How to Talk to Aliens - Daniel Whiteson - #528

Get my book Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://www.amazon.com/Into-Impossible-Laureates-Concentrate-Creativity/dp/1544548850 Imagine the day that aliens arrive not with a death ray, but with a rug and a new understanding of physics. Daniel Whiteson's new book opens with a wild question what if aliens show up with a better understanding of physics, we can't even recognize that's what they're offering. How would you react? This is his hope that aliens might carry the product of millions, billions, or kazillions of years of alien scientific thought that would catapult us unimaginably into the future. But Daniel speculates on why we might not be able to understand even the language it's written in. Join us today for a conversation about Daniel Whiteson's new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And a Romp Through the Drake Equation The Future of Artificial Intelligence, and physics, and even the search for exotic new particles. Now let's go deep into the impossible. Key Takeaways 00:00 "Do Aliens Speak Physics?" 08:07 "Are Aliens Humanity's Saviors?" 15:07 Early Attempts to Contact Aliens 19:03 Math: Tool or Universal Truth? 25:03 "Limits of Understanding the Universe" 29:30 "Possibility of Alien Communication" 36:21 "Learning from Alien Discovery" 37:08 "Physics, Humanity, and Alien Insight" 46:08 "AI, Physics, and Possibilities" 51:58 Technical Talk and Nobel Prize 53:23 "Quirks and Particle Physics Missteps" 01:01:17 Serendipity and Nobel Pursuits - Additional resources: Buy Daniel's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Do-Aliens-Speak-Physics-Questions/dp/1324064641 Get My NEW Book: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN8DH6SX?ref_=pe_93986420_775043100 Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating #danielwhiteson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Brian Keating?

  Imagine the day that aliens arrive, not with a death ray, but with a rug and a new understanding of physics. Daniel White's new book opens with a wild question. What if aliens show up with a better understanding of physics, but we can't even recognize that's what they're offering? How would they react? Physicists hope that aliens might carry the product of millions, billions, or gazillions of years of alien scientific thought that would catapult us unimaginably into the future. But Daniel speculates on why we might not be able to understand even the language it's written in. Join us today for a conversation about Daniel White's new book. Do aliens speak physics? And a romp through the Drake equation, the future of artificial intelligence in physics, and even the search for exotic new particles. Now let's go deep into the impossible.

• 1:39Brian Keating?

  Today with, uh, with Daniel, we're talking about his newest book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? With co-author Andy Werner. So this is an interesting book, and as you know, what I like to do is what you're never supposed to do, judge books by their covers.

• 2:06Brian Keating?

  So I want you to take us through the title, the subtitle of this book and the amazing illustrations throughout, but, but especially the cover illustration. We, we both forgot to bring in professorial, you know, prerogative, professorial physicist, podcaster, you know, triple P, triple threat. Take us through the cover. What does it mean? And how did you come up with the idea? Title, subtitle, cover card?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Nice. Thank you. So yeah, the title is Do Aliens Speak Physics? And the book is really asking the question of whether we can make mental contact with another intelligent species using physics, because this is something you hear often. You know, Carl Sagan says that aliens live in the same universe as we, and so they must discover the same laws of physics and chemistry as we. And when you see it on television shows, it's often math and physics that people begin with to make connections with aliens, because the assumption is that while, you know, psychology and economics and biology are about earth-based questions, physics is about the universe. And Newton told us that physics doesn't just apply here on earth, but also in the cosmos, right? And we can see galaxies spinning and apply our laws of physics. And so there's this sort of widespread belief that physics is something

• 3:12Speaker 03

  we'll have in common with aliens. And I'd love for that to be true, because I want to know the answers to questions. I want to talk to aliens about physics. I hope that civilizations that have been asking these questions for billions of years have figured a bunch of stuff out, right? And they would share the knowledge with us. But it always seemed to me to be a little bit too flattering, too self-centering, to assume that the ideas we have, our descriptions of the universe are the description. The humanities attempt to explain the cosmos is the reality of the cosmos. So I wanted to dig into the assumptions behind that and to figure out like, what do we really know about how aliens might think about the universe, whether they are, whether they have to use math, whether they'd be interested in the same things. So that's the impetus. And, you know, it comes really

• 3:56Speaker 03

  from a philosophical question, which is, you know, is physics, human physics, discovered? Is it part of reality? Or is it invented? Is it our description? Is it the map or the territory? And that was the book I wanted to write originally. And I pitched that to my teenager, who's interested in science and tech. And he was like, ugh, philosophy and physics, yawn. On and I thought, oh, no, this is my fashion project. But then I went back.

• 4:21Brian Keating?

  Add in some six, seven, add in some brain rot.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Well, I decided to add in aliens. I was like, well, why does it matter if physics is invented or discovered? It matters when we meet the aliens, when we try to have that conversation. If they have a different way of approaching explanations of the universe, it'll be quite obvious quite quickly. So I came back to him and said, well, what if it's a book about when aliens arrive and we try to talk to them about physics? Would that go well or badly? And he was like, oh, I'd read that book. And so that's why aliens are in the book. And that's why it's about whether aliens speak physics. Is physics the language that we can use to communicate with them? Is it, is it the thing we have in common? Are you and I, Brian, just two professors in like a galactic enterprise to understand the universe? Wouldn't that be incredible? But because it's philosophical, we added, you know, and other questions about the nature of reality and the universe.

• 5:09Brian Keating?

  And it's, it follows in your long tradition of collaborating with artists.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:12Brian Keating?

  So there's a tremendous number of, of artistic renderings of many different things. In particular, you know, just the, the, the way in which Andy, I guess, illustrates it to bring out and really, you know, make duck the dumb down. I hate when people say dumb it down, but make it accessible. And so was that a conscious, I mean, you're ever going to write a book that doesn't have a world renowned artist like Jorge or Andy?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  I hope not. You know, as you know, popular science has lots of different approaches. There are some books where you read it and you might not necessarily understand it, but you feel like you're in the presence of great ideas. And I think there's a lot of books out there. And some of those books, like Stephen Hawking's books, I read and I don't understand them. And I'm like, what is, how does anybody getting this? If you have a PhD in physics and it's not enough. So I think that's a different kind of experience, but my goal is to write a book where you really get it. Where the ideas click in your mind. I'm not trying to intimidate anybody with impressive cosmic ideas. I'm trying to really make people think about this stuff and make them realize that these ideas are totally accessible. Right? Ideas in philosophy and in physics, there are questions that people have.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  There are things people want to know the answers to and the ideas, they are accessible. And so absolutely it's a Conscious choice to use cartoons because they do several things. One is they give you the impression that this is a book that you can understand. Because hey, it doesn't take itself too seriously. It's got cartoons of aliens in it, right? Also, I think it's important as a sort of pacing device. Like you read something that's kind of a deep idea. Then you see a joke about aliens and how they might make pizza. And it gives you a breath and it gives you a time for that idea to sink in and really settle in and for you to absorb it. And so it's a lot of fun. And also, you know, I enjoy conversations. They're much more interesting than lectures. And in this way, the book sort of has two voices. There's the voice of the text and the voice of the cartoons. And they play off each other, make fun of each other a little bit.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  So the book becomes a little bit more like a conversation than like a lecture. So that was definitely a conscious choice. And I've always been a big fan of Andy Warner's. He's done a lot of great nonfiction comics about science and about history and et cetera. So I just cold emailed him and said, hey, would you be interested in writing a book about aliens? And in my history of cold emailing cartoonists, I'm two for two now.

• 7:25Brian Keating?

