The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary) (EP 52)

In this anniversary episode, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary look back at how two longtime friends turned their regular conversations about science into a show now shared by millions of people around the world, and what they hope to build with FFP Nation in Year Two. Then we turn to a new Nature paper challenging the idea that the precolonial Amazon was sparsely populated. Airborne LiDAR revealed hundreds of geometric earthworks hidden beneath the rainforest canopy. Combining the new survey with earlier archaeological evidence, the researchers estimate that the region could contain more than 20,000 earthworks and may have supported 1.25–3 million people around AD 100–300. Lester and Krishna explain how LiDAR sees through dense vegetation, why early European accounts of crowded Amazonian settlements were dismissed, how disease and forest regrowth could erase the visible traces of large societies, and what the findings mean for our understanding of the Amazon’s human and environmental history. The conversation then becomes a thought experiment: if our civilization disappeared, what would future archaeologists—or extraterrestrial visitors—recognize as our pyramids? Apollo landing sites, CERN, LIGO, and the James Webb Space Telescope become candidates for the enduring signatures of a curiosity-driven civilization. Finally, we christen the From First Principles library. Krishna shares the mathematics, physics, biology, history, and philosophy books that shaped how he thinks, including Baby Rudin, Landau–Lifshitz, Fermi, Jackson, Sakurai, Einstein, Schrödinger, Gibbs, Newton’s Principia, Plato, the Upanishads, and Adam Becker’s What Is Real? Help shape Year Two and enter the anniversary merch giveaway: ffpod.com/survey Support the show: ffppod.com/donate Research and show notes: Over 20,000 precolonial earthworks in the Southwest Amazonia Nature Research Briefing FFP episode archive and research library

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  And we're just like, let's just put some microphones and some cameras. And I was like, Lester, you handle that.

• 0:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 0:07Lester Nare?

  And you handle the science. How many people lived in the Amazon before 1492? And how would we even know if the evidence is buried under the vast rainforest that so many of us see?

• 0:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That means that there's more than 20,000 additional earthquakes. Just a few years ago, we used to think that there were 10,000 earthquakes in the entire Amazon rainforest. And now we're talking about in this tiny area that we're going to get into.

• 0:36Lester Nare?

  Hello, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. We are celebrating our one year anniversary of From First Principles. It's incredible that we've made it this far. And so many of you, 50 million of you across the world have joined us in our first year on the show. 13 million of you are now watching every month as we journey through discovery, curiosity and science at the frontier. We're extremely, extremely grateful for all of you in FFP Nation who have been very vocal about what you like and what you don't like.

• 1:21Lester Nare?

  And we've really taken that to heart as you've seen us evolve the show over our first year. Again, it is the two of us here, no production staff, no agency, no network, just two friends of almost, I think, 16 years now.

• 1:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:39Lester Nare?

  Trying to just figure out the world around us as much as we can. And as a small token of our appreciation for so many of you following us, as well as an ability for us to better learn about who you all are and what you want from the show as we enter year two, we are going to have a merch giveaway for our year one merch at ffpod.com/survey. There are a couple of questions that will help us understand a little bit more about our listeners, who you all are, where you're working, what you care about, what you want us to do on the show. As we go into our year two, now that we've figured out

• 2:22Lester Nare?

  all of the sound issues and the camera issues and other production problems, we really want to focus on community building and making sure that we are making the show collectively. Because at the end of the day, this would not be a show without all of you out here in FFP Nation. We do have a story that we will cover about the history of the Amazon. And as you notice, just in front of us, we have some books that we will be adding to the inaugural From First Principles Library, which is three floating shelves.

• 3:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. We're going to expand it, though. We're going to expand it.

• 3:05Lester Nare?

  We'll expand it. We'll eventually get a building.

• 3:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And the first iteration, we've got some bangers.

• 3:10Lester Nare?

  Yes. And we did ask the audience for some suggestions. And some of those suggestions did make it into the library. As always, we're going to talk about the science from the ground up today because this is From First Principles.

• 3:39Lester Nare?

  So today, we're going to have a little bit of fun. We will give you the best science, but we've left out the banter for several months as we've tried to really focus on being as information dense as possible. But there's so many of you who are new to the show. And we thought it would be helpful to help you understand a little bit more about who we are. Note, I am not Lamorne Morris.

• 4:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 4:02Lester Nare?

  From New Girl, okay? We barely look alike, although I did get approached.

• 4:10Krishna Choudhary?

  No, in person.

• 4:10Lester Nare?

  In person.

• 4:11Krishna Choudhary?

  That was crazy.

• 4:12Lester Nare?

  Here in the valley by a very nice older gentleman whose daughter apparently loves New Girl. So Lamorne, I just want you to know, as your apparent celebrity doppelganger,

• 4:26Lester Nare?

  you really are loved out here in the streets. But for those of you who may be new to the pod and just for us to have the chance to talk about why we are doing this again. Do you remember it was July, it was June, July of last year that we finally decided to maybe do something?

• 4:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. And we had flirted with doing something with other formats.

• 4:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And this is finally the format that we came up with, which is just like the two of us bantering and talking about science like we've done for the past 10, 16 plus years.

• 5:02Lester Nare?

  It's, and what's so interesting about this, and I don't think people understand, like, we literally will just do this.

• 5:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Lester Nare?

  Regardless.

• 5:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. We've been doing this since college, right? Among other friends, like at Princeton undergrad, we would just like be hanging out and we would be talking about the newest paper that came out in whatever field and whatever people are talking about. And there'd be so many other people that were bantering with us. And now it's just the two of us. But yeah, it's like, it was so natural. And we're just like, let's just put some microphones and some cameras. And I was like, Lester, you handle that.

• 5:40Lester Nare?

  Right. And you handle the science. And, you know, a part of how we connected initially, or among other things, is, you know, we both have science families.

• 5:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Lester Nare?

  And so that, that was obviously a connection point.

• 5:56Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 5:56Lester Nare?

  Indian Zimbabwean.

• 6:00Lester Nare?

  And I think you got more of a physics lens. I got more of a biology lens. And it's immigrants to the US.

• 6:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 6:09Lester Nare?

  In different ways. And, you know, LA for you, growing up, Jersey, shout out Jersey for me. A little bit of North Carolina, but you guys were kind of at the tail end. You know, that wasn't formative.

• 6:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah, for me, it was like India and then LA was high school. And so kind of at the tail end. But then it became formative because it was high school. It was, you know, when you come from a place like India to America, the first place you really put your roots down becomes a formative experience. Although, you know, I spent a year plus in Huntsville, Alabama.

• 6:42Lester Nare?

  Yes, that's right.

• 6:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Where Marshall Space Flight Center and NASA. So my dad was a solar physicist there. And so, you know, Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama, still, I remember Challenger Middle School. I don't know if there's anyone out there who went to Challenger Middle School.

• 6:59Lester Nare?

  It's also where all the UAP labs are allegedly.

• 7:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes. Yeah. And I mean, it's, I think it's like expanding a lot because Redstone Arsenal is there. And it's one of the few military space places that is expanding rather than going down.

• 7:13Lester Nare?

  Which is a story for another day. But ultimately, what we're trying to do with the show is build what I've always called an ESPN for science. You know, so many different aspects of culture have channels that really celebrate them, whether it's award shows like the Grammys and the Oscars and the Emmys, or things like SportsCenter, or all the different podcasts that are for comedy and entertainment and music and sports. And there's obviously a huge ecosystem of quote, "science communication." Obviously, there's the journal and magazine culture. But with everyone consuming content in vertical video now, sometimes in horizontal.

• 7:58Lester Nare?

  And I really feel like not a lot of people talking about the frontier in this way.

• 8:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Lester Nare?

  Where you have both a combination of the expert view that can get into the weeds technically, which is obviously our resident PhD Krishna, and the every person, which is me, trying to get a hold of what is going on. Because our view is that, for a whole variety of reasons, progress in the sciences is accelerating.

• 8:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 8:27Lester Nare?

  And it is really important for all of us in the general public to understand what is happening because it will be impacting our life directly in the way that the sciences always have, but at an increasingly fast and I think an increasingly more impactful way. Whether you talk about biotechnology, medicine, material science, obviously, the devil word of the day, AI.

• 8:55Lester Nare?

  Space exploration, it is an incredible time to be alive. And it's such a pleasure to be able to do this show for you all. And we're hopeful that we can continue to make science a part of the zeitgeist with the best science show on the planet. Data suggests, and we're all about data on this show. The data suggests that this is what the people want. But now enough of all of that self aggrandizing nonsense. We're going to get back to why you all tune into the show, which is our story, our only story of the day.

• 9:37Lester Nare?

  A little brief rundown of this idea that the Amazon was never empty. And I'm going to open with this question. How many people lived in the Amazon before 1492? And how would we even know if the evidence is buried under the vast rainforest that so many of us see on our social feeds as planes fly over?

