The Skeptics Guide #1104 - Sep 5 2026

Live from LA with guests Andrea Jones Rooy and Brian Wecht; Living in LA; What Ever Happened To: Breakthrough Starshot, Fen-phen, The Coming Hydrogen Economy, String Theory, The Segway, Going to Mars; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

• 0:09Jay Novella?

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 0:17Jay Novella?

  Today is Saturday, July 18th, and this is your host, Steven Novella.

• 0:26Jay Novella?

  And we are live from Los Angeles, California.

• 0:32Jay Novella?

  Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:37Jay Novella?

  Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:41Jay Novella?

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys.

• 0:45Jay Novella?

  And we have two guest robes on this show, Brian Wecht.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Hi, folks.

• 0:52Jay Novella?

  And Andrea Jones-Roy.

• 0:57Jay Novella?

  So, we are here in Los Angeles, and pretty much the entire time we've been here, we've had to listen to Brian and Kara, who live here, bitch about LA. So, we thought we'd make it a segment.

• 1:10Jay Novella?

  The segment is, "How do you guys live in this city?"

• 1:16Speaker 02

  This is not what we pitched, by the way.

• 1:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Steve is confusing us with him, I think.

• 1:21Jay Novella?

  No, this is what we agreed upon.

• 1:23Cara Santa Maria?

  We definitely are always trying to sell our lovely city, which we live in, because we choose to live here.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think what Steve is responding to is, these guys got in, some got in Thursday, some got in yesterday, and when we were planning this trip, the first thing they said is, "Can you pick us up at LAX?" And we were like, "No." "What are you talking about?"

• 1:47Jay Novella?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  And we were all very offended.

• 1:50Jay Novella?

  It is a totally wacky response, like...

• 1:53Speaker 02

  It is not. It makes sense. I don't want to spend, it's gonna take me an hour and a half, on a good day, to get to LAX, from where I live, which is, by the way, 10 miles away.

• 2:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's just to get there.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03Cara Santa Maria?

  What about getting through the airport?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  And, look, I love you guys. I don't three hours love you guys.

• 2:08Jay Novella?

  I know. But, I mean, but you have to admit, that is an admission of something wrong with LA.

• 2:13Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  It is not.

• 2:14Cara Santa Maria?

  The way I tried to explain this, and I feel like this made sense for you guys, so these guys live in Connecticut, and I was like, "That would be if I flew into JFK and I said, 'Can you just pick me up real quick.'"

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:23Jay Novella?

  We would pick you up from JFK. We pick people up at airports all the time.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Don't do that. It's a waste of your time.

• 2:28Cara Santa Maria?

  You have never picked me up from JFK unless we were on our way to White Plains. Usually, you're like, "Take the train."

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Okay, but there is no train here.

• 2:36Cara Santa Maria?

  We do have a train.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  You do have a train.

• 2:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It just doesn't go many places.

• 2:38Jay Novella?

  Kara, Kara, Kara, we love you five hours' worth, all right?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  You know what? I love you guys Burbank-level.

• 2:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Right? That's how much I love you guys. "I'll pick you up for Burbank, no problem. Happy to do it. LAX, nope."

• 2:53Jay Novella?

  So, when they started to tell us that, then they started to tell us, like, the traffic, the traffic, and it came up a lot, and they, of course, were right, because, "Oh, my god." Yeah, but, like, wait, wait, what happens to ambulances? Like, are people dying on the streets?

• 3:06Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but here's the difference between LA and New York. In LA, people move for the ambulance.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  We move.

• 3:11Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Unless we're going somewhere important.

• 3:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Cara Santa Maria?

  We abide the flashing lights. We also have this really cool thing in LA, which I've only ever seen living here, which is that a single cop car can stop all traffic.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Oh, with the...

• 3:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, if, yeah, like, if there's a sofa or something that falls out of a truck on the freeway.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Does that happen?

• 3:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, if there, you know, if there's a reason you need to stop traffic right then, like a bad rack, a single cop car will start to weave in his lane, and then he'll go into two, and then three, and everybody just gets it, and they stop, and then he parks sideways, across, and one patrol car can stop all of LA traffic.

• 3:48Jay Novella?

  That is damn impressive.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  It happens all the time. Do you see, you just sit around?

• 3:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I've never seen it outside of Southern California.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Is this why no one can get anywhere, ever? Is 'cause cops are weaving and everyone's stopping?

• 3:58Cara Santa Maria?

  There are legitimate reasons that our traffic sucks, but I still, I still argue that traffic in New York City is significantly worse than traffic in LA.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  But we have alternatives to traffic.

• 4:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It is. True.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  We just take trains.

• 4:09Jay Novella?

  I agree. It's also worse...

• 4:11Cara Santa Maria?

  People in New York always complain about LA traffic, and I'm like, "Come on."

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Well, also...

• 4:14Speaker 04

  There's no alternative.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I mean, so one thing I was telling these guys, I don't know, I assume most people here live in the area, is, if I'm going anywhere that's more than a five-minute drive, I will always put it in my phone, just to see if some road is completely hosed with traffic.

• 4:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  And it feels dumb, because it's like, I know how to get there, but you never know when something catastrophic is gonna happen.

• 4:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's hard.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  So, thanks to smartphones now, it's actually pretty easy to circumvent that stuff.

• 4:40Jay Novella?

  I do that, too. You want to know how long it's gonna take you to get there, and if there's any traffic or anything in the way, even if I know where I'm going.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  But you probably don't do it for a 10-minute drive, right? Do you?

• 4:47Jay Novella?

  No.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I will do that for a 10-minute drive.

• 4:50Jay Novella?

  Right, but the thing is, like, I do hear you guys complain a lot, like, "You had a meltdown when we asked you to pick us up at LAX."

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Meltdown is not correct, by the way.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  We got, like, 100 emails.

• 5:00Jay Novella?

  Like, they're doing right now.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I feel attacked.

• 5:04Jay Novella?

  "We've been here, and I've been here before, and maybe I haven't had enough experience, and maybe hasty generalization, but the traffic isn't that bad. It's not New York bad. It's not even Boston bad. So, what's the big deal?"

• 5:15Cara Santa Maria?

  It's because you, I think, there is a bias that comes when you visit someplace. So, like, they came into town, and then they were like, "Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna land, and then we're gonna go see our friend," and I was like, "Okay, what part of the town do your friend live in?" And they were like, "Camarillo."

• 5:30Speaker 02

  You know, that neighborhood of Los Angeles, right?

• 5:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's not LA. That's really far away.

• 5:35Jay Novella?

  Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Why is that funny?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's like landing at JFK and saying, "We're gonna see our friend in New York. What part of town? Bergen County." Or, not even, it's farther than that.

• 5:46Jay Novella?

  It was an hour drive.

• 5:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Like Pennsylvania.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  It's not, that's not Los Angeles.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not LA, though.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  That's a different thing.

• 5:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's Ventura County.

• 5:52Jay Novella?

  So, it's, you know, the skirt around LA.

• 5:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, I think the thing is, when you travel someplace, you kind of build in expectations, you know? We're gonna, we have a thing we're gonna do, we're excited about the thing, we're gonna plan for the thing, we're gonna get to the thing, but we have to deal with it all day, every day.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  It's the aggregate.

• 6:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Jay Novella?

  So, you have PTSD for LA travel?

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Well, it's like... This is Stockholm Syndrome, is what I'm hearing.

• 6:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I live in Eagle Rock, and I work in a large hospital in Beverly Hills/West Hollywood, but I mostly, yeah, I mostly work from home, but it takes, I want to say, 45 to 60 minutes to get there, and an hour and 45 minutes to get home.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's, can't be more than eight miles from my house.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you deal with it every day, it really adds up.

• 6:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, 10 miles.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  But I do, look, LA, to be clear to you guys and everyone listening, LA is a lot more than just bad traffic, right?

• 6:45Cara Santa Maria?

  100%.

• 6:45Jay Novella?

  Well, what's the best thing about LA?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  It's also wildfires.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 6:49Jay Novella?

  What's the best thing about living in LA?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Honestly, this, I've lived in a lot of cities around the world. This is the best food city I've ever lived in. The food in LA is amazing. You have basically everything from everywhere in the world somewhere here, uh, yeah, and a lot of times, it's some little, it's much better. LA is a billion times better than New York in terms of food. Billion times better.

• 7:11Jay Novella?

  A billion?

• 7:11Speaker 04

  A billion times.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  I'm a scientist, and that's a number.

• 7:18Jay Novella?

  I got two words for you, Brian.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:20Jay Novella?

  Pepe's Pizza.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Okay, that's not New York, first of all. That's New Haven.

• 7:23Jay Novella?

  You're right, it's New Haven. It's even closer.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  But, look, I'm not gonna argue, recently, my move to LA, 11 years ago, when I moved here, pizza was a little bit dicey. I think many people will agree, if you've been here a while. In the last five or so years, the pizza scene in this town has gotten amazing. And there's, I've read a bunch of articles recently about how, you know, pizza specifically in LA has gotten a lot better recently.

• 7:48Jay Novella?

  So, now, New York pizza's only a billion times better than LA pizza?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Only, yeah, that's right.

• 7:53Jay Novella?

  Fair enough.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  No, but, uh, look, there are some great regional pizzas, like your adorable little place in New Haven, but here we've got everything from everywhere.

• 8:02Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's not the only, I mean, yes, okay, we've got amazing food. I think, for me, I, so I've lived in Texas, New York, I lived in Florida for a year for my internship, and then I've lived here, and I've lived in LA since '09. I find that this city is the best city, and I've traveled all over the world, the best city for my mental health because of the weather. And it's very, very hard to, I think we take it for granted that it's, you know, 75 and sunny every single day.

• 8:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, except when we're here, right?

• 8:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Except when you're here and it's very hot, but here's the wonderful thing...

• 8:39Speaker 02

  You came in July.

• 8:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Even when it's hot, like, really hot in LA, it's cold at night. So, it's not like in Texas where you never get a break. You wake up and it's already 85, and, yeah, it's, yeah, you have to have a hoodie with you, it's always cold at night, but it's...

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's not that humid. I mean, it's gotten more humid in the last several years, I think.

• 8:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we only just got mosquitoes.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're...

• 9:00Cara Santa Maria?

  That's like a new thing.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, ankle biters, they're the worst, yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  But, yeah, the weather...

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Is that a climate change thing, the mosquitoes?

• 9:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah.

• 9:08Jay Novella?

  What's the worst thing about LA? Not, other than the traffic, since we beat that to the door.

• 9:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, probably the cost of living.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really expensive.

• 9:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah, the gas is crazy.

• 9:17Cara Santa Maria?

  But...

• 9:17Jay Novella?

  I know, we were shocked.

• 9:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But LA has, like, some of the best minimum wage, the best protections, we have good social, I mean, good compare, I mean, we're still in the US, so our social services are bad compared to other countries, but like, we have, we try...

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:31Cara Santa Maria?

  ...to care about our people and to make sure people are protected. Like, you're not making $9 an hour living in LA.

• 9:36Jay Novella?

  But I hear from a very reliable source that LA is a liberal hellscape.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I hear that, too, Steve.

• 9:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the best thing about LA.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  I will say, my, my least favorite thing about LA, this is true, I think, here more than anywhere I've ever lived, is, you can make plans with people, and then, half an hour before you're supposed to meet, they'll be like, "Yeah, I'm not coming."

• 9:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And it happened, right? Am I right about this? People flake all the time, and it's not just for traffic reasons, it's because the vibe was off that day or something.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And it, I am like, I will make a commitment three months in advance and be there five minutes early. Like, that's the kind of person I am. Drives me insane when I've already left my house. I'm on the way to meet somebody, and it takes forever to get there because of traffic, and then you're, you know, almost there, and they're like, "Yeah, I couldn't make it."

• 10:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Brian, how often, so I host, like, a semi-regular poker game at my house, and Brian is very conscientious. Whenever he says he's coming to poker, he is there for poker. But how often do I have a nine, you know, seated table, and then it's time to start and there's only six people?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 10:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, you know, it sucks.

• 10:42Jay Novella?

  But why do you, why do you accept it?

• 10:44Cara Santa Maria?

  You can't just not come.

• 10:44Jay Novella?

  Why don't you tell your friends, like, "Don't do that"?

• 10:46Cara Santa Maria?

  We do.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and...

• 10:47Jay Novella?

  Is this a cultural thing?

• 10:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I think part of it is culture. LA is the land of people telling you what they think you want to hear to your face, and then do it, and I think part of that, I don't know if it comes just from working, like, I work, how many people here work in the industry? Like, how many here work in film and television? What?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Not that many.

• 11:04Cara Santa Maria?

  We have an interesting audience. So, a lot of people here work in film and television, and you may have had that experience. At least, that's when I was first exposed to it, is a lot of people blowing a lot of smoke because they want good vibes in the room, and then later, doing pretty atrocious things. It's just, yeah, culturally, I think that does happen.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  There's some of that. There's a lot more of like, "Oh, we should totally hang out," and then it never, ever, ever happens.

• 11:28Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's just life, right?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  That is also life, but it's worse here.

• 11:31Jay Novella?

  It could be you, though, Brian.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  It's prob- well, it's definitely part me.

• 11:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Did we talk about, a friend of mine was talking about this app, and I'm sure they didn't come up with it, I'm sure they saw this on the internet somewhere, and I'm like, "Who is going to make this app and make a lot of money?" Where you make plans with somebody, and then you each have the app, and before the plans, you vote whether you still want to go or not.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 11:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And if both of you vote yes, you're on. If one of you votes no, but the other votes yes, you're on, and you never know that the other one did that. But if both vote no, it's like, "Congratulations, your plans are canceled."

• 12:01Speaker 04

  I would vote no on everything. I don't like to do anything, ever, so I would just say no all the time.

• 12:07Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think, I think the measure of a true adult is saying no when you first make the plan.

• 12:12Jay Novella?

  Well, just tell them you're not available. Well, maybe's, maybe's or no. If someone says, "Maybe,"

• 12:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 12:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but even just say maybe, but don't say yes, and then not show.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Now, I do want to say another great thing about LA. These are all cliches, these great things about LA, but they're all true, is you can be in the beach, at the beach, you can be in the mountains, you can be in the desert, all within like, an hour and a half of downtown.

• 12:35Jay Novella?

  But it takes you five hours to get there.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  No, I mean, like, an hour and a half, pretty much. Like, it's really, all that stuff is close, and it makes living here great, and I'll tell you what it really makes great, is raising a kid here. I can send my daughter to beach camp in the summer. She gets on a bus where we live, and then, you know, 45 minutes later, she's at the beach.

• 12:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Or forest camp.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Or forest camp, that's right.

• 12:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I think a friend of mine, who's a, who's a, a, a science writer, he was saying that LA's the only place in the world, I think, where you can see bighorn sheep and hammerhead sharks in the same day.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, you can, you know, like, we have these massively different ecosystems all around us, and for a while, until he sadly died, P22, who lived within LA limits, we were this only one of two cities in the world that had a-

• 13:22Jay Novella?

  And that was a cougar.

• 13:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he was a cougar.

• 13:23Jay Novella?

  Was he a puma?

• 13:24Cara Santa Maria?

  He was a-

• 13:25Jay Novella?

  A mountain lion?

• 13:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Or a catamount.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  I thought you were talking about a person, so.

• 13:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  He's an honorary person.

• 13:30Cara Santa Maria?

  We love P22. But, other than, I think Mumbai, those are the two cities in the world that had a big cat living within city limits-

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Really?

• 13:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Of a large city, yeah.

• 13:39Jay Novella?

  All right, all right, LA's great. Wait, one more thing, one more thing. Because there is something unbelievable in this city that Bob, Steve, and I got to see yesterday.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 13:48Jay Novella?

  And I'm still jaw-dropping.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Reader's Italian Ice.

• 13:51Jay Novella?

  So, at the California Science Museum, the- Science Center. Science Center. Just say it correctly.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  It's one word, "Science Center."

• 13:57Jay Novella?

  Science Center. Through contacts that we have, we got to see the space shuttle, full stack. The Endeavour. And- Upright, full stack.

• 14:06Bob Novella?

  That was, Jay, that was on the level of seeing Saturn V and the bridge of the original Enterprise set. That was jaw-dropping, a religious experience, we say euphemistically, it was jaw-droppingly amazing.

• 14:19Jay Novella?

