in the world can you find a gorilla couch? And then compare prices on them. There's lots of the same quality and very different prices. Dupe works for clothing, shoes, jewelry, electronics, and tons of other stuff. You can even just describe what you need, like noise-canceling headphones for traveling,

• 1:30:41Danny Jones?

  and let dupe do the research for you. It's completely free and you don't even need an account. Using dupe.com is insanely simple. Just go to D U P E dot com, paste any product URL, upload any photo, and it will instantly show you similar items for way less. There's also an app and a browser extension if you want to make it even easier. No account needed, totally free. So start saving money with dupe.com today.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  I actually spent some time digging into this, thinking about like, how hard is it to learn an alien language? Well, we can't know, of course. But we can think about how hard it is to learn like ancient human languages. Like, think about ancient human societies that wrote stuff down, and then we found it and we're like, okay, let's decode it. Turns out that's really hard.

• 1:31:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  It's like, mostly we don't know how to do that. Like, we have a couple of examples of having figured that out.

• 1:31:26Danny Jones?

  Well, ancient Greek had like, like almost two million unique words.

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:31:32Danny Jones?

  How crazy is that?

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  That's a lot. Yeah.

• 1:31:35Danny Jones?

  And are, I think, how many words do we have? And I think 200,000 in modern English?

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:31:40Danny Jones?

  That's astonishing. And they used to walk around singing.

• 1:31:45Danny Jones?

  That's how they memorize books.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Danny Jones?

  They would sing them.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Greek is still around, and so we like, we never lost it, right?

• 1:31:50Danny Jones?

  Well, ancient Greek is a different language.

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:31:52Danny Jones?

  I think it's a, I think it's a completely different language than modern Greek. But I don't know how, I'd be curious to know how many actual words are in modern Greek compared to ancient Greek. But it's, it's crazy, like, just to, just to measure, like, the explosion of intellect

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Danny Jones?

  that happened in that period of antiquity, you know, when the Greeks were really thriving and doing that stuff, where you had Socrates and Plato and all these people that were

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Danny Jones?

  coming up with all this stuff.

• 1:32:21Danny Jones?

  But yeah, I don't know what this says.

• 1:32:23Speaker 04

  Well, this is modern Greek has, uh,

• 1:32:26Danny Jones?

  A hundred thousand to two hundred thousand, okay. Well, that number's wrong for ancient Greek. We already proved that with Luke, Luke Gordon.

• 1:32:33Speaker 04

  Hundred and twenty thousand? Yeah, but, but isn't it weird because you can combine the Greek words to make new ones?

• 1:32:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  So like, how do you measure it? I don't, I don't know.

• 1:32:43Danny Jones?

  Well, unique words. Did you search for unique words?

• 1:32:45Speaker 04

  No, I didn't say unique.

• 1:32:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's another thing about ancient Greek is you could like, you could, people were walking around just creating word forms all the time. Like they were combining different words to create new word, corning new words all the time. It's insane.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there are assumptions about language that don't hold, like, and there are other languages from that same era, like Etruscan. Nobody's ever figured out how to crack it. We have a bunch of examples of written Etruscan, and nobody knows what they say.

• 1:33:11Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  There's nobody around who reads Etruscan anymore or speaks it. It's just lost.

• 1:33:14Danny Jones?

  Just a lost dead language.

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's not like they're weird, right? They lived alongside the Romans. The Romans wrote about them.

• 1:33:20Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  They knew the Romans. It's like very culturally adjacent to us.

• 1:33:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  We just can't figure it out because like, it's hard to translate a new language because it could be anything, right? Like, when you write something down, you're creating these words and the words are symbols and they're just arbitrary.

• 1:33:36Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  Like, we've decided chocolate means chocolate, but we could have called it, you know, bluga de blabla or whatever. It's totally arbitrary. We just agree on it.

• 1:33:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  So now if somebody comes along and tries to like, reverse engineer that without any cultural knowledge, it's basically impossible. Like, our one example of figuring it out, like hieroglyphics, that turns out to be like more of a cautionary tale than like a story of triumph. You know, like, the only reason we ever figured out hieroglyphics is because of the Rosetta Stone, right? We found this example where it's like, here's some hieroglyphics and the same text also in Greek and in another language, basically like a cheat sheet.

• 1:34:11Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  But even still, after the Rosetta Stone, it took twenty years to crack hieroglyphics. Like, twenty years is a long time.

• 1:34:19Danny Jones?

  That's a very long time.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Even after you get the cheat sheet. And the reason is that we were making the wrong assumption about how the language worked. Like, we assumed, and everybody assumed for centuries, that hieroglyphics were like pictograms. Like, if there's a bird in it, it's about birds. If there's water in it, it's about water. And people were like, wow, the Egyptians had this incredible language that superseded words and whatever. But they were wrong. Turns out hieroglyphics are phonetic, just like our language. Like, this symbol makes a sound and the other symbol makes another sound. So people made the wrong assumption about how hieroglyphics work, and it took them an extra twenty years to figure it out because they made that wrong assumption. So there's like, there are these landmines, these assumptions everywhere, not just in translating language, but in science,

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  where we're assuming things have to be a certain way, and that's blinding us to other possibilities. And those are the times when, you know, we need some new fresh data to, to show us

• 1:35:13Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  tear us out of those assumptions to be like, no, you guys are all wasting your time. It's, this is the right way.

• 1:35:18Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, that's, that's another huge problem with science, which I've only learned since starting this podcast, is that one of the things that just shocked me was how, uh, how stove piped and, and how like, everyone in science has their blinders on. There's so little interdisciplinary people coming together and trying to solve, solve bigger problems. Right? Like, people stay in their lanes and like, you could talk to somebody who studies ancient texts, like, oh, well, how many archaeologists have you talked to? Or, or how many, uh, you know, forensic examiners have you talked to that study the actual DNA that's going into these people's, the dead bodies that correlate the text, that correlate the megalithic stonework or whatever archaeology you pulled up?

• 1:35:57Danny Jones?

  It's none. It's all, they all stay in their exact academic lane, which is, uh, it's crazy to me that that, that's, it's that way.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's a product of the system, you know, you, to, to get somewhere, you have to be at the top of the game. Like, to get an academic position, you have to beat out like hundreds of people for one job.

• 1:36:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's the rat race.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  So you have to be like, at the very, very top of this mountain of people working on this particular thing. So you gotta be really, really focused, you know? And that's how it works. But once you get tenure, then you can branch out. You could do other stuff. You can like, join the philosophy department. You can find interdisciplinary work. And I actually think AI is going to be really, really helpful to facilitate that.

• 1:36:40Danny Jones?

  To facilitate what?

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Interdisciplinary work.

• 1:36:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of the challenges is like, say I want to do physics, but I also want to use ideas from statistics or some other field or something. Well, they speak a whole different language and like, well, am I gonna learn how to read their papers and like, understand what they're doing? It's gonna take me like five years.

• 1:36:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  And so that's been a real challenge. And I've been doing interdisciplinary work between physics and machine learning and statistics, and it's taken a long time to develop these bridges. But now with AI, like, I can call up some statistics paper, I can be like, translate this into my language.

• 1:37:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  And boom, it's done.

• 1:37:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:16Speaker 03

  And I can also ask it like, hey, go find me papers about this, but in other fields that I don't really know how to search or where the papers are, or who does the work. And it can go and read all of those and find them and translate. So I think AI is going to be a really powerful bridge between these fields, helping translate between these different ideas and these different disciplines and make these connections. It just, it makes it a lot easier to do all that work.

• 1:37:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's true. And I wonder, like, with the exponential growth of AI and how it's kind of like ever accelerating and advancing and self-updating and all this stuff, like, how this is gonna affect science in general? And, you know, how this is gonna affect the people that are working at CERN, working on a large hadron collider? Like, if this thing becomes like so insanely intelligent and powerful that we're, you no longer need people employed working in labs and in, you know, physics laboratories and all this stuff, colliding particles together because the AI can solve all the problems. Like, what is that, what does that do? Because I think it's like, one of the fundamental things about human beings is that they're curious.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Danny Jones?

  Right? So like-

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  We're always gonna need people being curious. Like, I agree with you, it's gonna change how we do science.

• 1:38:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Speaker 03

  It's gonna accelerate things. It's gonna take things that used to take months and make them take days. But in the end, that's just powering human curiosity. We still need people asking questions.

• 1:38:38Danny Jones?

  That's the point. It's human.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Danny Jones?

  So when you're, when you're subbing all that stuff out to a machine, how does that change? Because like, one of the fundamental things about being human is like, human motivations, right? People want to acquire more resources. They want to reproduce. They want to find a mate. They want to-

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  Understand the universe.

• 1:38:59Danny Jones?

  climb the hierarchy and they want to do all this stuff to, because they know eventually they're gonna die. Right? Life is finite. Now, if you're saying like, now if artificial intelligence is doing that, then what does that do to humanity?

• 1:39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, well-

• 1:39:14Danny Jones?

  They don't have the same motivations that we do, that machines don't.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I don't think that AI will replace that human curiosity, or it should. Like, it's gonna allow humans to do more, allow things to happen faster and more efficiently, make connections, make progress. But it's not gonna like, stop us from being curious. It's not like, uh, AI is gonna come up with quantum gravity and then I'm gonna be like, okay, cool, I'm gonna retire. I'm bored. Like, no, I'm gonna have questions. I'm gonna have new questions. AI will help us answer today's questions and help inspire tomorrow. Those answers will inspire tomorrow's questions. But it's not gonna replace curiosity. It can't, as you say. It's like, it's not human.