• 10:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a very strange question. For the longest time, people thought there was no one in the Amazon before Christopher Columbus came to the New World. And surprise, surprise, of course, that is not true. Okay, there's a new paper out in nature that was submitted in April 2025, accepted in June.

• 10:28Lester Nare?

  July.

• 10:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Sorry, yeah, July. And it's actually showing that there, the Amazon is way more populated than we could have ever imagined. Surprise, surprise.

• 10:39Lester Nare?

  Yes, shocked, I'm shocked, this is my shocked face.

• 10:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's, and getting into sort of the historical tendency of why we think the Amazon was just desolate, and now we're sort of correcting our views. It's a very interesting story. So we'll start with Gaspar de Carvajal. Okay, he's a Spanish explorer and he explored the Amazon in 1542. He went up the Amazon River. And when he went back to the King of Spain, he talked about crowded cities, advanced societies along the Amazon River. Later explorers came to corroborate what he was talking about and they found no one. Okay, this was in a span of about 100 years.

• 11:27Krishna Choudhary?

  So within 100 years, there was no one. Historians traditionally say, well, he's just BSing. Okay, he was just trying to impress the King of Spain. He's talking about these wide roads, busy marketplaces, large armies of local warriors. But hey, maybe he was just trying to like get in with the Spanish royalty to like get more money, to do more expeditions.

• 11:54Lester Nare?

  There is a current story in geopolitics around the Spanish king right now. And so this idea of people trying to curry favor or not curry favor is very topical.

• 12:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, this guy was trying to do it, apparently. That's what we all think.

• 12:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 12:11Krishna Choudhary?

  We all think that he was just lying because he wanted some credibility. He wanted more funding to do more expeditions, right? Now it turns out, if we, if we really go back, we're starting to find evidence for more and more civilizations in the Amazon with kind of the techniques that we're going to go over. And it turns out what probably happened was European diseases like smallpox wiped out 90 to 95% of the indigenous population. And that can happen very, very quickly. I mean, we saw that with the COVID-19 pandemic. Now imagine smallpox, which is a much more deadly disease and a much more transmissible disease, exposed to a population that has never seen anything like it, right?

• 12:54Krishna Choudhary?

  European and Eurasian populations, there's, there's this famous book Guns, Germs and Steel that talks about why European populations and Eurasian populations, because of their proximity to domesticated animals, developed kind of a herd immunity to pathogens like smallpox. But when you introduce that to a completely naive population in the Americas that has never been exposed to cows, domesticated cows and things like that. Now all of a sudden, something like 90 to 95% of the population can be decimated. And then when, I mean, that, that kind of number is where societies collapse.

• 13:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 13:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Krishna Choudhary?

  What, what are you going to do with only 10% of your population remaining?

• 13:40Lester Nare?

  Not even distrib-, not evenly distributed across the roles necessary to sustain.

• 13:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, whatever society you had, you're, you're back to the Stone Ages type of thing, right? And so whatever society remained, the survivors went back deep into the jungle. And then perhaps that's why, when you see all of the newer explorers come in 100 years after the 1500s, they don't see anyone. They also don't see any remnants because the jungle is a beast, right? Most of these dwellings are made out of earth and mud and wood. These are things that are biodegradable and these are things that trees can grow on, right? Now the jungle takes over, you don't see anyone, you call fraud and you call him a liar.

• 14:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 14:31Lester Nare?

  Fair, given the information at the time, I can think of my backyard and how quickly it's been taken over by nature. We have a cement mall in the back that was there. And then within six to 12 months, you cannot see it.

• 14:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Lester Nare?

  And, you know.

• 14:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, life finds a way, right?

• 14:51Lester Nare?

  Shout out Dr. Ian Malcolm.

• 14:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. So more than about 20 years ago, there was a geographer, Alsayu Ranzi. He's now at the University of Accra. And he was on the right side of an airplane going over the Amazon jungle. And he saw a ring like structure. And he's like, that's not natural. Okay, it's really never natural. If you see a perfect ring somewhere, that's almost always manmade. Okay, unless it's like a meteor impact. But if it's a meteor impact and you can still see it, that's very strange, right? And so he's like, there's got to be, there's got to be something that made that. It's got to be humans.

• 15:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Decades of subsequent research by Ranzi and his colleagues have slowly revealed that the Amazon was populated by millions of people, even in the most remote areas of the Amazon, right? And so now researchers suggest that ancient Amazonians were widespread in territories that previously we considered uninhabited. That's where this current story comes in. There's a new paper that we talked about, this out in nature, science covered it. A lot of presses covered it. It's showing that in even the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, away from rivers, away from the traditional places that we would have expected large scale civilizations,

• 16:18Krishna Choudhary?

  we are finding structures that demand an economy that is worth millions of people, right? It's one of the most favorite things I think about in archaeology. When we look at structures that were built by civilizations of yore, the structures are a proxy for how big the society was, right? We look at, I mean, a beautiful example is Egypt, 5,000 years ago. They built the pyramids, the three giant pyramids of Giza. The largest one, the Pyramid of Khufu, is like one of the largest structures ever. It was the largest structure for something like 4,000 years before some random cathedral in Europe took over. Honestly, that's insane.

• 17:02Krishna Choudhary?

  That's, that's actually insane that Egypt built a structure that was the largest structure, the largest manmade structure on the planet for 4,000 years, right? If you think about it, like the, the people who built the Colosseum, like Julius Caesar and the Romans who built the Colosseum, they looked at the pyramids like we look at the Colosseum. It's just insane to think about. And more importantly, when I look at structures like that, I think about what was the size of their economy?

• 17:33Lester Nare?

  Right, in order to be able to.

• 17:35Krishna Choudhary?

  In order to be able to support the workers. I mean, sure, there was a lot of slavery involved, right? Still, with like getting the stone from like random places along the Nile, putting it up in a pyramid environment, guys, there weren't any aliens. It was just an incredibly advanced technology, right? And, and incredibly advanced civilization that could like muster together the amount of humans to create something like that.

• 18:03Lester Nare?

  The idea of taking the, the work process and breaking it down into its fundamental steps in order to be able to scale it, to be able to create infrastructure of that size.

• 18:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Lester Nare?

  When no one had ever done that before.

• 18:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Lester Nare?

  Right, so you're, you have a blank slate and you're, how do we, I, we have this imagination as humans. So I have a vision, I want this thing, I want it to look like this. And they just figured out how to do it without being able to reference how anyone else did it.

• 18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 18:35Lester Nare?

  No one came in and was like, oh, we have this thing called cement, whatever, right? And that's, I think, truly what's so, you know, and this is what's so fascinating when we think about some of these.

• 18:48Lester Nare?

  Older generations and cultures and humanity. And we always come back to kind of the same things.

• 18:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Lester Nare?

  Right. And it manifests a little bit differently with little different flavor each time. But everywhere we look across the planet, we have these highly sophisticated, you know, civilizations in time periods where we did not expect there to be this level of collective accomplishment.

• 19:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Lester Nare?

  Particularly around infrastructure and, and all the, so I'm really interested because the Amazon is always talked about so much. It's talked about a lot in, it's like Egypt and the Amazon.

• 19:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Lester Nare?

  In terms of, you know, armchair archaeologists.

• 19:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Lester Nare?

  Uh, and the Amazon in particular, for a lot of scientists, has been the object of a lot of curiosity.

• 19:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Lester Nare?

  For some time.

• 19:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Especially from like a standpoint of deforestation.

• 19:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:51Krishna Choudhary?

  A standpoint of climate change.

• 19:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:52Krishna Choudhary?

  A standpoint of like being a carbon sink. And now it's gaining credibility from a standpoint of archaeology, which I think is very, very cool. Um, so the, the latest paper, Ronzi is actually one of the authors on this paper. It details nearly 200 previously undocumented earthworks in a very small patch of a corner of the rainforest.

• 20:18Lester Nare?

  I just want to make a quick note. I think it's 400, not 200.

• 20:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right.

• 20:22Lester Nare?

  It's double. Yeah.

• 20:22Krishna Choudhary?

  It's double that. Yeah.

• 20:23Lester Nare?

  Which is, which is.

• 20:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is crazy. Yeah. And then what's crazy is if you extrapolate the results, right? Um, then that means that there's more than 20,000 additional earthworks. Cause you can like do the math, right? You can be like, I sampled this region and then I found this many. I sampled the whole thing and this region was not any special compared to everything else. So I can make like a blanket kind of guess. 20,000 earthworks in that area. And just a few years ago, we used to think that there were 10,000 earthworks in the entire Amazon rainforest. And now we're talking about in this tiny area that we're going to get into.

• 20:59Lester Nare?

  It, it, this, this is like, is an analogy. This would be like, we found Brooklyn and there's 400 things in Brooklyn.

• 21:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Lester Nare?