  I'm sure all you guys are gonna go, at one point, you have to. It's, it's a beautiful, beautiful setup that they have in there, they really, you know, they knew what they were doing, and they set it up so you have, you could see it from every angle, you can walk underneath it. Couple of things to point out, it's so much bigger than you think it is, it's crazy. Like, when you, when you enter the room, you, it's like, "What the hell?" Like, every time you see it on TV, it, it, it really is small, even if it's zoomed in, it just, you don't get the proportions at all, the thing is a monster. Imagine listening to this with no context, by the way. Yeah. These, the, um, liquid fuel tank, the, the one that's like, brownish-rust colored, that thing is enormous. When you look at that and go, "It's filled with fuel," it, it, that's mind-blowing.

• 15:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's there. Oh, that's why, because I was gonna say, imagine what it looks like on the fuel tank. Oh, that's why.

• 15:09Jay Novella?

  It's upright, full stack. You know, the two solid rocket boosters, the fuel tank, and the shuttle.

• 15:14Cara Santa Maria?

  So, what about the shuttle on its own? Is it a monster?

• 15:16Jay Novella?

  It's huge.

• 15:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:17Jay Novella?

  It's huge, and I, you know, when you're, I, I got to see it, and like, I noticed things about it that I never knew, like, the very back bottom of the space shuttle has an airfoil, like, so the engines are here, and then there's a big piece right here that is an airfoil that, I guess, interacts with the engines. That was so freaking cool. But the thing that blew my mind the most is, imagine if I-

• 15:37Bob Novella?

  More like an aileron, Jay, right?

• 15:38Jay Novella?

  It was a-

• 15:39Bob Novella?

  Is it aileron?

• 15:40Jay Novella?

  No, it's an airfoil. But they had aileron, they had ailerons. Yeah, it has ailerons. So, um, imagine if I had a model of the full stack, right? So, it's the, it's the space shuttle, the two solid rocket boosters, and the big fuel tank in the middle, and I, and I put it here. The way that it's mounted to the launch pad, and the way that they had it mounted in the museum, is that the solid rocket boosters are bolted to the platform, and there is no other touchpoints. So, you have the two solid rocket boosters, like, here, then you have the, the fuel tank, which is not touching the ground, and the space shuttle, which is not touching the ground, and the space shuttle is probably five feet away from the, the, uh, liquid fuel tank.

• 16:15Bob Novella?

  It's mounted to that big fuel tank.

• 16:17Jay Novella?

  So, those two, those two solid rocket booster engines that are here-

• 16:20Speaker 02

  You just keep doing that for a while.

• 16:21Jay Novella?

  Are holding the whole structure up, and, you know, when you, when you, I looked at it, and I realized that those were the connection points, they're so strong, the weight of that thing, and the, you know, it's like a tree that is going to the right, and it wants to go that way, you know what I mean? It's so heavy, and it, it just, the engineering is staggering.

• 16:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So, so Jay-

• 16:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Speaking of engineering, when, when Endeavour got here, it was October 2012, I don't know if you guys remember.

• 16:46Jay Novella?

  I remember it.

• 16:46Cara Santa Maria?

  They had to drive it from LAX to the California Science Center, and it was, they had to move 400 trees, I was just looking up, how many was it? 400 mature trees they had to unearth and replant.

• 17:00Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 17:00Cara Santa Maria?

  They had to move traffic lights, street signs, and like, two inches, they measured. Sometimes the wingspan would be like, an inch away from the front door of a strip mall, as it was like, riding through.

• 17:11Jay Novella?

  And somebody drove that?

• 17:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they actually put it on a 160-wheeled, computer-controlled transporter.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Did you see it?

• 17:18Jay Novella?

  Oh, it was computer, that's smart.

• 17:19Cara Santa Maria?

  There were block parties, like, all around it, yeah, and there were a lot of really great, like-

• 17:22Jay Novella?

  That is cool.

• 17:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Videos in it, yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Wow, oh, look at that, wow.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And for a while, it was-

• 17:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that's on the 110 there, or something.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  It was mounted, flat, and you could walk underneath it and everything, right?

• 17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  That was really great.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  That's a reason to have some traffic.

• 17:33Jay Novella?

  And one more cool thing. The building that, so they, they stacked it, and then they built the building around it, because there was no other way. And the building, the structure of the, the building is, it's just a shell, there's no internal supports anywhere in the building, because the outer structure is meant to carry load. And it's so cool, because you walk in, and like, the, the rooms are huge, and there's no beams coming down, or whatever, just, I mean, the whole thing is amazing. I really, really recommend that you guys go, like, two months after it opens, because it's gonna be a mob scene. Yeah, yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's another great thing about LA, is the museums here are incredible, right? Not only do we have the Science Center, we have the Natural History Museum, we have the tar pits, which has closed for renovations, LACMA, the Broad-

• 18:12Cara Santa Maria?

  The Getty.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  The Getty, they have the Getty Villa, like, there's just so many great institutions here.

• 18:17Jay Novella?

  I lived in Washington DC for a while, so.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, which also has great museums.

• 18:21Jay Novella?

  Also, I hear has great museums. All right, the next segment, the, the bulk of the show, we're gonna do a segment that was actually inspired by Brian, and it's called "Whatever Happened 2," where we're gonna talk about, so each of us are gonna, you pick the topic.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Sounds like a dig at my career.

• 18:35Jay Novella?

  Something that was kind of big in the news, or in the public consciousness in the past, that has kind of faded away. And we're gonna give you an update on "Whatever Happened 2," and Bob's gonna start us off with the star shot. Bob, tell us about that.

• 18:50Bob Novella?

  Okay, breakthrough star shot. Who, who remembers or recognizes what, what that was? Oh, crap, okay, nobody.

• 18:59Bob Novella?

  This, this, for me, this was the most exciting near-term space probe that was ever being actively researched for a, a near-term launch. The plan was none other than sending it to the nearest star-

• 19:11Jay Novella?

  Well, wow, what is it?

• 19:12Bob Novella?

  In our lifetimes.

• 19:13Jay Novella?

  Tell us an explanation.

• 19:14Bob Novella?

  It's, um, it's essentially a, a gram, a probe that's about, uh, the size of one or two grams, maybe 10 grams, it was a very, very light probe, that had a solar sail around it, that then would be shot using super powerful lasers to accelerate to about 20% the speed of light, and arrive at, or not arrive, it's gonna do, it would do a flyby of the nearest star, which is Proxima Centauri, and also the nearest known exoplanet, Proxima B, do the flyby, send us back images, which of course, would take four years to come back. So, within, within a lifetime, 20 years, maybe 30 at the most, we would potentially have images of another, another star, another planet.

• 19:56Bob Novella?

  It would be one of the biggest scientific news events of, of the century, if not the millennia, I mean, the millennia's not very old at this point. It would have been amazing. So, whatever hap- whatever happened to this, and why do I believe that if it was created as was planned, it could have, it could have escalated into an international incident? Getting this thing there in 20 years, it, it might seem like, "Oh, that's really cool," but it's hard to appreciate how extraordinary that was, because the fastest chemical rockets that we have now would take not 20 years to get there, but 78,000 years to get there. So, what do you think it would take, using a chemical rocket, to do what this star shot was, was planned on doing, getting there in 20 years?

• 20:39Jay Novella?

  You mean, how much fuel?

• 20:40Bob Novella?

  How much fuel? What would it take? How much fuel would it take to get there in 20 years, to send, using a chemical rocket, even just sending my glasses? How long?

• 20:48Jay Novella?

  Kara, what do you think?

• 20:49Bob Novella?

  How much fuel would it take?

• 20:51Cara Santa Maria?

  All of it.

• 20:54Bob Novella?

  No, you're, you're, you're way wrong.

• 20:58Bob Novella?

  Take the observable universe, all of that mass, convert it to fuel, and you're not even close.

• 21:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so, Price is Right rules, I won, right?

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:11Bob Novella?

  It would take 10 to the, let me verify here, to the 6,000 power, 10 to the power of 6,000 times the mass of the observable universe, in chemical fuel, to get it there in 20 years.

• 21:24Jay Novella?

  But if you bought that much, though, it would be really inexpensive, you know?

• 21:28Bob Novella?

  Yes. So, this is, this is the tyranny of the rocket equation.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  They're price breaks, 10 to the 5,000.

• 21:32Bob Novella?

  Sorry?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Never mind.

• 21:36Bob Novella?

  So this is the tyranny of the rocket equation. If you are carrying your fuel onboard your rocket, if you just want to go a little bit faster, it takes exponentially more fuel to move the fuel that you just added. So that's why chemical rockets are, they're great for launching off of the surface of the earth, but if you want to go interstellar, chemical rockets are not the way to go. So what they're doing here is that they're actually, the rocket engine or the photon engine is actually on the planet, so it's not carried onboard. That's why it could do it in 20 years, something chemical rockets could never do. Now, this wasn't a fly-by-night plan here. We're talking, Stephen Hawking was a founder of this, so he's, you know, the gravitas of Stephen Hawking, it was pretty amazing.

• 22:19Bob Novella?

  Mark Zuckerberg, sure, he does not have the gravitas that Stephen Hawking had, of course, but he had a lot of money. He was ready to drop a hundred, basically a hundred million USD for this, and the total at that time, about 10 years ago, was about 3 to 5 billion, and I think he was kind of ready to drop that as well, which is pretty cool. So how hard, I want to give you an appreciation of how hard this project, this mission, would have been. The starship, the probe that we would be sending there would be maybe 3 to 4 grams, maybe 10 grams or 14 grams, but super light. It was basically going to be the weight of a, the mass of a nickel, or maybe a ballpoint pen, but not much more than that. So this thing was ridiculously light.

• 23:04Bob Novella?

  But on this little chip, which is like a postage stamp size, maybe a little bit bigger, you would need an atomic battery, you would need multiple cameras, some of them lensless, you would need a radio transmitter, you would need processing, you need a computer, all on this tiny little thing. So as you might imagine, the engineering was ridiculous to make that happen. The laser sail, which is about maybe 12 feet, the plans changed all the time, so the last time they were talking about it, it was maybe, you know, 4 meters, 4 meters big. So not very big, but this solar sail would had to accelerate at 10,000 Gs, 10,000 G acceleration, reaching this 20% of the speed of light in minutes, potentially. There was a very brief window where you had to accelerate it, because then the lasers

• 23:47Bob Novella?

  would just peter out. So we're talking accelerating it to 100 million miles per hour within 10 minutes, say, for example. And then, the lasers to push that would be a phased laser array, multi-kilometers, the footprint on the surface of the earth would be multiple kilometers.

• 24:04Jay Novella?

  So Bob, would they be phasers, if it's a phased laser array?

• 24:07Bob Novella?

  No, not in the Star Trek sense, and you knew that, Steve. Now, this is a phased laser array, so this was, imagine-

• 24:16Speaker 02

  A phaser array.

• 24:17Bob Novella?

  Yes, okay, I'll give that to you. Now imagine, this isn't one big-

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Why did you give that to me and not Steve?

• 24:23Bob Novella?

  Hmm. I don't know, because you're right next to me, perhaps. Now imagine, this isn't one big laser, this would be millions of lasers on the ground. One number blew me away, was like 700 million lasers, like what, that's just a ridiculous number. But they were low-powered, but together, the aggregate of all these lasers would be something about 100 gigawatts, or one number was 200 gigawatts. So that's like 100 to 200 nuclear reactors in order to power this-

• 24:54Jay Novella?

  I think the number was exactly 1.21 gigawatts, Bob, wasn't it?

• 24:58Bob Novella?

  Yes, yes. So clearly, the engineering here was just mind-boggling. So they started research, they researched it for years, some of this is still being researched, but the big result was that this was entirely feasible. This was not breaking the laws of physics, it could be done. Some of the problems that they thought were insurmountable were essentially surmountable, from their research, they realized this. So that means that it became an engineering problem, this was an engineering problem. And they had some successes here, like the solar sail results that they have from their testing and their simulations was really successful. They found a material, a silicon carbide, I think, material that would work, but they were also using metasurface for this solar sail.

• 25:40Bob Novella?

  So this is nanoscale engineered components, and this was critical, and they realized through their simulations that this would really work. This solar sail could survive a hit from a 100 gigawatt beam of lasers, because the nanoscale surface was able to, should be able to reflect almost all of that, which is what you would need to do, because if it didn't reflect it, if it absorbed any of this laser beam, you know, like 1 or 2%, it would just turn to dust, because that's a lot of heat. And it was also self-stabilizing, so if you have this solar sail hit with a laser beam, if the solar sail started drifting off, because of its design, it would come right back. So it was self-stabilizing, which is also critically important.

• 26:22Jay Novella?

  So when's this going to happen?

• 26:24Bob Novella?

  So, but, so here's the big but. Scientific American, last year, said the mission is on indefinite hold. And this is only after $4.5 million of the 100 million original has spent, so they really haven't spent that much money on it. Research continues on various aspects of it that are not mission-specific, so the question becomes, you know, what was so problematic about this? And you can imagine it, the probe itself was only 2 to 4 grams to maybe 14 grams, like a stick of chewing gum, super, super tiny probe, that had maybe 100 milliwatts of power available to it, maybe a watt, maybe a few more, so there's not a lot of power there. That power had to run, imaging, communications, the computer, the atomic battery, of course, would be supplying it. So, a couple things.

• 27:09Bob Novella?

  We'll talk about the communications. Now imagine, you're flying by, you know, Proxima Centauri, it takes an image of it, it's got to beam it back to the earth, like 4.3 light-years away, and there's not a lot of power here. We're talking milliwatts to maybe a couple of watts of power available to send it back. And the beam itself would be like an infrared laser beam that would, you know, attenuate over 4 light-years, there's going to be a lot of attenuation here. So they figured that they would need to build millions of receivers on the planet in order to receive this, and it could be receiving just a few photons every second, over months or maybe even years, to build up an image of this Proxima Centauri system. So you can imagine, imagine creating millions of Earth, these receivers, all over the surface of the earth.

• 27:54Bob Novella?

  I mean, where are you going to put them? You know, it's a huge, a huge problem. The laser array, though, was the biggest problem. This is the one that people say, this is the real meat of the research and the engineering, because, like I said, I already gave you a lot of this information, 100 to 200 gigawatts, millions of lasers, the expected cost for this laser array would be, let's see, 300 to 400 billion dollars. So I think, by 2050, not 2025, and we were thinking that they could have had this done in 10 years, which is kind of ridiculous in hindsight, of course. But this is what scared Zuckerberg away, I think, when they realized that this is going to cost 300 to 400 billion dollars. He's like, I'm sure he probably said, "I'm out, there's no way we're going to make that happen."

• 28:36Bob Novella?

  But the real interesting thing that I alluded to at the beginning was the geopolitical ramifications. Now imagine, you have a 200 gigawatt phased laser array on the surface of the planet somewhere, that could essentially, you know, it could accelerate the probe, but it could also do many other things. What could such a powerful laser do? Anything entering your airspace could be utterly vaporized. Imagine if you have some reflective mirrors in orbit, that you could then bounce that array off of the laser array and hit any, almost any point on the planet. This would be a devastating weapon, of course, and I think a lot of countries would say, "No, you're not going to be building this, because this is just too-"

• 29:14Jay Novella?

  Well, there would have to be an agreement to disassemble it, basically, once the probe is off, you know, you can't keep it going.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Unless you wanted to send another probe.

• 29:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but we're not going to do that, right?

• 29:25Bob Novella?

  But, Steve, there's no way they're going to spend a half a trillion dollars to just to send a probe, when you've got this amazing instrument to do so many other things, like you could launch solar sails throughout the entire solar system, not interstellar, but you could send other solar sails anywhere, you could do so many different things with it. There's no way it would be built if it would be like, "Oh, we got to shut it down now, now that it did this one little push." But yes, this would be very problematic geopolitically, and I think that could actually kill something like this, you know, preventing it from being ever created, because the ramifications geopolitically are just way too out of the way.

• 29:59Jay Novella?

  So this is a cool idea, but it sounds like this is not happening in the lifetime of anybody in this room, basically.

• 30:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Jay Novella?

  Do you think that's fair?

• 30:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 30:07Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 30:08Bob Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 30:09Jay Novella?

  All right, let's move on. All right. Thank you, Bob.

• 30:18Jay Novella?

  So this is- Basically, Steve goes, "Whatever." I have to control the timing of this show. I'm producing this show in real time up here, okay?

• 30:28Bob Novella?

  I know, and he took a few minutes, right? How long did that take, Adam?