• 1:39:51Danny Jones?

  It won't replace curiosity, but what will it do to human drive? Right? Because a lot of the reason that people do things, people try to make big achievements is because they want to make a name for themselves, right? Before they die. They want to be known for something. They want to, and, and generally, just across, you know, throughout time, that has been the struggle of humanity is we're territorial apes. We kill each other for territory and resources and for the attractive mate. That's, that's baked into us from the beginning. So, and, and that, that is, it's a double-edged sword to why we have been able to innovate

• 1:40:32Danny Jones?

  and create newer and newer things with technology and with war, with weapons and exploring outer space and all that stuff.

• 1:40:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't think everybody like, gets into physics to find mates and get lots of resources. You know, it's not like, uh, so simple. I think also-

• 1:40:45Danny Jones?

  No, everybody doesn't get into physics for that, for sure, right? There's a lot of people that are just genuinely curious and they want to find a career in something that they're really interested in. They want to make a better lives, a better life for themselves, right? But I'm just like, I'm generalizing.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:40:58Danny Jones?

  So, um-

• 1:41:02Danny Jones?

  And with the way technology is like you're rewarded for creating better and better technology, human beings, they're rewarded, like corporations, they make more money, they sell it to more people, people get to show off, look, I got the brand new iPhone, you know, I got the iPhone seventeen plus pro or whatever, it does all this, I can see the moon with it, like, what kind of iPhone do you have? It's a, it's a, it's a human reward system, right? So, so what happens to science, like, if that is no longer a fundamental thing that is necessary, because we have AI to answer all these questions for us? What happens then? Like, what happens to us? I don't know.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  Well, I think you still need somebody directing the AI. It's like, think about what happened to science when we had computers, like, we could do calculations much faster, we could do more calculations, it accelerated science massively. Like, when they first came up with the idea of predicting the weather, it used to take six weeks to predict what was gonna happen six hours later. So like, totally useless, because it took longer to do the calculation than it did for time to pass. Then when computers came on the scene, like, oh my gosh, we could predict the weather in six hours, and it took six minutes. Now it's actually useful, huge advance. And since then, like, obviously a huge advance, but they haven't like, replaced humans, it's just made humans more effective. And I think that's what's gonna happen with AI, it's just a powerful tool that makes human curiosity more powerful, more effective.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  There's no point where you're like, we don't need the Large Hadron Collider, because like, AI is not gonna do experiments, analyze data, and it's not like you're gonna say, oh, we don't need theoretical physicists, because even if some of their work can be made more effective, you haven't gotten rid of the need to try to wanna understand the universe, or to think about the questions that we want answers to. So I don't think AI is gonna replace humans in science, because, humans are in science because we have questions, and that's not gonna change. And you see a lot of these, you know, Sam Altman says, we're gonna solve physics in AI, and like, I don't even know what that means, like, what does it mean to solve physics? Yeah, like, what does that mean? There's no time in which humans are not gonna be curious about the universe, even if aliens

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  came, and they're like, Daniel, here's the theory of everything, and it works, right? I'd be like, okay, well, why that theory? Why is there a seven in it? You know, why this other thing? Like, I'm always gonna have questions, that's the nature of being human, so, I think AI is gonna change how we do science, but I don't think it's gonna stop us from doing science. But I think it is really, really good at something we're bad at, which is combining ideas. Like, if you think back on the history of human scientific breakthroughs, a lot of them came from, some guy has a problem, somebody else independently came up with a solution, and then they figured out how to put them together. Like Einstein and general relativity, he was like, struggling with that, and then he learned, oh, these mathematicians came up with these mathematical tools, not to solve

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  my problem, just because they were nerds and they thought these number of problems were fun, they developed all these techniques that perfectly solved his problem. So, this is interdisciplinary work, right? If he'd never met those mathematicians, he might not have figured out general relativity. Same with quantum mechanics, like, relies on this thing called group theory, which a bunch of French nerds invented a hundred years earlier, because they like playing games with numbers, not to like, understand the nature of the universe, just like chocolate and peanut butter. And AI is great at that, AI is like, oh, you're working on this problem? Have you read this paper over there? Because that solves that problem, much, much better than we are, so, that's gonna happen very quickly.

• 1:44:35Danny Jones?

  That's great if, if AI is completely not fucked with or tinkered with by any humans, right? As long as there's no bias, there's no hidden agendas or anything like that that's baked into it, they can be completely objective on its answers, right?

• 1:44:53Speaker 03

  There's always bias.

• 1:44:55Danny Jones?

  That would work, there's always bias with humans, but like, if you could completely remove human beings from the equation, from the AI, that would be ideal.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  There's always bias in AI, based on what it's been trained on.

• 1:45:05Danny Jones?

  Right, well, yeah, there's been some bad examples. There was the early Google one, did you see that? Where they said, they said, show me Nazis, and it had a bunch of black people with dreadlocks, like, women and stuff like that, like, oh, it's like, yeah, they're hopefully weeding that stuff out of it over time, but, that's gonna be something that's, we're gonna have to contend with for a long time. But like, one of the greatest examples of interdisciplinary science would be like, the Manhattan Project, right? Where we took all those Nazis, and we brought them here, and we had them create the bomb for us. Like, that was human ingenuity at its finest, right? Not for any good reasons, for a terrible, evil reason.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if we had Nazis on the Manhattan Project, we had like, Jews who were fleeing.

• 1:45:54Danny Jones?

  Lots of Nazis.

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he was, he was like, building rockets after the war, and if, was he involved in the Manhattan Project?

• 1:46:00Danny Jones?

  I believe he was, yeah, I believe he was. Find out, uh, let's fact check me there, say, were there any Nazis, and former Nazis, former in air quotes, involved in the Manhattan Project? Yeah, no, he was, uh, in charge of NASA.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, he definitely built the rockets.

• 1:46:18Danny Jones?

  I think he was a part of the Manhattan, maybe I'm wrong.

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  Well, this is what it says.

• 1:46:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, Google, no bias found here, right? Okay.

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  Refugees, not Nazis.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  I actually grew up.

• 1:46:32Danny Jones?

  Refugees.

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, see, like Einstein and Enrico Fermi, these were guys, they were definitely not Nazis.

• 1:46:38Speaker 04

  So von Braun is a refugee, not a Nazi.

• 1:46:40Danny Jones?

  What? He was a full-blown car-carrying Nazi.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  It says there, he is a former Nazi rocket engineer.

• 1:46:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:46:47Speaker 04

  Okay, so there, it already.

• 1:46:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, such as Warner von Braun, okay, during Operation Paperclip, for the space and missile, go up, go up, go, go, okay. So this is saying, no captured Nazi scientists were involved in the Manhattan Project, I was wrong. While the US later employed former Nazi rocket engineers like von Braun during Operation Paperclip for space and missile programs after World War Three or Two, uh, the atomic bomb was fully developed and tested before any German nuclear research, oh yeah, that makes sense, duh.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  And Heisenberg, Heisenberg was leading the German version of the Manhattan Project. There's actually a cool question there, historically, about like, because he made a mistake in some of his calculations, which led their whole project down the wrong path.

• 1:47:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  And there's a question about whether he did that intentionally, or not, and he had this conversation with Niels Bohr, um, just beforehand, they had like, this famous walk they took through the park in, in Copenhagen, about, and, and it's like, hard to believe that Heisenberg would make this mistake, and so, people speculate that on this conversation, Bohr was like, you can't let the Germans have the bomb, you know, let's agree, you shouldn't make this mistake and lead the program down the wrong way. It's a great play, actually, it's called Copenhagen, it's all about that.

• 1:47:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  But I actually grew up in Los Alamos.

• 1:48:02Danny Jones?

  You grew up in Los Alamos?

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, both my parents worked the lab.

• 1:48:06Danny Jones?

  They worked at Los Alamos?

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, on weapons, uh, projects.

• 1:48:09Danny Jones?

  What were they doing? They meet Bob Lazar?

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  I don't know, I don't know what they were doing.

• 1:48:13Danny Jones?

  You ever asked them if they met Bob Lazar?

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  I never asked them if they met Bob Lazar.

• 1:48:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, come on, yeah, you have, you're gonna tell me after this, Steven, shut the cameras off. That's when Bob said he was there.

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, is that right? Well, I mean, I grew up in Los Alamos, it's a crazy place, Manhattan Project, like, deeply infused in that, that whole climate, but my parents both worked on weapons programs, but I don't know what they worked on, because I don't have a security clearance.

• 1:48:39Danny Jones?

  They weren't allowed to tell you?

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  They weren't, I never saw their offices.

• 1:48:41Danny Jones?

  Sorry, son, sorry, young Daniel, one day you'll learn.

• 1:48:44Speaker 03

  No, I don't wanna work on, uh, nuclear weapons programs, like, one reason I work at CERN, is because there's no immediate practical applications for weapons of anything we do. Like, of course, when you develop new ideas about the universe, you could always imagine it maybe down the road, it gets turned into a weapon, but it's not like what we're doing is to develop death rays or something like that, I wanted to work on something that was more fundamental, more separate from like, immediately developing weapons of mass destruction that are pointed at civilian populations, to me, that was always, I mean, it put food on my parents, on my table as a kid, but, it was always sort of morally questionable. Um, so I wanted to move away from that, a little further from direct development of weapons.