  And then like New York.

• 21:07Krishna Choudhary?

  And then Jersey, Connecticut.

• 21:08Lester Nare?

  Right. Yeah. So it's like, oh, like everything around here is pretty much the same.

• 21:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Lester Nare?

  There's 400 in Brooklyn.

• 21:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Lester Nare?

  So obviously we also have it in Manhattan.

• 21:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 21:17Lester Nare?

  The Bronx, et cetera.

• 21:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really, really cool. So, um, let's talk about how they actually did it.

• 21:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:23Krishna Choudhary?

  We always want to focus on the procedure and the methods on this podcast. They use LiDAR. It's effectively using a laser, an infrared laser. What you do is you have a drone or an airplane that has infrared laser that's sending out laser pulses, hundreds of thousands of laser beams per second downward. Okay?

• 21:43Lester Nare?

  Laser beam.

• 21:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's going to go and scan everything. And then each laser pulse, it's going to get split when it hits something. There's going to hit a leaf. Part of it's going to go through the leaf, right? And then it's going to hit another leaf. Every time it hits something, it bounces back. And sometimes it's going to hit the ground and bounce back.

• 22:03Lester Nare?

  Have you ever seen these like, uh, landscape scanning drones in person before?

• 22:08Krishna Choudhary?

  No, I have not.

• 22:08Lester Nare?

  It's really creepy.

• 22:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Really?

• 22:10Lester Nare?

  Cause if you don't know what's happening, you kind of, kind of just see this like light thing happening. And it's just like, and it, it's clearly programmatic.

• 22:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Scanning. Yeah.

• 22:18Lester Nare?

  It, it's actually quite, it's, it's interesting, but I think the point you bring up there is important is we're sending something down. When it hits something, comes back.

• 22:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, LiDAR sounds like radar because it's the same physics, right? Radar is radio. Here we're doing it with light, not necessarily optical light, mostly infrared, right? And then what you do is the computers take all that data and then they remove the top layer of where the leaves are. You can like tell that this bounced back from a leaf. This went all the way down to the ground. You can, you can find like a sort of floor of where the bounce happened.

• 22:50Lester Nare?

  Because it takes longer.

• 22:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And you just do the timing.

• 22:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah. So you just remove everything that's really short in time.

• 22:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And you look for the extremum in some given.

• 22:58Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 22:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like time bin, right? And then once you do that, now you've got a final ground level data. And then you can look for undulations. You can be like, there's an earthwork. What that means is there's a mound and then that mound is gonna, is gonna have a geometric structure and you can find this out through LiDAR, right?

• 23:17Lester Nare?

  There's a certain characteristics of like human made structure.

• 23:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Lester Nare?

  That you can basically map to.

• 23:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Lester Nare?

  It's not a hill.

• 23:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm. It's got some shape.

• 23:25Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 23:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That's like very weird.

• 23:26Lester Nare?

  Circle as an example.

• 23:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Circle, square.

• 23:28Lester Nare?

  Square that you brought up earlier.

• 23:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And so the area that they surveyed, um, the researchers went through the Acre and the Amazonas, which are two states of Brazil, effectively. The Acre is the one that is bordering Peru.

• 23:44Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right next to Peru. And then Amazonas is the giant one that covers most of the Amazon rainforest. Right in that border is where they were looking. Notice, this is far away from the Amazon River. Okay. The Amazon River is, is going up top.

• 24:00Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes.

• 24:01Krishna Choudhary?

  These are minor rivers that are tributaries into the Amazon. More so, they're tributaries very, very far away from the Amazon rainforest. I mean, sorry, from the central sort of Amazon River.

• 24:14Lester Nare?

  The, I think the, the point you're trying to bring up is, uh, ancient civilizations would have likely gathered or aggregated around major water sources.

• 24:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. That's the assumption.

• 24:24Lester Nare?

  That's the assumption.

• 24:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That you want to make, especially given what that Spanish guy had seen, right? Cause he had just gone up the Amazon. The Amazon's like the easiest navigable river. It's, it's like a mile wide the whole time.

• 24:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 24:37Krishna Choudhary?

  So you just like go up, right? He's not going up these tiny tributaries.

• 24:40Lester Nare?

  And so the, the, the point being this place that we're looking, which is sort of in the southwest.

• 24:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's like almost towards Peru.

• 24:48Lester Nare?

  It's almost in Peru. There, there is, there are no natural infra, there's no natural infrastructure that would suggest that human life would congregate in that area.

• 24:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And that's why they, the scientists were so surprised at the density of what they found, right? This is a civilization that the researchers have previously named the Acre. It's named after two of the rivers that are in that region. They're tributaries into the Amazon, right? Now the team identified most of these earthworks in the new study. They're geoglyphs. They're ditches that are made in the ground that form geometric shapes. Um, some are even more sophisticated with geometric shapes. They're like, they're like a square inside of a circle, or I think it's a circle inside of a square. Um, if you look over here, clearly human made, right? They're in a line. It, it reminds you of sort of Teotihuacan.

• 25:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Near Mexico City where the pyramid of the sun and things like that. It reminds you of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. This is sophisticated society, right?

• 25:53Lester Nare?

  You, you, for example, if anyone goes to Italy and, you know, you go through any of the, you see the roads, you see the grid system in some format.

• 26:02Krishna Choudhary?

  The Vatican.

• 26:03Lester Nare?

  Right, right. And there's permutations and slight differences, but there's clearly a network because you, people are trying to go from point A to point B. And you start to see these, and, and the density, like you were saying, proximity, because I'm not trying to go two miles.

• 26:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Lester Nare?

  To get to the pizza parlor.

• 26:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, it's incredible that they're finding this with LiDAR, right? Now, based on the calculations of the workforce that was necessary to create and maintain these earthworks. And that's, that's where we get into what is the size of the economy? What is the size of the population? The researchers estimate that it's up to something like 3 million people could have lived in that tiny region.

• 26:41Lester Nare?

  There's no way.

• 26:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And, and the little green dots, that, those are the, those are the images that we saw earlier, right? This is a massive swath of rainforest. All of that rainforest looks exactly the same as this swath. This is a random spot that they picked, right? So if we were to extrapolate, you can imagine just the many millions of people that are living in this, in this part of the rainforest before Columbus showed up, before any of the Europeans showed up. And this is around 100 to 300 AD, right? So this is right after, right after, um, death of Christ, like the start of the common

• 27:22Krishna Choudhary?

  era, right? Um, if we talk about like when, oh, the timeline of American civilizations, right? Um, this would be right around, so the Aztec and the Inca, those are very new. Those are around 1300, 1400 AD. Um, so that's a thousand years after this stuff, right? It just tells you how rich the human history in South America and the Americas in general is. We've got the Olmecs, which is around, it might even be preceding this in Mexico. The Maya, the Maya is like this giant civilization. It goes anywhere from like 3,000 B.C. to

• 28:01Krishna Choudhary?

  900 AD. So they, the Maya is like whenever archaeologists like see stuff that looks kinda like Maya. But it's like, there's no way there's a same civilization that went on for 3,000 years, right? Maybe.

• 28:15Lester Nare?

  Maybe.

• 28:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Maybe, but it, it, it could also just be our lack of granularity.

• 28:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:20Krishna Choudhary?

  In seeing the differences, right?

• 28:22Lester Nare?

  Can I make a small side note?

• 28:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Lester Nare?

  For all my Nickelodeon heads who are listeners, you mentioned Olmecs.

• 28:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Lester Nare?

  Have you ever seen the game show in the nineties on Nickelodeon, Legends of the Hidden Temple?

• 28:36Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 28:36Lester Nare?

  So there, there is the, the, the whole, the kind of, the shtick was that the Olmecs had this hidden temple. And these kids would come on the show, similar to Global Guts, and they would have to like traverse this like, you know, mystery path, like these little mazes in the hidden temple. And they had different, they had like the silver snakes and they had like the purple iguanas. And you would be on a team and you would traverse this hidden temple of the Olmecs.

• 29:04Krishna Choudhary?

  That's pretty cool.

• 29:04Lester Nare?

  And for the, the connection there is like, I actually never knew that it was a, related to a real thing.

• 29:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Lester Nare?

  I thought it was, they kind of just, you know, took something that was real and, you know, did their movie ma, their TV magic to it. But, oh no, real thing.

• 29:22Krishna Choudhary?

  A real, Olmecs are a real thing. They're kind of like, you know, in Halo, we have, we've been talking about Halo on this podcast. But you know, in Halo, there's like the race called the forerunners.

• 29:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:33Krishna Choudhary?

  That came before humans and the covenant.

• 29:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the Olmecs are kind of like that for Mesoamerica. They came before, they, they might've been the same time as the Maya, but they definitely came before the Aztecs. And the people of Teotihuacan. And the, the people of Teotihuacan and the Aztecs regarded the Olmecs as kind of like the, the forerunners of their civilization.