  So that's pretty good. Well, maybe you can help me out with Scott Adams. I don't think he's aligned with you in many ways. But what's, uh, what's also kind of unique about this book is embedded within it is a fiction story. There's a lot of, and I don't want to give away any spoilers. You know, I interviewed Chris Hadfield of The Apollo Murders and his most recent book, Final Orbit, or Andy Weir, non-graduate of UCSD. He attended UCSD, but he didn't graduate, like many, so many people. But he, uh, yeah, I would say it's the hardest thing to do is to interview somebody about a fiction book. Because, you know, you're forbidden to talk about it. And I'm not, you know, going to play the role of short form. One of my sponsors, sponsor, this video is not sponsored by short form, but many are. You know, I'm not going to summarize, but it's almost impossible to, you know, kind of encounter a fiction book without giving away some of the blah.

• 8:11Brian Keating?

  At least he has a lot of hard science fiction and historical events and things up until the murders. You know, spoiler alert, it's called The Apollo Murders. Final Orbit, you can guess what they're about. But this book has a fiction story embedded within it. And I kind of want to use that not, you know, to spoil it or anything like that. Uh, I love when people talk about, you know, and they're talking about a movie like, uh, you know, contact or Interstellar, you know. Okay, spoiler alert, you know, like, someone hasn't watched Interstellar, you know, I actually just watched it this year, by the way, and one of my kids forced me to watch it.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  If it's been out for 20 years, I think it's fair to talk about.

• 8:43Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Matrix, I've never seen that, but it's, it's, it's fair game for Slack.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Could see, we all know how that ends.

• 8:48Brian Keating?

  But I want to start off with the kind of the question you, you, you asked in the beginning. Physicists hope aliens might carry the product of millions or billions, or kazillions, as we know, a unit of SI knowledge, of alien scientific thought that would catapult us unimaginably far into our quest to understand the wonderful, bizarre, violent, and beautiful cosmos.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:06Brian Keating?

  Now, do you think that there's underlying it, I, I often feel like, uh, in the, embedded in the Fermi paradox is sort of a, a secret projection of religious overtones or, you know, kind of godlike powers, that you're kind of a savior here, right? If aliens exist, I mean, you're not saying that, but this is what a lot of physicists and laypeople among us feel, that when aliens come, they're going to deliver the answers to the, you know, humanity's final exam. Give us the theory of everything which does make an appearance here, no spoiler. But why is that? Why are people so convinced that they're going to be, you know, far in advance of us instead of being, you know, dolphins or slime mold or, or whatever, just happen to be teleported here in some, some intergalactic Lorcon seven, planet Lorcon sevens, you know, science fair project.

• 9:50Brian Keating?

  So why do you think that they're going to be so advanced? They're going to save us, Daniel, they're going to be our saviors.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  I think a lot of people look to space, not just to aliens, but space exploration and conquest as the future and somehow out in space will leave all of our problems behind. And if you've read Zach and Kelly Wiener's amazing book, you know, that like, there's, you know, a lot of projection there. So I think people are just sort of hopeful. The same way people like, you know, move to the frontier to leave their problems behind and brought them with them.

• 10:17Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  And so I'm not sure that's really going to work out. But in the case of aliens, it's potentially could because, you know, there's been a long time in the universe where alien civilization could have developed. The ingredients for life have existed for billions of years. So it's certainly possible to have ancient alien civilizations. Uh, your question, how would we know they're going to be more advanced than us? Well, if they just exist on their planet, then who knows, right? It's just algae or. Dolphins or whatever, but if they arrive here, then they at the very minimum have technology that we don't. Right. If they can cross the stars, either they have technology or patience or funds that we don't.

• 10:55Brian Keating?

  Among life spans, I think Brian Johnson and the.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  To try to, you know, crisscross the universe and to come here. And so that's why in the book I focus on that scenario. When aliens arrive, they have this technology. What can we learn from them? Because although I'm enthusiastic about the about SETI, for example, as I write in the book, I think the prospects for that kind of communication and mental contact are basically zero. I think it's.

• 11:20Brian Keating?

  Because they don't exist. I mean, I'm I resonate with this, but to be devil's advocate or, you know, aliens advocate. Because such advanced life forms don't exist, or because the universe is so capacious. We can't ever hope that they could come to us or we could get to that. Why? Why do you say that?

• 11:35Speaker 03

  I think it's it's just it's not a scientific assumption. It's not. Sorry. It's not a scientific statement, but I hope and assume that the universe is filled with life and that there's intelligent life out there. But I say that it's impossible for us to make a mental connection with those aliens. Because I think the task of decoding an alien message is probably impossible. You know, we take our ideas, we encode them in some language. There's a translation there. You know, you go from ideas to symbols and those symbols are always arbitrary.

• 12:04Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  There's no set of symbols which only have one reverse encoding. And so you have to know something about the people who encoded it in order to decode it. Like when we decode human languages, right? We look for a translation that makes sense. You know, you've decoded it correctly when like clear text pops out and it makes some sense. In the case of an alien message, how do you know what it's supposed to look like? How do you know if if you translate it correctly, you would be able to make sense of it anyway? The ideas themselves are so alien.

• 12:33Brian Keating?

  So what do you make of these, you know, sightings by prominent? I've had them in this very often, not when it looked as nice as it does for you today. I have prominent fighter pilot Ryan Graves in here who's claimed that not necessarily. He has seen objects, but that his squadron mates and others have seen it. And he has a side quest to make aviation more safe, which is admirable. But but tell me, I mean, what do you make of David Gruish and Lou Elizondo? Yeah, he's not a fighter pilot, but it was a military guy.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 12:59Brian Keating?

  Uh, all these, all these different people that claim that not only are alien, do aliens exist? Not only are they much more advanced than us technologically, but we have actual, physical, cold, hard encounters, evidence. And um, not just eyewitness stuff, but circumstantial and even physical evidence. Gruish claims that there's a craft with biologics within them. He said to my friend Jesse Michaels, you know, there were, the spacecraft has aliens in it, you know, bodies in it. So what do you make of these people that otherwise got to very high levels of uh, of, you know, government security clearance? Or they just, you know, kind of lost it? Or what, what do you make of it as a scientific, from a scientific point of view?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know these folks personally, but um, I hope that they're right. I would love if aliens were here. I would love if there were craft in our skies, they were extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence. I would love if, uh, you know, I would have loved if Omu Omu was a light, uh, a light shield. I'm sorry, was a light sail. I would have loved if Atlas was a probe from aliens. I'm a big fan of all that.

• 13:57Brian Keating?

  Why? So they could cover your class or they'd go to this dean's meeting that preempted us from?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  So I could sell my book intergalactically. No, so that we could learn these secrets of the universe from them. Like, you know, what an incredible moment to make contact. Everybody's excited about that. Scientists, non-scientists is an example of the kind of things we're all fascinated by. So I want that to be true, but I also wanted to, to know that it's true. And for me, that requires more than just a story. And so we've heard lots of stories and we see fuzzy videos, but they all have other explanations. And the stories we hear of evidence don't come with the evidence. You know, so a guy says he has some evidence, that's a story, it's not the evidence. So, and I'm not an expert in these things. I haven't like um, gotten into the debunking and the debunking of the debunking.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  But I would love for that to happen, but I, I haven't seen the hard evidence yet.

• 14:48Brian Keating?

  Even knowing the history of, you know, encounters with, to an alien civilizations, you know, between continents. You know, it's not like when settlers from Europe came to America, they shared the, you know, secrets of calculus or, you know, in middle, medieval, you know, kind of Capri Cavernican theory, right? I mean, they did a lot of bad stuff and, and did a tremendous amount of, you know, kind of enslavement and, and torture and warfare. And some things were intentional and some things maybe weren't, but. But it

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Was it, for example, the burning of all the Mayan books was intentional?