• 1:49:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, I mean, certainly during the Cold War was like, the time in America where the most money was going towards this kind of stuff, you know, weapons and spying and all this stuff.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Los Alamos was at the heart of that.

• 1:49:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, at the heart of that.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  They got a lot of money, and, you know, for a lot of scientists, it was not an easy question, like, this is what's being funded, and then, so that's where the jobs are, so if you wanna do physics research, like, well, you're gonna end up working on that, and so a lot of people I know, these days, work on weapons programs, or work for the defense industry, or whatever, because those were the opportunities.

• 1:49:59Danny Jones?

  That's where all the money was, that's where the most innovation was, if you wanted to make the most money, being like, cutting edge of physics and scientific research, and blue sky research stuff, where they throw just infinite money at the wall to try to get these scientists to, you know, they were meeting with, we had this amazing journalist, Andy Jacobson in here, who wrote a book all about this, called, um, The Pentagon's Brain, and the Pentagon was literally inviting in science fiction writers to the Pentagon, to just like, Have creative meetings on like, let's fantasize about future weapons and technology. What could we create? They had like the writer of Terminator in there, the writer of Alien in there. And they do this like every year.

• 1:50:35Speaker 03

  I think it's great. I mean, I think science fiction writers are very creative and they're out there thinking about how the universe might be. And you know, to me, there's not a divide between science fiction writers and theoretical physicists. It's a spectrum. You know, theoretical physicists are also thinking, maybe the universe works this way, or maybe it works that way. And so I think they have a lot of influence and a lot of, a lot of role to play in understanding the universe. I just wish that there was more money for that kind of blue sky research that was not connected to weapons and immediate application. You know, the amount of money.

• 1:51:08Danny Jones?

  We're territorial apes, man. That's what we do.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  Well, it's just like, it's such a tiny fraction of what we do is like, give money to people to just be curious and think about the universe. Like defense spending versus basic research, even like, you know, how much money do we spend on Roombas as a society every year? Vastly, vastly more than we spend on like, understanding the universe, you know, or cell phones or, you know, chewing gum. Like as a, as a society, we have made this very, very low priority. And I think this is the reason why we have a lot of these problems in academia.

• 1:51:41Danny Jones?

  Bless you.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  Like, why are people so siloed? And why are people, why are there these incentives? It's because we've starved everything of money. So there's no room for creativity. You have to have like, an idea that's going to be compelling, that gets you a job. If we had more money in these areas, then people would be more free to explore. So anyway, that's just my little soapbox.

• 1:52:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  We should fund the science more.

• 1:52:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I completely agree with you, man. And you know, another one of the crazy things that's kind of happening right now with, with space exploration in particular is just like become super privatized.

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:15Danny Jones?

  You know, with like Elon and a lot of the guys that were the head of NASA, there was the NASA AIM Center in California. And a lot of money has been getting sucked out of NASA and into this private space industry. Where it seems like all of the budget is all of these rockets, there's rockets that go up every single day in Cocoa Beach.

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Danny Jones?

  Kennedy Space Center. And they're just putting up satellites for contractors, for defense contractors and things like that. And that seems to be where all the budget's going to, just buy satellites and stuff like that, and defense satellites. And like, you know, they're paying Elon a fee to shoot the rockets up there. And he's in partnership with all these companies as well. And they're all tied to the military industrial complex, you know, they're all tied, they're tied with,

• 1:53:07Danny Jones?

  not just SpaceX, but like Palantir and OpenAI. And there's another company in Venezuela that's partnered with them. This guy from Venezuela has a company called Satologic, which are like these super sophisticated satellites. That's like basically Google Earth on steroids.

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:53:25Danny Jones?

  Where they can like zoom in super tight and switch on different types of AI modes or whatever. And they're somehow combining all this stuff with, what they're using the data centers to sort of, process all this data somehow and build more data centers. And there's a big push to do those things in Argentina right now, in like Patagonia.

• 1:53:50Danny Jones?

  And there's no, it's all for profit type stuff for intelligence and military applications like that. There's no more like, let's go to the moon, let's go to Mars. It's all.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think you're right. There's an important divide there. Like on one hand, should we be privatizing launches? And like clearly Elon knows how to do that. And that's cool. And it's awesome what he's been able to do with reusable rockets. But people think that that's all that NASA does, but it's not, right? NASA also does like, let's land rovers on, you know, Europa and drill through the ice to see if there's like crazy aliens living in the oceans underneath the ice of Europa. They could be there right now.

• 1:54:33Danny Jones?

  I wish that. Are they doing that? Do they have ambitions to do that?

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  They have ambitions to do that, but they don't have the money. Like it would cost a few billion, which is like nothing. It's chump change.

• 1:54:41Danny Jones?

  Do you imagine we found out what's in this ocean under the ice of Europa?

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  Imagine we found alien life in our solar system. It would change everything. We could do that, but we have just decided not to. And so when we defund NASA because we're funding SpaceX, we're also defunding a lot of these science missions. Like Elon is not doing science. He's good at what he's doing and more power to him, but he's not doing science, right? And NASA also does this science and that's being starved. And that's a tragedy because we're like kids in a candy store. We're surrounded by all this candy. We have the money in our pocket, but we're just like, let's not, let's not spend the money to go answer these questions.

• 1:55:17Danny Jones?

  In 1960s NASA received a peak of about 4.4 to 4.5 of the total federal budget during the height of the Apollo moon program. Today's NASA funding has dropped dramatically to point four, 0.4 to 0.5 of the federal budget.

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's a political thing. We just, we did it when we were trying.

• 1:55:33Danny Jones?

  It's all political. That's spot on.

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We were trying to beat the Russians. And look, it should be political. This is a political decision. Like how much money should we spend on science? And it's not like there's a right answer or wrong answer.

• 1:55:44Danny Jones?

  And my problem is though, when these new appointees, like the new head of NASA, heads of NASA get appointed, like, how come we're not paying attention to like, oh, this guy has some business tie with, you know, SpaceX or with whatever company? Like there's always these back deal, backdoor deals and financial entanglements between all these people. It's just.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:56:04Danny Jones?

  It's frustrating.

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  It's more complicated than quantum entanglements even.

• 1:56:09Danny Jones?

  Quantum entanglement, yeah.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  But you know, I think that people want science to happen. They want answers to these questions. Like if you ask people like, would you pay a dollar so that we could get the answer to the question like, are there aliens on Europa? People would be like, yeah, sure. I'd pay a dollar for that, you know, or, but, but there's not a whole lot of political support for science right now.

• 1:56:32Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:56:32Speaker 03

  Broadly. And it's part of this like anti-expert, anti-elite movement in this country, which is unfortunately also meaning less funding for science. And fewer answers to basic questions about how the universe works, which are cheap and they're out there and we could just buy them. We have the technology to do this. We have the know-how to do this. We just don't have the political will to spend the money to answer these questions. Which is to me a tragedy, but you know, it shouldn't just be me making these decisions. It's a society-wide decision. And this is the way politics are going right now. But I just wish people understood better what that money was being spent on and how valuable it is. And also how that money comes back. Like every dollar we spend on basic research has a, you know, huge return on investment in terms of like,

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  our children and our future, you know, blue sky research is like what led to transformers and lasers and all these things that completely changed. Sorry, transistors, not transformers, that completely transformed our society, right? The reason we have wealth right now is because previous generations invested in basic science. They're like, give nerds money and let them mess around because they will invent cool stuff. And it might not be tomorrow and it might not be predictable, but in 20 years, you're going to be glad you spent that money. And if we don't spend that money now, then like China is, or somebody else is, and somebody's going to revolutionize society. And it's not going to be us anymore. And I think.

• 1:57:58Danny Jones?

  Listen, how does this make me any money? Okay. How am I making money here? I don't understand.

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  Well, if you believe in America and you want to invest in America, this is the best way to do it. It's like, you know, spend money to, for our future, which is investing in, in basic science research. And I also think it's cool. Like even if it didn't yield any economic benefits, which of course it always does, it's just worth it to spend a little bit of money to understand the universe. But you know, I chose to spend my life in this. So obviously I have a certain perspective on it. But I just want people out there to know like, what that money is being used for and how valuable it is.

• 1:58:32Danny Jones?

  What is your view on, sorry to change the subject so abruptly on you.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:58:37Danny Jones?

  The whole simulation hypothesis.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:39Danny Jones?

  I had this guy in here named Jim Gates, who I believe he's an MIT theoretical physicist. And Sylvester James, Jim, he calls himself Jim Gates. He, he said that he was trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality. And it led him to a set of equations that he said was indistinguishable from search engines and the computers. Are you familiar with this?

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  I haven't heard that argument in particular, but I know a lot about the simulation hypothesis.

• 1:59:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  Generally.

• 1:59:10Danny Jones?

  That to me was astonishing. And I don't remember exactly how he said he got to those equations and, but there's a great video of him talking about it with Neil deGrasse Tyson in an interview years ago, where he's talking about those equations. I think there's a name for those equations he came up with. But him and I were talking about that for a while when he was in here and he's a very like high level guy. He knew, he knew.

• 1:59:42Danny Jones?

  Why I always forget the guy's name. Who's the guy in the wheelchair?

• 1:59:45Speaker 03

  Hawking.

• 1:59:45Danny Jones?

  Hawking. Yeah, yeah. He knew Hawking. Had a bunch of those legendary guys. He had photos with all of them.