• 30:31Jay Novella?

  So, Brian, again, this is the topic that Brian pitched that inspired the whole segment. Whatever happened to string theory?

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Ah, yes.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Whatever happened to string theory? Is that still a thing? So, for context, I am/was a string theorist. So, I, for many years, a theoretical physicist. I worked on string theory, quantum field theory, and supersymmetry 10-ish years ago. I quit that and moved here to be a full-time musician.

• 30:57Bob Novella?

  That made me so sad. When he quit, I was so disappointed. I was like-

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Every time I see Bob, you tell me what a terrible decision I made by pursuing my dreams.

• 31:07Bob Novella?

  I mean, you've had some success and you seem to love it, so I can't complain about that, but it's just very, you know, just like, "Ah."

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think it probably hurts you more that I didn't personally check with you when I decided to leave.

• 31:18Jay Novella?

  No, yeah, Bob, because Brian was the guy who was gonna crack this wide open.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So, but the thing that inspired this is, you know, many of us here are old enough to remember a time when there were these endless gushing articles about string theory in the press, right? It was like, it seems every time you'd look in the science section of the Times or something like that, there'd be some like, "The physics of the future today is here" type article about how it's gonna solve all these problems. And these days, you really don't see too much about it. So, I thought it might be interesting to talk about for someone who's kind of inside it, and still somewhat, you know, still have a lot of friends working on it. Is that the vibe inside the field? Is there even still a field to talk about, or what?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  For context, first of all, let me just very briefly summarize what string theory is. String theory is, you can summarize string theory very, very quickly. It basically is the idea that instead of the universe being fundamentally composed of point particles, what we would say are zero-dimensional things, they have no spatial extent, the fundamental things in the universe have some spatial extent, they're one-dimensional strings. That's the idea with string theory. What if, when you zoomed in on something really, really, really close, you saw that it actually had some spatial extent to it?

• 32:36Jay Novella?

  So, it's more like spaghetti?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  If you like, yes. So, it turns out, so it seems like a simple idea, who cares? What it turns out is that if you really pursue this idea, it seems like a promising framework for reconciling two ideas in theoretical physics that had been at tension, which is quantum mechanics and general relativity, or the theory of gravity. Quantum mechanics is the study of the very small, general relativity is the study of things that are pretty big, and there was not one unified way that you could talk about both. If you tried to do quantum mechanical calculations for gravity, you got incurable infinities, which you couldn't solve. Sometimes you can solve infinities in physics-

• 33:17Jay Novella?

  Renormalization?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, through something called renormalization, and it's not a big deal, but some infinities you have to take very seriously. And the infinities that you get when you do general relativity calculations or gravity calculations, basically scattering of gravitons off each other, which are quanta of gravity, using quantum mechanical language, were nonsense. String theory provides a way of allowing, basically curing those infinities for technical reasons I'm not gonna get into now. So, when this came along, people were like, "Oh, my god, what if this is the grand unified theory of everything, a theory of everything that we could use to describe all of, you know, all of the fundamental forces and structure of the universe?" So, people kind of went down this road.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  It really, the first big wave of hype was in the mid-'80s because Green and Schwartz discovered a mechanism by which the theory was consistent, called Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation, and they, you know, people started taking this idea very seriously and immediately hit what seemed like they may be deal breakers, which is to say that if you want a string theory to be consistent, you need to have supersymmetry, which basically is a bunch of particles that, as far as we know, do not exist in nature, we've never observed them, and extra spatial dimensions. Consistent string theories require one time and nine space dimensions. All right.

• 34:39Cara Santa Maria?

  How is that not like, I don't know, it just sounds like fantasy?

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Well, so this is the question, is, you might just see that and be like, "Nope, that's wrong." So, the question you have to, you can wave these both away with different explanations. One is, supersymmetry definitely does not exist in our universe, but maybe it existed in the early universe and physics parlance was broken, so that there's some remnants of it, which are very heavy particles we haven't seen yet, but they don't exist in our low-energy lives. You could have supersymmetry in the early universe, things very hot, very energetic, that didn't persist to the present day. That's something people have studied extensively.

• 35:17Bob Novella?

  Well, weren't we expecting to potentially see supersymmetric particles with the LHC?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll get to that in a minute. But that is something people had hoped to see at the LHC. With the extra dimensions, you can say, "Well, what, obviously, there aren't nine large dimensions, right? We would know that. We live in a universe, as far as we can tell, has one time and three space dimensions. What if the extra six dimensions were very small and curled up into a shape that, again, we can't see in our kind of macroscopic, everyday lives, but there are some vestiges of this if you could explore very, very small distances?" So, another way of saying this is that the potential to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity is, it's such a hard problem to solve, that maybe you're willing to put up with

• 36:02Speaker 02

  some difficult things to put up with, and then see if you can get around them somehow. For a while, in the, let's see, late-'80s, people, some physicists really went overboard with the string theory hype, and there was a hope that we would write down like, a central equation for string theory, and we'd just follow our noses, and we would end up with the universe that had one time, three space dimensions, with the particles and forces that we see, you know, all the stuff would just kind of follow from a straight line. So, those pictures that you're showing there on the slide, Steve, those are shapes for what we can do with the extra dimensions. Those are Calabi-Yau manifolds, which are special shapes of the extra dimensions that allow you to preserve this supersymmetry thing.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  So, it turns out, unfortunately, there are a very, very large number of such possible shapes for the extra dimensions, and to this day, we don't know any mechanism for deciding which of those a priori should be correct. You can say, "Okay, maybe these give you these particles, and these give you these particles," but we don't know which of those would be the right shape for the extra dimensions. And as far as we can tell, there is no known way to do that within the context of string theory. So, one of the very early hopes for string theory, that we would just follow our noses and find this universe, appears to, I mean, there may be people out there who disagree with me on this, that appears to definitely not be the case. And if you accept string theory, that means you accept the possibility of a lot of different

• 37:29Speaker 02

  possible consistent vacua, that is to say, universes, for these theories.

• 37:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I disagree with that, Brian.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Okay, great.

• 37:36Bob Novella?

  Is that called, is that called a landscape problem?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  That is, yeah, so people call this different set of shapes for the extra dimensions, the landscape of string theory, and right now, there's no real known way of deciding which of these would be correct.

• 37:49Bob Novella?

  Is it fair to say that, one way to describe this is that, and the numbers I have here is 10 to the 500, up to 10 to the 10 to the 300 types of solutions? My understanding is that these solutions apply to almost any type of universe, so to find the solutions for our specific universe, that's part of the problem? Is that fair?

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you don't know which, I mean, people, it's a large number. What that large number is, you can argue about, but it's 10 to some large number, and that's even just if the extra dimensions are something geometric, maybe they could be something weirder, which is also possible with string frameworks. And you, so far, we literally don't know any shapes of those extra dimensions that give us the universe we see with, you know, the three fundamental non-gravitational forces and the particles we see, et cetera. So, we just don't know how to pick.

• 38:33Jay Novella?

  Right, is it, is it still just as likely that it could be correct?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  I don't know how to judge that. Like, how to say how likely that something is correct is not, I think, that's not really a scientific question.

• 38:44Jay Novella?

  Is it thrown away? They don't talk about it anymore?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  So, this is where I'm going with this, because, so, that early promise was, was pretty much left in the dust at this point. We were hoping that the LHC would see some evidence of new particles, these so-called superpartners or supersymmetry. The LHC so far has found the Higgs boson and nothing else. And, this, by the way, it's not like most physicists thought the LHC would find supersymmetry. A lot of people, probably most people, would say, "Yeah, we'll be lucky if we see anything else." Optimists were hopeful we would see something, or at least some evidence of supersymmetry. We have seen nothing.

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Did, did most physicists who were not themselves string theorists, so still, let's say, theoretical astrophysicists, cosmologists, whatever, who, but who are not string theorists-

• 39:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Buy into string theory?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  I mean, it depends who you ask. I think string theory unfortunately generated, because the hype was so extreme, the backlash was extreme as well. And there were a lot of like, oh, you know, is string theory crap? Kind of stuff. I, you know, as a, as a working string theorist, colleagues who were string theorists, you know, you can argue, as scientists do, people argued about whether certain papers or results were correct all the time. Everyone I worked with was extremely careful and working very hard to do good science. I think there was a backlash, not just outside of science and the general culture, but also in science with a lot of, oh yeah, with a lot of scientists who didn't think string theory was deserving of the hype.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  And of course, the direct reason for this is a lot of funding was being moved to fund string theory positions and stuff like this that might have otherwise gone to departments. So I think it's very easy to feel resentful of the new hotness that's getting all the money when your thing isn't. That's not to say they didn't have legitimate objections, but you know, funding is scarce in academia and a lot of hiring is very fad driven. And when the fad's not your thing, it's easy to be mad about it.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Where did the hype come from, Brian? Was it internal? I'm sort of thinking about like, from a science communication perspective, it's like, if you're excited about a new thing, that's great. But at what point is the over-communication, over-promising and sort of lead the, both the field and the public perception of the field to kind of suffer?

• 40:59Speaker 02

  I think it came from two things. One, there were definitely string theorists who were making, in retrospect, pretty wild claims. And then the press seized upon this and really blew it out. And people were writing all these books about, oh, it's the, you know, the physics of the future and stuff. So I think it was a kind of a feedback loop where people internally were very, I think they were legitimately excited about it. I don't think people were making stuff up, with the exception of Michio Kaku.

• 41:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was about to say. I hosted a panel of three string theorists once. It was, oh gosh, let's see if I can remember. It was Kaku, it was Brian Greene, and then it was, oh, Sylvester, James Sylvester?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Oh, uh, uh, Jim Gates, yeah.

• 41:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Jim Gates, yeah. And it was so fascinating to see the difference in how they talked about it.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Those are three very different people.

• 41:53Jay Novella?

  You shouldn't have invited Kaku.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, Kaku just makes stuff up. Gates and Greene are careful scientists.

• 41:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And it was really interesting to see how they spoke about it because of that. And also, I think Gates is like religious and Greene isn't. So there was also a lot of really interesting like conversation about that intersection between physics and metaphysics.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Also, Gates is more of a, at least when I think of him, he's more of a supersymmetry guy. And Greene is more of a string theory and cosmology guy. So they, I mean, they just have different things. Anyway, so, yes.

• 42:26Jay Novella?

  Getting interrupted by everybody. But, so one of the problems, it seems to me, like just putting my skeptical lens on, is that from your description, it sounds like there's an awful lot of special pleading going on, right? Like, here's string theory, it predicts A, B, and C. We don't see A, B, and C, but maybe that's because of some other reason that we're just making up, like, right? So that doesn't mean it's wrong. Sometimes those objections are all correct. But when you start stacking them up, yeah, we don't see extra dimensions. Yeah, we're not seeing the supersymmetry. Yeah, we're not seeing these other things. But that, maybe that's because of some other thing that's going on. That, I think, drives a lot of the skepticism.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Well, so I think that is true, but it depends on the question you're asking. So if the question is, does string theory describe the universe we live in? Then absolutely, I 100% agree with that. And right now, it seems, there's no compelling evidence, I think, that string theory describes the universe we're living in. However, if your question is, what can we do with this interesting new theoretical framework? Which is the way I always approached my work and most of the people I know approach theirs. Then that is not even, then it's just like, hey, what, what are the different structures we can put here? It's kind of a different approach to it.

• 43:32Jay Novella?

  Is it useful? Not, is it real?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Not even useful. It's like, what, what is this framework and what are the boundaries of it? What can we use it for?

• 43:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, I mean, that theoretical astrophysics is a field, right? So it is theoretical by nature. And then the translation, I think, is the interesting part. How testable is this stuff?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  So that's a, that's a separate question. Also, this is not astrophysics, and I want to be clear. This is particle physics. This is theoretical particle physics. It has cosmological implications, but it's not astrophysics. So yeah, testability is also a big problem here because the particles that we're talking about, things that would provide direct evidence of string theory would be so massive that you'd only get them at very high energies. And there's no way to actually give direct tests of it. So at the moment, also, there are no known direct tests of string theory, or even like plausible indirect tests. If you ruled out supersymmetry completely, that is a knock against string theory. And since the LHC didn't find anything, yes, that makes string theory maybe look a little bit less real.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  But the thrust of where I wanted to go with this, with the what happened to string theory thing, is most working string theorists today, and there are fewer than there used to be. It's not, you know, this hot new field anymore, are using string theory as a tool in theoretical physics and part of a larger toolbox and not as, maybe this is the theory of the real universe. And I don't think, I think they're both interesting questions, and I don't think one is less valid than the other. So I'll give you just one example here. There are lots of examples. In the late 90s, which is a while ago now, Maldecena came up with this idea called the AdS-CFT conjecture,

• 45:11Speaker 02

  which has been tremendously useful. It's still a conjecture, but is, I don't think anyone thinks it's not right, in which a 10-dimensional string theory was discovered to have the exact same information as a four-dimensional quantum field theory. And problems that were hard in one were easy in the other. So what that meant is you could use string theory and geometry to study difficult problems in quantum field theory. So that is a, you know, do any of those universes, you know, correspond to the one we live in? No, definitely not. However, if your question is, what is the structure of quantum field theories? Which are theories that we know describe the universe. Quantum field theory works.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  It's been very, very well-tested. Then this is an interesting thing to use as a theoretician because it gives you a thing to play with. So the question of what happened to string theory? The answer really is, it morphed from this thing where people were very optimistic, or some people, optimistic that it would describe the real world. And it basically became a tool that is in the arsenal of theoretical physicists, which sometimes gets deployed as needed to study different problems. And I don't think that's, you know, obviously it'd be amazing if we found the unified theory of everything. That's the best thing that could happen. That is not happening with string theory. And I think it's unambiguous that that's the case. However, I think it's also amazing that it gave us this whole set of interesting and useful tools that we can study frameworks in theoretical physics.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Brian, this is revelatory to me because this is basically what happened with rational choice theory in political science.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Which I'm sure is what everyone else was thinking as you were hearing this. It's like, you know, because this is exactly, we didn't have the, anywhere near the same amount of hype. But for basically the 2000s and 2010s, political scientists were like, we basically were just delayed on economists. But we were like, assume a rational actor and then see what we, what they do. And Steve, you and I have talked about this on the show at length. We have all these models that say, okay, why would a rational voter vote these ways? Why would two rational leaders go kill each other? And anyone who's seen the news knows that none of us are rational and none of the voters are rational, and certainly not the leaders. So it's not a correct model of the universe. But we were all super excited that it was like useful enough. And it, the hype has died down and there's been much more of a movement towards like just massively churning through large data sets.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  But the framework is very, very useful. And it's still a tool, which is to say, if we can explain why two rational people would do something that seems irrational, then we can go in and layer on the, the ego and the crazy and the risk aversion and the da-da-da-da and all these other things. So it's kind of the same arc with way less.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  And I think that exact arc happens a lot in science, right? It's like, oh my God, this is going to do everything. And then it's like, oh, actually, that was really hard. But look, this fun new thing we have to play with. And maybe this gives us insight into other stuff. And that's not a bad thing. It's a feature, not above.

• 47:56Jay Novella?

  That happens in medicine every second Tuesday, right? Every discovery is going to cure everything. It's going to be, yeah, but it turns out to be, okay, no, it's a useful little thing with a subset that helps some people sometime, whatever. It's great. It's incremental. But yeah, it's always at first, the cure for everything.

• 48:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. In psychology, you see too, like every bias, every effect, you know, the whatever, whatever. And it's like, now we can explain human behavior. And it's like, no, it's all of them together that explain human behavior.

• 48:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah. As a producer, I mean, you know, there are people that'd be like, this cable's better than that cable. You know, we, but you know, what happens is like, the cable might get a little bit better. Anyway, I gotta, I gotta say this. I gotta say, I don't know what you did, just leave me alone. So Brian, you were one of the reasons why I was able to comprehend just how smart people are and how.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  People like me.

• 48:45Jay Novella?

  When it trickles down, when it trickles down to people that aren't, you know, experts in a field that don't, don't really understand, like, you said to me, like, Jay, I really know this stuff, you know, well, or whatever. But he's like, there are people that know this so much better than I do. And it's crazy because like you're talking and I am like, understanding what you're saying on a very surfacey level, right? Because you're telling it that way. But I find it fascinating that there are people that are just so unbelievably advanced and stuff. And by the time most of us get it, like in the news, we talked about this previously. By the time it trickles down to us and we have some science communicator tell us about string theory, it is so dumbed down that it really is just like, it's an analogy of what the real thing is.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Well, that's right. Well, it's because the language of theoretical physics in particular is math. And unless you're speaking math, you're not going to get it. And even when you are speaking the math, it's still, you know, it's still a little bit hard.