• 15:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, for sure. Eminem, what you mentioned in here is a way to kind of decode. Let's let's touch upon one thing that I found very fascinating. You say something to the effect that language and skills kind of only evolve, in my interpretation, to meet the technology of the species. In other words, dolphins don't need quantum mechanics, right? Even we didn't need quantum mechanics until very recently. Maybe you do some speculative fiction, you know, what would have happened if Einstein, you know, knew quantum mechanics as a five year old and started asking questions about that? I think it's like the Simpsons, you know, like Abe Simpson said, the Homer, if you go back to the to the past, never step on a bug because you'll, you know, you know, ruin the future. But but tell me, I mean, what what? What would it look like? I mean, could we even communicate? What is the speaking?

• 16:03Brian Keating?

  What what are we speaking when we speak physics, as you say in the title?

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  That's a great question, and and you have to get into the specifics, like, what do we really mean? And, you know, humans have tried this. In the 1800s, von Littrow, like, dug trenches in the Sahara, filled them with kerosene, wrote down mathematical equations and set them on fire, hoping the Martians would see them and go, oh, look, there's intelligent life on Earth. So, you know, that's like early attempts. And then Carl Sagan and Frank Drake with the pioneer plaque. They like took, they made a depiction of the hydrogen atom and put it on a plaque and hoping that somebody would see that and go like, oh, yeah, that's a hydrogen atom. And you know, what are the chances that aliens could really understand that? Well, I put that Pioneer plaque in front of a bunch of UCI grad students. And you know, this is a very easy audience. They're like physics grad students. They're biologically human. They have the same cultures, these folks.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  They had no idea what this thing was supposed to mean, right? Like, because the picture-

• 17:24Brian Keating?

  Nudie picture. We'll show a clip of the Pioneer plaque here. It's a little risque for today's-

• 17:29Speaker 03

  But you know, in the corner, there's hydrogen atoms. And like, that describes how we thought about the hydrogen atom for about 20 years, about 100 years ago.

• 17:36Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  And so it's a moment in our culture. It's just an example of how difficult it is. So, yeah, how would you communicate physics? You need some symbols. You need some common language. And so, you know, I think if we just get a message, it's impossible. But if they show up, then we have a context in common physically. So we can like, begin with math and say like, here's a donut. Here's two donuts. And you can point at things. You could have that context. You can associate the symbols with the object. So I think it's not impossible if the aliens have similar ideas in their minds, which is a big if, for us to find some symbols and associate them with them if we share that context in common. That's why I think alien visitation is crucial to making any progress at all.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  If we're just sending messages back and forth across the stars, we're going to be decoding it forever and having no idea.

• 18:25Brian Keating?

  So, you know, the famous 1962 essay by Eugene Wigner called The Irreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. You mention aspects of that in this book. It seems like if they speak anything, you know, remotely, you know, possible for us to decode, it might not be physics. It might be, which is layered upon layers of partial differential equations predominantly. But it might be mathematics. So why would, you know, why is the book not called Do Aliens Speak Mathematics? Or do they know, you know, calculus and A B?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's part of the question, right? In order for them to speak physics, they have to also speak our mathematics. And it's a fascinating component of it. And you know, anybody who's done physics knows that like mathematics is incredibly important to the way we think and express physics, but also to discoveries we make, right? How many times in the history of physics has mathematics led the way to reveal something true about the universe? You know, from Maxwell, like putting the equations together and feeling like mathematically, this could be prettier. There's a piece missing, there's a symmetry that's not exact here. And he, you know, essentially proposes this new piece and then goes out and discovers in the universe. That's math showing us the truth of physics.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Or I remember as an undergrad, learning quantum mechanics and seeing those calculations to like nine decimal places. And then they measure it to nine decimal places and having what, you know, felt to me like almost a spiritual moment where I'm like, wow, this isn't just a description. This is the source code of the universe, man. Like this is how the universe decides what happens to an electron.

• 19:58Brian Keating?

  I mean, because as you're saying it, yeah, I get goosebumps.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:01Brian Keating?

  You are now them, okay? You are one of the foremost experimental physicists. You work in the LHC up the road. You work on ATLAS, we work on CMS. So we've got to wrap up the interview now. These are rivals, but you know, as I said,

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Friend collaborators.

• 20:17Brian Keating?

  You're friendly, yeah. We're all in the same project of understanding mother nature, right, Daniel?

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Me, you and the aliens, yes.

• 20:23Brian Keating?

  So how's it feel now? You are the them, you are the people now getting things to ten decimal places. That's an awesome responsibility and awesome accomplishment. How does that make you feel just as a human being?

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Oh, it's hard to put yourself back in your shoes of who you were when you were an undergrad, hoping that you could spend your life answering questions or asking questions about the universe. It feels, I feel very lucky, very privileged. Things went just the right way for me at the right time. I was in the right place, many moments and very fortunate. So I feel grateful, but I also no longer agree with, you know, 21 year old Daniel about this philosophical question of whether math is part of the universe. Because I've been exposed to other ideas and there's so many really powerful skeptics, so many really powerful. Questions I don't have answers to, you know, like, is math more than just effective? Is it necessary? Like, it's possible that math is very powerful and helps us think about the universe,

• 21:17Speaker 03

  but it could also just be a tool we use. And I read this great book by Hartree Field called Science Without Numbers. And he argues that a lot of the machinery we use in our calculations, which is mathematical, are sort of intermediate points, you know, things that you don't need. They're helpful, but you don't need them. For example, a field, right? What is an electric field? Has anybody ever seen a field? No, a field you can only measure by its effect on particles. And so in that sense, we put these numbers everywhere in space. But do we know those numbers are really there? Does a field exist when you're not looking at it, right? Philosophical question we don't have an answer to. And he goes beyond that and he says, well, this idea of putting numbers in space, why do we need the number line at all, right?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  The number line is sort of an abstraction. You have things that are like bigger and smaller, further and closer. And then you assign values to them. And so he developed a theory of gravity without any numbers at all. So his book is called Science Without Numbers. And it's not a pretty theory, like it's ugly, it's clunky, you would never use it. But it makes the point that this thing we thought was fundamental turns out to be an accelerator. It's just useful and, you know, we can't go from that to like all of physics. He just did one portion of it. But for me, it really struck a tone of doubt. Like, how do we know? These things, I like to believe that math is fundamental to the universe and that aliens must also discover it. But how do I know? As a skeptic, the scientist in me, do I have any data? Or is it just a compelling belief?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Because, you know, the history of science is being, having those compelling beliefs, those intuitions peeled away. When you see the data, you're like, oh, wow, the universe doesn't require classical paths at a quantum level. It's crazy and insane in a way we're still trying to deal with. So I think we need to be skeptical and we need to accept the fact that some of the things that make sense to us, that feel comfortable, that we'd love to believe might not be true. And the book essentially is asking us like, well, how strong are the counter arguments? Can I make a reasonable argument against some of these assumptions to try to? Open people's minds to the idea that aliens might be much more alien than we expect.

• 23:22Brian Keating?

  Right, and completely incompatible even with our modalities of communication or comprehension. It's funny because I'm kind of going the opposite way, you know, to turn things to my favorite subject.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:31Brian Keating?

  Which is me. The, the opposite subject, the opposite direction for me is that I'm wondering if, if there can be a one to one, you know, mapping of every mathematical structure into a physical structure. I'll give you an example, like we teach, you know, classical mechanics and we know there's this concept called the Poisson bracket, where you take simultaneously the measurement of the position of a, of a, you know, beach ball and the position of, and the momentum of the beach ball, and you can do those, you know, commensurately, you can do those consecutively. You can commute those measurements, you can measure the momentum first, then the position, vice versa. So when you construct the mathematical operator of position times momentum, subtract that from momentum times position, you get zero. So that's a commutation relation that vanishes.