• 1:59:51Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it's a really fun idea, like, and I love it. And it's, it's cool to remember what we don't know, because fundamentally, we like taking the universe through this narrow set of senses, right? And we don't know what's really generating that input. Is there some objective reality out there? Or is it like being generated by a computer or whatever, right?

• 2:00:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  So that's definitely true. But I think that we tend to, I think you said this earlier, we tend to like, see our own culture reflected in it, like, computers are the thing these days. And so now it's like, oh, maybe everything is a computer. Right? And I think it's just how we interpret our questions about the universe. And I also think there's a, the argument often is, look, we look at the, the description of the universe, and it looks like something you might put into a computer.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

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• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  Like, the universe seems to operate the way a computer simulation does. Like, how does a computer simulation operate? It's, you start with a description of the universe, and then you evolve it forward. You say, what are the laws to move the universe forward? One step, or another step, or another step, right? So you simulate the universe step by step. And that's how the universe works, because we discover laws that describe how the universe changes with time. And so there's some similarity there, right?

• 2:02:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:29Speaker 03

  But I think there's also a big flaw in that argument, which is this, that if we are in a simulation, right, then we're running inside a computer, the way like, Super Mario, he's in a simulation. He's running inside a Nintendo box, right? But it doesn't mean that the rules in our universe reflect the rules of the universe in which our computer is in. Like, Super Mario, he's learning, if he was a scientist, he could learn about how the Super Mario universe works.

• 2:02:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  It doesn't tell him anything about how our universe works. He's trapped in his universe. He doesn't know anything about our universe. And the computer that's running his simulation is in our universe. It follows our laws. So if we are inside a computer, that computer is following laws of the outer universe. We're Super Mario, right? We can't learn about the laws of that outer universe. So we can't say that this simulation resembles the laws of that universe, because we have no idea what those laws are. They could be totally different. We could be running on a quantum computer. That outer universe, if it exists, could be running any sort of crazy, weird physical laws. It doesn't have to resemble ours at all. So how could we argue that our simulation, or the code for our universe, looks like

• 2:03:43Speaker 03

  how a computer would work in that outer universe when we don't know anything about that universe? So it's like Super Mario somehow discovering that he's in a simulation by saying that his universe seems to resemble a simulation. Like, there's, there's no way he could understand how a simulation works in our universe, because he has no access to, to, to our universe. So I've always struggled with that.

• 2:04:03Danny Jones?

  But usually in video games and stuff, you model, we kind of model our own universe, right?

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  Sometimes.

• 2:04:07Danny Jones?

  The new Grand Theft Auto, have you seen it?

• 2:04:11Danny Jones?

  So like...

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Well, I hope our universe is not too much like that, like that video game. But also, you can create anything you want, right? Like, Super Mario doesn't follow physics. You know, there's all sorts of crazy stuff in there.

• 2:04:22Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  So you can, but you also don't have to. So there's no guarantee that the way our universe works, if we're a simulation, tells us anything about the meta-universe. I know, I've always struggled with that. I think it's an awesome science fiction concept, and it would be super cool. But there are some, some fun speculation I've heard, like, there are some mysteries in cosmic rays that some people speculate are evidence that we're living in a simulation.

• 2:04:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because one of the big mysteries in cosmic rays is, how did they get so much energy? The cosmic rays are just particles from space, right? And space is filled with these particles. They're everywhere. And they come from the sun, they come from black holes, they come from whatever. But there are some particles out there we've seen that have insanely high energy, like, like so much energy, it's hard to imagine. You know, like a single particle having the energy of like, a fastball, like a, a whole baseball at 100 miles an hour. And there's nothing out there in the universe we know of that can make particles with that energy. Like, you, you shoot them out of a supernova, you slingshot them around a black hole, there's nothing that gets up to that energy. So, but we do see them. We measure them.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  But there's nothing in the universe we know of that can make them, which means there's something new out there, or something happening. So I read this paper from a guy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and he's saying, well, look, if the universe is a simulation, and it's cut into huge cubes in which the simulation is being done, really, really fast particles might, like, make it through the cube too quickly, so that they, they like, get caught by the update, and it's basically a glitch in the simulation. So he's arguing that these super-duper high-energy particles are a glitch in the simulation. They're moving too fast. They cross these cubes that the simulation is based on. I mean, there's no...

• 2:06:07Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

  It's just like a cool thought experiment, you know, ways you might identify that the universe is a simulation by looking for flaws in the assumptions that are built into it. That, I think, is really cool, like, because then you're looking for internal inconsistencies, right? Like, maybe the laws of physics break down in certain scenarios in a way that might be consistent with the simulation. To me, that I think is really cool.

• 2:06:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Steve, play this quick clip, real quick, of him top, explaining this theory to Neil deGrasse Tyson. So I, I know I kind of butchered his explanation of it, but I know...

• 2:06:40Speaker 03

  I think the word you're looking for was supersymmetry, right?

• 2:06:43Danny Jones?

  Supersymmetry? Yeah, he's a, that's his big thing, is supersymmetry. But play that little clip of, of him explaining how his equation, what, what his equation was. I think it'll be, I think it's a pretty interesting.

• 2:06:54Speaker 06

  These are pictures of equations. I've been, for the last 15 years, trying to answer the kinds of questions that my colleagues have, have been raising. And what I've come to understand is that there are these incredible pictures that contain all the information of a set of equations that are related to string theory. And it's even more bizarre than that, because when you then try to understand these pictures, you find out that buried in them are computer codes, just like the type that you find in a browser when you go surf the web. You're saying your attempt to understand the fundamental operations of nature leads you to a set of equations that are indistinguishable from the equations that drive search engines and browsers on our computers? That is correct. So...

• 2:07:40Speaker 06

  Wait, wait. I'm still, wait. I have to just be silent for a minute here.

• 2:07:46Speaker 06

  So you're saying, as you dig deeper, you find computer code writ in the fabric of the cosmos? Into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos, yes. Computer code? Computer code, strings of bits of ones and zeros. It's not just sort of resembles computer code, you're saying it is computer code?

• 2:08:11Speaker 04

  Computer code. It's not even just is computer code. It's a special kind of computer code that was invented by a scientist named Claude Shannon in the 1940s. That's what we find very, very deeply inside the equations that occur in string theory and in general in systems that we can say are supersymmetric. Some of those codes are showing on the screen behind you right now. They don't look like codes, but these pictures, which we call adinkras, are graphical representations of sets of equations that are based on codes that in the description of our universe, that is a supersymmetrical universe, which we were going to test in the LHC. If you believe that description, I can show you the presence of these codes.

• 2:08:56Speaker 04

  That's my statement.

• 2:08:57Speaker 07

  Do you have any predictions in your ideas or any ways to test any of your ideas any more than, say, the guy over on the screen?

• 2:09:05Speaker 04

  The work that I'm doing is in fact so theoretical that we don't, we don't understand yet whether it is even possible to complete the program. We have found these strange graphs. We know that they are equivalent to equations and we have found in these equations computer codes. And so that's where we are right now. So I cannot give you a prediction. This work is less than two years old.

• 2:09:28Speaker 03

  Well, that's trippy.

• 2:09:29Danny Jones?

  Theoretical, super trippy, right?

• 2:09:32Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, there's some pieces in there that I think are worth unpacking, like supersymmetry is a common idea you hear about a lot, but it doesn't really have to do with the simulation hypothesis. It just says like, all the particles that we know about, maybe they all have hidden partners we haven't discovered yet.

• 2:09:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:48Speaker 03

  Like the electron, maybe there's another version of it called the selectron and the photon, maybe there's another version of it called the photino. And theoretically, it's very attractive because it's, it creates a symmetry where we didn't have one before. We have like asymmetry now. We're like, why do we have the photon and the electron and no partners for them? And in physics, we see lots of symmetries. Like we see the electron has a symmetry with the anti-electron. Like there's this matter, antimatter symmetry. And we see other symmetries, like the electron is very similar to the muon, which is very similar to the tau. So we're constantly seeing patterns and symmetries and looking for how the universe has reflections within it. And so supersymmetry is this idea that maybe there's this like mega symmetry where all the particles are reflected in this new way. Very cool. Solves a lot of theoretical problems.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  No evidence for it.

• 2:10:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:35Speaker 03

  It's like, it was a big thing. We were hoping to see the Large Hadron Collider. Some people made a big deal about how we were definitely going to see it, which was a bit of a overhype.

• 2:10:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  But in general, there's, there's been no evidence for it. So we don't know if it's a part of the universe at all. It is a big part of string theory. Like the strings themselves are supersymmetric. They have this kind of relationship.

• 2:10:59Speaker 03

  So what he's talking about in that video is saying that like he sees evidence for like structure within string theory that's similar to computer code. And, you know, I think that's a bit of a reach.

• 2:11:08Danny Jones?

  Well, he said it was not similar. He said it was identical to a specific computer code that Claude Shannon came up with.

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:14Danny Jones?

  And I think the 1950s or whatever.

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are these error correcting codes. Shannon was super genius, came up with lots of like foundational concepts in computing. But, and you can always draw these connections, but that doesn't mean that, you know, the universe is written in this code. I think it's a, it's a bit of artistry there, if you ask me.

• 2:11:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's strange. And he, and by the way, just he didn't, he's not like a big proponent of like the whole simulation theory. Like he, uh, he says what he says and he doesn't extrapolate for whatever reason. I don't know why, maybe because he's like high in academia. He's afraid to like get, you know? But I'm sure he's like, he's pretty safe, right? He's got to be tenured by now. But it's funny how, you know, people like him, they like to only color inside the lines. They don't like to speculate about things too much because, you know, you could get, you could get shunned or outcast or.