• 49:41Jay Novella?

  That's why, yeah, we get emails all the time from cranks, right? Who think that they've, you know, discovered what's really going on in the universe. And I always say, like, do you, did you do the math? It's like, well, I didn't do the math. This is all theoretical. It's like, then you don't, you haven't done anything. Because you don't understand any of the things you're talking about. What you have is a three-step removed metaphor that people who actually know what they're talking about have filtered down to you. And you can't even think about it. So unless you're doing 12-dimensional differential calculus. Shut up, because you have no idea what you're talking about.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Is that your email auto replying, Steve?

• 50:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Shut up.

• 50:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I also think, Jay, to that point, I think it's important that we don't overhype the essentialism of the scientists doing this work. Like, these are people who, yes, need a certain base level of like cognitive capability to do this kind of work, but most of the most brilliant scientists doing these things that seem so intellectually unreachable, it's just because they've dedicated all their time.

• 50:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, just a year, just decades.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  What I tell people, you know, a lot of people will be like, oh, string theory, you must be really smart. They're not wrong. But I do tell them, I learned to speak a language. It's like you learn to speak another language. I just got used to talking to that language. I was not, you know, I had a good career. I had some big results. I did not consider myself at the top of the pack of string theorists. Like, there are people who were much, much, much smarter and better at it than I was. But you just learn to speak a language. And it's not that hard to learn that, to speak that language if you put the time in.

• 51:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Right?

• 51:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Smart, like, you know, there are some fundamental things about cognition, but smart is very often a function of just how much time you dedicate to it.

• 51:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I want to clarify, because I wasn't saying that. What I was saying is, you know, when you stack your knowledge, you go through, you know, 20, 30 years, and you become so in the weeds with it, that people that have never even walked down two inches of that path, like, they are like wicked advanced because they put the time in. Like, I think, you know, but again, it's another conversation. I don't think everyone could do what Brian did.

• 51:45Cara Santa Maria?

  No, 100% not.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Oh, I think everyone can do what Brian does.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  But I think more people could do it than think they could.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Right? Because it really is just, you know, I use this analogy when I'm talking to young musicians as well. We just have to be comfortable with a very high failure rate. And you're going to sit there, and you're going to bash your head against the wall, metaphorically, and try to understand a math thing. You're going to try to write a song, and it's not going to work. And most of what you do, you're going to trash. But if you put in the time and you really try for it, this is why process is so important. This is why, you know, people using AI to just get to the result are missing the entire point of this kind of stuff, is if you put in the time and engage in the process, you will get better at it. And I think most people could, I mean, there's probably some natural

• 52:35Speaker 02

  aptitude or whatever that's at play here. Most people could get to a point where you would at least develop basic competence.

• 52:42Jay Novella?

  Totally.

• 52:42Bob Novella?

  And if you can't, and if you can't devote your career to it, find some good science communicators and to get a lay understanding of what's happening, which we often, which is basically what we do when we're talking outside of whatever our expertise might be. That's the key. You don't have to, you know, devote decades to it. Just find some good people that are telling you the consensus, the scientific consensus.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  We're in a golden age of textbooks and lecture notes. And then go on the archive, www.archives.org, YouTube videos, that's right. You can, if you put in the time, you can learn this stuff, and it's not as hard as it seems.

• 53:20Jay Novella?

  All right. Thank you so much, Brian. Kara, tell us what happened to fen-phen?

• 53:24Cara Santa Maria?

  So, yeah, when we first talked about doing this topic, whatever happened to, I think the first thing that popped into my head was fen-phen for some reason. And it's this like cultural thing that stuck into my mind. I'm an elder millennial, so I was an 80s baby, grew up in the 90s, and I just, what a kind of culturally relevant thing. The 90s, it was all about fen-phen. So what is fen-phen? What was it? And whatever happened to it? Has everybody here heard? Like, it at least brings something up when I say fen-phen? Yeah. So fen, yeah. Fen-phen, no, no. Don't cheer for fen-phen. You'll soon learn why. So fen-phen, surprisingly, I learned so much when I dug into this, is not a drug. It's

• 54:08Cara Santa Maria?

  two drugs, fen and fen. And they were never actually co-packaged. They were just often prescribed together. So the first drug is fenfluramine. That's the bad one. And then there was fentermine. So fenfluramine, F-E-N, fentermine, P-H-E, fen-dash-phen. And fenfluramine was actually prescribed as two different drugs over the course of its life. It was a regular fenfluramine, and then there was a dex version of fenfluramine. And they're actually way older than you think. We think of this as a 90s phenomenon. But fenfluramine was first developed in the 60s, and it was on the market in France first in 1963, and

• 54:49Cara Santa Maria?

  then it hit the United States market in 73. Fentermine was actually on the market as early as 1959 here in the United States. And both of them had other indications, but fenfluramine, the first fen of fen-phen, was seen as a weight loss drug that was kind of not very effective. It was like for short-term use. It helped people lose a little bit of weight. And then in the 90s, basically, there was a big marketing scheme, kind of the, this was the era of new, I mean, we think of like pill mill type places. This was the era of like drive-through weight loss clinics. And so after this marketing scheme that said, oh, if you take them both together, they'll be like more effective, even though there

• 55:33Cara Santa Maria?

  was not a single study showing that, they went on the market and it exploded. And so in 1996, there was a total of, let's see, 18 million monthly prescriptions for either one or the other or both in combination. And in 1997, it was pulled. So, why? What happened with fen-phen? And there's kind of some seedy stuff going on here. I didn't realize how much investigative journalism had to dedicate to this. And there seemed to be some like Purdue Sacklery-esque, you know, problems that were happening at the time. But very quickly, physicians started to discover that folks who were taking the

• 56:16Cara Santa Maria?

  fen part, the effien part of fen-phen on its own, or the dexfen, which was the newer generation, or fen-phen together, were starting to have heart problems. And what were those heart problems? They were not good. So we were seeing pulmonary hypertension, and we were seeing these like valve deformities that were starting, especially on the right side of the heart. And early on in the studies, these valve deformities were actually seen, but the studies were short, and it was a low percentage of individuals. Later, research showed that if you took this drug for fewer than three months, you had something like

• 57:00Cara Santa Maria?

  a 3% chance of developing, which is still pretty high, right? Which is why they pulled it from the market. But if you took this drug for upwards of two years, like 40% of people had irregular or abnormal EKGs. Yeah, and so 40% of people, they were often asymptomatic, but when given EKG, they were already starting to see irregularities on EKG. Yeah, which is really, really disconcerting. So, there's a lot of kind of dark behind-the-scenes stuff that seems to be going on, where there were different FDA reviewers that were, you know, one guy was like a whistleblower, but then he couldn't get his vote through. And then after he left FDA, he was actually able to testify that there were concerns about this

• 57:43Cara Santa Maria?

  based on the literature, long before it became kind of a super-hot drug and was prescribed in such large numbers. But there were other individuals who were like, no, based on the literature now, we're not too concerned. There's also some really gross stuff. You were kind of looking as I was, as I was pulling things up here. So fen-phen together, there actually was one study done on children.

• 58:08Jay Novella?

  What?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Wait, this is for weight loss, right?

• 58:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. But it's not only for weight loss. Oh, actually, this study wasn't on fen-phen together. It was just the fen, the bad one. Fenfluramine was given intravenously, and guys, this was like in the 90s, okay? So keep this in mind, in the 90s in New York, to between 100 and 150 black and Hispanic boys, between the ages of six and 10, who had delinquent older brothers. And the idea here was, maybe, because the first fen of fen-phen works on your serotonin, maybe they could predict delinquent behavior based on serotonin levels. And so they used this drug to boost those serotonin levels and compare the differences.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  How did they get through IRB on this? Like, didn't we have things in place for?

• 58:56Cara Santa Maria?

  By the 90s, we had pretty much all the ethical things in place.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so how did this happen?

• 59:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, unfortunately, I think that the literature has not been, yeah, there was a, an investigation, a year-long investigation by the New York State Psychiatric Institute that found that there was no misconduct in these tests. Yeah. So, and actually, this

• 59:14Speaker 02

  No misconduct.

• 59:15Cara Santa Maria?

  No misconduct. They found no misconduct. This study was actually published before the drug was pulled. So the study was published in 95, and the drug was pulled in 97. So why the heart problems? It does seem to be the case, or at least researchers believe that it has to do with the serotonin itself. So it wasn't a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It was a special type, I'm forgetting what it's called, but like something that actually forces the cells to produce more serotonin. And so the idea is that serotonin does have some impact on growth, and that these heart valve tissues became thickened and hardened, causing them to narrow, causing them to not be able to flex for the blood to come through,

• 59:58Cara Santa Maria?

  causing the heart then to have to work harder. And by the end of this, we saw, I think, something like, there were definitely hundreds of lawsuits. There were case studies of individuals requiring heart Lung transplant, like full heart lung transplant. And by the end of it, the original drug manufacturer had paid out billions plural in lawsuits, in payments. And so the first drug, fenfluramine, it was pulled from the market altogether. The second drug, phentermine, actually didn't seem to have any effect. When they looked at all of the studies, if anybody only took phentermine, there was no effect. And it's still on the market.

• 1:00:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't worry, because it does seem to be that the literature is fine with phentermine. There's still a combination. It's often given for seizures, but there's still a combination of phentermine, topiramate, like Topamax, that's given for weight loss. But it's for short-term use, and it is not nearly as effective as the next-gen weight loss drugs. So obviously, I think one of the big questions is, how does this relate to the Ozempic craze right now, right? When we talk about GLPs and semaglutides, and there's a lot of interesting literature online about-

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Sorry, real quick. It was the claim that the first drug was problematic and the second wasn't, or it was the interplay between the two?

• 1:01:20Cara Santa Maria?

  So the first drug was problematic on its own. And, but it was often given to people as the combination, because the idea was, oh, it's not that good for weight loss, but if we give them both together, it'll be good. And then it just, people-

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  But it's just the first one?

• 1:01:35Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just the first drug. So on its own, with the other drug, or with the other version of the drug, seemed to be the problem. But people weren't really using them individually anyway, because they didn't work that well. And it turns out, together, they didn't work that great either. And they really only had these short-term effects. So how does that relate, right? Because we're living in a world now where it's like, okay, a new miracle weight loss drug. And while there are a lot of kind of online think pieces about how American physicians really took a step back after fen-phen, I do think the fen-phen thing affected the way that primary care physicians and internists approached obesity medication.

• 1:02:19Cara Santa Maria?

  They were like, I don't really want to have a whole lot to do with this, so maybe only talk to a specialist. There was a lot of kind of concern around that. With these, and I wouldn't even call them next-gen, because they're next-gen, next-gen, next-gen, there have been a lot of iterations in between. With these semaglutides, GLP-1s, and now the dual agonists, where they're glucagon-like plus glucagon, I think that, I don't want to say there's no cause for concern, because, you know, the jury is always still out when it comes to longitudinal studies. But there have been thousands of studies on GLP-1s in the last 20 years, thousands. Most of these drugs are not nearly as new as you think they are. They've been around for type 2 diabetes for quite some time. And the major studies that were done on these drugs, I think the longest one is three full

• 1:03:03Cara Santa Maria?

  years on the drug, whereas the fen-phen studies were three to six months. So we do have a lot of evidence. We have a lot more robust evidence. And study after study after study, while there are side effects, and while there are, you know, concerns, especially in certain groups of people, medullary thyroid cancer, there's some other people who shouldn't take them, we are seeing outcomes for a lot of different health problems. If anything, the next-gen drugs are better for your heart. We're seeing that over and over, right? That people's cardiovascular health is improving on them. At its surface, big craze, obesity medication, everybody getting their hands on it, kind of these, back then, there weren't the online clinics, they were the drive-through clinics, now the online clinics.

• 1:03:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It would be easy to say, don't fall for it, look what happened, is it going to be another fen-phen? But I do think it's important to remember that the science is different, and we are doing much more robust research now on these drugs.

• 1:03:58Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I was in my fellowship when the whole fen-phen thing happened. I mean, I never used it as a neurologist, but it had a bad reputation even before it got pulled. Like, it was really sus.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Did people kind of immediately know something was-

• 1:04:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's like, first of all, again, it's like, all right, some combination weight loss drug, immediately, we're very suspicious about that. And, you know, again, these drugs have been around for a while, and they were not, you know, they had very niche sort of applications. The whole thing seemed like a marketing campaign gone wrong.

• 1:04:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And then it went real wrong.

• 1:04:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  But we are selling some at the merch table. Just the first one, though. Yeah, just the first one, obviously.

• 1:04:38Jay Novella?

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show this week to talk about our sponsor, Eleven Labs.

• 1:04:45Cara Santa Maria?

  I just the other day had to call tech support for some podcast software that I was using. And you guys know this headache, right? You can't get to the right person, you keep saying, speak to a representative over and over, and it's like, just tell me a little more about your problem. It was so frustrating. We have to find a solution for this.

• 1:05:08Jay Novella?

  Well, Kara, Eleven Labs, which is the company, by the way, that I've used many, many times on the show and in live shows, being Steve, for example, making fun of Steve in Georgia, I like to do that a lot. So anyway, Eleven Labs has another product, it's called Eleven Agents, and it's an AI platform for voice and chat agents that can actually listen, it can understand what customers are saying, it can get them to the right place, it can give them the information that they need. And the good news is, it isn't just one person that really knows what they're doing at a company, you know, maybe there's a handful of people at any given company that know this stuff well enough to help you completely, but this, you know, is infinite. You could have 100,000 people calling at the same time, they're all going to get the same intelligence.

• 1:05:49Bob Novella?

  If you run a business or handle customer operations across support, sales, or marketing, you could start with a demo at elevenlabs.io/sgu. See how Eleven Agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers will actually love. Elevenlabs.io/sgu. That's E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S dot I-O slash S-G-U.

• 1:06:13Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, guys, let me ask you this. Whatever happened to the coming hydrogen economy? Yay.

• 1:06:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Hydrogen.

• 1:06:23Jay Novella?

  So this is like, if you go back to, you know, around the turn of the, around 2000, late 90s, early aughts, there was a lot of hype around the coming hydrogen economy. And I'm not just talking about hydrogen fuel cell cars. The thinking at the time was, and I remember like, you know, reading a lot about it and thinking, oh, this, you know, this is, there's something to this, that by the 2020s, right? By now, the entire economy was going to be turned over to hydrogen as a universal energy carrier, right? And so, because hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a storage medium for energy, right?

• 1:07:03Jay Novella?

  Because unless we find huge reservoirs of hydrogen under the ground, which is actually recently been discovered as maybe the case, but not counting geological hydrogen, you have to make hydrogen, right? It's a high-energy, basically, molecule that you have to make from lower-energy molecules, where you have to strip it from other high-energy molecules. And then, but then, once you have, you know, pure, pretty pure hydrogen, it's a great source of energy. You could use it in a lot of industries. And, so, you guys remember, what was the innovation that led to all of the hydrogen economy hype? The fuel cells, right? The fuel cell, exactly right. So not that this is, you know, the fuel cell is very interesting technology.

• 1:07:48Jay Novella?

  So this is a proton exchange membrane, or PEM, that was sort of the key development there. And what this does is, you take hydrogen, you split it up into protons and electrons, and then the electrons go through one circuit, and that is an electric current, right? So that's your electricity. So it's basically directly creating electricity. The protons go through another pathway, then you bring them together at the end, and you combine it with oxygen, and you get water, heat, and electricity. And that's it, no pollution, no carbon, seems great. And so you could, you know, you could store hydrogen either as, you know, liquid hydrogen or as compressed gas, you could store it in tanks, you can pipe it. You could now, with fuel cells, which are now much smaller, much more efficient than

• 1:08:33Jay Novella?

  hydrogen combustion. Hydrogen combustion is basically like an internal combustion engine, but you're burning hydrogen for fuel, right? You're burning it at a high temperature. And whenever you have to burn something at a high temperature, it costs energy to heat it up, it takes time to heat it up. Fuel cells could be turned on very, very quickly, you didn't have to heat them up, they were twice as efficient, you know, combustion's like 20% efficient, the fuel cells are like 40% efficient. So that generated a ton of hype. And Toyota, Honda, GM Ford, Daimler, BMW, all unveiled hydrogen concept vehicles based upon this new PEM, hydrogen fuel cell technology. In 2003, George Bush announced a hydrogen fuel initiative, over a billion dollars, to develop hydrogen technology.