• 24:13Brian Keating?

  When you add the concept of square root of negative one and a constant called Planck's constant, then in quantum mechanics, that same exact identical mathematical structure is non-zero. It equals the square root of negative one. It is so bizarre that that happens. And I've, you know, wanted to write an essay called "On the unreasonable effectiveness of the square root" in the physical science, because I think it's even more, you know, than just mathematics.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:38Brian Keating?

  When you, when you invent something like that, once you have that, then you have quantum mechanics, then you have the Schrodinger equation. Once you have the concept of the, of a, of a four, four dimensional matrix space called the Pauli matrices. You can represent spin one half and that kind of gets represented as a square root of a three dimensional operator in real space, you get the complex two dimensional representation of the Pauli matrices.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  You have quaternions.

• 25:05Brian Keating?

  Quaternions, octonions, right.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  It's amazing.

• 25:07Brian Keating?

  My concept is like, does everything, and I asked Terry Tao, our collaborator in the University of California system.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:13Brian Keating?

  I asked him basically, does everything in math, you know, exist? And he basically said he doesn't know. We can't really know that. So in the book, you talk about kind of just a way of maybe describing math, you know, science without math or something like that. You say- What if, you know, these aliens and aliens are a proxy for just, you know, maybe physics we don't understand.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:34Brian Keating?

  But maybe aliens can smell electrons. Um, what kinds of, you know, kind of hidden, it made me think of hidden variables and made me think of things that we used to think like, oh, we knew everything, you know, in a famous statement by allegedly by Thompson, but it really wasn't by Lord Thompson, that the future of physics is in the last decimal place of six digit numbers or something. That was in 1899, you know, right before Planck, right? Uh, it couldn't be more right. And I went to his, I went to University of Glasgow. I went to Maxwell's birthplace uh, this summer. I had a sweet Scottish tour. It was really great, but, but tell me.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Did you have haggis?

• 26:04Brian Keating?

  I, I, it's hard to find kosher haggis. Yeah. I, I tried, but it's very hard to find. It's impossible.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Vegan haggis when I was in Scotland, isn't it?

• 26:11Brian Keating?

  Oh, that's kosher. Why don't you tell me? Oh man, we could have, you could have hooked me up. Uh, that would have been great. I did have some Scotch and I did have, uh, I did play some golf at St. Andrews. That was nice. Uh, but, but tell me what other kinds of things are stranger than possibly we can imagine that might preclude us from ever being able to understand the codex alienus or whatever it is.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think, uh, you hit on something there, which is how we perceive the universe. Because we know now, of course, that the universe as we imagine it, I have this model in my mind of your chair and your body and the, and the floor here, that there's much more going on. Our senses don't reveal everything. And, you know, we've overcome that, of course. We have technological senses now that can tell us that there's neutrinos flying through us and there's oceans of dark matter and there's a dark energy out there and all sorts of stuff. And, you know, we, we have a reliable way to probe the universe beyond our senses. But I think in the end, we're fundamentally limited in our understanding and in our intuition by those original senses. Because we tend to translate our new technology back into the original language.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Like our basis set of our minds, the eigenvectors of understanding are our visualizations. Or, you know, the structures in your head, those come from your senses. So when we take pictures with James Webb, for example, you don't look at them in the IR, right? When you get, yeah, you translate them into the visual spectrum, right? And we do that with everything. You take gravitational waves and you listen to them like they're sound chirps, right? Everything gets translated back into our intuition. And so now imagine aliens. Maybe they evolved in a different setup and so have slightly different senses that suit their evolution. That I think also might mean that they have a different intuition. And they translate things into their intuition and we might just not have an overlapping intuition.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  So things that make sense to us that we go, oh yeah, that clicks. I get it. They might be like, whoa, hold on a second. That makes no sense to me at all. And things that make us puzzle, they might find totally natural. And so we might end up at a place where like the explanations that we're satisfied with are incompatible. Right? That we're fundamentally looking for different kinds of answers. If we have different intuitive language about the universe. And I see this everywhere in physics, you know, it's not just like shifting wavelengths, but also concepts. Like you try to explain to your undergrads, what is a photon anyway? Oh, it's a particle. Oh, it's a wave. What are you really doing there is you're taking something totally alien and unfamiliar

• 28:42Speaker 03

  and trying to express it as like a some, you know, combination of mental eigenvectors. You're like, use this one plus a little bit of that one and you know, it doesn't really work. And it doesn't work because it can't be described by those two. It's not in your mental space at all. And so that's an example of something which we never, we might never really intuitively understand because we don't have the language embedded in our minds because of the kinds of perceptions and the experience we evolved with. And so that could be a fundamental limitation. Or it could just be that, you know, our kids grow up and to them it makes sense, but we never get it. Or something. As the aliens arrive.

• 29:19Brian Keating?

  So throughout the book, it resonates the Drake equation. And obviously Frank Drake was a Titanic contributor to a lot of what we think about when we think about SETI. Past guest and upcoming guest Jill Tartar is coming back down. She'll be in that chair in a few weeks. Yeah, she's, she's one of our favorites.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Hey everybody, I'm usually the one that asks my guests to judge their books by their covers. But today I'm asking myself to judge my own book by its cover. My newest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, is chock full of advice, life tips, and focus and productivity tips from nine of the world's greatest minds. Nobel laureates ranging from economics to peace to physics, of course. It launches September 9th, which is also my birthday.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  I will go check it out. And my publisher's gotten Amazon to run a special just for listeners of the Into the Impossible podcast. So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today.

• 30:11Brian Keating?

  Talk about that, the Drake equation. First of all, give a definition for those of the audience that might not be familiar. And then also talk about, you know, you and I are experimental physicists. So what are the limitations of it? Errors, systematics, calibration? Talk about the nitty gritty details of it, but first give an overview.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Sure. So the Drake equation is sort of deceptively simple. It's an attempt to describe the number of alien species or civilizations we could come in contact with. And the structure of it is not like complicated, like, you know, the Schrodinger equation or the Dirac equation. It's just a bunch of numbers multiplied together. But hidden in that structure is a real wisdom because it tells you that you have to have lots of things all line up in order to have those, that alien communication. It starts with, you know, the number of stars in the universe, which we now know is huge. And then the fraction of those stars that have planets, which we now know is significant. And then the fraction of those that have life on them, still totally unknown. The fraction of those that are intelligent, the fraction of those that develop civilizations we could communicate with, and then times the length of those civilizations.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  So it gives you a sense for like, how many aliens are out there that we could communicate with? And, you know, the multiplication of them tells you like, if any of those are zero, it doesn't matter how many planets there are, if none of them have life. Doesn't matter how much life there is, if none of it's intelligent, or if none of it is technological. You have to have everything line up just right to have that glorious moment of alien communication. And it's super exciting that we live now, and like in our lifetimes, we've gone from having no idea how many planets there are around an average star, to having measurements with uncertainties. And, you know, those measurements, like 30-ish percent plus or minus 10, 20%, it's incredible. Cause that number could have been 0.0001. We could have been the only star out there with planets. We could be like the aberration.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  And now we know we're not, that we're very typical in that sense. And that many, many stars have Earth-like planets. So that's incredible. But then the next number, right? What fraction of those have life on them? We still know that's just at least one over a huge number. And it could be just one, like we could be alone or it could be everywhere. So, but it's exciting because we're living in an era where, you know, we're imaging extraplanets and we're measuring their atmospheres. And we're learning about what's in the composition of those atmospheres by seeing the light from those stars pass through the atmosphere. It's incredible what smart folks are doing. And so it could be that in the next 10 years, we learn something much more concrete about that next number. How many planets out there have life happening?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  But then again, it could still just be algae in the oceans or whatever slime molds, who knows? That are not going to talk to us. And there's something else about the equation I love, which is that it tells us essentially what we're looking for. Because yeah, we're curious about whether there are stars out there and planets out there. But really, we want to find someone to connect with. We want to find an intelligent race to talk to about what it's like to be alive in the universe, right? To communicate with and get another perspective. And, and that's why I chose the Drake equation as the foundation of this book and then extended it. Because frankly, I'm not satisfied if we just get to talk to aliens. Because I want to ask them questions about science. Like you have questions, you've devoted your life to questions about cosmology. Hopefully aliens have figured it out.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  So in the event that we meet aliens, I want to meet aliens we can talk to about, talk physics with. And that's why I added extra terms, already highly constrained Drake equation. I was like, no, no, no, I'm going to be pickier. I want aliens that do science. I want aliens that we can communicate with. I want aliens that ask questions we're interested in and aliens who generate answers we can understand. All those things have to happen for my scientific fantasy to come true. Where we sit down and absorb the incredibly advanced knowledge of the universe. But the exciting thing is like, it could, right? It could really happen. And so, yeah, it's, it's a lot of fun to think about. But I think the structure of the Drake equation really reinforces how everything has to fall into place. But you also start from a huge number.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  And so in the end, you really just need one, right?