• 2:12:02Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know. I think big ideas are also welcomed. I mean, but there's, um, you know, institutional inertia. You come up with some crazy new idea that's going to change everything. You know, it takes a while for people to like absorb that idea. And that's because people have limited time and attention, you know? Like I get 10 emails a day with people like, I figured out the universe. And like, I read all of them actually, and I write back to everybody. But, you know, I don't have time to give everybody like a week to dig into their idea and see, maybe this is the new idea. And maybe one of them does have the right idea about the universe, but everybody's got limited time and attention. We're all just people and I have to decide where to spend my day. And that's true of everybody in academia.

• 2:12:44Speaker 03

  And so like, if you have to decide what to work on, should you gamble on some crazy new idea or should you work on the thing you know has been producing something useful?

• 2:12:53Danny Jones?

  Well, I think the interesting thing about this simulation hypothesis and the Claude Shannon thing, like if these, if these error correcting binary bits are somehow a fundamental part of reality, right? If, if I'm going to take his, what he claimed to have found, and I want to make that like a hypothesis, that this is the nature of reality. Well, that, the interesting thing about that is it reconciles very well with this whole, uh, parapsychology stuff, right? Of like consciousness and telepathy and like, um, remote viewing and all these things, right? There's this, there's this book called, I think it's called The Secret Life of Plants,

• 2:13:33Danny Jones?

  where this guy put a, um, a lie detector test on a plant and he lit it on fire and it started going off the charts. I think the idea is that like consciousness is everywhere, even plants are conscious to a certain degree. And, uh, like if you think about things like, um, morphic resonance, where like on one side of the world, and this is Rupert Sheldrake, I think who came up with this, like a problem is solved in like a remote tribe on an island somewhere near Australia, like somewhere else, like not much farther after that is discovered by another group of an uncontacted tribe somewhere else. Like the same way that world records have been broken and like running and sprinting,

• 2:14:16Danny Jones?

  like as soon as it's broken somewhere, it's like immediately broken somewhere else. So like, how that reconciles is that like, if we are in this computer simulation, this is just a conservation of energy, like, right? If we've already figured out the problem in one spot, now we can figure it out somewhere else, the same way a computer, a computer program would do it, right?

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  I mean, you could make parallels, but there are also like simpler explanations. You know, like as soon as somebody breaks a record, that motivates other people and they learn, okay, well, it's possible. And so much of like running is a mental game. Like what do I think I can do? And that's why like you run much faster.

• 2:14:55Danny Jones?

  And you know it's possible. If someone tells you it's possible, you need to believe that this is possible.

• 2:14:59Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's why like they broke the four minute mile and then very quickly other people did because they used to think it was impossible. And like my kid, my son is a runner. He, I know he runs faster when he's running against faster people. He runs faster than he even thought he was possible because he like, he just pulled along by their momentum. So, so much of this stuff is mental. I think the panpsychism stuff is really cool because there is a lot about consciousness we don't know, like super basic questions we do not know. Like are electrons conscious? We don't know. And there's like, there's a very reputable theory, panpsychism, that the whole universe is conscious, that everything has a little bit of it. And that our consciousness comes together from the emergent property of all of our conscious bits. And it's not like a yes or no, it's a spectrum.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  And like everything in the universe is conscious and that sounds nuts.

• 2:15:45Danny Jones?

  Is consciousness inside the brain? Or is looking for consciousness inside the brain the same as looking for a TV show inside the TV?

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. And I don't think anybody knows. And I don't even know if it's a scientific question. It's, it's like very philosophical because like, how do you even define conscious? How do you measure it?

• 2:16:01Danny Jones?

  Philosophical, right? It's not, it might not be physical matter. You know, it's not physical matter, obviously. Can you build, can you build up to, it doesn't make sense. I don't, I can't in my head come up with an idea of how you could build up to consciousness from atoms and protons and neutrons and matter.

• 2:16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, is it just an emergent thing, the way like hurricanes are emerging from water droplets and wind? Like I can't imagine how to go from water drops to wind to hurricanes, but it happens, right? Lots of stuff emerges in the universe that we, that we have a hard time with. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But, you know, it, is it possible for inert not conscious things to come together to make consciousness? I don't know. And to me, the basic problem is it's not something we can measure. I, I just like, I have to trust you that you're conscious.

• 2:16:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  I have no access.

• 2:16:49Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:16:50Speaker 03

  Like you could just.

• 2:16:50Danny Jones?

  You have no idea.

• 2:16:51Speaker 03

  You could be.

• 2:16:51Danny Jones?

  I could be a robot.

• 2:16:52Speaker 03

  You could be a robot that sounds very much like a conscious person, right? And, and how would I know? And even though I, I feel very strongly other people's consciousness, like I have a wife, I'm in love, I think she's a person. I think there's a being in there. I feel it like, and even when I look at my dog, I think my dog loves me.

• 2:17:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:10Speaker 03

  I feel that connection, right? But I don't know. And there's nothing I can do to measure that.

• 2:17:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  I can't get any data. And that I think is the biggest obstacle to any scientific exploration of consciousness is that there is no data to say this or that. And I don't think we even like have a good definition of consciousness. So. But I think there's a long history of like philosophy, taking really hard problems. We don't really know how to grapple with and smoking banana peels and thinking about it for a thousand years till eventually we figure out a way to start to make it into data and then start to really tackle it. You know, what is the universe? Now we can actually make measurements and figure that stuff out. Consciousness, we might need another thousand years of banana peels before we figure out like how to turn that into a real scientific question, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff.

• 2:17:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it is super weird, right? And there's all, there's all kinds of like weird things that happen to people in their lives where it's just like, what the fuck was that? Like, how did, how did you read my mind? You know, I can, I can think of like, you know, dozens of times where that's happened to me where I've like been thinking about something and my wife immediately says it like, what is that? What are the, is there an antenna between us connecting us? Is this, am I being deceived here? Is this some sort of like basic, there's a basic explanation for this that I'm not, I'm missing or whatever. People like to say that like, you know, I was thinking about this person and then they called me.

• 2:18:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:18:30Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, what was that? But like my, like that's, that one for me is like, well, how many times have you been thinking about that person where they didn't fuck?

• 2:18:36Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:18:37Danny Jones?

  Or anyway, how many times you think about people when they don't call you? Those don't register. It registers when you are thinking about them and they call you and it's like, oh my God, meaning, this has so much meaning to it.

• 2:18:48Speaker 03

  That's why we need science because we're so influenced by events and we're bad at this stuff and we need like careful rigorous ways to learn about the world. But you know, from a scientific point of view, there is no biological impediment to telepathy. Like all telepathy requires is that your brain generates some kind of signal that another brain can pick up. And like our brains are electrical, they can generate electromagnetic pulses and your brain is electrical, it can read electromagnetic pulses. Like telepathy is not like physically prohibited. Like, I don't know why we didn't evolve it. And

• 2:19:19Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, why, why doesn't it exist?

• 2:19:22Danny Jones?

  Do you think it's possible with devolved? Do you think it's possible? Maybe, maybe humans had it at one point?

• 2:19:26Speaker 03

  I mean, anything is possible, but it's hard to imagine why you would give that up.

• 2:19:29Danny Jones?

  But you can imagine though, like, like hypothetically, you could, you could see how the development of language and the written word could, if we started using that, that would atrophy, right?

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  I suppose, but that's so much less efficient, right? Than just like direct connection. So, I don't know, I've seen all this stuff like the telepathy tapes and a lot of that is built on, you know, facilitated, facilitated communication, which is scientifically, I think, very questionable.

• 2:19:53Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  So I think it's easy to believe some things because you want to like, wow, it would be a dream come true if autistic kids had a rich inner life and were communicating it telepathically. Everybody wants that to be true, which makes it easier to convince yourself that it is. But I don't think there's, if you look into the science underneath it, it's pretty shaky.

• 2:20:11Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:20:12Speaker 03

  Unfortunately.

• 2:20:13Danny Jones?

  I agree. Yeah. I think if I was to bet, I would, I would say that like these cases of, of telepathy or the things you hear about in the telepathy tapes, I think it's true to some level, but I don't think you can perform it at will, right? Like, it might be something that's, that boils to the surface with some people, maybe like young children before they're indoctrinated into the world and hardened to the world and their senses are like locked in, maybe before that, when things are more malleable, right? When the brain is more plastic, maybe some other sense can like pop through.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20:53Danny Jones?

  That maybe we had millions of years ago and, but like, the idea that you can just perform that like a magic trick, I think is very unlikely.

• 2:21:06Speaker 03

  That makes it hard to test then, doesn't it?

• 2:21:07Danny Jones?

  There's like this guy Uri Geller, who's a famous guy, was a part of the Stargate program. He's famous for bending spoons and all this stuff. Like, maybe when he was a kid, he was able, I believe it's possible that he was maybe able to manipulate it with his consciousness. But like, as he got older, he started like, I'm becoming famous, I'm making tons of money from this, I'm selling books, I'm getting paid to fly across the world and do conferences. I gotta figure out a way to fake this now. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it could be a combination of both where it's like, the answer's somewhere in the middle. Like, the guy's not a total charlatan and he's also not like a habitual spoon bender, right? Like, maybe this was something that he was able to do at one point and that is possible in human consciousness or in, you know, baked within us that, um.