• 1:09:17Jay Novella?

  In 2004, the Governator, you guys remember Arnold Schwarzenegger? Your California governor? He had the hydrogen, the California Hydrogen Highway Initiative, right? And his vision was that by the 2020s, we would have hydrogen fuel stations as common as gas stations, that pipelines would distribute, you know, the hydrogen everywhere, and we would be making the hydrogen with fields of solar and wind power using electrolysis, right? Taking water and turning it into hydrogen and oxygen, right? You store the hydrogen, then you burn it back with oxygen in the fuel cell. Or you could also, of course, use nuclear, or geothermal, or hydrologic, any source of power, just as long as it's not fossil fuels, right? That would kind of defeat the whole purpose. And, you know, not-

• 1:10:02Jay Novella?

  Only could you use these efficient, small, cool, you know, fuel cells to drive your car. You could have them in your home to make energy for your home. Now, you're making your own energy. All you do is pipe in the hydrogen and you make your energy as needed right there. And this would be, again, the universal energy carrier for civilization, right? The hydrogen, that was the hype, the hydrogen economy. So, you may have noticed that none of this has come to pass in the last 30 years. So, what went wrong? What was the problem? Would you guys have any thoughts? Like, what would you, just give me one thing on your list.

• 1:10:36Bob Novella?

  Infrastructure.

• 1:10:36Jay Novella?

  So, Bob is correct. So, one thing is, it's not that, this is not an impossibility. This is just a, you know, a speed bump. It would have required a massive investment in infrastructure. And that often determines, like, which technologies went out. Sometimes it's not the technology itself. It's like, well, what's the infrastructure that's already in place? And how much of an infrastructure barrier is there to widespread adoption? Hydrogen requires massive infrastructure. So, first of all, you need the infrastructure to make all the hydrogen, right? Then you need to store all the hydrogen. You need to pipe it all and you need to distribute it all. And then, of course, you need the fuel cells to use it. And we had none of that, right? So, that's again, that's why the Schwarzenegger wanted to build, start building that infrastructure.

• 1:11:21Jay Novella?

  And that's actually not a bad idea. If you really think that this technology is coming, paving the road with infrastructure is the way to go. Unfortunately, infrastructure was far from the only problem or the only obstacle to develop big hydrogen. Yeah, the other one, hydrogen is like an old man. It leaks easily. Yes. Hydrogen, it's the smallest element, right? It's basically...

• 1:11:41Speaker 04

  Is that Shakespeare or Rush?

• 1:11:44Jay Novella?

  Well, that's the Bible.

• 1:11:48Jay Novella?

  So, it's very leaky. It is very leaky. And so, we didn't really have good material to store it in. You could just put it in thick steel tanks, but it leaks, it'll leak through steel. It'll leak through pipelines. And if you're storing it under pressure, it leaks even more, right? And keeping it in liquid state is super cool. Takes a lot of energy. When they fuel up those hydrogen-fueled rockets, they put the fuel in there hours before they're gonna set it off. And if they lose their launch window, it's gone. You can't keep it on the launch pad with liquid hydrogen in the tank. So... What do you mean? They pull it out or it just, it goes away? I think they just get, they pull it out, yeah. So, the infrastructure was a problem, the leaking of hydrogen. It's also very corrosive. So, it's just a really nasty, you think it's just hydrogen gas, but it's a really nasty thing to deal with.

• 1:12:34Jay Novella?

  And we would have needed to develop the technology to efficiently store and distribute the hydrogen as well. Any other guesses as to... Is there a scaling issue at all? Does it scale up the way you want it to? Oh, yeah. So, that's kind of the infrastructure thing, but there is a scaling issue. But I'll tie that to what I think is the number one problem. It's super explosive. And efficiency? Well...

• 1:12:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Was it public opinion, kind of like how we all freak out about nuclear?

• 1:13:02Jay Novella?

  No, I think public opinion was very positive. Oh, wait, how do we get hydrogen? So, all of these things are correct. Let me, I'll just take them. Did you wanna add something?

• 1:13:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I was just, you were mentioning that we had to, like, the Governator's vision was that we have all these, like, solar and wind farms to be able to do the hydrogen fuel. Why not just go straight to electricity?

• 1:13:19Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and so, exactly. And Bob, I think, mentioned the efficiency thing, so... Oh, you didn't hear me. Yes, I do.

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  Is Bob here?

• 1:13:27Bob Novella?

  Way over here, huh?

• 1:13:28Jay Novella?

  So, this is, so there are some problems, which are infrastructure problems, some are technology problems, and some are physics, you know, thermodynamics problems. So, one problem with the whole hydrogen economy is, is that you're gonna take water, turn it into hydrogen, store the hydrogen, transport the hydrogen, and then recombine it with oxygen to make electricity. So, right, so electricity to hydrogen, right? Then back to electricity again. And each step loses energy. And it's very inefficient compared to other ways of using electricity. So, as Kara said, if, you know, you can just directly use the electricity, right? And especially like the idea that we're gonna be burning hydrogen in our homes for electricity, like, just send me the electricity. We don't need to do that.

• 1:14:12Cara Santa Maria?

  We already have a grid.

• 1:14:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there's a massive inefficiency in doing that. Oh, my God. I get to see, like, the engineers and they're like, okay, so we got the hydrogen. Then we do all this stuff and, you know, it starts with electricity, hydrogen, stuff, and then electricity. And then one engineer just comes over and goes, well, what, we just take out the middle? Yeah, take out the whole middle, exactly.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  Plug it in, man.

• 1:14:32Jay Novella?

  Right. That's like the, every other, a crank decides that they can, we can drive a car on water. What are you doing? Well, I'm splitting the water into hydrogen and we're burning the hydrogen in the combustion engine to drive the engines. Like, why don't you just use that power that you're using to split the water to drive the car? So, yeah, so the math doesn't work. And also, the whole, it's, the round-trip efficiency is very low. So, the hydrogen combustion is better than hydrogen combustion, but that's terrible. It's like 20% efficient. It's only 40% efficient. Battery electric vehicles are like 75 to 90% efficient, which is, was the ultimate problem, was that batteries won, right? Because they're way more efficient and it's much more direct pathway in terms of using the electricity, right?

• 1:15:14Jay Novella?

  So, why would you use a 40% efficient system when you have a 90% efficient system, right? So, hydrogen fuel cell cars will never be as good as battery electric vehicles. And also, we had a whole range problem with the cars, right? Because, all right, so here's another problem. I'll get to Brian's scaling issue in a minute. But one of these, I remember this at the time, I was following this very closely. One of the things, one of the arguments for widespread use, widespread adoption, was that, well, we're working, a lot of people were researching ways to store lots of hydrogen efficiently. Now, what that means is that they were mostly working with ceramics, right? So, you would have some kind of ceramic material that you could, you can infuse it with hydrogen,

• 1:15:59Jay Novella?

  and then that would be where the hydrogen was stored. And then you'd pull the hydrogen out when you need it, right? When you need to send it to your fuel cell. Problem was, you had to heat that ceramic up to 300 degrees Celsius to get the hydrogen out of it. Again, whenever you have to heat something up, that creates a massive inefficiency in the whole system. So, they were saying, okay, well, we need to figure out a way to get it out at a lower temperature. And they could. But when, but there was, it turns out there's an inverse relationship where the lower the temperature you can get the hydrogen out, the less dense it was. The temperature was basically how you got a lot of hydrogen in there in the first place. And so, it was a fundamental physics problem that they never solved and they completely abandoned it. So, you know what they did? They built better tanks. That was it.

• 1:16:42Jay Novella?

  There's not, so now, if you buy a hydrogen fuel cell car, the tank holding the compressed hydrogen is a carbon polymer lined with a special material that keeps it leaking. It's great. It's high-tech. It's expensive. And it's also pretty much operating at the limit that we're gonna be able to safely operate at, 700 bar, right? The old steel tanks were 300, 350, now we're at 700, sure. So, the range of the hydrogen fuel cell cars went from 200 to 400 or whatever, that's fine. But this is not a linear curve, right? As you increase the pressure, you, the engineering problem increases geometrically, which mean, and also, it takes energy to compress hydrogen.

• 1:17:23Jay Novella?

  So, you have a system where you have to put more and more energy in to make a more and more unsafe explosive device with lots of compressed hydrogen. And I think we're pretty much at the limit there, right? Whereas, we, theoretically, battery, the battery technology can increase by an order of magnitude. I mean, like, we could get to batteries that are 10 times as energy dense as the ones that we're driving around in now, where we're basically at the limit of hydrogen, even with advanced materials.

• 1:17:51Cara Santa Maria?

  So, why the promise at the time? Was it because we weren't getting to be as efficient with batteries felt far off?

• 1:17:58Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so it was, yeah, at the time, the battery was still, batteries, EVs were still, had 100-mile range, 85-mile range. It wasn't quite there. It was kind of a race.

• 1:18:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Jay Novella?

  And, yeah, that's why I said batteries won the race. Because it took 20 years longer than anyone thought it was going to, to get to work out the whole storage problem with hydrogen. And even that solution wasn't very good. And the hype, like, just completely outstripped reality. Completely outstripped.

• 1:18:22Bob Novella?

  Steve, imagine if the battle between electric cars and the internal combustion engine went towards, towards batteries over 100 years ago.

• 1:18:31Jay Novella?

  That was an infrastructure, yeah. Gasoline won because of infrastructure, not because of any inherent advantage. But that was, the case here was physics, though. It really was a problem. They never, and a lot of it was this magical thinking of, we're going to develop this convenient way to store hydrogen. They never did. That was pretty much the deal killer. You know, delayed it for long enough, that batteries won, right? So, that was the big issue. All right. But here's, I don't, I think there's even a bigger issue that we haven't even mentioned. Well, there's a couple. One little thing I wanna throw out, the PEM, the hydrogen fuel cell, has a critical element that it needs to operate, and it's platinum. And whenever you hear that, like, this technology requires platinum. That is never going to be adopted widespread.

• 1:19:16Jay Novella?

  So, the amount of platinum that we produce each year, most of which goes to a lot of other technology that we needed for, like, a lot of electronics use platinum. We would have to use all of the platinum that we produce just to have 10% of the cars on the road be hydrogen fuel cell. Why can't it ever be iron? Well, that's, we're always working on that, like, we're working on, because these rare elements have really great properties, like, electrical, electronic kind of properties. But, yeah, that's why they're always working on an iron battery or a sodium battery, yeah, because they're, it's abundant. It's, but yes, the platinum always works best. So, until we're like mining platinum group, platinum group asteroids, it's just not gonna happen. We're never gonna get to any substantial number of hydrogen fuel cells.

• 1:19:58Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not gonna happen then, Steve.

• 1:19:59Jay Novella?

  It's not gonna happen. Well, wait, but yeah, I mean, it's so obvious that nothing is gonna happen here because electric cars and the infrastructure is being put in and all that. There's so many problems and the thing that's interesting is every time a company makes an incremental advance in one of these issues, we can do it with 80% of the platinum that we were doing it before, or whatever, we have more efficiency on the, they announce like, finally, we're gonna have the hydrogen economy. No, you're not, because you still have all these other problems, some of which are never going away.

• 1:20:26Speaker 04

  What are the incentives to even continue working down this road? Like, why are some companies even still doing it?

• 1:20:30Jay Novella?

  I don't know.

• 1:20:31Bob Novella?

  What, niche applications?

• 1:20:32Jay Novella?

  No, even so, yeah, so you could say, well, there are niche applications for like railroad or big trucks, but even then, you run into the platinum problem, because the amount of platinum you need for a big truck is 10 times what you need for a passenger car, which is six or seven times what you need for a catalytic converter in an ICE engine. EVs use no platinum, by the way. You know, gasoline cars do, because you have a catalytic converter.

• 1:20:56Bob Novella?

  All right, the hydrogen is dead to all of us.

• 1:20:58Jay Novella?

  It's dead to all of us. All right, but I promise you, I'll get to Brian's point.

• 1:21:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Real quick, I think, I think what often happens in the sciences, but especially in sort of like tech and like the innovation space, is that people, they get tunnel vision, they get blinders on because they've dedicated their career to solving these problems. And it's really hard, it's, it's almost more than the sunk cost fallacy, because there is such a thing, right, in poker is being pot committed? And I think for some people, what will happen is they're like, unable to see the forest for the trees.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  They're redlining.

• 1:21:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, because they're so, yes, they're so invested in the trees, and that's where all of their knowledge is, yeah.

• 1:21:37Jay Novella?

  All right, so, the scaling issue. Where does most of the hydrogen that we, that is used by industry in the world, that's produced for use in the world, come from? What do you guys guess?

• 1:21:49Bob Novella?

  The sun.

• 1:21:50Jay Novella?

  No. Isn't it, is it gas in the earth that's up? No, that's theoretical.

• 1:21:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Water?

• 1:21:56Bob Novella?

  Water.

• 1:21:57Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:21:58Bob Novella?

  Not water?

• 1:21:59Jay Novella?

  No, it comes from fossil fuels.

• 1:22:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:22:02Jay Novella?

  Right? So, 65% of hydrogen, it's 100 million tons produced per year, 65% is stripped from natural gas.

• 1:22:11Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 1:22:12Jay Novella?

  20% from coal.

• 1:22:14Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 1:22:15Jay Novella?

  5 to 10% from oil and naphtha, 10% or so is industrial byproduct, and get what percent is left for green hydrogen? Green hydrogen means you're electrolyzing water with solar panels. 2%. Less than 1%.

• 1:22:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So, wait, was this, is this just like a greenwashing initiative?

• 1:22:33Jay Novella?

  100%, 100%.

• 1:22:35Bob Novella?

  You could've just told us that.

• 1:22:37Jay Novella?

  I know, that's the deal.

• 1:22:38Bob Novella?

  Anything else, and we'd know that's, we're done with it.

• 1:22:40Jay Novella?

  Whenever anyone's like, yeah, until we're getting a substantial amount of our hydrogen from green sources, it's a moot point.

• 1:22:47Bob Novella?

  Fuck hydrogen, it's all over.

• 1:22:49Jay Novella?

  No, seriously.

• 1:22:50Cara Santa Maria?

  So, these were the fossil fuel companies doing this, weren't they?

• 1:22:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, probably, because it's worse, it's environmentally, just burn the natural gas, it's better than stripping the hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen, again, you get that thermodynamics problem, it's dumb. So, and that's the scaling issue. We can, yeah, we can electrolyze water with solar panels, but it's hard to do it at scale, and, and then you get to, to Karas problems, and if you're gonna build all of those solar panels and wind turbines, just use the electricity, right? So, until we decarbonize the electrical grid, right, we decarbonize our electricity sources, we're not even close to that, until we do that, and we produce hydrogen to decarbonize industries that are hard to decarbonize, steel making, concrete and fertilizer, it's good for those, then, then you could think about

• 1:23:37Jay Novella?

  burning it in a fuel cell, right? But that's like the last thing you wanna use it for, and only after all those other things were done. So, talk to me in 100 years, and even then, it's dumb, because battery technology is gonna be so much better than anything you would use it for. It's really a dead technology, and it just amazes me, the hype that still surrounds every incremental advance in one tiny aspect of it, that doesn't address any of the multitude of deal killers.

• 1:24:05Bob Novella?

  Steve, don't worry, because we're all, after all this that you put us through, we are all gonna go out there and tell everybody that we know, and we're gonna kill this shit.

• 1:24:13Jay Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Can I, little shout out to LA, I was just looking this up, um, LADWP, so if you live in Los Angeles, right, yeah, water, power.

• 1:24:23Jay Novella?

  Has the best buildings, right? There are all these neoclassical, cool looking buildings around LA.

• 1:24:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Is 59% carbon free, our energy here in LA.

• 1:24:32Jay Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:24:33Bob Novella?

  That's awesome.

• 1:24:34Cara Santa Maria?

  41% is still carbon based, but 30 of that is natural gas, and then 11% is leftover petroleum, but we reached the milestone of being 100% new coal free. There's no coal going into our energy.

• 1:24:44Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 1:24:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's kinda cool.

• 1:24:46Jay Novella?

  You're welcome.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Jay Novella?