• 34:10Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  It's, it's like marriage.

• 34:13Brian Keating?

  That's right. Unless you're Elon Musk or Donald Trump.

• 34:16Speaker 00

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• 34:46Brian Keating?

  Uh, yes, exactly. I do feel though, that, you know, there is often this kind of obsession with, uh, with space being big. Even Carl Sagan, you know, had this in the movie, which by the way, involves a, a non-fictional version of Jill Tarter up until they detect aliens in contact. My dream is to get, you know, her co-star, Jodie Foster's co-star on here. And Jodie Foster would be great too, but Matthew McConaughey, Interstellar, come on. Has been, uh, been a great, he's gotta be a science geek at some level. So, um, if you get him, send him my note.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. But, uh, but I'm- Next time I have a beer with Matthew McConaughey, I'll mention your name.

• 35:22Brian Keating?

  It's in there in that movie with Andruyan. I did have Andruyan on the show and she's Carl Sagan's widow, uh, who co-wrote the book. Uh, most people don't realize that. Uh, and I said, you know, there's this refrain throughout it. If there are no aliens, it's an awful waste of space, which is this theological, almost, again, messianic or, you know, quasi-theological argument that there's some purpose to the universe, which, you know, I believe there is, but, but who knows? I'm not speaking scientific. I have no evidence for that.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:47Brian Keating?

  Uh, but, but in general, you know, I make the argument that, you know, I've been to Antarctica twice. Here is some ice water, you know, no longer in the ice water, icy form phase, but this is actually collected, uh, at the South Pole, Antarctica. You know-

• 36:02Speaker 03

  There's some floaties in there, Brian. What are those?

• 36:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, those are alien. Those are, uh, those are Klingons, uh, clinging to the bottom there. Uh, so, you know, Antarctica, when I was there, I think I was the fattest person on the count. I was like the most out of shape. There are people there that run marathons. A guy won, uh, the Boston Marathon 10 years ago. Yeah. Like, I'm like the least in shape person there. I mean, there's some real studs and studettes that, so I'm like, I'm not counting- Because you know, I could be like a super pro, I can be, you know, maybe I have the best physics knowledge of anyone, although there's a lot of smart physicists at the South Pole. But you get the point. The South Pole is almost devoid of people, right? It's this huge continent, it makes up one-seventh of all continents, it makes up, I think, five percent or seven percent of the landmass of the, of the entire planet.

• 36:44Brian Keating?

  So if you said, look, Daniel, we know the planet's teeming with life, it's even teeming with technological conscious visit, there's literally a million physicists on this planet. What do you think the, you know, percentage of them that live in Antarctica is, you know, and it'll be like zero point zero, you know, just having space is not enough, right? I've never thought that was a good argument. My friend and probably yours also fellow Norton author, Adam Frank, wrote, you know, basically there's 10 to the 24th, you know, stars and planets in the observable universe. I'm like, well, I don't really care about a planet that existed, you know, 12 billion years ago in a galaxy that's, you know, 40 billion light years away now, you know? So what's relevant is, is the space that's occupied in our galaxy. And I, and it sounds like you might resonate with this too, that yes, the odds of life

• 37:29Brian Keating?

  might be extremely high, but, but there's no evidence for it, right? So we have no evidence, so right now necessarily must be faith-based. And that's when people's chiming in, well, what about the eyewitness evidence? So you kind of get in this loop and I wonder if there's a Drake equation for that, like, you know, for, for the, yes, the types of, of, you know, kind of communicates your wish list, your teleology is different, you know, than, than maybe the audience. But you make that case in the book that, okay, so let's say they do all those things.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:54Brian Keating?

  Daniel's, you know, Christmas wish list has been satisfied, they're buying your book, they're, they're communicating, whatever, but they, they actually see neutrinos or gravity waves or gravitational, you, you talk about that in the book.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:05Brian Keating?

  Doesn't that narrow the phase space to basically zero? I mean, like, the fine tuning problem in cosmology is really hard, but you know, if you have to tune not only the electromagnetic wave spectrum, the neutrino spectrum, the gravitational wave spectrum, it's basically hopeless, is it not?

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot that has to go right, you know, for, for this to work out. But even if it doesn't work out, even if they show up and they do physics in some mind-boggling way that makes no sense to us. Then we still learn something like in one scenario, in Daniel's Christmas scenario, we learn about the universe because it turns out that the way we're that the things we've learned about the universe are universal and we can share knowledge and build together. But in the other scenario, we learned that the human lens we've used to view the universe has contributed to our understanding or distorted it somehow that part of our theories of physics are not just the universe, they're our experience of it and our way of thinking about it. And in the scenario where aliens show up and they aren't perfectly aligned with us,

• 39:04Speaker 03

  then we learn about that human lens, right? And I always got into physics because it was universal and I thought I was asking these big questions. Though, you know, personally, honestly, as time goes on, I feel a little bit like, hmm, that's cool, but it's also impersonal. Like, nothing I do can help anybody, it's not relevant to life on earth. But as I was writing this book, I was feeling like, you know what? It would be actually kind of cool if aliens show up and they don't do physics the way we do, because then we'll learn about humanity and it turns out that our physics is telling us something about the human experience and the human mind, what it's like to be human and alive in this universe, not just deep questions about the universe. So I think it's a win either way.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  You know, if the aliens show up and we get to learn about the universe, amazing. If the aliens show up and we realize that we've been making some assumptions and looking at things too narrowly and they blow our minds, we realize, oh my gosh, there's another way to do math or another way to do science, or they've gone well beyond our, you know, our process of science that they think is super primitive or something, then we'll learn something about humanity. And I think that would be maybe even a greater revelation about, you know, what it's like to be alive in the universe. So I'm looking forward to aliens arriving either way.

• 40:18Brian Keating?

  So one, you know, kind of semi-alien technology that's with us right now is artificial intelligence.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:25Brian Keating?

  You talk a little bit about it in the book as well. Um, you know, curious, we can talk, you know, shop and, uh, You know, they say when when amateur artists get together, they talk, you know, about impressionism versus cubism versus the this and that. And when professional artists get together, they talk about where to get cheap turpentine and, you know, horsehair bristles. And so we can talk, you know, over lunch, maybe a little bit more technically. But but how are you using AI both in your physics research and machine learning? You you're one of the early pioneers, you know, in my social network, so to speak, ten fifteen years ago, using advanced machine learning. But and this is another one of those things that is sort of the magic of the square root. Because, you know, ninety nine percent of the advanced mathematical operations in machine learning,

• 41:09Brian Keating?

  or at least in L L M's, is diagonalizing matrices.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:12Brian Keating?