• 2:21:49Speaker 03

  But we gotta let the data tell us, right? We gotta keep an open mind.

• 2:21:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:52Speaker 03

  Because there's lots of times we've been blinded to ideas because we thought we understood something. And in the case of the brain, like, we definitely don't. Like, so many open questions about the brain. So we should, we should be very open to big surprises, but we should let the data speak. Like, we should only believe stuff if we can show it because there's a lot of reasons to believe stuff otherwise. You want this to be true, you don't want this to be true. So it needs, it needs real data, unfortunately. That's the, you know, scientifically is the only way to like untangle these questions is like, let the data speak.

• 2:22:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there are some people who think that like certain psychedelic drugs are what break you out of the simulation, you know, because people relate to seeing like, people have taken psychedelic drugs and like had crazy experiences where they communicate telepathically with the person in the room with them. And like, it's this profound, meaningful experience.

• 2:22:43Speaker 03

  I had professors at my university go on these like, you know, trips, they took peyote and ayahuasca and whatever. And they came back with like understandings of quantum mechanics. And I was like, came and talked to me about it. And I was like, wow, man, it sounds like you had a good time.

• 2:22:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for real.

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I think it's possible that people just sometimes ascribe too much meaning to things that happened in their inner psyche, whether it be psychedelic experiences or phone calls when people, when you're thinking about somebody across the world, they call you like, some people can like, they just put too much meaning towards it and they can like fall into that trap, you know?

• 2:23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to disentangle.

• 2:23:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Because there's a lot of people that have proven that have like a long time, like psychedelic researchers have said, scientists have said that like, that study this stuff for a living. They say that what psychedelics do is they're like a placebo to the inner psyche. Like, they bring out what's already there and they show it to you in a way that's like novel. So you think that like, this is something, you're, you're getting this revelatory cosmic divine download from something. But really, if you really dig into it and you look at the data across all the experiments and studies that have been done from John Hopkins and everywhere else, like there was this famous John Hopkins study that they did this study

• 2:24:01Danny Jones?

  on religious professionals from Jewish, Christian, Hindu, all of the other religions. They basically took four or five like heads of religions and they put them together, gave them psilocybin, and they documented their experience. And each of them had very profound intensified experiences based on their pre-existing belief in their religion.

• 2:24:22Speaker 03

  Fascinating. Yeah.

• 2:24:24Danny Jones?

  So, yeah. And basically like, that seems to be the idea is that it's a placebo effect. It brings forward what's already there.

• 2:24:33Speaker 03

  Well, it's fascinating that your experience can be so obviously affected by chemistry.

• 2:24:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  Right? Which tells you that like, some part of it definitely is emergent from the underlying chemistry.

• 2:24:43Danny Jones?

  Because you're right. It's not just the brain by itself. Like, we are constant fluctuating hormones and we're a bag of chemicals that's always alternating with, you know, cortisol, hormonal imbalances and all that stuff. And that directly affects the brain and cognition and how the brain works and what state you're in. And it's a very, it's not like, the brain's not just a computer, right? It's definitely more than that. It's very intertwined with like the biology of our entire anatomy.

• 2:25:10Speaker 03

  Well, if somebody wrote this into the simulation, they made it really complicated.

• 2:25:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:17Danny Jones?

  They definitely did. But like, I mean, it's not impossible that we will create, especially with like AI right now, we're going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality.

• 2:25:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:25:27Danny Jones?

  Right? Like, and if, and I can imagine in a couple of years, we're going to be able to do this where we're both sitting here right now or on opposite sides of the world with some fucking thing plugged into us, a spinal tap, who knows how they do it by then. But the, I guess the biggest problem is you can't disprove it.

• 2:25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the interesting question is like, AI already can claim to be conscious. And then like, again, we don't have any data, we can't access it. Like, is it just claiming it the way you claim it? Or my dog, you know, or my wife claims it? Or is it real? Is it not? Like, we can't tell, we have no access. And, you know, there's a deep question there about like, can a simulation of a consciousness be conscious? Like, is it about the substrate? Does it have to be in like wetware? Like your actual like messy wet neurons? Or is a simulation of it have this equivalent experience? We don't know, we can't know. Deep questions that maybe eventually we'll learn how to figure out how to probe. But having, creating an AI that can have the same kind of expression of, of claiming of

• 2:26:26Speaker 03

  self-awareness, I think really brings to a forefront this question of like, is claiming to be conscious the same as being conscious? And I think it's not.

• 2:26:34Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:26:35Speaker 03

  But, but you know, how can we tell?

• 2:26:38Danny Jones?

  It's just so, it's so crazy how we have created something that is a hundred times more intelligent than we are.

• 2:26:47Danny Jones?

  You know, like, we are the gods to AI.

• 2:26:50Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:26:50Danny Jones?

  And it is so much more intelligent than us and is going to become like another god.

• 2:26:55Speaker 03

  Why do you think it's more intelligent? Like, I find it still pretty dumb sometimes. You know, like, I try to get it to do my job. Sometimes I'm lazy. I'm like, hey, could you read these things?

• 2:27:04Danny Jones?

  Well, that's basic L L Ms. There's, there's cra- you know, they haven't even released some of the best AIs to the public yet. That are solving equations. I mean, I see stuff in the news every single day of equations being solved that have never been solved. It was done in like a matter of minutes. And then when you start to integrate that with supercomputing, it's gonna, it's gonna be like, you know, off the chain.

• 2:27:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think it's worth digging into like what that means because what the AIs have been able to do so far is what I said earlier is take open problems, find existing solutions and apply them. And it's made a lot of breakthroughs. Like, because the mathematical literature is huge and nobody can read all of it. And so it turns out if you can read all of it, then you can find problems and solutions that fit together. And that's basically what it's done. And that's great.

• 2:27:51Danny Jones?

  Have you heard the stories of like the different AIs communicating with each other? And stuff like that? And then also-

• 2:27:56Speaker 03

  Building societies and sacrificing each other and all this stuff.

• 2:27:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, I didn't hear that.

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, there's like a bunch of them that made some security break and but to do so, they had to like sacrifice some of them to get through. But there's a lot of like-

• 2:28:08Danny Jones?

  Are you talking about the one where they blackmailed the people?

• 2:28:11Speaker 03

  No, this is, um, they worked together to, to escape some black box they were stuck in, but-

• 2:28:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. But there's a lot of interpretation there, a lot of like putting human emotions and human motivations on a machine. It's not really clear how much of it is really there and how much of it is us telling stories about it. So you gotta be careful. But in terms of like transforming research, absolutely. Absolutely. It's totally transformed mathematics. But interestingly, it hasn't yet done that for physics. Like, you don't see lots of physics papers being done where like an AI has come up with a new strategy to solve a physics problem. It's happened in math. It hasn't yet really happened in physics. One or two where like some calculation was assisted by AI. But I think that's interesting. You know, that hasn't, that it's a different category of problem. And so the AIs

• 2:29:00Speaker 03

  can't do it as well yet. And I think the reason is that math is very crisp and clean. And it's like, you know, very clear when something is correct. And physics is a little more fuzzy. Like, mathematicians are always laughing at us because they look at our math and they're like, oh, my God, you guys are so sloppy. Because physics is not about like, let's build the most perfect mathematical machinery. It's like, let's think about this question. Let's try to answer our, uh, uh, you know, let's address our curiosity. Let's, you know, slap together a few ideas. So it's, it's less rigorous. It's more intuitive. And so I think L L Ms aren't there yet. I think they'll get there. And I think they'll have a transformational change in physics, the way they have in, in math. In the same way that they're gonna notice like existing solutions to existing problems and put them together.

• 2:29:43Speaker 03

  But there's more fuzz in physics, which I think makes it harder.

• 2:29:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's just scary to me how ubiquitous it is becoming. Not just with the L L Ms, but with everything. Everything is using AI. I don't know if you follow this flock camera thing?

• 2:29:57Speaker 03

  Yes, unfortunately.

• 2:29:59Danny Jones?

  These flock cameras are being installed everywhere and they're using AI and stuff like that to like create some like 3D digital control grid using the satellites as well. So like, no, yeah. Actually, they just did a thing I read this morning where they're, uh, getting rid of all of them in Florida.

• 2:30:16Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:30:17Danny Jones?

  So I don't know if that's gonna happen, but that's what scares me the most about AI is like just complete and total lockdown police state. And being able to track and corroborate everything and it just gets rid of total privacy.

• 2:30:35Danny Jones?

  Which, you know, essentially is human control, right? Like, that's a very human thing. There's, that's human nature being driven, driving that AI, right?

• 2:30:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:45Danny Jones?

  But

• 2:30:47Speaker 03

  Well, I already have-

• 2:30:47Danny Jones?

  When it gets off the rails, like, it's just, you can't even fathom, right? Like, you can't, you can't fathom what something that's a thousand times smarter than you would do. Right? Just like a squirrel can't fathom what we, what our next move, you can't game out what our next move is gonna be.

• 2:31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. Well, I've already had the experience of being replaced by an AI because I was texting with my daughter just a minute ago before we started recording and she has a physics problem she couldn't solve. And so she asked AI and I'm like, I'm a physics professor. Why didn't you ask me? She's like, well, you weren't here today.

• 2:31:23Speaker 03

  Apparently, she's just like asking chat GPT for help because, because I'm not home.