• 29:56Lester Nare?

  That's exactly.

• 29:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And if you look at like the Olmecs, a lot of the, what we have remaining from the Olmecs is a crude writing system because we don't have a lot that's survived. And we also have faces, Olmec faces, where a lot of the Aztec art, you know, the characteristic like Aztec art with the 2D.

• 30:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Sort of, that's derivative of Olmec art because they were, you know, descendants of the Olmecs. Or at least they tried to say they were. I mean, the Aztecs were kind of a messed up people, right? With all the human sacrifices and the, uh, subjugation of all the other tribes. But, but like they thought of themselves as like descendants of the Olmecs. Kind of the same way, it reminds me of Halo.

• 30:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 30:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Where it's like the humans and the covenant, that we both thought that we were descendants of the forerunners, right? And it turns out we're just like fighting each other.

• 30:43Lester Nare?

  I, I just want to say literally on the show, they had, the Olmec was a, a face carved in stone.

• 30:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So, so those are the famous faces of the Olmecs.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  It was literally, that was the main like person giving you the hints on the show. Someone please in the comments, let me know that you have seen this show. So I don't feel like a crazy person. It was such a classic. I wanted to be on all the game shows on Nickelodeon, but it's, the connection to real history here.

• 31:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Lester Nare?

  And understanding the, I think the Halo reference is actually helpful to kind of contextualize how these different Mesoamerican.

• 31:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Lester Nare?

  Uh, ancient civilizations relate to each other.

• 31:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's really cool. Like in humanity, we always, we always seek continuity, right? We always seek a story that we're a part of in the past. And, uh, and, and that's invariant of whether you're from Europe or Asia, or even the ancient civilizations of the Americas. I, I think it's, I think it's really cool. So in the past 40 years, this is, uh, we're, we're kind of going to transition from this is really cool archaeology to the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed. Okay?

• 31:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And this is kind of a problem.

• 31:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Krishna Choudhary?

  We talk about the real things on this podcast. It's very cool that we're discovering new, new earthworks and new civilizations in the Amazon and new evidence for it. But the reality of the situation is that the Amazon has lost more than 13% of its vegetation cover in the last 40 years.

• 32:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And some scientists say that the region might not be able to sustain itself any longer. If the figure passes 20%, we're already at 13%. So they, it, it becomes kind of a conundrum about how agriculture is taking over the Amazon rainforest. Because, um, Brazil is an economy that is hungry, is a developing nation. It's one where they realize they've got this vast resource of fertile land. They want to exploit it for their agriculture, right? And for their society. Now, I want to be a bit nuanced here because I think a lot of takes about Amazon deforestation just blames Brazil and blames the farmers in Brazil and these developing countries.

• 32:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's take a look at Europe and let's take a look at America. Okay? The American prairie, for example, was a vast ecosystem that rivaled the African Serengeti. And what did we do to it when we came here? We turned it into farmland. Europe has no old growth forests left.

• 33:19Lester Nare?

  Which is so crazy to me still.

• 33:21Krishna Choudhary?

  There's like one pocket in the Black Forest and the, in the, in, in Germany, in the southwest corner of Germany, near Freiburg. But that's about it.

• 33:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Krishna Choudhary?

  All of the old growth forest in Europe is done because the industrial revolution happened. The agricultural revolution happened and they, they went at it, right? And so now we're, we're coming upon developing nations that are trying to get that bag.

• 33:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 33:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It cannot be only on them to figure out a solution to make preservation of their forest sustainable. Okay? You can't just be like, hey, stop, stop cutting down trees.

• 33:59Krishna Choudhary?

  It, it's, I don't know what to do. I'm just saying it's not on them.

• 34:03Lester Nare?

  I, I think this is, this is.

• 34:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It makes sense.

• 34:06Lester Nare?

  It's true about a variety of different issues, which is like, you have a generation of what we now called, now call first world countries.

• 34:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Lester Nare?

  That were able to burn coal, tear down their natural environments in order to accrue a level of, of wealth and, um, socioeconomic status for some, not all.

• 34:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Lester Nare?

  Of their people. And it's not evenly distributed and there's complexities about all of that. Yes. But comparatively to the majority of nations on the planet, there's this cohort of, of first world, quote unquote, first world countries.

• 34:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 34:40Lester Nare?

  That were the first to cross the finish line. So now you're having another batch, and these happen to be, now you're having the third, fourth or fifth cohort. Try to do the same thing. This is where you see things like BRICS, you know, Brazil.

• 34:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 34:53Lester Nare?

  South Africa, China, China's already there, obviously now.

• 34:57Krishna Choudhary?

  India.

• 34:57Lester Nare?

  India in there, like who are now trying to effectively say, we're just doing what you did.

• 35:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Lester Nare?

  And so, but now there's this almost holier than thou.

• 35:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Because they're the ones that have it left.

• 35:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 35:11Lester Nare?

  Right. Because we have nothing. And so it's like, well, and, and now we're a globe, we're more of a globalized society with communications, with, um, supply chain. And so the things happening over there impact what's happening over here much more than they did, you know, years ago, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. And so I think your point is, is, is we need to have a broader discussion.

• 35:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's got to be a global solution.

• 35:36Lester Nare?

  Right. Because we can't just, again, you know, uh, ignore that what's driving so much of the climate problem and all these other things is because of the things that the first.

• 35:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Lester Nare?

  Groups that went through did, not, not the ones who are trying to go through now, which is like, oh, sorry. Uh, I destroyed all the road behind me, but like, no, you can't use natural resources to repay it.

• 36:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's like, no, I, I wanna, I want a good economy.

• 36:03Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Krishna Choudhary?

  I want air conditioning all the time.

• 36:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 36:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? I want to use plastics all the time like you guys are. So it's, it's, it's a weird take. I'm probably going to get some hate, but that's what I think.

• 36:13Lester Nare?

  I, I, I think like with everything, unfortunately, um, have you heard this like bean soup, uh, theory? Let me not go there. But, um, we just, everything there's there, we need to just, there's a lot of, we live in a complex adaptive system.

• 36:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Lester Nare?

  And there are a lot of variables that go into that. And there's a rush to say, it's either this or it's that.

• 36:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Lester Nare?

  And 99.9% of the time, it's like a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Uh, uh, we, we need to be able to have complex nuanced, nuanced conversations. And, um, it is in all of our benefit, uh, to prevent catastrophic ecosystem collapse. And it is not going to be solved by any one nation.

• 37:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 37:04Lester Nare?

  At the end of the day. Um, but this is a sensitive issue. Obviously people have very strong opinions about it.

• 37:12Lester Nare?

  This is a record level El Nino year.

• 37:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Lester Nare?

  Uh, if you're in Europe, y'all have been having fires going on right now that you do not have the infrastructure to deal with. Canada's been having fires that are taking over everywhere. I think it was, uh, Seattle, Washington or.

• 37:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, I heard. Yep.

• 37:28Lester Nare?

  Burning, and look, you know, when I was growing up, that wasn't what it was like.

• 37:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Lester Nare?

  So.

• 37:35Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's progressing fast.

• 37:38Lester Nare?

  We, we cannot, um, ignore the reality that's in front of our face. And it's okay to just talk about it. We're not prescribing an answer.

• 37:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Lester Nare?

  We're not saying you can't have plastic straws. But, you know, maybe these large industrial companies need to be a little bit more responsible.

• 37:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And perhaps we make them responsible. We, we make them, you know?

• 38:01Lester Nare?

  We don't, we don't be like, please.

• 38:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Can you, can you save the, can you not like mess up our only home? Our only home in this vast emptiness? Can you maybe like try to, try to, try to not mess up the only home that we have?

• 38:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah. This was a tangent. As you can see, we try to keep it tight, but these are complex issues. And sometimes we just need to get it off our chest. Been a year. So I think we've earned the right to have a little social, political commentary.

• 38:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And actually, wait, one more thing before you move on.

• 38:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Krishna Choudhary?

  I wanted to, I wanted to do like a mental exercise because like, you know, we're talking about,

• 38:42Krishna Choudhary?

  we're talking about modern civilization now, us with LIDAR and things like that coming in and seeing old, old infrastructure and old civilizations. And we're trying to judge the capabilities of the civilizations based on what they've left behind. For example, with Egypt, we can guess that their economy was insane. With something like Rome, building the Colosseum, we can guess that the economy was insane. So suppose like something crazy happened, right? And like humans died.

• 39:15Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And aliens came back in like a million years, right? In some insane amount of time, like what would they see and what would they judge from us? I was thinking about this, like, for example, even if Earth looks very, very different, there's quite a possibility that like the moon is not going to look that different. And so if they, if they saw like the remnants of Apollo 11 and all of our Apollo missions, they'd be like, this is crazy.

• 39:43Lester Nare?

  They got from there.