  And you do, you know, L decomposition as well as anybody. And so it's basically taking square roots of matrices, right? So there's another instantiation of the square root. But but tell me, how are you using AI in both research and teaching and writing and podcasting?

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, I have been doing AI in particle physics since well before it was cool. That's true. And

• 41:36Brian Keating?

  G P T negative seven, Daniel, was there?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  No, no, I use, you know, more machine learning than L L M's. You know, we have vast quantities of data and a big challenge in analyzing it is knowing how to reduce the dimensionality of that data. You know, you measure a hundred million things about a particle collision, but it really can be projected down to like a one dimensional surface in a hugely high dimensional space where all the useful information lies. And that can be challenging. Physicists can approximate that. We use our intuition, our knowledge, like, oh, I think I know how to do that. And we've done it effectively for years, but it turns out not optimally. And so mostly my machine learning work is like, well, let's figure out how to optimize that and extract that another ten percent, another twenty percent out of our data.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  But more recently, it's been a little bit more transformative. Machine learning has also taken problems that were once intractable, that we've basically given up on.

• 42:30Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Not where we've found an approximate solution that can be optimized, but we were like, yeah, nobody's ever going to do that. And now with machine learning, we can tackle some of those problems. I'll talk about that in my Lecture today about, you know, finding kinds of things that we were we were blind to before. And now because of the power of machine learning, we can probably see these things. And so it's a great tool, it's a great assistant to analyzing our data, to looking for new stuff. Incredibly powerful. For me, it's a lot of fun because it's essentially applied statistics. And you know that if you're working on these huge collaborations, you're not a jack of all trades. You like build the accelerator and the detector and operated and analyze it and write the papers and do the statistics. You're a specialist. And so my role is like the machine learning, the statistics, the data analysis.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  I think that's the kind of stuff is super fun. That's my flavor of nerd. And so machine learning is wonderful because it's the basically applied statistics. And I'm all into that. In terms of chat GPT and writing and stuff, I'm a big proponent of not doing any of that.

• 43:29Brian Keating?

  Oh, really?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  I think that writing is thinking.

• 43:32Brian Keating?

  I'm sorry, Chatty. Sorry that he said that, honey. I'll go as soon as we can.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  And that it's really important to develop your own voice and to learn to write effectively. So much of my job is writing, even if I wasn't writing books and podcasting. It's grant proposals, it's papers, it's emails, it's lectures, it's all about expressing yourself. And it's so important to learn to do that and to develop your own voice, to be able to write in a compelling way and clearly. And to know when writing is good. So I, right now, I'm teaching a class. It's scientific writing for undergrads. How do you analyze data? How do you tell a story about it? And I feel like if we just outsource that to chat GPT, then number one, everybody's going to be writing the same very bland, boring to read kind of text. Nobody's going to develop a voice and people are going to lose the ability

• 44:20Speaker 03

  to do the magic of science, which is like to take a bunch of data and tell a story about it. That's the scientific process. We're always telling stories. And if you lose the ability to tell those stories or you lose interest in reading them, then I don't know that you're really doing the science anymore. So I'm kind of a.

• 44:35Brian Keating?

  I just feel pushback with requisite love and respect. I mean, some people made similar arguments about the word process or some made similar arguments about the typewriter. You know, just you're taking the person out of it, you're taking the humanity out of it, it's going to lose its soul.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  But the typewriter doesn't take the human out of the equation, huh?

• 44:50Brian Keating?

  Well, it differs.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  You're still writing all the words.

• 44:52Brian Keating?

  You know, you go back to the original writing, you know, it's cave painting and then you go back to, you know, telling stories on scrolls, on parchment, then the codex, then, you know. So, I mean, there is mechanization, that things that made things easier, spell check, I mean, there's another one, autocomplete, things that we take.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Big fan of spell check.

• 45:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah, me too. That's right. And, and of course, there's always some attendant, you know, emissions, you know, you refine petroleum to make, to make fuel, you have unwanted emissions and we, you know, kind of distill our, our social network into, you know, for-profit algorithms, we get unwanted rage and, and all sorts of other things. So there's a lot of unwanted effects, I'm sure. Even just, you know, speaking physically, the, the use of a, of AI LLM to do a search is like nine times more energy intensive than to do it just a simple Google search. But, you know, I don't think we're going back to not doing any kind of search, obviously. Looking it up in the, in the library is gonna cost something, but maybe not as much as a Google search.

• 45:50Brian Keating?

  So where does it, I mean, what uses, so it sounds like you're not, you know, personally using it, but like, I do feel like with my students, I, I encourage them to use it. For example, as a, you know, as an always-on-demand teaching assistant, I don't, I think I'm a good teacher, but you know, if they had Einstein, you know, available to them to ask questions about relativity, and it was fully embodied AI, robotic AI, I'm not sure he's gonna do better than me, you know, maybe not as good as the best teachers, but, but I do feel like there's a huge opportunity. And I did a panel last night with a bunch of undergraduates here at UCSD, along with Adam Bergdasser and Ethan Naller here at UCSD. And I asked the students, like, what are your professors allowing you to do with AI? I also asked this to my friends at Princeton on Tuesday.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:33Brian Keating?

  And they're like, we don't let them use it. I'm like, that's crazy to me. I mean, to me, it's like not letting them use a computer or use Python or whatever was 10 years ago. I mean, this is their new reality. So how do you let them, or what, you know, knowing that you want to keep the, the kind of soul in the, of the, of the writer and stuff like that, which I can agree with, how do you encourage them to use it and actually apply it?

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Well, I tell them to be very skeptical. You know, I treat chat GPT the way I treat a potential collaborator. Somebody comes to my office and we're talking physics, and they say something that I know is totally wrong, and they're very confident about it. And I'm like, I don't think that's true. A CMS guy.

• 47:10Brian Keating?

  Just kidding.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  You know, then I'm like, I'm not sure I'm gonna ask this guy another question. Or if somebody BSs me confidently several times, I'm like, your information is worthless because I have to check it every single time. I can no longer believe you. So I know people like that in physics and they're just like sort of off my list of people I'm interested in talking to or authors like them. Like, I'm not reading that because you have to look up everything. I don't, I don't believe you. And so ChatGPT is in that category because I've asked it questions about stuff I know anything about and I'm not impressed with what it says. And so I can't trust it on anything I don't know anything about.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  The same is true for a learner. They go to ChatGPT with a question, how do I do this math? How do I factor this polynomial? How do I do this? And they have no confidence that they're gonna get the correct instructions.

• 48:23Brian Keating?

  It's not, I mean, they say, you know, this is the worst AI is gonna be, right? I mean, right now is the worst it's gonna be and it's improving rapidly. I think there's actually an underlying issue that nobody's really considered, which is that I don't think LLMs are the pathway either to AGI.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:37Brian Keating?

  Or, you know, superintelligence or even to doing useful things in physics because they're basically trained on language, which is great. And physics is a language and aliens speak it, you know, as a bestselling author, professor and all around genius Daniel White and asserts. But who's to say that, you know, I mean, we tried with one of my brilliant undergraduates, Evan Watson here. I tried to just give it Mercury's data from its perihelion advance from the last thousands of years from JPL horizons and then say, like, can you come up with a remontanzer? Can you come up with a curved spacetime as a description? It couldn't do it. We had to add in like a grid coordinate system and make it into a GPU like thing, the way LLMs and GPU

• 49:16Brian Keating?