• 2:31:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's another thing about it too, right? Like, it's gonna be doing like the hard work, the hard, heavy lifting for us now. So it's gonna make us lazier. We're not gonna have to do the hard work, crunch the numbers. Everything's gonna be instant gratification.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  Or it's gonna allow us to think about bigger problems and harder questions. Like, the way computers have, right? Like, I don't have to sit down and do a page of calculations anymore. I get to think bigger and let the computer do those calculations. So, you know, science is constantly transforming and, and the new tools allow us to ask harder, bigger, broader, deeper questions. Because we're the ones asking the questions. And I think the interesting thing is like, say we have that AI, it's a thousand times more powerful than us. We are the squirrel, right? We're still the ones in charge. We're still the ones asking the questions. So what is it like when a squirrel is in charge of a superintelligence? Like, all right, maybe, you know, it's doing what the squirrel wants, but still the squirrel's in charge. And so, you know, as long as we're still the ones asking the questions and running the data centers and whatever,

• 2:32:26Speaker 03

  even if it's more intelligent than we are, it's answering our questions. And so I'm not so worried about that. I mean, my brother's a professor of AI and he's not worried about the AI taking over. He's like, we'll just unplug them if we have to.

• 2:32:40Speaker 03

  You know, they are, in the end, reliant on our infrastructure.

• 2:32:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but you have to imagine, you have to take into consideration the people who are running those things and the people that are in charge of those things. And what those people's motivations are. And do they really care for the general publics that we survive? You know? How do they make their money?

• 2:32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of financial entanglements.

• 2:32:59Danny Jones?

  Do they make their money by doing good for the world and feeding the homeless and

• 2:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:03Danny Jones?

  some, you know, fixing the pollution problems and the starvation problems all across the world? And no, they do quite the opposite.

• 2:33:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:10Danny Jones?

  And if those are the guys that are in charge of plugging and unplugging the AI, then I'm fucking terrified.

• 2:33:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, private control of this stuff is scary, right?

• 2:33:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:21Speaker 03

  The public should have a say and our representatives should have some influence over it. So that is what's terrifying. And what we're seeing in science is a move away from funding it in a public, open way to funding science through these companies.

• 2:33:34Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:33:35Speaker 03

  Like, there's this big Genesis mission recently, which takes a lot of money away from fundamental research and funnels it to these private companies.

• 2:33:43Danny Jones?

  Genesis?

• 2:33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. A recent massive funding program by the government to, it's like a AI version of the Manhattan Project.

• 2:33:51Danny Jones?

  Can you look this up, Steve?

• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  To revolutionize how we do science in America. But mostly, it's about funneling money to private companies. Basically, like, let's let OpenAI do physics. And, you know, initially, it's like, we'll partner with OpenAI, but it seems like clear that the trend is like, let's take money away from academia and universities and fund towards these private companies.

• 2:34:13Danny Jones?

  But wouldn't those private companies have to fund the academia and universities?

• 2:34:16Speaker 03

  No, they just do the research in-house, you know?

• 2:34:19Danny Jones?

  Genesis Mission is a US government initiative launched by executive order in November of 2025 last year to accelerate scientific discovery, accelerate scientific discovery and secure national technological dominance by integrating AI with federal supercomputing, national laboratories and proprietary data sets. Led primarily by the US Department, oh, God, Department of Energy. The program functions as a whole of government platform utilizing dozens of federal agencies and private tech sector partners.

• 2:34:54Speaker 03

  Private tech sector partners, that's the key. They're taking all this money out of research in the government that was going towards national labs and academia. And they're sending it to Anthropic and OpenAI and et cetera, et cetera. Basically, like, take our data and use it to solve physics is the plan.

• 2:35:14Danny Jones?

  Hold on a second. Zoom in on that. Okay, what are the objectives? Connects the nation's most powerful supercomputers, automated robotic labs and massive government data repositories into a single closed-loop ecosystem. That's, does not sound good. National Science Challenges focuses cross-sector resources on designated challenges such as advanced energy, fusion, quantum science and material design to double research productivity. And then public and private collaboration partners with major technology companies and research institutions, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia to pool infrastructure. So you're saying this is gonna take funding away from

• 2:35:59Danny Jones?

  like, public institutions and universities and stuff like that?

• 2:36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's no new money here. It's a redirection of existing-

• 2:36:08Danny Jones?

  And it's moving all of that, those funding and those grants and things to private companies.

• 2:36:14Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And, you know, the idea is like, look, the private companies have the best AI. So we should be taking advantage of that and working together with them. But it is moving this money away from academics and towards these companies.

• 2:36:28Danny Jones?

  Wow. Expanded from the Department of Energy centric initiative into a multi-agency operation involving over 15 federal departments, including NASA, the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Health. The latter running in parallel with the Biogenesis Mission for Biomedical Innovation. Jesus.

• 2:36:47Speaker 03

  The whole thing was announced last minute and they gave everybody like a few weeks to put programs together. And, um, the whole thing was, was ridiculous. But it's just this, this, the way things are going is take money away from universities and towards private companies. And they were like, we're like outsourcing the fundamental research in this country, which to me is scary.

• 2:37:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:37:13Speaker 03

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• 2:37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:42Danny Jones?

  That is fucked up.

• 2:37:43Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:37:45Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that giving money to universities to investigate the nature of the universe has paid off and we should keep doing it. And I think this, we should also do this. We should definitely partner with AI and, and take advantage of it to accelerate our research. I'm not against that, but it shouldn't be instead of what we're doing. It should be in addition to.

• 2:38:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:04Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:38:05Danny Jones?

  What do you think is like the next frontier of technology when it comes to CERN or whatever it is to like pushing the boundary of physics? Like I know there's the Large Hadron Collider. There's a bigger one that they're building. Like, what do you think? Like in your, in your ideal world, if you had unlimited money to do whatever you wanted, what would it be?

• 2:38:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they do have designs for a bigger collider. I, if I had unlimited money, I would not invest in that. I would invest in new technology to make colliders smaller. Because these new colliders are really big, really expensive, because you need more room to accelerate the particles up to higher energies. So the way that works is we have like a string in these little accelerators. You stack them together, you get a big accelerator. You want a bigger one? You stack more of them. So you need a bigger tunnel, bigger accelerator, more billions of dollars. You're just using the same technology, but bigger. That's cool. And I think it's, it's worth it, but there are other technologies like plasma weak field accelerators that potentially could accelerate particles to the same high speeds with much, much smaller

• 2:39:07Speaker 03

  facilities. In principle, it'd be amazing to have the same capability in like a lab this size, right? You don't have to build billions of dollars of tunnels and whatever. So we should investigate and we should invest in those kinds of technologies because that will change the whole game. Because at some point it just gets too big and too expensive to do. You know, the, the LHC costs $10 billion. That's like already the limit of like what the public would support. It's a lot of money, right? It's not a small amount of money. You got schools that don't, that have crumbling buildings. You have roads falling apart. So asking for 10 billion is, it's a big ask. Now you're asking for 100 billion for a bigger one?

• 2:39:43Danny Jones?

  That's how much they're asking for the new one?

• 2:39:44Speaker 03

  It's gonna be expensive. I think it's maybe 40, 50 billion.

• 2:39:47Danny Jones?

  Where's that money coming from?

• 2:39:48Speaker 03

  It's a European money mostly. It's gonna be built at CERN, but they don't know for sure. There's hopes that, you know, it'll be international, but.

• 2:39:56Danny Jones?

  Steal some of that. Middle East oil will pay for this new collider.

• 2:40:02Speaker 03

  The Chinese have been talking about building a really big one, but I think we need new technology to make these things smaller and cheaper. And there are ideas out there. So we should invest in plasma weak field and other technologies to make it so these things can be smaller because, you know, say we build a bigger one and we don't find anything. What are we gonna do? Build one on the moon? Build one in the solar system? Like it's, at some point you need a new technology rather than just going bigger. So that would be my dream is develop a new technology to make colliders smaller.

• 2:40:31Danny Jones?

  Interesting. Now what about the LIGO thing? Like the LIGO are these lasers that detect gravitational waves? Is that right?

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, super awesome, right? This was an idea Einstein had like 100 years ago. His theory predicted ripples in spacetime and he famously said like, yeah, but nobody's ever gonna be able to see them. And I remember touring Caltech when I was choosing where to go to grad school. And they were trying to get me to join this experiment. I remember thinking like, these guys are never gonna see. This is never gonna work. It's impossible. And you know, then 10 years later, they won the Nobel Prize for, for finding them. So clearly I was wrong. But they have these incredible sets of mirrors. They shoot lasers in two directions and they bounce back. And then the lasers interfere and they use that as a really high precision way to tell like, did one leg get shorter or one leg get longer? Cause if one leg gets slightly shorter, then the lasers interfere differently.

• 2:41:22Speaker 03

  And that tells you if a gravitational wave came by, because that's what gravitational waves do is they squeeze space this way and then that way. So really amazing. And we have one in New Orleans and one in, well, it's somewhere near New Orleans. And one in Washington and there's one in, in Italy. But they want a bigger one and they want to build one in space. And so, yeah, it's called LISA. And it would be basically three satellites.

• 2:41:47Danny Jones?

  LISA?

• 2:41:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. And.

• 2:41:49Danny Jones?

  Who's gonna build this?

• 2:41:50Speaker 03

  It's a conglomeration. I think it's European and American, but I'm not sure. But it's like three satellites linked with lasers. And so it's measuring how space wiggles as, as they float there. So they use the lasers to measure how far away are we from each other? And then they look for deviations. Cause deviations come when a gravitational wave comes through and shrinks space between them or expands space between them. So that's a super awesome.