• 39:44Krishna Choudhary?

  They got, they got off that planet with a pretty strong gravitational field.

• 39:47Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, it seems they walked around, there's like footprints and stuff. Cause the footprints aren't going to go away.

• 39:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, there's not enough meteor impacts for the footprints to grow. They got a car with like wheels. I think they'll know what wheels are, right? And, and they, they might be like, damn.

• 40:04Lester Nare?

  They were so close.

• 40:05Krishna Choudhary?

  They were pretty good.

• 40:06Lester Nare?

  They, they almost escaped the single point of failure.

• 40:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Or like if they came, if they came on Earth, right? And they went and they saw CERN, which is underground. So it might be, it might be like shielded from vegetation loss, right? And atmospheric loss. Like I can imagine like Manhattan, all the, all of the buildings might like crumble and fall. Maybe the steel will still be there and like the, the fact that we have pure steel, like in, in like these sort of columns, they might be like, this is pretty cool.

• 40:38Lester Nare?

  It'll be just a bunch of pointies.

• 40:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Lester Nare?

  Coming out of the ground.

• 40:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. But like, uh, but CERN, for example, it's underground and it's a giant thing. And there's massive magnets, right? There's going to be wires of pure copper and silicon and all of this other stuff. They're going to look at that and be like, this is nice.

• 40:55Lester Nare?

  I like this.

• 40:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like that, those are the things that I think would be our pyramids, right? If the aliens came down and searched for our pyramids or our Colosseum, they would, they would find CERN and LIGO and the moon landing, you know? I, I think that's kind of cool to think about.

• 41:14Lester Nare?

  As a, as a last note on that, it's, it's sort of like, you know, for civilizations that came before us, large scale infrastructure.

• 41:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 41:22Lester Nare?

  Was the thing that was signature of it. For our generation, it's almost like large scale. I, I don't use scientific loosely, but like this instrumentation.

• 41:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. That's like pure and like, you know what I mean?

• 41:36Lester Nare?

  It's like single focus, single function. It's not to honor some dead pharaoh. It's not to facilitate the transfer of goods and services. It, it's purely, it kind of speaks to, oh, we, they became a curiosity based.

• 41:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Lester Nare?

  Civilization where they had some level of abundance or sustainability, not evenly distributed.

• 41:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Lester Nare?

  That allowed them to spend money on things that didn't have a direct functional outcome to their own survival.

• 42:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 42:05Lester Nare?

  That's really interesting.

• 42:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It is, right? Because like, because they would look at CERN and they could see, they would see the electromagnets. They would see the solenoids of the, of the, of the copper becoming electromagnets. And they could probably discern because they know the laws of electromagnetism, that these were giant magnets that were curving the thing, you know? And like, and, and, and there's these giant centers where the two, the two beams sort of meet. So you see the two beams meeting up and then right where those two beams meet up, coincidentally, there's a giant detector, right? That's the size of like a building underground. So maybe that's a particle collider, like, you know, like.

• 42:42Lester Nare?

  That's really good. I know. That's a good one.

• 42:44Krishna Choudhary?

  I, I thought, I thought, I like, I was just thinking, whenever I think about like old stuff.

• 42:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Krishna Choudhary?

  I think what would, what would a civilization 10,000 years, a million years from now, look at us and say, damn, that was sick.

• 42:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? If the International Space Station is still.

• 42:58Lester Nare?

  Floating around.

• 42:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Floating around, probably not because it's, you know, it's gonna, but like if it was, actually James Webb Space Telescope.

• 43:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that will be.

• 43:06Krishna Choudhary?

  That thing is at La Grange two or something, right? That's like way off of Earth orbit. So that thing's just going to be following us around the sun. Like if they saw that.

• 43:15Lester Nare?

  It's a techno signature, you know?

• 43:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. If they saw that, they'd be like, this is insane.

• 43:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Right? They were looking for us.

• 43:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Lester Nare?

  We were, we just came a little late. We missed the train to the train. That's really interesting because when, when you, you know, a lot of times you have people in sports and entertainment and media or whatever, even in life, think about legacy.

• 43:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Lester Nare?

  But they, I always talk about things at like three scales. You have, you're, you have the individual or four scales. You have the individual unit, the family unit, your like community unit, which could be neighborhood, city, state, nation, state. And then you have the civilizational unit. And a lot of times the legacy conversation is talked about in the individual family or neighborhood, like context.

• 43:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Lester Nare?

  What is our civilizational legacy to an outside observer?

• 44:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. If we were to just disappear.

• 44:04Lester Nare?

  Here, right now, like for our generation, not for the past.

• 44:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Lester Nare?

  That's a, I'm, we're gonna, I'm going to think about that more.

• 44:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Lester Nare?

  I really do like that quite a bit. I really do like that quite a bit. And you might all know what's coming next because this kind of, um, just fascinating, incredible, deep and fun conversation is brought to you by From First Principles. Now, uh, we, we currently are just the two of us, as we mentioned earlier. And so now we have to shill the pod a little bit. For those of you who are listening for the first time, welcome. The water's warm, FFP Nation is growing. One of the best ways that you can support the show, that we can continue to have these fascinating conversations, like, share, comment, subscribe on any of the platforms you may

• 44:54Lester Nare?

  listen to us on. We're available as a video podcast on Spotify, coming soon in video to Apple Podcasts. Keep an eye out for that. You can also listen to us on your favorite podcast app. We're on all the podcast applications. Our website, ffpod.com has the research papers we talked about, including the one we just talked about in this past Amazon story, which again was in nature in July 2026. This was out of the Ibuero American Institute of Finland and the University of Helsinki about LIDAR scanning to penetrate through the canopy in the Amazon to learn that it was much more populated and dense than we did before.

• 45:38Lester Nare?

  If you would like to support this show monetarily in this economy, you can go to ffpod.com backslash donate. One thing we've not talked about before, but is going to be super helpful for us. If you're listening on Spotify and Apple, a five star review will do wonders for us to get this to more people. And if you are in the journal club or have technical, curious or science friends to talk to, uh, this is a great show to send over to them. For those of you watching our clips, send them in groups, send them to DMs. The clips is the best way to onboard people to being scientifically curious. And I want to just do a reminder before we get into wrapping up the episode with the

• 46:23Lester Nare?

  books that we are going to add into the library, that we are trying to build community around the show as we enter year two. Part of what we need to understand is who are our listeners? And so we have our giveaway where we're going to have merch given out. Then we're going to choose, we're going to start with 10 people, 10 people. We might increase it to 20. It's going to get some of our free merch, not just what we have on right now. You can go to our shop and see all of the other stuff, T-shirts, sweaters, swag bags. We have a great field notebook. There's a ton of stuff in there. If you can complete our survey to help us better understand what you want us to do

• 47:06Lester Nare?

  in our second year, that's over at ffpod.com backslash survey. To all of those who say, what does Lester do on the show? I shill the website.

• 47:19Lester Nare?

  And, and so we are now going to transition into the christening of our brand new library, which just a bunch of shelves behind us. So you can see some of the books that Krishna has put together for our inaugural christening of the FFP library. So for those of you who are watching, as you can see, there's an empty set of three floating shelves behind us and we're going to christen our new library with some of the books here and we're going to do it one shelf at a time. So Krishna, what are we going to put into the library with our first shelf here in the collection? We have two piles, different contexts. So what is our first set of books?

• 48:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So I, I thought a lot about what we were trying to put in the shelves. The first shelf I want to christen with the textbooks that made me the, you know, physicist, thinker, whatever you want to call it that I am. I'm going to start with mathematics and then we're going to go into physics and biology. Okay. So the first mathematics book, Baby Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis.

• 48:32Krishna Choudhary?

  This is called Baby Rudin because I cried like a baby while I was reading this thing. This was my first semester at Princeton University. There was a course called Math 215. It was called Analysis in a Single Variable. That was the tagline. And then, and then the description in the syllabus was Analysis in a Single Variable. I get, I get to the first lecture and it's Peter Sarnak, who is a legend in mathematics. He's got this thick South African accent and he goes, "What is a number?" And I'm like, "What are we talking about?" Right? What's going on? And, and, and this is the book. This is the textbook for it.

• 49:16Krishna Choudhary?

  It was, it was, it was an insane course. It was one of the most formative courses in my life. The first lecture, we get into what it means to be a number, what it means to be a real number, that stuff that I was talking to you about, countability and the fact that real numbers are uncountable, but rational numbers are countable. And there's functions that are continuous everywhere, but you can't differentiate anywhere. It's like really, really strange things. Basically, it's, it's the foundations of calculus. Because when Newton invented it, like every good physicist, he was very hand wavy. He was like, "Limits approach," you know, and it's like obvious.