  Were designed to make you better at Minecraft or at, you know, kind of beating your friend in GTA six. Yeah, maybe it's just it's bad now, but like it sounds like you're kind of writing them off like the the crazy uncle you don't talk about Thanksgiving like how can they get back potentially into your good graces? These collaborators that are unreliable.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Well, you know, like my crazy uncle, you know, the doors that was open and you don't write our family. There could be a moment when they achieve something and and then they're impressive and they can contribute. And I'm not saying that's impossible, but certainly it's they're not there now.

• 49:49Brian Keating?

  But if we don't train students now, are they going to be kind of forsworn off in the future? Like, is it gonna be I'm not saying you're doing them a disservice, but just for the sake of the army.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 49:58Brian Keating?

  Is it kind of like handicapped compared to, you know, Brian Keating's wonderful students who use it every day, you know, in class, I'll say, here's a spectrum of hydrogen. You know, tell me what the what the lamb shift is or tell me, you know, here, here's the day. And like, I don't expect them to know, you know, relativistic quantum mechanics as a, you know, junior, but they can kind of glean inside. Well, there's a systematic error there because of projection effects or thermal effect that they wouldn't have thought of. So are they, you know, do you worry that like not training your kids or your students who are kind of like our kids in some ways in a beneficent platonic way, but but how is it possible that we can, you know, train them for the future that's going to exist and we don't even know what it's gonna look like?

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think students should experiment with it and play with it, but they should understand what it can and can't do. And I also think there's real value in teaching students to do the work that chat GPT, even if it became exceptional, still does like, why do we teach students to do integrals? Why do we teach calculus in high school? Like Mathematica basically solved that problem. You throw any integral in Mathematica, it's done. Why should we teach anybody how to do integrals? It's because we're training them how to think and we're hoping that they go on and surpass us. And we don't want humans to lose that capability, in my opinion.

• 51:07Brian Keating?

  Sure.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  And so there's lots of things that are sort of solved problems that we still ask students to do, and I think it's important and valuable for them to do that as a way of training them and teaching them these critical thinking skills. We're always telling physics undergrads, you can do a physics major and then do anything. And that's because we've taught them these. Tools of thought, these tools of analysis, these ways to think about problems that let them go off and then eventually become, you know, podcasters and cosmologists and all sorts of things. And so I think we do them a disservice.

• 51:37Brian Keating?

  That's my racket. We got corner, corner to the market.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  We do them a disservice if we don't teach them those fundamentals of thought. We just like throw the L L M at them. But you're right, they need to be aware of it and know how to navigate it and use it. You know, absolutely, they need to be familiar with it. But I wouldn't rely on it as a teaching tool.

• 51:55Brian Keating?

  Sure. I mean, it hallucinates and it's sycophanty, which I love. I mean, bring on the sycophanty for the brilliant Professor Keating. Make it call me Herr Professor Senior Keating. You know, I asked it like, what books is Brian Keating? You know, we used to go, I used to Google myself. I'm not going to say if you did or not, but I used to Google my, you know, what's going on Brian Keating? And now I, you know, chat G P T myself and it comes up with, you know, what books has Brian Keating written? Well, it's written, he's written Losing the Nobel Prize. He's written Into the Impossible and Galileo's Dialogue.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  And do you have a Groca Pedia entry?

• 52:26Brian Keating?

  I do.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 52:28Brian Keating?

  Twenty pages long. But then it says, you know, after Into the Impossible, focused like a Nobel Prize winner, now available, as you know, on Amazon. We'll put the ad in for that here, by the way. It says, A Brief History of Time. And I'm like, yeah, that would be nice to have, you know, 1% of those book sales, but unfortunately, I don't know. So there's rumors that there'll be an A I data center in space in the coming years, which made me think of, well, let's say one of those goes rogue and we have, you know, Hal 9000 up there and it just now it decides it's gonna blast its way through the wormhole around Proximus and Turri B. And check that out. So it's gonna be an alien artificial intelligence, maybe in a physical embodiment, a data center, you know, a mu mu flying through space with a, with a bunch of Nvidia hoppers on it. But,

• 53:12Brian Keating?

  but maybe it's just the pure A I coursing through the space. And maybe that's the alien that we come into contact. What do you suspect? I mean, certainly cheaper than sending meat chunks around the galaxy, right? So what are the odds that the aliens that we encounter will be artificial intelligence, pure code?

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's certainly possible. And it's tempting to imagine that that's inevitable because it seems the direction of our civilization. But I also think that that's shortsighted that we're always. You know, taking whatever we developed in the last 10 years and imagining that that dominates the universe.

• 53:39Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Much more likely there's something even more mind blowing that in a million years a civilization develops in a way that would be like hard for us to even think about. But like, imagine explaining AI to Isaac Newton, right? Like, great. What words you would you even, how could you possibly even do that? So we're so primitive, I think, compared to those other civilizations. But like, AI data centers in space never really made sense to me because everything is harder in space. You know, building it, repairing it, cooling it, everything is harder in space. To me, AI data centers in space only makes sense for AI in space and built in space. So if you have like a space industry and you have power needs in space and data center needs in space, sure. But for use on Earth and like built on Earth and launched to space, that doesn't make

• 54:25Speaker 03

  any sense to me. I don't see how the numbers work out.

• 54:27Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, I think they're saying things like power requirements and because the latency is not such a big deal. I mean, I wait, you know, 10 minutes for a query to come up, you know, like, well, that's Brian Keating written in addition to Brief History of Time.

• 54:39Brian Keating?

  You know, soon we're going to take you up to the faculty club to fetch you as you deserve with an all you can eat salad buffet. But before we do, I do want to talk about a little breadcrumb for the audience to stay tuned to the channel because we're going to have a technical talk, but as Daniel is almost unparalleled at doing, he has a way of explaining it even to fellow physicists in a way that cosmologists, a simple experimental cosmologist can understand. So that'll be a talk. I'm going to preview that in just a minute. But before I do, I mentioned losing the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize figures very prominently in this book, also published by Noren, which was publisher of my first book. And the Nobel Prize is sort of seen as this talisman, as this anchor that, you know, aliens can help you win.

• 55:22Brian Keating?

  Maybe I think I'm permanently off the list after my first one. But we have invented not the Nobel Prize, but the Keating Prize.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Oh, look at that.

• 55:28Brian Keating?

  This is a Keating Prize for impossible wisdom.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 55:32Brian Keating?

  In this, let me see what's this here. There we go. So the keating prize is hereby presented for impossible imagination, featuring a picture of Arthur C. Clarke, a monolith, and it is presented to Professor Daniel Whitehead. October 31st, Halloween. Here you go, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming down.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  I should have worn my tuxedo. I wasn't prepared.

• 55:52Brian Keating?

  You should have brought the book. That's all I wanted you to do, Daniel. You had one job, literally. Okay, let's talk about the tech talk we're going to talk about later on today. So this is a very interesting, you know, kind of topic that seems to suggest that even classical electromagnetism, you know, we talk about quantum mechanics, but even some aspects of the application of electromagnetism to particle detectors may be wrong, or may involve new things. I don't know if quirk was meant to be a particle, or it might be meant to be a quirk. So tell us, what is the topic, first at a lay level? And obviously, people stay tuned for the technical talk later on, which we'll have on the same channel in a separate episode. But tell us, yeah, what is a quirk? What

• 56:34Brian Keating?

  are these different features that physicists might be getting wrong? And first, begin with, how do normal particle accelerators work?