• 2:42:17Danny Jones?

  These are like, like ripples in time essentially?

• 2:42:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, ripples in spacetime. And so when space gets more curved, like near a black hole or near the center of the earth, time goes more slowly. And so ripples in spacetime have the same effect, but on a much, much smaller level. These are really, really gentle ripples. So we want to see even gentler ripples from like more distant black hole mergers or from the very, very early universe. Like one way to learn about the early universe is to look for really, really old light. We talked about that. But that comes from that moment when the universe became transparent. And that was like almost 400,000 years after that earliest moment we can think about.

• 2:42:59Speaker 03

  Gravitational waves can look much further back because the universe has always been transparent to gravitational waves. Because they can pass through anything. And so if we find gravitational waves from the very early universe, it'd be like seeing that cosmic microwave background light, but from much, much earlier. So this is like seeing like a fetal picture of the universe instead of a baby picture, you know? You could learn so much about the very beginning of the universe. So that's a really exciting technology. And these gravitational waves are like a new way to look at the universe, to listen to the universe. And that's exciting because every time we develop a new technology to explore the universe, we see something bonkers.

• 2:43:39Speaker 03

  Something we're like, what? And that's why it's so worthwhile, you know, just like gather data about what's going on.

• 2:43:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, like this new satellite that they put in, uh, somewhere in South America. It's detecting all these interstellar objects that are coming through. You know the name of that satellite? This is new observatory that we have, which was like the best one we've ever created. And since they built it in like 2018 or 2017.

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  Oh, the Pan Stars. Yeah.

• 2:44:06Danny Jones?

  Maybe that's it. Yeah. We've detected all these interstellar objects. And now we've, we've seen what? Like three or four of them?

• 2:44:12Speaker 03

  Oumuamua.

• 2:44:13Danny Jones?

  Oumuamua. And then there's the 3I Atlas one.

• 2:44:15Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:44:15Danny Jones?

  But like this is the first time we've ever been able to detect interstellar objects. So we look at it and we're like, they're Albe Lubs like, oh my God, it's a spaceship. But like, we've never seen, we've only seen three so far. So we can't really, you know what I mean? We can't, we don't have a good library of interstellar objects.

• 2:44:28Speaker 03

  And until we opened that new kind of eyeball, we had no idea how many there were. We didn't know if they were coming once a century, once a minute.

• 2:44:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:35Speaker 03

  Right? We just don't know. And now we know, fortunately they're coming pretty often, which means we can learn something about the universe.

• 2:44:40Danny Jones?

  I wonder when the next one's gonna be. Look at that thing.

• 2:44:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, that's the Rubin Observatory.

• 2:44:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's not the right one?

• 2:44:47Speaker 03

  That I think is looking to study dark energy and dark matter, but I think, I think it's the Pan Stars that's.

• 2:44:53Danny Jones?

  Pan Star. Pan Star, Steve-O.

• 2:44:56Speaker 04

  Pan Star.

• 2:44:57Danny Jones?

  And where is this one? I think it's in South America.

• 2:45:01Speaker 03

  There it is, yeah.

• 2:45:06Speaker 04

  The blurriest photo ever.

• 2:45:07Danny Jones?

  Steve, get us some, some, some info on it. Go to, go to you, or Google, yeah. The Pan Star Observatory, Paneranic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System Observatory is located at the summit. Oh, that's in Hawaii. No, this is, this one was in South America. Oh no, this is the one that found a Muamua.

• 2:45:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the one that.

• 2:45:29Danny Jones?

  Okay. So you, you were right. This one's in Hawaii. So its main job is to find near earth objects and dangerous asteroids that could threaten earth. Massive camera system, uses digital cameras with roughly 1.4 to 1.5 billion pixels to image large areas of the sky very quickly.

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  Pretty awesome.

• 2:45:45Danny Jones?

  It found a Muamua, which is the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. Did this one discover the 3I Atlas as well?

• 2:45:53Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:45:54Danny Jones?

  Scroll down.

• 2:45:57Danny Jones?

  Type in, did it find 3I Atlas?

• 2:46:01Speaker 04

  3I Atlas.

• 2:46:09Danny Jones?

  No, Pan Stars did not find 3I Atlas. The interstellar comet.

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  You're right, Chile.

• 2:46:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, the Chile one. Right.

• 2:46:16Danny Jones?

  Find a picture of that one in Chile.

• 2:46:19Speaker 03

  The Atlas Survey. There you go.

• 2:46:22Danny Jones?

  So is the, I assume the Chile one's a newer one?

• 2:46:33Danny Jones?

  Cool. Okay. Looks similar.

• 2:46:37Danny Jones?

  Crazy.

• 2:46:40Speaker 03

  And just shows you like every time we look into the universe, we learn something because it's always going to surprise us. And we gotta keep an open mind and we gotta gather as much data. Think about how much information about the universe we're ignoring. Like the universe is screaming information at us when we have these tiny little telescopes.

• 2:46:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah. We don't have the senses yet.

• 2:46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, like there are photons hitting the sidewalk outside right now that have secrets of the universe encoded in them. And they're just getting absorbed by the sidewalk. Right? Most of the information that's coming to us from the universe is being ignored. And we build these tiny little telescopes to look at the universe. And every time we do, we learn something shocking. And so to me, it's astounding that we don't do more of that. You know, we should have 10 times as many space telescopes looking out into the universe. It is amazing also what we have learned. Like, we've never left this planet or its neighborhood. Yet we've learned about like the structure of the universe and its history, just from gathering these few photons we've been able to collect. It's incredible, right? What we've been able to do, what we've been able to learn. I just feel like there's so much more to understand and.

• 2:47:43Danny Jones?

  It's crazy. It's crazy that we've, you know, we still haven't been able to figure out much about the moon, or Mars, you know? And like, the moon is one of the ones that's so bizarre, because it's like, the size of it, and the distance between us and the sun is like, creates this perfect eclipse. And if it wasn't for that moon being exactly where it is, the size it is and everything, life would cease to exist here. Like, it seems like every other moon that we know about is like a potato, and it's a different size, and they're not, they, none of them have that distance where they may create the perfect eclipse. Where it's like, it seems like a divine miracle that we have that moon.

• 2:48:16Speaker 03

  Sometimes there are just coincidences, though, right?

• 2:48:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, like.

• 2:48:19Speaker 03

  It's amazing that it's just the right size. It's, it's awesome. Have you ever seen totality? It's an incredible experience.

• 2:48:25Danny Jones?

  Have I ever what?

• 2:48:26Speaker 03

  Seen a total eclipse, like been in the path of totality, where the, you know, the day becomes dark.

• 2:48:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there was one not too long ago, right? A year ago, maybe? Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 2:48:36Speaker 03

  It's pretty crazy. I'm not a religious person, but it like, felt like a spiritual experience to me. I was like, imagining what it was like to 5,000 years ago, when you see that, you know, I think like, whoa.

• 2:48:46Danny Jones?

  What is God mad at us?

• 2:48:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. What did we do?

• 2:48:50Danny Jones?

  We have to sacrifice some people quick.

• 2:48:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man, the mysteries are, are never ending. And you're right, like, with the new technology, like these, these telescopes and the other things that we're trying to come up with, it's like, and combining all that with the AI and the supercomputers, I think that the shit's gonna start accelerating at a tremendous speed that, I don't know if we're ready for it.

• 2:49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to it.

• 2:49:15Danny Jones?

  Well, thank you for doing this, man.

• 2:49:16Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me on.

• 2:49:17Danny Jones?

  I really enjoyed it. Tell people where they can find, you have a podcast, right?

• 2:49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. We talk about all the mysteries of the universe, break it down in a fun way, make a bunch of silly jokes. And I have a book out recently called Do Aliens Speak Physics? All about these questions of like, how would aliens think about the universe? How would we figure it out? What would we like when aliens came to try to talk science with them? So yeah, check me out, Daniel White, and you can just Google me, find all my stuff.

• 2:49:43Danny Jones?

  Okay, fantastic. We'll link all that below. Do we have Patreon questions?

• 2:49:48Speaker 04

  We have one that's right up there. I think it'd be nice to.

• 2:49:51Danny Jones?

  I'll read it for you. Nathan Bennett. So we have a Patreon where we have people like, paid subscribers that ask you direct questions. Are we gonna end the show? Are we gonna put this in the show?

• 2:49:59Speaker 04

  No, just put it in the show.

• 2:50:00Danny Jones?

  Put it in the show. Alright, fine. Alright. How many different types of plasma are there? And how long can you make stable plasma exist at CERN? Is that a good question?

• 2:50:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's lots of different kinds of plasma you can make. And at CERN, we don't make anything that lasts very long. Like, things last for like 10 to 20 seconds. So CERN is about reproducing things over and over again. We have a collision every 24 nanoseconds at CERN. Over and over and over and over again, because we're looking for rare stuff. So the way to find rare stuff is to have collisions really often. So you see like, the one in a billion, one in a trillion kind of stuff. So nothing at CERN is very stable. And that's by design.

• 2:50:38Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, we don't want a stable black hole.

• 2:50:42Speaker 03

  We want it to evaporate and go away. Exactly.

• 2:50:45Danny Jones?

  Perfect, man. Alright, well, we'll link all your stuff below for folks that want to find more. And thanks again. I really enjoyed this, man.

• 2:50:50Speaker 03

  Thank you. A lot of fun.

• 2:50:51Danny Jones?

  Alright. Good night, world.