• 49:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And for most smooth functions that like we deal with on a day-to-day basis as physicists, it's totally fine, right? And as a physicist, I can totally understand why he would choose to present calculus that way. But pretty soon, like within about 50 years of him saying all that, and 100 years of him saying all that, mathematicians start saying, "Well, what about this? And what about that?" And turns out there's like functions that are completely non-intuitive. There's functions that are continuous everywhere, meaning I can take a pen and I can draw it out theoretically, but I could never find a slope anywhere on that function. That's a really weird thing to do. Baby Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis.

• 50:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Honestly, a great time. Once, once you get over the trauma and everything, it's, it's an amazing, amazing book.

• 50:50Lester Nare?

  I'll, I'll take it, I'll take it here.

• 50:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 50:52Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 50:53Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Next one is actually, it's my favorite course that I ever took at Princeton University. My favorite course that I ever took at Princeton University was a mathematics course. It was not a physics course, even though I was a physics major. It was complex analysis. The author, Elias Stein, was actually my professor at the time. He's also the PhD advisor of Terrence Tao.

• 51:19Lester Nare?

  Ah, we've got a lot of Terrence Tao in the comments lately.

• 51:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um, this book is absolutely amazing. It is not like Baby Rudin because this is gentle. This brings you in and it treats you fairly and it treats you like you're a human being. Okay. And it, it goes on to show some of the most beautiful things in mathematics. It starts with the invention of I, the imaginary number, and it goes on to talk about the Cauchy-Riemann equations, how to take integrals in the complex plane. It talks about the, the Riemann zeta function. It talks about the prime number function, which is how many, how many prime numbers there are as you get higher and higher.

• 52:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It turns out it's like related to the log of how high you get. And you know, have you ever heard that like weird math thing that's like all of the numbers added up, like 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4, all of them added up to infinity is negative 1/12?

• 52:25Lester Nare?

  No.

• 52:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. That's something that we can get, get into. But it turns out the sum of all the natural numbers is negative 1/12. And this is the key to understanding that, complex analysis. It has to do with holomorphic functions and the fact that everything is okay in complex analysis. Stuff that, stuff that is not allowed in real analysis becomes allowed in complex analysis. It's absolutely beautiful. It's my favorite thing.

• 52:51Lester Nare?

  If you would like us to cover it, let us know in the comments.

• 52:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Finally, the next one, I lost the cover to this, but this is also Elias Stein. This is part of his Analysis series. This is Fourier Analysis. This was instrumental for physics in general, right? Understanding Fourier Analysis. There's a lot of really non-intuitive things about Fourier Analysis, like the fact that like I can add up a bunch of sines and cosines and I can get a convergent function, but then the derivative of that function can be divergent, which is really weird, like the derivative will blow up, but the function itself will approach like a really nice, steady value. Again, really weird things. This was, this was a great course, but this was actually the last course in higher mathematics that I took at Princeton University.

• 53:40Krishna Choudhary?

  I also took at the same time Algebra with Galois Theory. The textbook is not here because I don't wanna, I don't wanna talk about that experience.

• 53:48Lester Nare?

  It is not getting added to the collection.

• 53:50Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not getting added because I don't wanna talk about that experience. That's a class that I PDF'd.

• 53:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Remember when we could do pass, D, fail? I passed. I did not get a D or a fail.

• 54:01Lester Nare?

  No D, no F.

• 54:02Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't wanna think about what the letter would have been had I not done that.

• 54:06Lester Nare?

  This is not a file that you can open in Adobe. Having a class that's PDF is not maybe a Princeton-specific thing, but...

• 54:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Usually it's just pass, fail, but Princeton's one of those like, "I'll give you a D." So you gotta, you gotta, you gotta work a little bit.

• 54:23Lester Nare?

  That selection process.

• 54:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. All right. So that was the mathematics. Now let's get into the physics. The first physics textbook I'd like to talk about is again, the Bible. This is Landau-Lifshitz Mechanics. A lot of the viewers and a lot of the grad students in the audience will know this book by a different cover, okay? They're gonna know the, the newer version with like, there's like circles and like yellow circles everywhere. This is the original version that my dad actually gave me. And it's one that he wants back. "Daddy, you're not gonna get this back." Okay? This, this was a formative experience because this was classical mechanics. My second year, first semester.

• 55:07Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a crazy textbook. This is by Lev Landau, who's the legendary Russian physicist. In the first two pages, he proves that mass cannot be negative. Okay? In the first two pages. And I remember reading this going, "This is insane." That like, that like, we just take for granted as an axiom, the axiom of least action. That like everything goes by least action. You have like a Lagrangian and stuff like that. And from that you can prove that mass is negative. And then a lot of the problems in here are just like insanely hard. And he has problems and solutions. There's a, there's a colloquial saying about Landau-Lifshitz, which is

• 55:50Krishna Choudhary?

  "Not a, not a thought of Lifshitz, not a word from Landau." Because Landau was kinda narrating and Lifshitz is the guy who typed.

• 55:59Lester Nare?

  This sounds like the show.

• 56:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Lester Nare?

  You're the guy narrating and I'm the guy who types.

• 56:04Krishna Choudhary?

  But this, this, absolutely an amazing textbook, formative for classical mechanics. And it's a textbook that I definitely used.

• 56:13Lester Nare?

  This also reminds me of all the Rugrats fans out there. Dr. Lifshitz, the doctor in Rugrats. Slightly different pronunciation, equally impactful.

• 56:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Definitely. Next one on our list of textbooks. We've alluded to this before, Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi. This is one of those where he treats you like a human being. He treats you like a human being. Enrico Fermi, Thermodynamics. This is a great textbook for intro thermodynamics. You don't wanna get into like statistical mechanics and the theory of atoms and things like that. You just wanna talk about heat, temperature, entropy. This is an amazing, amazing read. Really short, you can tell. But just really informative. PV equals NRT, equations of state of gases. Absolutely amazing.

• 57:07Lester Nare?

  And also on our ranking in our Oppenheimer Scientist Ranking episode, which you've, if you have not watched, is a fantastic deep dive in the concentration of brilliance and genius that was applied to unfortunately, the nuclear program.

• 57:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. But, and I think Enrico Fermi was top five.

• 57:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:26Krishna Choudhary?

  In that, right?

• 57:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:27Krishna Choudhary?

  And totally deserved.

• 57:29Lester Nare?

  Totally deserved.

• 57:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, next one. So I, so I gave you the first textbook on classical mechanics, which was Landau-Lifshitz.

• 57:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:36Krishna Choudhary?

  This next one is The Bane of My Existence. Goldstein, Classical Mechanics. Look at how thick this is. And then, and then it's just, it's just, it's just the worst. It's just the absolute worst. It's so dense and it covers literally everything that has to do with classical mechanics. But the problems are insane. Like no reasonable person would assign more than two in a homework problem. And guess how many we got? A lot more than two.

• 58:05Lester Nare?

  A lot more than two.

• 58:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. So Goldstein.

• 58:08Lester Nare?

  Classic.

• 58:09Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, a lot of trauma with this textbook, but I get, I, I do know classical mechanics really well now because of this, right? And this is a really good precursor to learning quantum mechanics because this goes over kind of the subtleties, like it goes over Poisson brackets really well, which is something that becomes commutators in quantum mechanics. So it's like, it's like a kind of really nice bridge between classical and quantum mechanics. It's still a terrible textbook. I have to say, it doesn't explain stuff, but the problems are pretty, pretty insane.

• 58:45Lester Nare?

  If you want some light summer reading as you get ready for year two of FFP, pick up the second edition.

• 58:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 58:54Lester Nare?

  Classical Mechanics.

• 58:55Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Here's another bane of my existence. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics. I think every physicist would agree that this is the bane of their existence. Okay. Most physicists learn electrodynamics first using the Griffiths textbook. It's a great textbook. I don't have it here, but that's, that's the one that I first learned electromagnetism with. This is the second version of that where it's like, okay, now let's talk about the real stuff. This is where, like, if you want to know how antennas work, this is it. If you want to know how light propagates through random medium, even if the medium

• 59:35Krishna Choudhary?

  is not homogeneous, it's like a really weird medium, this is where it happens. What, what's kind of cool about this is there are problems in this textbook that, you know, require a lot of, lot of thought, but there are also things that now I encounter in my research and in my job. Like I work at a quantum computing company where we're doing spin qubits, right? And part of confining individual electrons to create spin qubits is to create a kind of egg carton-like landscape of potentials where it's like positive five volts, negative five volts, and so on and so forth. That geometry is a homework problem in Jackson. Why he would think that's a reasonable homework problem? I'm not sure.

• 1:00:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. He, he was a maniac, but Jackson is another one of these trauma inducing physics textbooks that, you know, now, given the years past that I look back on, I'm like, okay, this was pretty legit.

• 1:00:36Lester Nare?

  Uh, two notes on this one. Uh, if we go back to our episode where we covered the ice cube neutrino detector.

• 1:00:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Lester Nare?

  We talked about how light moves through ice.