  All right, Andrea, whatever happened to the Segway?

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, first of all, can we just talk about how cool these people look in this picture of a Segway, that Steve has showed? Uh, second of all, when, when we went, decided to do this exercise, I was, I'm also an elder millennial, and I was like, what was something that I was super pumped about? Maybe not as pumped as you were about fen-phen, but, uh, what was I really excited about, and then, didn't transpire? And I was like, oh, yeah, Segways, because, at least for me, well, make some noise if you've been on a Segway. Woo! Some people, okay, maybe a third of the room, maybe a quarter, have any of you guys been on a Segway?

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  I honestly can't remember. I feel like maybe once, I don't know.

• 1:25:33Jay Novella?

  I have the, the one where you steer it with your knees. You ever see those?

• 1:25:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that real? Like a half Segway?

• 1:25:39Jay Novella?

  No, it's, it's really awesome. It's such a platform. You don't have, instead of the, the bar coming all the way up, and you have it in your hands.

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  Oh, it's sort of like the wheel that you can balance on?

• 1:25:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so you stand on the platform, and then, a thing comes up right where your knees are, and then you just like, kinda lean, and it, it does it.

• 1:25:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, you have that right now?

• 1:25:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah, when I got it, it was not expensive. And do you know why we have it?

• 1:26:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Why?

• 1:26:01Jay Novella?

  Because we were going to Dragon Con, and we wanted to play dementors and float along the ground.

• 1:26:06Speaker 04

  That's cool.

• 1:26:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, did they let you bring it?

• 1:26:10Jay Novella?

  That would've been epic.

• 1:26:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I was gonna say, you can't bring like a hoverboard on a plane, right?

• 1:26:13Jay Novella?

  I convinced Steve that we had to buy, I bought one, and then the whole thing fell apart, because Bob didn't do a goddamn thing.

• 1:26:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I also think they're banned, I don't think you can bring them on a plane.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  Luckily, Bob's not here today, so.

• 1:26:21Jay Novella?

  That's what happened, Bob.

• 1:26:22Cara Santa Maria?

  That's Bob.

• 1:26:23Bob Novella?

  That was your take, that's your memory of what happened?

• 1:26:25Jay Novella?

  Is that what happened, Steve? I don't remember.

• 1:26:27Bob Novella?

  So, imagine, imagine, you're on a Segway platform with this thing going up to your knees, and you're wearing robes that go to the ground, and you're, and you're scooting around. We would've killed ourselves. So, Jay, I didn't procrastinate, I saved your life.

• 1:26:41Jay Novella?

  Thank you, Bob.

• 1:26:44Speaker 04

  Well, that concludes my presentation on Segways, that's all I have to say. So, well, so I have been on a Segway, but I think only in like a Segway shop, like a store where you could try them out, in like, the Washington DC area, you could go, and it's like a novelty thing, and so I went and tried it out and drove around, I was like, this is the future. And so, so, since we all know, they, they have really only been used, I think we see them used by mall cops, and the occasional tourist group in like Chicago, where it's like a little too far to walk around. And so, I was thinking about it, I was like, well, where did they go? What happened? Right? And then, there's a couple of stories that maybe you, you all know from, from some of the timeline that, that I'll get to, but, but it's actually a little bit more complicated than I thought. So, so, the original inventor

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  is someone named Dean Kamen, and correct me if I'm saying his name wrong, some of you are, are nodding, who was an inventor before the Segway, and he continues to be an inventor to this day. And so, he did a lot of work before the Segway around, it was like an insulin, uh, uh, tool, and a wheelchair that you could use to kind of go upstairs, which was actually quite cool looking, if you, if you look it up.

• 1:27:50Jay Novella?

  We saw him demonstrate those at the.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  Oh, did you?

• 1:27:53Jay Novella?

  At the, um, Ig Nobel Awards.

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  Ah. All right, well, so, was the insulin, any, the, the tool, any good? Were people even using it?

• 1:28:01Jay Novella?

  I don't know, I don't treat that, either.

• 1:28:02Speaker 04

  You didn't prescribe fen-phen through his insulin pumps?

• 1:28:05Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  All right, so, so, he came up with the, with the Segway, and, and the idea at the time, and this is, you know, 1999 was the first patent, and by 2001, it was available on the market, and, and everyone was talking about it, you know, there are quotes from, Steve Jobs said, this is about to be bigger than the PC, and someone else, who's, whose name I don't recall, said that it was gonna be bigger than the internet. And this is, even then, it was insane, like, it was 2001, the internet wasn't as big as it has become, and even then, it's an outlandish claim. And so, people were really pumped about it, and it was this big solution to the final mile problem, right? You can use public transportation to, you can take a plane to New York, you can take the, the train from New York to the metro, you can take the subway, and you still have to walk this final mile. And so,

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  everyone was very excited to finally rid humans of having to walk ever again. Because that's obviously, Steve, you know as a doctor, this is obviously very, very bad for us to walk. And so.

• 1:28:58Bob Novella?

  Andrea, Andrea, one quote I remember from way back then was that, somebody actually said, cities will be built around the Segway. That was the quote, like, oh, my god.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  There was, it was like, you know, what cars did, they replaced the horse carriage, it's like, Segways are gonna replace the car. And I, so I was like, 18, 19, about to, like, I was going to college, and I was like, I'm gonna live in a car-free future, and we're all gonna go around on these like, coasting things, and we could dress as dementors if we want to.

• 1:29:24Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  And we can do all this. And then, in my memory, it sort of disappeared, and the only kind of two bullet points in, in, in the history that, that I kind of saw as the peripheral, because these things sort of do fade, you don't really hear about the downfall. But one was, maybe you remember, George W. Bush rode one, and fell hilariously. Which is like, no such thing as bad press. That was bad press. Like, it was, there were a couple of early adopters and early efforts to be like, "This is the future. Let's get all these high-profile people to use it." And they, you know, at least by the time Joe Biden fell off the bicycle, like bicycles had cemented their role in society. You know, like, we'd already agreed that those are gonna be around for a while. So, so a couple people fell, and there were a couple of, like, actual, because the early

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  version, you, if you've been on it, you know, it was very cool. There was this sort of balancing thing with the two wheels. And all you needed to do to go forward was to just lean a little bit. Like, it was this kind of very intuitive thing, but you had to steer still with two handles where you had to kind of twist somewhat awkwardly. And so people were just, again, hilariously falling off of curbs and slamming into people. And they eventually changed that part where you could just kind of lean. And so they did solve some of the problems. But the press was quite bad. It very quickly went from like this technology of the future to this sort of goofy-looking thing.

• 1:30:40Jay Novella?

  Wasn't that the ultimate problem? Was that you looked like a dork while you were riding it?

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  Well, so, and that's part of it, is like, and I've been thinking about it as I was reading about this, I was like, well, what, who decides whether someone looks like a dork or not? Right? Like, you could imagine a world where it's like, walking around and like, talking into earbuds where you can't even tell you're on a headphone. You look kind of dorky, because you just look like you're talking to no one. But we all kind of agreed that it's okay.

• 1:30:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  So there was something, I think, in the cultural ether, and this isn't a scientific claim, that really made it go from like, cool to what we all see right there, which is very dumb. Right?

• 1:31:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it also just felt like they were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:31:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we have things with wheels.

• 1:31:15Speaker 04

  Right. So, so we do have, again, the bicycle, if you've heard of it, is, was, was another contender at the time. But one of the problems as well, was it really didn't, they didn't quite figure out, is it a replacement for a car? Or is it in like a dense city like New York City? Or is it a replacement, or even here? Or is it a replacement for walking? And if you're not really deciding which problem you're solving, you're sort of solving neither.

• 1:31:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And what percentage of people who can't walk can still stand and control a Segway?

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  Right. Right.

• 1:31:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So, it's like, people who can walk, but just don't want to.

• 1:31:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so, so a couple other problems is that one of the early cities, the, Dean Kamen, the inventor, lives in the Northeast, and one of the key cities that they were gonna start in was New York City. And very early on, New York City said, "Okay, it is officially illegal to drive these things on a sidewalk, because you're gonna slam into people, and it's gonna cause a huge problem." But they're also not robust enough, fast enough, safe enough to drive on a road. Right? And we didn't really have bike lanes in New York City at that time. And so you couldn't really put it anywhere. One of the other problems was it was promised, again, as this replacement for walking, is like, "Okay, if you live too far away from the bus stop or the train stop, you take this thing." And then it's like, "Okay, well, then what do you do with it?" Because you can't like, it's quite heavy, it's quite cumbersome, you can't just pick it up and take it with you to work.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  You can't lock it up like a bike, because it's a very expensive piece of technology. And so there were a couple of practical issues. It was also very expensive.

• 1:32:39Jay Novella?

  So, it was ultimately, then, an infrastructure problem, right?

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:32:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43Speaker 04

  It was, it was an infrastructure problem, but it was also, it was, it was not practical enough to be worth the cost. They, they did stay in business, and people were using them, but they did very quickly become more of a novelty thing. And so they kind of started to solve these very, very specific problems. Others of you might remember another famous story, which was kind of the last gasp I had heard of Segway news until, until I looked into it, which was that the person who bought the company from Dean Kamen died on a Segway. Do you remember this?

• 1:33:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was wondering if that was a myth, when you said the "oh."

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  No. Right. So I thought, so I was like, not in the know on this, and I figured it was the inventor who died. "Oh my god, that's crazy." But it's not the inventor. The inventor is still alive, doing some weird stuff. We can talk about that in a second. But someone bought it, this, this like, rich dude, I think, from, from the UK. And the, the story I had heard originally, and tell me if you heard this too, was that he rode it off a cliff.

• 1:33:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 04

  And, but I, now, I was reading about it, I've tried my best to, to fact-check this thoroughly, it seems like he actually drove into a river. Is that better, worse? It's almost less impressive. Like, a cliff, you kind of, like, "Oh, I didn't see it coming." Like, you see a river. Right? Like, what was he doing? And he, he drowned. And so that was bad. Also, bad press.

• 1:33:56Jay Novella?

  Right. So he drives, he drives it into a river, like, you're not attached to it, all he had to do was just go up?

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  There's a lot that we don't understand about that piece of it.

• 1:34:04Jay Novella?

  But you know, you know what would explain everything? They were both on drugs.

• 1:34:08Speaker 04

  They were, they had all been on drugs. So, so even then, so this was, this was, you know, not, this was, we're in like, 2009, 2010, 2000, like, up through 2015. The company is still hanging on. They're still making Segways. You're still seeing them, to this day, you can go use it at like, a tourist place, you can become a mall cop, and then, I'm sure there's a third use, I don't know what that third use is. But eventually, they sold the company to a, a company called, I believe it's called Ninebot, which is a Chinese, like, electronic robotics, uh, transportation company. And so it now is owned by Ninebot. Segway stopped production. It no longer makes actual, original brand Segways. They, those stopped in the year 2020.

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  Something like, a total of like, 14,000 Segways ever were actually sold. Like, very, very few, for replacing cars, the way that they replaced horse carriages. But, the Chinese company is still alive and well, and you can buy new, they've made newer ones, they're smaller now, they're lighter, they've solved some of the kind of steering problems. But they also, and this was, I had no idea, they used a lot of this technology, the kind of gyroscope technology that allowed that early balancing, is actually in a lot of the e-scooters that we use today. So if you're taking Lime, or, or whatever, even around LA, a lot of that original innovation, a lot of those early patents from Dean Kamen, are behind the technology that eventually

• 1:35:32Speaker 04

  was used for things that are much more practical, that, that kind of get past some of the infrastructure problems, that don't require us to rethink how roads and sidewalks work. And so that, that company integrated a lot of that technology, and is actually doing very well. And we are seeing a lot of the uses of this, this, uh, technology today. I will also say that Dean Kamen is a weird dude. Because you can look him up, he, he lives in New Hampshire on some kind of big estate, but he bought, um, an island in the Long Island Sound called North Dumpling Island. Does anyone know about this? It's a, it's an, he owns it, and he officially seceded from the United States. And I think, whoever was president at the time, it was either Trump or, or, it was a Republican, okay? I'm not being partisan, it just, it was.

• 1:36:16Speaker 04

  Uh, they, they granted him like, his own, like, the currency is called the dumpling, if you live there, you're a dumplonian. Like, it's their own, they're off the grid, it's independent. So he's just this, like, kind of eccentric, rich dude who's doing, he's continuing to do a lot of work. A lot of it is in like, green technology, and, and, you know, getting rid of our dependence on fossil fuels in this kind of strange way where he flies between New Hampshire and, and this tiny island.

• 1:36:40Jay Novella?

  Andrew, like, he, he picked an island off of Long Island as his country?

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  Well, it's off of Mystic, Connecticut, it's closer. But, uh, yeah, it's not, it's not a great.

• 1:36:48Jay Novella?

  I just want to say, look, I'm from New Jersey, I feel it important to say this publicly, Long Island sucks.

• 1:36:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. It, it is off the coast of Connecticut, we can weigh in on, on all of that. But the last thing I'll say, and we don't need to dwell on it unless you want to, is he also, uh, well, one good, one last good thing, and then one bad thing. One good thing, he also, in the process of the last 20 years, since Segway fizzled out and became what it is today, founded a youth, uh, kind of nonprofit called FIRST, it stands for something, something, something robotics. And it gets kids, you get it. It gets kids really excited about robotics and innovation, and a pathway to STEM, so it's like, for children to get involved in, so that's all lovely. He resigned from the board of that company in January of this year, because of ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

• 1:37:32Speaker 04

  And, uh, and this is where I will conclude today's seminar, uh, of inspirational words for you on innovation, where it turns out, he, he, he denied that he was involved in blah, blah, blah, but then he's on a bunch of flight logs, and then it turns out, he, he hired someone to work at this organization, who was one of Jeffrey Epstein, like, the women who was part of the, so it's all very unsavory. But you can still take a Segway ride, uh, in many of our great cities today. Thank you very much.

• 1:38:03Jay Novella?

  It's a, it's a great example of, which you can read it all about in our book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Future, by the way.

• 1:38:09Speaker 04

  Where is that book?

• 1:38:10Jay Novella?

  For sale, at the back of the room. Uh, no, seriously, but we talk a lot about technologies that failed, and oftentimes, they don't fail because the technology fails, they fail because there's no killer app or use case, or, they just couldn't predict how people would react to the technology. And that was, it's just, the Segway is like, our classic example.

• 1:38:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Jay Novella?

  What's the use case?

• 1:38:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Google Glass.

• 1:38:30Jay Novella?

  Google Glass.

• 1:38:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, it works, right? People just don't want to wear them.

• 1:38:34Speaker 04

  I think about it a lot, where it's like, "Oh, if only I could, you know, make the perfect thing, and we can develop a perfect thing." And it's like, no, you're not inventing in a vacuum. You're inventing in a world where people are gonna have to use this and navigate an existing world.

• 1:38:45Jay Novella?

  All right, Jay, whatever happened to going to Mars? Does everyone remember when Elon Musk was telling us that we're gonna go to Mars? I think I had a Mandela effect happen in this. I distinctly remember that they were, they were recruiting people to go live on Mars. Yeah, right. Company was it wasn't Musk. It wasn't Musk.

• 1:39:05Bob Novella?

  You had to submit like an application. It was like a contest.

• 1:39:07Speaker 04

  And they picked some people and there was a couple and one of them got chosen. And he was like, I'm so lucky. My partner is so supportive of me going to Mars. And everyone was like, she wants to break up with you.

• 1:39:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Was that was that Mars one?

• 1:39:19Bob Novella?

  Yeah. That's what it was.

• 1:39:21Jay Novella?

  Didn't we interview someone? I think we interviewed some. Okay, great. It wasn't this. That could be a possibility. Yeah. So the question is, you know, there was a lot of talk about this and Elon Musk was like, really like seemingly going all in on this and was, you know, making big proclamations. So what I did was I very quickly, I just put together a timeline of everything that's happened since 2001. I'm going to go through this pretty fast. So this whole thing started back in 2001 to 2002 where Musk said that that he wanted to put a greenhouse on Mars. One, as a proof of concept and two, to reignite excitement for space exploration. And, you know, it's cool. Okay, great. And you're going to pay for it and everything and it seemed like, yeah.

• 1:40:03Jay Novella?

  So within that same two year span, the project was abandoned because the costs were too high.

• 1:40:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it's an idiotic idea.