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this talk is about an example of what I mentioned earlier, where machine learning can help us do things that were impossible before. And so the way we see particles currently is we smash the particles together, and then they fly out, and they pass through layers of detectors that leave little hits. Let's say a particle went through it, a particle went through it. So we don't see full paths of particles. We see these little traces that they leave. And then we're left with a combinatorical problem of like, well, I have 10,000 traces, probably due to 1,000 particles. How do I know which was which? How do I reconstruct the particle paths from the traces that were left? And that's a very hard problem, because there's lots of possible assignments. This one, that one, the other one. It's like, you know, 10,000 choose 1,000 is a big number. Trying

• 57:22Speaker 03

  them all is impossible. And so we have tricks. And a lot of the tricks we've used help us solve the problem more quickly, but also blind us to possible solutions. So one trick is, for example, to assume that the particles are all charged electromagnetically, like either they're neutral, in which case they're invisible anyway, or they have positive or negative charge, in which case they move like a helix in our magnetic field. And so you can say, well, I'm just Is going to look for helices. Cool, because most particles are helical in their trajectory. That really simplifies the problem, makes it tractable. We can, we can process all the data at the Large Hadron Collider. But what if there's a particle that doesn't just have electromagnetic charge, it has some new weird charge, some dark matter charge, and it moves through the detector in a weird path that's not helical.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  Our algorithms would not find it, they would skip right over it. And amazingly, like, your algorithm would find it. If I printed out that event and showed it to you, you'd be like, oh, I see that. Because your brain is really good at finding tracks. And it used to be that we used humans to do this, back when we didn't take a lot of data, and the signals were obvious, and you could just like, put them in front of ladies. Computers were women. Yes. Exactly. Yes, humans doing this. And now we can't afford to do that because we take data every 25 nanoseconds, and it's just, it's too much. So we developed an algorithm to find particles that don't move as a helix, using machine learning. And one example of that is the quirk, which is a great example of physicists taking an English word

• 58:48Speaker 03

  that means something else and just giving it a meaning in physics, which is terrible, you know? Like work, right, or color, or flavor, all these things. Beauty, charm. Yes, exactly. But a quirk is a particle that has a new kind of charge on it. And if you produce them in pairs in the colliders, they don't move in a helix. They oscillate with really strange trajectories. So it's just one example of a non-helical path. And so in the talk today, I'll talk about how we found an algorithm that can find quirks, and then how we generalized it to develop an algorithm that can find any smooth path at all, even if it's unexpected, unanticipated, unpredicted, for which there's no simple explanation. Because that's my dream, is to run this thing on real data and have a shocking surprise and be like,

• 59:32Speaker 03

  what is this thing in our data that nobody had ever seen before? Because our algorithms were blind to it. And it could be like, a single particle, you know, one particle, one Nobel Prize. That's the classic ratio, you know, the positron, for example. Higgs boson, when we discovered that, it took like, billions and billions of collisions to get a few examples. But there could be obvious, no background, single event discoveries waiting for us in the data. That already exists. That already exists, they're sitting in the data right now. That if we only knew which event to look at, we could print it out today and look at it right here live on camera, and make a discovery. But we don't have the algorithms, or didn't until now, have the algorithms to find those things. So that's what I'll be talking about.

• 1:00:13Brian Keating?

  Are you also involved in the technical sense, looking for, you know, conserve quantum? Is there something analogous to weak isospin to lepton number? Would there be a new quantum number associated with the quirk?

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Perhaps, yeah. Or, you know, if we find something even weirder. My goal is not to find something that makes sense, is to find something that doesn't make sense. I want to find something that I take it to our theory colleagues and they go, no, they can't be. We proved that can't be part of the universe. I'm like, well, but the universe says it is, so what are you going to do with it? You know, that's the fantasy where it's a struggle to incorporate it. Because you and I both know that our theory of physics is incomplete, fundamentally so. There's a foundational layer we have not cracked. And we don't know where is going to be the clue that cracks that. Is it going to be people working on string theory? Is it going to be people, you know, looking into the stars? Or is it some new particle we produce at the colliders? That when we tug on that string, everything unravels and reveals the truth.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  You don't know. So, but, you know, swing for a homerun, that's my plan.

• 1:01:11Brian Keating?

  That's right. Well, I'm feared for your safety now because people are trying to, you know, build bigger and better colliders, the future circular collider, the largest linear collider, the collider on the moon and all sorts of other things. And now they won't need it with the Weyntz and algorithm. They'll just go back to the archival data. And it seems like you could apply it to any data, right? It could be in, from the Tevatron, it could be in it. So that's amazing. So that would obviate, you know, the pork barrel spending with. Luckily, you know, for your safety, there's not a huge danger of somebody spending a lot of billions of dollars in this climate.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  I'm a big fan of spending money on big science projects. You know, people say you don't need the next collider, but I say you don't know.

• 1:01:48Brian Keating?

  Your thoughts on the next collider?

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  I say, you know, you don't know. And I think it's a mistake to say, is it the next collider or this other project? I said, let's build them both, right? It's not an either or. Science and economics are not zero sum, right?

• 1:02:01Brian Keating?

  Well, how do you react to, you know, our mutual friend Sabina Hossenfelder is very critical of plans to build things whose purpose is not exactly as well at maybe motivated as the Higgs was even, which, you know, took 30 years before it's discovered. What do you say to critics that, you know, you shouldn't spend money on something in the case that you might find it? And there are a lot of projects that do that, including my projects.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  I think. Exploration is valuable. I don't think you need to know what you're gonna find before you look. We don't go to Mars just to look for like cats and dogs. We go to Mars to find something shocking, something surprising, and we hope that our our tools have the capacity to discover surprises. You know, that when we go and land the Europa Clipper, it's gonna find something super duper weird. So I'm a big fan of research as exploration and not making promises in advance about what we're gonna find, because you never know, and that's the joy and the frustration of research.

• 1:02:52Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Right? What do I say to critics? I say that these things are valuable, that research spending always returns in terms of like, you know, aesthetic benefits of understanding the universe, economic benefits of the technologies and the transformational ideas.

• 1:03:07Brian Keating?

  Educational benefits.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Educational, cultural benefits. Every dollar we spend on this stuff is worthwhile.

• 1:03:12Brian Keating?

  Turns more than a dollar.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that people can reasonably disagree about how to spend limited research budgets, and that's fine, and other people welcome to have ideas and think that our ideas are silly, and that's fine, but we have a process for that. We get together, we review them, and I think that that process is flawed because we're human, but it's done in good faith. And I think that's where I disagree with some of your friends. I still think most people out there are curious scientists doing their best to understand the universe and operating in good faith, even if they don't agree with some folks about what the best way is to uncover the secrets of the universe.

• 1:03:46Brian Keating?

  Oh, I pointed out to my good friend and UC Riverside Professor Barry Barris that he would not have won a Nobel Prize had the Super Collider not been canceled, because he was working on that, and maybe he would have stayed with it, but because it got canceled, he was able to work for LIGO, and because he worked for LIGO and led LIGO, he helped LIGO achieve a Nobel Prize for not just himself, but Kip and the team and Ray Weiss, the late, great Ray Weiss. So I think that, you know, you have to kind of always be on guard, as I say in my first book, you know, serendipity is hard to plan out. But this is a delightful book. Can't wait for your lecture. We'll broadcast the lecture on the channel later time. We're going to get the episode out

• 1:04:25Brian Keating?

  about do aliens speak physics with the very terrestrial, very always illuminating and fellow, you know, it's rare that. There's so many people that do, you know, theory and theory's cheap. I always say experiment is expensive. Theory is kind of like software. You can make much of it if you want. It's not AI slot, but you can make a lot of, it's hard to make a lot of experiments as we know. Right? Daniel White, UC Irvine, thank you for this wonderful book. People check you out on Twitter, on the podcast, Daniel and Kelly, Explain the Universe. Extraordinary. Extraordinary Universe. It was Jorge, you know, primacy of learning. And of course, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Thank you so much for coming down. Thanks very much for the fun conversation. All right, let's go get some Faculty Club lasagna or whatever they have today. Thank you, Daniel.

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

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