• 1:00:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's in.

• 1:00:49Lester Nare?

  Uh, which was a very viral and popular clip that we had.

• 1:00:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Cherenkov radiation. The fact that if a charged particle moves faster than light in a medium, it's going to create a shock wave. Yep, that's in there. Literally everything that you could ever want from an electrodynamics textbook about any electrical phenomenon is in here.

• 1:01:07Lester Nare?

  And for all of my UAP fans, one of the things people talk about is that how these UAP allegedly move around is a part of extended electrodynamics.

• 1:01:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Lester Nare?

  And so you have to start here first.

• 1:01:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. You got, you gotta do the homework problems.

• 1:01:22Lester Nare?

  Before you get there.

• 1:01:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep. This is one of my favorite textbooks, Thermal Physics. This was my introduction to my favorite subject in physics, which is statistical mechanics. I, I took thermodynamics with Enrico Fermi, but that was in my first year. It was part of the intro physics curriculum. Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi is very gentle. This one is also actually very gentle. Kittle and Cromer, Thermal Physics. In the first chapter, or maybe the second chapter, he proves the second law of thermodynamics using two state systems, like a magnetic spin system. And that's a proof that I still have internalized and memorized.

• 1:02:04Krishna Choudhary?

  And it was a very deep thing for me to realize that the second law of thermodynamics is like something you can just like realize from math and combinatorics. This goes into all the way from phase transitions, like the Stefan Boltzmann law that we talked about in the last episode, the T to the fourth dependence, ideal gas law, how you can get the ideal gas law from just talking about quantum particles. It's an amazing textbook as the first textbook for deep statistical mechanics. I would highly recommend. It's honestly one of my favorite physics textbooks of all time. Yep. And finally, we've dealt with classical mechanics.

• 1:02:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Electromagnetism and statistical mechanics. The last of the four pillars of modern physics is quantum mechanics.

• 1:02:56Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Here we have Sakurai and Napolitano. This is in line, sort of similar to Landau-Lifshitz in that Sakurai is the brains behind the textbook. Napolitano is the editor. Modern Quantum Mechanics, this is an amazing textbook for the first half because the first half was written by Sakurai during his lifetime. The second half, Napolitano and a bunch of his colleagues took over and you can see the, you, you can see the decrease in quality. It's still very good, but JJ Sakurai's way of introducing quantum mechanics, first using the Stern-Gerlach experiment, where the first, the first lesson in this book is just about

• 1:03:40Krishna Choudhary?

  why you need imaginary numbers to describe quantum mechanics. It's, it's a very simple description of an experiment and he says, "The only way that you can describe this experiment is if the internal dynamics involve complex numbers, if they involve the imaginary unit I." It's, it's absolutely amazing. And then he goes into the Heisenberg picture, the Schrodinger picture. He builds angular momentum, the theory of everything that, you know, we know and love in quantum mechanics. Absolutely phenomenal, phenomenal textbook. This is what I used in my graduate studies. The, in undergrad, I used Griffiths, but in graduate studies you use Sakurai and every

• 1:04:22Krishna Choudhary?

  physics, every physics nerd knows JJ Sakurai, Modern Quantum Mechanics.

• 1:04:28Lester Nare?

  Uh, I'll just make a note, for those who may be new, we've covered so many of the concepts that you just talked about on several of our previous podcasts in a variety of frontier research that we build from first principles, the history of the understanding that enabled those frontier projects. And it's one of the topics that I personally find super fascinating and clearly the audience does as well because so many people react in a positive way anytime we do those discussions. It looks like we have two final.

• 1:05:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:05:08Lester Nare?

  Textbooks left for our first section of the library.

• 1:05:12Krishna Choudhary?

  This one is Experiments in Modern Physics. There was a course at Princeton University, again, a great course at Princeton University called Experiments in Modern Physics. It was training you in how to do experiments, how to figure out what the noise level is, how to figure out what your error bars is. And what they would have you do is basically spend two weeks doing specific experiments that are legendary. So for example, you could do the Cavendish experiment that measured big G way back in like, I think the 1800s, I think maybe late 1700s. You can do the Millikan oil drop experiment where you measure the charge of a single electron.

• 1:05:55Krishna Choudhary?

  You can do the Lamb shift experiment, which is what we see on the cover over here. You, the, one of the ones that I did was measuring the 21 centimeter line, the 1420 hertz in the galaxy and charting the gas in the galaxy and showing that the galaxy's rotating, calculating how fast the galaxy is rotating by taking a little dish and pointing it at different spots in the galaxy and measuring the Doppler shift. So a lot of these seminal experiments are described in great, great detail in this book. It's absolutely phenomenal for someone who is interested in experimental physics and especially interested in like the history of how way back when they were still able

• 1:06:39Krishna Choudhary?

  to get their error bars so small. Michelson-Morley, another one that is described in this, in this book. It's, it's a great book.

• 1:06:48Lester Nare?

  And I will yet again note that if you are a long time listener of this podcast and you just heard that description. Of what you get in experiments in modern physics, you'll notice an overlap with the topics that we cover.

• 1:07:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Lester Nare?

  Because every single thing that you just mentioned, Michaelson Morley, the Lamb shift, the 1420 hydrogen line. I think I remember back to, there was a story we talked about, the formation of, it was a, oh, it's escaping me now. But we talked about a, an astrophysics story where it was the accretion disk.

• 1:07:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, the, um, the galactic rotation.

• 1:07:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And measuring that like, oh, dark matter.

• 1:07:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, it was a dark matter halo.

• 1:07:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It was, it was the fact that like, the galactic rotation curve is flat after some time. That's something.

• 1:07:37Lester Nare?

  That's something that is, is here. So as you can see, as we continue to build the narrative and the story and the history of who we are, you can see how that bleeds into the content we cover. Now, the last, but not the least, is the one and only biology book to start the collection.

• 1:07:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right. This is the, the one and only biology textbook that's going to be on the shelf. This was formative for my interest in biology. And you can tell from this podcast, I'm very interested in biology from a physics perspective. This is Fundamentals of Molecular Biology by Elizabeth Allison. Great, great textbook that really goes into depth about kind of the processes, like the Lego block. You know, I always talk about like Lego blocks in biology and how everything is just trying to be Lego blocks. This is kind of where I get that from. This was, the part of this course was also doing a molecular biology lab, where we grew bacteria with GFP, green fluorescent protein.

• 1:08:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And then we like, we expressed recombinant DNA. So we had a plasmid with the green fluorescent protein, and that also had a little antibiotic attached to it, or a way to circumnavigate the antibiotic so that you could only select for bacteria that had the plasmid. And then you could isolate the plasmid and you can isolate the GFP protein. That was one of my favorite courses at Princeton was like, just doing this lab and like manipulating life.

• 1:09:04Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:09:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Like live, you know, you'd come back the next week and the bacteria were grown and like, you could like do things with it. Absolutely cool. This, this, this book is also amazing. Also, cool thing, one of the guest lectures during that course was Shirley Tillman.

• 1:09:21Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 1:09:22Krishna Choudhary?

  President at the time of Princeton University.

• 1:09:24Lester Nare?

  I, I think I've told you this story, but I'll briefly share it. So as you mentioned, guest lecturer Shirley Tillman. My first day on campus, I was with a teammate of mine walking north on the campus. We were there for preseason and so no one else was yet there. And we're walking, we, you know, we're just trying to figure out where our classes are going to be and stuff. And this nice person walked up to us and asked us where we're from and are we acclimatizing well? And we were like, yes. And we asked who it was, who, uh, I think, I, I don't want to get the story wrong. So I'll just say they had asked, um, you know, who we were, and then we asked who they were. And then she said Shirley Tillman.

• 1:10:08Lester Nare?

  And we were like, oh, so what do you do?

• 1:10:12Lester Nare?

  She's like, oh, I'm the president of the university.

• 1:10:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Lester Nare?

  So that gives you an idea of where my, uh, lack of context was at the time as an 18 year old who was just obsessed about being able to be there, but also play soccer at the same time. I will also note that one of the best bands at the university at the time was Shirley and the Tillmans.

• 1:10:33Krishna Choudhary?

  That was a good band.

• 1:10:34Lester Nare?

  Great band, great band name.

• 1:10:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Lester Nare?

  And so for all of those, if you, if any of you who are band members are listening, we all remember.

• 1:10:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are not forgotten.

• 1:10:45Lester Nare?

  You are not forgotten. Formative for all of us. And that completes our first shelf in the library. We're going to come back with the second, which will be a little bit smaller, but will expand.

• 1:10:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:10:59Lester Nare?

  So now we are moving on to shelf number two, after placing our first shelf of textbooks with an esoteric collection in this selection.

• 1:11:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep, we're going to start off our esoteric collection with Relativity by the one and only Albert Einstein. This is a pretty short book. It's quite fancy. If you look at the pages, like, it's like, uh, like ruffled pages, you know what I mean?