• 1:40:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but again, if he's paying for it, who gives a shit? But the result of that was that Musk founded SpaceX because he wanted to reduce the cost of getting to space. Okay, cool. Right. You know, so something came out of it. And to his credit, he freaking did. I mean, that, this is the time period where like, oh, Musk was pretty cool. I mean, SpaceX is working. And even today, you know, I did a huge deep dive on the whole, like, what's the cheapest way to get into orbit? Space plan, blah, blah, blah. It's basically, you know, the Falcon 9 kind of approach is the cheapest way to get into low Earth orbit. And, and so, you know, because he made that frigging rocket land and be reusable. And, you know, just to clarify things, like, you know, he hires amazing engineers.

• 1:40:54Jay Novella?

  Like, I saw a picture of what their first jet rocket engine looked like. And it was like, it just looked like a bomb went off inside the jet engine. There was pipes everywhere. It was all weird looking. It, you know, it didn't look like, you know, it could even be contained to put on a ship. And then they showed the iteration of like 10 years of them working on it. And now it is the most elegant streamlined, unbelievable piece of technology. Again, it's he didn't do it. He just tells people, do it, you know, and he gets these fantastic engineers. So you have to, I think we have to keep in mind that even he's a jerk, but he's got a lot of really good people that are working for his companies. Anyway, so right after, right after that failure, but SpaceX is born.

• 1:41:38Jay Novella?

  He then tells the public that SpaceX, the purpose of the company is to make humanity a multi-planetary species. Remember that bullshit?

• 1:41:48Jay Novella?

  And he really sold that. And a lot of people believed it. Did he? I don't know. We're like as enthusiastic as you can get about, you know, getting people into space. And we didn't buy it for a minute. Well, I mean, it wasn't that, I didn't buy that it was going to happen soon. I bought that it could happen. Eventually. And it has to start somewhere. Package that he was selling was like, really, come on. But he did, a lot of people were like, oh yeah, it was like, you know, it was a fact because the billionaire said it.

• 1:42:14Jay Novella?

  The reality was though, during the 2002 to 2015 time period that the company, they did focus on developing reusable rockets. And again, this was like all that they were really doing. And they, you know, they weren't like developing a Mars mission. They were just building the rocket. Then from 2011 to 2017, the idea of the Red Dragon came into existence. He said, you know, Musk said SpaceX is now planning to land an uncrewed Dragon capsule on Mars as early as 2018. It's not working out. Yeah. So not even close. Like, that was, that was such an unbelievable lie.

• 1:42:54Jay Novella?

  It wasn't even an exaggeration. It was, it was not possible at that time because like Steve was saying about the hydrogen economy. Tons of technologies that didn't exist needed to be created and he, and his company couldn't build all the technology. It had to be done by NASA and space agencies and private venture. It just was not a reality at all. It was a complete hoax. So even then, his Red Dragon concept fell behind schedule. The landing system, they abandoned the whole landing system and then Red Dragon was canceled in 2017. So right now, we have two missions that he announced that were both canceled. Now we move on to, during 2016, Musk was telling the public that humans could reach Mars by the 2020s.

• 1:43:38Jay Novella?

  He said that Starship was going to carry 100 people to Mars. Remember that? Like 100 people are going to go to Mars. He also said that tickets would eventually cost around $200,000. What? And then he said, there's going to be a city of 1 million people that could exist on Mars. And he was like basically saying the infrastructure could be, you know, could exist and all that. A million people is an amazing amount of people.

• 1:44:00Cara Santa Maria?

  How much ketamine do you think he was on at this time?

• 1:44:04Jay Novella?

  I don't know. I think he was just doing what he could do to make himself money, you know, like just says things and his income goes up.

• 1:44:13Jay Novella?

  Like I said, the reality here was that the technologies didn't exist. He was also including in the list of technologies that there needed to be orbital refueling for the Mars thing to happen. That's true. And that is remarkably dangerous and it's, you know, the technology doesn't exist yet. It's achievable, but it's a really big piece of technology that is going to take a long time to develop. It's not like, you know, they can't just do it in a couple of years. Moving on now into 2017, he announced his BFR, right? The Big F and Rocket, later renamed as Starship. So he said that they're going to be doing cargo missions with the Starship in 2022. Then there's going to be a crewed flight in 2024.

• 1:44:56Jay Novella?

  And the reality is neither of them happened. Starship was not even completed by, by 2024. They didn't have, they didn't have the integrated test flight system, the cargo mission, none of it, none of it happened. In 2023, he did start Starship testing, which is fine. He told the public Starship is the vehicle that will take humans to Mars. You know, he was still doing it. And then the reality was that SpaceX, they did make genuine progress. They did. They did fantastic work. They were testing all launches, reentry, the booster recovery. And we all saw it on TV. It was fantastic.

• 1:45:35Cara Santa Maria?

  But none of it had to do with Mars.

• 1:45:36Jay Novella?

  No, no, it absolutely did not. At that time, they still had an experimental launch system. It was not operational. It was not an operational Mars spacecraft by any measure. And then later in that year, they were doing recruitment. He told the public, ordinary people, not just astronauts, could someday move to Mars. And, you know, he was discussing, again, further ticket prices.

• 1:45:58Bob Novella?

  Once you're on your way to Mars, aren't you by definition an astronaut?

• 1:46:02Jay Novella?

  That's an interesting discussion. I thought it was if you go to a certain altitude, you're an astronaut.

• 1:46:07Speaker 04

  So like Katy Perry is not an astronaut, right?

• 1:46:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's the difference, right? Are we talking about a payload specialist or are we talking about a career?

• 1:46:14Jay Novella?

  But we, but what we determined on the show though, what we agreed on the show many years ago. Definitive, by the way, that's not.

• 1:46:20Bob Novella?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:46:21Jay Novella?

  No, we were all, we were all mutually agreeing that like an astronaut isn't just going to an altitude. It's a job classification that comes with skill sets. Because I think it's just needed to do it that way. Well, the thing is, all people going to space were astronauts, but now we're getting to the point where tourists are going to space. Are they astronauts?

• 1:46:37Bob Novella?

  You would differentiate between a space tourist and an astronaut.

• 1:46:39Jay Novella?

  Yes, yes. So in other words, it's not a sport.

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  What if you fight each other in space?

• 1:46:47Jay Novella?

  Space boxing.

• 1:46:48Bob Novella?

  Space chess boxing.

• 1:46:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this gentleman right here had an amazing, has an amazing life. He was trying to tell me that chess is a sport and we argued about it. And then he said, well, it is because he did chess boxing.

• 1:47:03Cara Santa Maria?

  He was a world champion.

• 1:47:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, he didn't just do it. He held the title of world champion chess boxer.

• 1:47:14Jay Novella?

  And I've decided I don't care if you're lying. I think you're awesome.

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  And his laughter appears in the background of the gods must be crazy.

• 1:47:28Jay Novella?

  And many other things we don't know about. So the reality of the whole, like, ordinary people can go to Mars and everything. SpaceX never opened formal, you know, Mars astronaut or settler recruitment programs. They never selected anyone to be on any Mars based crew. They're still developing their technology. And it really, I don't know. I mean, it was all just him hyping and bullshit. It really was just all bullshit. So at least along the way, he's developing usable, practical rocket technology, which is fine. Hyped it for Mars though is annoying and creating unrealistic expectations. And then also then you get a backlash.

• 1:48:09Jay Novella?

  But the other thing is like with the hydrogen thing, none of this addresses the key reason why we're not sending people to Mars. Radiation, radiation. Thank you. So until you solve the radiation issue, we're not sending anybody nowhere, right? This is not happening. You can't spend a year or two years in space without the atmosphere as a shield. And so that, you know, they, it's a critical thing that needs to be addressed. Just making a slightly better rocket is not going to, not going to fix it.

• 1:48:37Bob Novella?

  And there's no real good plans. I mean, we interviewed somebody from NASA and she's like, yeah, that's a big problem. But you just have to get there fast and deal with any medical problems that might arise. That's the plan. It's a really hard nut to crack and until, and Jay, has Musk even addressed the radiation issue?

• 1:48:55Jay Novella?

  I don't think he's ever even said the.

• 1:48:56Bob Novella?

  Right. It's just ridiculous.

• 1:48:59Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the part that frustrates me is yes, like there's a lot of interesting technology that's been developed. And I don't think anybody can argue against that. But why are you talking about terraforming Mars before you solve the problem of getting there?

• 1:49:11Jay Novella?

  So Brian, you are going to actually do your first science or fiction?

• 1:49:18Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 1:49:21Speaker 00

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  So, okay, I have participated in several, but I've never run it before because Steve decided to offload some of his work onto me. To echo a thing Steve says, there's a theme this week. And I was thinking about the string theory stuff I was talking about. So the theme of this week's Science or Fiction is Math and Physics in Higher Spatial Dimensions. Whoa.

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  Perfect. We already know everything about this thing. We'll be fine.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  I also figured it was something Steve wouldn't already know everything about. Okay. Item one. Although the volume of a D-dimensional cube with sides of length 1 stays constant as you increase the number of dimensions, the volume of a D-dimensional sphere with radius 1 grows without bound, having the asymptotic functional form of an exponential. Item two. Black holes in four spacetime dimensions are uniquely characterized by their mass and angular momentum, but the equivalent result in five spacetime dimensions is no longer

• 1:50:44Speaker 02

  true, meaning that there can be multiple singular solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations with the same mass and angular momentum.

• 1:50:51Speaker 04

  I thought you were gonna make this hard for us.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  And finally, item three. The densest way to pack D-dimensional spheres is known only in dimensions 1, 2, 3, 8, and 24, and otherwise remains an open problem in mathematics.

• 1:51:11Speaker 04

  Two of these are true?

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  Two of these are true. One of them is not. Can you read the real ones to us now? I'm kinda scared right now. Steve, do you regret letting me do this?

• 1:51:26Jay Novella?

  Oh, no, not for a moment.

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Well, then you should go first.

• 1:51:30Jay Novella?

  All right, fine. Well, clearly, one is true. I mean, I don't think anybody had any question about that one.

• 1:51:37Speaker 04

  It is trivial to show that.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. The proof is left as an exercise to the podcast.

• 1:51:43Jay Novella?

  And I like the densest way to pack D-dimensional spheres problem. I'm very fond of that. So I'm gonna say that the black holes one is the fiction.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  Okay. Bob, since you're looking at me like that.

• 1:51:56Cara Santa Maria?

  So just no reasoning for anything.

• 1:52:00Bob Novella?

  I assume it's okay. I'm looking at these.

• 1:52:02Speaker 02

  There's no indication in the thing Bob is looking at which one is the fiction.

• 1:52:06Bob Novella?

  All right, so the third one here, packing D-dimensional spheres, known only in dimensions 1, 2, 3, 8, and 24. I mean, those numbers ring a bell to me for some stupid reason, and probably, you know...

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  Well, three, you live in three dimensions.

• 1:52:18Bob Novella?

  Yes, but 8 and 24 makes sense in terms of higher-dimensional theories that I have, you know, dabbled in, of course, don't know very well at all. But those numbers seem like kind of like iconic numbers. So I gotta grab something here, you know? There's so little for me to actually grab onto. So I'll say that one is science. Let's see, the cube... Oh, man, dude, this is crazy.

• 1:52:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Talk out loud, think it through. It's a podcast.

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  I put the black holes one in just for you.

• 1:52:52Bob Novella?

  I appreciate that one. I appreciate that one, but I mean, you really want me to... You wanna hear me read this one about black holes again?

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  I wanna just hear what your thoughts are.

• 1:53:00Jay Novella?

  Yeah, just pick, Bob, there's three, and you pick one of them.

• 1:53:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but Brian just said he wants to hear my thoughts on them, so that's a different thing than what you just said.

• 1:53:09Jay Novella?

  He's just being kind.

• 1:53:12Bob Novella?

  So mass and angular momentum, yeah, those are critical bits of information, obviously for a black hole. Five spacetime dimensions, that's no longer true. I'll say that for five spacetime dimensions, I think that angular momentum and mass would still be incredibly important, so I'll say black holes is fiction.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:53:32Speaker 04

  Is that what's...

• 1:53:33Jay Novella?

  Solid reasoning, Bob.

• 1:53:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, really.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  All right, should we just go down? We'll go down one now.

• 1:53:37Cara Santa Maria?

  You gotta pass it, yeah.

• 1:53:38Jay Novella?

  All right, so the third one, because the word mathematics is in it, it's science. That one's science. The second one, the vacuum Einstein, I'll buy one of those.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll define stuff if you want me to define stuff. Do you know what I mean by that?

• 1:53:55Jay Novella?

  It really would just be painful for you to tell me what these things mean. I do...

• 1:54:00Speaker 04

  I thought this podcast was about seeking knowledge.

• 1:54:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Until it gets too hard.

• 1:54:04Speaker 04

  And then you're like, "Do not tell me."

• 1:54:08Jay Novella?

  There's seeking knowledge, then there's rubbing your forehead with a cheese grater. So, you know, look, the vacuum Einstein sounds brilliant, I think that's science. The first one, D-dimensional, I don't know, I think you made that up. This whole thing is ridiculous.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  D is just the number of dimensions, that's all I mean by that.

• 1:54:28Jay Novella?

  Look, I'm talking here. You come at me with D-dimensional, and I'll say F-dimensional. What do you guys say about that?

• 1:54:37Speaker 02

  It's a variable, dude, you can call it what you want.

• 1:54:39Jay Novella?

  Look, you see, he immediately reverts to like the inner talk, the language that we physicists speak. It's, you know, come on, it's bullshit. So, one is nonsense, you made it up in the bathroom.

• 1:54:48Cara Santa Maria?

  What'd you pick?

• 1:54:49Jay Novella?

  Thanks.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  He said number one.

• 1:54:51Jay Novella?

  One is the fiction.

• 1:54:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, and then Bob and Steve think that the black holes is the fiction. So everybody likes the densest way to pack D-dimensional spheres. So just can you define for me, like, one dimension is...

• 1:55:06Speaker 02

  Length.

• 1:55:07Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I thought. How do you put a three-dimensional sphere into one dimension?

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  Well, you don't. So what that means is, as you increase the... So a one-dimensional sphere is a line segment.

• 1:55:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  Right, a two-dimensional sphere is like a circle.

• 1:55:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's still called a one-dimensional sphere, even though it's not a three...

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you could call it a hypersphere if you wanted to.

• 1:55:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Damn it, I thought I found it.

• 1:55:24Speaker 04

  I was gonna still call it a hypersphere.

• 1:55:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, yeah, I thought that was a loophole here. Okay, so reasoning through this, that would've been why I would've picked the 1, 2, 3, 8, and 24 one, but now maybe that is science. Should I trust that Bob has heard of the 8 and 24 thing? Or is that what you want him to do? So the black hole one, so now we're split between the two. The black hole one, so something changes once you're in five dimensions?

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  It is adorable that you think you could reason your way through these things. This is partly why I wanted to do these, is to see what people would say.

• 1:55:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know how obvious these are to him, or if he like left an Easter egg in here that we're supposed to be, like, something that should be obvious to us.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  Like, if you read it backwards, it says, "This is fiction, you dummy."

• 1:56:10Cara Santa Maria?

  D-dimensional cube with sides of length 1 stays constant as you increase, but a D-dimensional sphere with a different radius grows without bound. Hmm, that's interesting. I don't know, I feel like space, something about spheres and they're most conserved, and I don't know, I kinda like that one. So I think I'm gonna say that the black hole one is fiction.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  Okay. I will say, when I was writing this, I was like, "Is this gonna be too obvious?"

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

  That is the greatest insult you've ever said to all of us. And that is after not picking us up from the airport. All right.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  You're the only one who didn't complain about that.

• 1:56:49Speaker 04

  I get it. I'm not picking anyone up.

• 1:56:51Cara Santa Maria?

  She lives in New York.

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, no one's picking. Can you imagine? I'd have to rent a car to go get you.

• 1:56:57Jay Novella?

  Or a Segway.

• 1:56:58Speaker 04

  I could take a Segway, and you could ride on my back. I'll do that next time. All right, so I wanna start with the densest way to pack D-dimensional spheres, because we've all been packing very densely for the last... So I feel like I have a personal firsthand knowledge on this, and I have packed several D-dimensional spheres for our trip. I do think it might be known in a few other dimensions, so I'm thinking that this one might be the fiction, but before I say that for sure, I want to ask Brian a question about the volume of a D... This is the one that I'm trying to reason through, and I think I shouldn't be trying to do it. The volume of a D-dimensional cube with sides of length 1 stays constant as you increase the number of dimensions, but the volume of a D-dimensional sphere with radius 1 grows without bound. That seems plausible to me, but I guess I don't know, how do you think about volume after three dimensions?

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Right, so that is a good question.

• 1:57:44Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  You need to think about, so there's some equivalent of, let's say, if you had a square object, or a...

• 1:57:53Speaker 04

  Like a tesseract or something.

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  Like a, not a hypercube, but like a hyper... What's the word I'm looking for? Things with rectangular sides. It's not length times width times height, it's the extent in each dimension, for example, for a simple object like that.

• 1:58:08Speaker 04

  So what you're saying is there's something special about having no corners that makes the volume grow without bound?

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna comment on the reasoning for it.

• 1:58:16Speaker 04

  You're not gonna say what you're saying, all right.

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  What I will say is, you do need to define how you speak about volumes in higher dimensions.

• 1:58:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:58:24Speaker 02

  The units, for example, change. In 2D, it's area, right? Let's say square units, 3D, it's cubic units, then you have units to the fourth, units to the fifth, units to the sixth, et cetera.

• 1:58:33Speaker 04

  We didn't name the rest of those?

• 1:58:35Speaker 02

  No, sadly not.

• 1:58:36Speaker 04

  Area, volume, and then four, five, six, seven.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Hypervolume, I guess, yeah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, all right. All right, well, I'm gonna say that one is true, because it sounds cool. And most people have said the black holes one is fiction, and so I'm gonna say that's also true, for some cognitive diversity in this room. Which leaves, as I originally suspected, I think there are some dimensions missing in the dense packing, so I'm gonna say number three is fiction.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  All right. Okay, so where we landed on this is, Andrew, you think number three is fiction. Correct. Kara, Jay, and Bob think number two is fiction.

• 1:59:08Jay Novella?

  So I picked number one.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Oh, you picked number one.

• 1:59:10Jay Novella?

  Kara, Stephen, Bob.

• 1:59:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Kara, Stephen, Bob.

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  Kara, Stephen, Bob think number two is fiction, and Jay thinks number one is fiction.

• 1:59:15Jay Novella?

  Now you gotta hold the audience.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll read them, and then we'll vote, okay? So I'll read each one, and then we'll say if we think it's fiction. All right, number one says, "Although the volume of a D-dimensional cube with sides of length 1 stays constant as you increase the number of dimensions, the volume of a D-dimensional sphere with radius 1 grows without bound, having the asymptotic functional form of an exponential." We're gonna do the George Robb single clap thing. If you think this item, number one, is the fiction, clap now.

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  Uh-oh.

• 1:59:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, you guys.

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  You guys don't believe in spheres.

• 1:59:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Individuals.

• 1:59:47Speaker 02

  All right, number two. Black holes in four spacetime dimensions are uniquely characterized by their mass and angular momentum, but the equivalent result in five spacetime dimensions is no longer true, meaning that there can be multiple singular solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations with the same mass and angular momentum. If you think this is the fiction, clap now.

• 2:00:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Sounds better.

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  Number three. The densest way to pack D-dimensional spheres is known only in dimensions 1, 2, 3, 8, and 24, and otherwise remains an open problem in mathematics. If you think this is the fiction, clap now. So it seems like an even split between two and three, right?

• 2:00:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah, run them again.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  With a distinct minority of people thinking number one.

• 2:00:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Which means one is...

• 2:00:24Speaker 04

  The fiction.

• 2:00:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Speaker 02

  All right, we are going to take these in reverse order. Starting with number three. The densest way to pack d-dimensional spheres is known only in dimensions 1, 2, 3, 8, and 24, and otherwise remains an open problem in mathematics, and this is science. Thank you. This is a known result, that's right. Sphere packings in three dimensions, you know, it's like stacking oranges is the classic thing, but it's generally an open problem in math, except in special dimensions. Does anyone know why? Can anyone guess why in special dimensions, we might know something about this?

• 2:01:03Jay Novella?

  They're evenly divisible by something? No.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  No. Mathematicians were able to find special lattices where they put the centers of spheres in these extra dimensions, which are particularly good for creating these sphere packings. And what's interesting about this-

• 2:01:20Jay Novella?

  That was my second guess.

• 2:01:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  The problem, which is not known, and this is a big problem with sphere packing, is why does the densest packing have to be on a regular lattice? How do you know that it can't just be some crazy irregular thing? And in some dimensions, I think 10 being 1, there is an irregular sphere packing which is known to be denser than a regular sphere packing. So the general problem is wide open, and only in these certain special dimensions do we actually know what the densest packing is.

• 2:01:51Speaker 04

  It sounds like you don't know that I've discovered several of these other dimensions.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  Write it up.

• 2:01:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  Now, Bob, you did say 8 and 24 sound interesting to you. Here's why. 8 plus 2 is 10, and 24 plus 2 is 26.

• 2:02:05Jay Novella?

  Of course.

• 2:02:06Speaker 04

  Ah. I see.

• 2:02:07Speaker 02

  Which are critical dimensions for string theory.

• 2:02:09Speaker 04

  Ah, yeah.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  So, the bosonic string theory naturally sits in 26 dimensions, and superstrings naturally sit in 10 dimensions, and those are related. So 8 and 24 are special things that do show up in string theory.

• 2:02:23Speaker 04

  Steve, can you make sure Brian never does this again?

• 2:02:27Speaker 02

  Okay. Number two. Black holes in four spacetime dimensions are uniquely characterized by their mass and angular momentum, but the equivalent result in five spacetime dimensions is no longer true, meaning that there can be multiple singular solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations with the same mass and angular momentum. Now, Bob, Steve, and Kara, think this is the fiction, and this is science. Oh, my God!

• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  Jay, how did you know?

• 2:02:57Jay Novella?

  I accept this award, honey. I want everyone to know that I did it for the children. And if I were a trillionaire, all of you would have luxury yachts that said "SGU Forever" on it. Thank you very much.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  So, this is actually really, really interesting.

• 2:03:14Jay Novella?

  I'm sure.

• 2:03:15Speaker 02

  Can anyone guess what, so in five dimensions, what might you do with a black hole that's different than in four dimensions?

• 2:03:22Jay Novella?

  And what would you do with it?

• 2:03:23Speaker 02

  What could be a different property of a black hole be? How could black holes in 5D be different than black holes in 4D?

• 2:03:29Jay Novella?

  Maybe the gravity is different with five dimensions?

• 2:03:31Bob Novella?

  Something, is it something with the singularity?

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  It is the shape of the singularity, yeah. The difference is that the event horizons can have different topology. So in 5D, you can get something called black rings, where the event horizon is like a torus. So it's like if you take a two-sphere, a ball, and then moved it around in the circle, that can be the event horizon of a black ring. And it turns out, in five dimensions, there are certain values of the mass and angular momentum of the black hole, where it could have either the standard spherical event horizon or this ring type of event horizon.

• 2:04:09Jay Novella?

  So Brian, if you were in the fifth dimension, would it behave differently to you than if it was in three dimensions?

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a different solution, yeah, it's a different structure, so, yeah.

• 2:04:20Jay Novella?

  That's crazy. So like, so wait, so like-

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  So I'll tell you what's interesting about it. Why, in four dimensions, it kind of immediately collapses. You might think that the black hole would just attract itself, so if you formed an event horizon that was a torus or something, it would just collapse in. Turns out, in five dimensions, you can have that thing rotate in a way that cancels out the gravitational attraction, and those two forces, for kind of technical reasons, balance each other out and are stable.

• 2:04:47Bob Novella?

  And Brian, when you say "dimensions," you're always referring to spatial dimensions, not temporal.

• 2:04:51Speaker 02

  So, in this case, I said four spacetime dimensions, because it's important that there is a time dimension. So four spacetime dimensions is one time in three space, five spacetime dimensions is one time in four space.

• 2:05:03Bob Novella?

  Okay. I have come across articles that discussed two different types of temporal dimensions, and of course, space as well. Have you ever come across anything like that? Two-time dimensions?

• 2:05:14Speaker 02

  2T stuff is not well thought of by most physicists.

• 2:05:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's bullshit, Bob. This stuff is real.

• 2:05:23Jay Novella?

  I just had a-

• 2:05:24Bob Novella?

  It's interesting to think about.

• 2:05:25Jay Novella?

  I just had a very strange sensation, guys. I actually felt for like, a nanosecond that I started to understand this shit.

• 2:05:33Jay Novella?

  That's an illusion, Jay.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  It does turn out that in theories with more than one time dimension, you naturally get tachyons as part of the spectrum of particles, which indicate, a tachyon is not, you know, the common thing, is it's a faster-than-light particle. Really what it means is that you have an unstable theory. They're particles with, what we'd say in physics, is negative mass squared. So it indicates that there's some fundamental problem with the vacuum state of your theory. So if you have, because it's a lower-energy state, if they have negative mass squared, then you can start producing tachyons and go to a lower-energy state, right? And that's bad. Physics always wants to go to a lower-energy state. So-

• 2:06:12Speaker 04

  I love Andrea's actively listening over here. Mm-hmm, right, right, yeah.

• 2:06:16Speaker 02

  A theory with tachyons, something went wrong. You misunderstood something.

• 2:06:20Speaker 04

  It's like tachycardia from the pit, right?

• 2:06:23Jay Novella?

  So, the bottom line, when you hear about tachyons in science fiction, it's bullshit. It's like, nah.

• 2:06:27Speaker 02

  That is not the way any physicist thinks about tachyons. Tachyons, who are physicists, theoretical physicists, because they're theoretical, are indicative of some problem with your vacuum state of the theory.

• 2:06:40Jay Novella?

  But it sounds cool, though, tachyon.

• 2:06:41Speaker 02

  It does sound cool.

• 2:06:42Jay Novella?

  It's a cool word.

• 2:06:43Speaker 02

  All right. So we're gonna go to number one. Although the volume of a d-dimensional cube with sides of length 1 stays constant as you increase the number of dimensions, the volume of a d-dimensional sphere with radius 1 grows without bound, having the asymptotic functional form of an exponential. This is the fiction.

• 2:06:59Jay Novella?

  So why, Jay?

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  Which means Jay got it right.

• 2:07:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, Jay, explain it. Yeah, Jay, tell us why.

• 2:07:02Jay Novella?

  I told you, it's F-dimension, D-dimension is bullshit.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  I will say, the first half of this is obvious, that the hypercube stays constant volume, because if the lengths are all size 1, then the volume is 1 times 1 times 1 times 1 times 1 times 1, et cetera, to any number of dimensions. Now, in some sense, that is how you define higher volumes, right? You take that cube as like, your unit volume in the higher dimensions. So that's a little bit of a hedge, but that is how you define volumes. The interesting thing about higher-dimensional spheres, can anyone guess what happens to the volume of a sphere as the dimension goes to higher and higher?

• 2:07:41Speaker 04

  Maybe it's six.

• 2:07:41Speaker 02

  No, this is the fiction.

• 2:07:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, Jay, give us the award back.

• 2:07:45Jay Novella?

  I am trying so hard to follow this.

• 2:07:48Speaker 04

  Well, you would think-

• 2:07:49Jay Novella?

  And you keep talking over there.

• 2:07:50Speaker 04

  Because it's pi R squared, so even if it was set at 1, you would think it would keep growing, right?

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  Well, pi R squared is the area of a two-dimensional.

• 2:07:57Speaker 04

  Oh, right, because we're-

• 2:07:58Speaker 02

  So, the sphere with radius R, in d dimensions, has a volume that goes like R to the d, right? In two dimensions, it's R squared. Volume of a three-sphere is R cubed. That just goes up with the number of dimensions. But it's the coefficient, so if you said R equals 1, the question is, what happens to the coefficient in that volume? The coefficient of R. And the totally non-obvious, non-intuitive fact is that it starts to go up, that coefficient of R to the whatever starts to go up, and then goes back down, and as you go to arbitrarily high dimensions, the volume of that sphere goes to zero.

• 2:08:32Speaker 04

  Why?

• 2:08:33Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it's an interesting thing. So if you actually calculate it, you find that the biggest coefficient is in d equals 5, for reasons that are not obvious. And then, basically, what's happening is, the cube gets kind of more and more corners, and the sphere takes up less and less of space in that cube. It is not an obvious statement. It's very, very counterintuitive, but, yeah, that's the weird, physics and math in higher dimensions is extremely non-intuitive, and I've always found this to be a fascinating result.

• 2:09:03Speaker 04

  Brian, how clearly can you picture these dimensions? Like, we can all picture 1, 2, and 3. You can go online in 4 and see like, that tesseract, right? Like, a cube kind of rotating, and that's the representation. How do you, can you see more than we can see in your mind?

• 2:09:17Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. You just kind of get, so I was talking to somebody about this over here right before the second half of the show. You develop an intuition by solving these problems time and time again, but I can't visualize any of this stuff, and I don't think anyone really, really can.

• 2:09:32Jay Novella?

  What everyone wants to know, though, is like, are there weird creatures in these other dimensions?

• 2:09:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, stand up.

• 2:09:40Bob Novella?

  You can't, I mean, I love the way Douglas Adams described it. You can't visualize four-dimensional space, because it's like, thinking of a right angle to reality. What direction is that going? You can't imagine it. And Andrea, a hypercube, a tesseract, is really a shadow of a four-dimensional object in three-dimensional space, like a sphere has a circular shadow. So that's, that's the only way you're gonna visualize it, by seeing the shadow.

• 2:10:03Speaker 04

  I just didn't know if Brian had a sense, like, some secret knowledge of higher shadows.

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  No, no, you just get, you just get used to it. It is interesting, though. It turns out that if you want to visualize things, you know, we think about things in higher dimensions by usually projecting onto 3, right? And usually, when you see a picture of a hypercube, you'll see a two-dimensional picture of it, because it's like a drawing, right? So it turns out that when you drop a dimension by 1, if you take a cube and you draw it in two dimensions, that is, you can do a full-faith rendering of that, you don't lose any information. But once you start projecting dimensions down by 2 or more, you start to lose information. So you can prove that mathematically. And so any drawing of a hypercube, a four-dimensional object in two dimensions, means you couldn't uniquely reconstruct the hypercube just from that drawing, but you could uniquely reconstruct

• 2:10:51Speaker 02

  a three cube.

• 2:10:53Jay Novella?

  Dimensional hypercube. Is anybody else having a panic attack right now? It is kind of, it makes me a little- It's awesome, though. It is awesome. I'm glad that people like you exist, Brian. You have no, I have immense appreciation, because I can't touch any of this stuff. My brain is not wired for it, so thank you.

• 2:11:10Speaker 02

  Thank you, but, I mean, like I said, this just comes from experience of doing it again and again and again. I, you know, there's no like, super genius code or something, I just did it a lot and got used to it, and that's kind of how it is.

• 2:11:24Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 2:11:25Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:11:25Jay Novella?

  Thank you so much, Brian.

• 2:11:32Jay Novella?

  Bob, take us out with a quote.

• 2:11:34Bob Novella?

  "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." Marie Curie. This is obviously a poignant quote, because, you know, she paid the ultimate price for her understanding of radiation. But it's important to point out, to point out, though, that she wasn't saying that fear is irrational. It's just that ignorance amplifies the fear. So that's the important takeaway, I think. And that understanding, kind of like, it lets us respond to risk intelligently. So that's, I think that's a good takeaway from that quote.

• 2:12:08Jay Novella?

  All right, well, guys, thank you all for joining me on this very special LA episode of Yes to You. Thank you.

• 2:12:14Speaker 02

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:12:20Jay Novella?

  Brian and Andrea, it's always great to have you guys on the show.

• 2:12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's awesome to be here, and I'm so excited to go to Australia and New Zealand with you all.

• 2:12:26Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this is the first of 10 events that we're holding in, or the second, actually.

• 2:12:30Speaker 04

  Second.

• 2:12:31Jay Novella?

  Second of 10, over a two-week period. And, yeah, we're all going to Australia.

• 2:12:34Speaker 04

  And then none of us will speak to each other ever again.

• 2:12:37Jay Novella?

  That's right.

• 2:12:37Speaker 02

  Bob already got mad and left.

• 2:12:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:12:41Jay Novella?

  So, thank you, guys, again. Again, thank you all for joining us for this episode, and until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 2:12:54Jay Novella?

  Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to quality science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.