• 1:11:25Lester Nare?

  It's like a Harry Potter book.

• 1:11:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of cool. 2007 is, is the, is the date that I have here. Krishna Choudhary, December 19th, 2007. I didn't understand anything about relativity. 2007, I was in sophomore year of high school, okay? But the magic of relativity is you can like, try and read it even in high school and kind of get it. Okay, it's not like quantum mechanics where I have, I still have no idea what the, what the hell they're talking about. Relativity is like one of these nice things about physics that just kind of makes sense the more and more you think about it. And Einstein, fair play to him, he's a really good explainer of relativity.

• 1:12:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's not like Heisenberg where he wrote the 1925 Um Doytung paper. And then, and then people still read it today. And it's like, how did you come up with that? Relativity, especially special relativity, kind of makes sense. And then when you graduate to general relativity, it still kind of makes sense. It's a beautiful textbook in his own words, the man himself, Albert Einstein.

• 1:12:28Lester Nare?

  First in our esoteric collection.

• 1:12:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Next one, Arnold Summerfield.

• 1:12:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:34Krishna Choudhary?

  We've talked about Arnold Summerfield. He's the mentor to so many of the greats, including Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg. He was Heisenberg's PhD advisor and kind of saved his PhD thesis because Heisenberg nearly failed and Arnold Summerfield had to go to bat for him and make sure that he passed and go on to greatness. Arnold Summerfield never won the Nobel Prize, but he mentored something like 10 Nobel Prize winners, including, including Hans Bethe, Wolfgang Pauli, uh, just some of the greats of all time. He had the first collection of lectures on theoretical physics.

• 1:13:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Nowadays, a lot of times people use Landau Lifshitz, which we covered with the mechanics textbook that I had earlier. Landau Lifshitz also has a textbook on fluid mechanics, statistical physics, field theory and all, all the works, right? And it's kind of become a gold standard for graduate textbooks. But before Landau Lifshitz, there was Arnold Summerfield. This is volume six, Partial Differential Equations in Physics. You can imagine he had a mechanics, he has an optics, he has a statistical mechanics, one of the greats of all time.

• 1:13:52Lester Nare?

  And one of our earliest episodes.

• 1:13:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:13:55Lester Nare?

  We covered, uh, that relationship in depth, which again, Mr. Shill here. Some of our library of previous episodes is just phenomenal around the history, particularly in physics. And so if you're interested in the relationship between these people and how that relates to the growth of the field and our understanding, some of that, it's like our episode two, three, four, five.

• 1:14:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Lester Nare?

  Were very heavy, uh, in, in that arena, in some of these early developmental.

• 1:14:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's how we first got viral on Instagram.

• 1:14:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Is with the Summerfield Heisenberg episode.

• 1:14:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:14:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Where we covered the 1925 paper and the 100 year anniversary of it.

• 1:14:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:14:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Back in 2025, last year.

• 1:14:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:14:36Krishna Choudhary?

  A year later.

• 1:14:37Lester Nare?

  A year later. Look at, look at us. Who do you, who'd have thunk?

• 1:14:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Lester Nare?

  Not me.

• 1:14:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, not me. Another one from our previous episodes.

• 1:14:46Lester Nare?

  Another one.

• 1:14:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Schrodinger's What is Life?

• 1:14:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:14:50Krishna Choudhary?

  We covered this in detail in our DNA episode where we covered James Watson and his work with DNA. What is Life is a seminal textbook in biological physics. This is where a physicist tried to tackle the question, what is life with biology? This is where he predicted that DNA would be a aperiodic crystal. Why? Because it has to store information, which means that it can't just be the same thing over and over again. It can't be something like starch or cellulose, which is just glucose, glucose, glucose, glucose, everywhere, because there's no information, it's just all glucose. But if you have something like a aperiodic crystal, like something with bits,

• 1:15:35Krishna Choudhary?

  where it's a 01100110, then you can all of a sudden store all of the information that is needed for life. And he reasoned from first principles that if we wanted a molecular basis for information storage, we needed something like a crystal that had regular parts, but different sequences.

• 1:15:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Krishna Choudhary?

  To store all of the diversity. He predicted the structure of DNA before we even knew that it was DNA that we were looking for. It's absolutely incredible. Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?

• 1:16:08Lester Nare?

  The Double Helix episode is a great way to dig into that concept that you just covered, which, uh, is fascinating to me. And also the history of the discovery of the double helix and kind of some of the, uh, non-scientific social drama,

• 1:16:25Lester Nare?

  of the real world humanity that relates to these early discoveries is also quite interesting.

• 1:16:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's absolutely amazing. Okay, this one, S. Subramaniam Chandrasekhar.

• 1:16:36Lester Nare?

  The Thunder Shaker.

• 1:16:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. Chandrasekhar's Radiative Transfer. This is a seminal textbook in astrophysics. It's talking about, um, how radiative phenomenon goes through ionized atmospheres, stellar atmospheres. This thing is like a end all be all for that subject. It's absolutely incredible. He uses principles of symmetry to talk about radiative transfer in astrophysics, which is very different from how normal astrophysicists used to do it at the time. Normal astrophysicists used to make a phenomenological model. They'd make some kind of model that would be like, oh, okay, so this is happening and then this is happening. Here, he went through, um, like symmetry principles to be like,

• 1:17:23Krishna Choudhary?

  this needs to happen because of the symmetry of the stellar atmosphere, because of the symmetry of the geometry and things like that. It's a very physicsy approach. Now, I'm going to be honest, I've only read very small parts of this, but, um, I asked my father, who's an astrophysicist and a big fan of Chandrasekhar, and he has like five or six textbooks. And this is on loan, by the way, from the, um, Choudhary family exhibition. So he wants it back maybe in like a year.

• 1:17:50Lester Nare?

  It's on permanent loan.

• 1:17:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's on permanent loan.

• 1:17:55Krishna Choudhary?

  So I asked him, you know, of all of the Chandrasekhar textbooks, which would you say is his most seminal work? And he said Radiative Transfer. And I'm like, okay, thank you.

• 1:18:07Krishna Choudhary?

  That's going in the FFP pod library.

• 1:18:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:18:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Absolutely legendary astrophysicist and physicist in general. So I'm, I'm glad that we have this thing here.

• 1:18:19Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Next one. Gibbs.

• 1:18:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. This is the graduation of statistical mechanics into a formal field where we go from Boltzmann, Maxwell Boltzmann distribution, Raleigh Jeans Law, all the way up to now Gibbs talking about chemical potential, talking about the Gibbs Ensemble. This is the book that put American theoretical physics on the map. Okay. Now, he is from Yale University, but we'll forgive him for that. He still deserves to be in our library and I had to do a lot of soul searching.

• 1:19:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah, I plead the fifth.

• 1:19:01Krishna Choudhary?

  To, to, to, to really convince myself. But, you know, Willard Gibbs, we covered him in the 250 year America anniversary. This guy was definitely a legend and he put American science, American theoretical physics on the map. He completed the Gibbs Ensemble to create like all of the statistical mechanics that we know and love today. This is why chemists love statistical mechanics is because of Willard Gibbs. Or maybe they hate him. I don't know. But in any case, you can't deny that it's hella useful. I mean, it describes chemistry, right? So.

• 1:19:37Lester Nare?

  We've remained number one in theoretical sense and that may not continue to be the case unless we continue to invest in the hard and fundamental sciences.

• 1:19:50Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right. All right. The next esoteric addition. Albert Einstein, philosopher scientist. This is actually a collection of essays about Albert Einstein by the preeminent physicists and mathematicians of his time. There are several biographies of Albert Einstein. I didn't want to include the biographies of Albert Einstein because they're, they're written today based on stuff that people said. This is what people actually said. Okay. There's an essay from Niels Bohr talking about how much of a legend Albert Einstein is. There's an essay from Kurt Gödel talking about how ridiculous Albert Einstein is.

• 1:20:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Wolfgang Pauli, Arnold Sommerfeld, like all of the who's who of people who could, who could say stuff about the goat and this, and this is it, right? It's like, imagine interviewing the star NBA players.

• 1:20:49Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:20:49Krishna Choudhary?

  In Jordan's time.

• 1:20:50Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're all talking about how ridiculous Jordan is and how, like Jordan is here and like we're, we're, we're a step below.

• 1:20:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's, that's this book.

• 1:21:00Lester Nare?

  The, the football reference would be, uh, if you had today, all the star footballers talking about Messi. You listen to Becca, you listen to Neymar, you listen to.

• 1:21:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Thierry Henry.

• 1:21:12Lester Nare?

  Thierry Henry, Vinny, all these, you know, legends who in their own right have earned the right to be at their plateau.

• 1:21:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Lester Nare?

  Not, not quite the same. Kind of the same.

• 1:21:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Kind of the same.

• 1:21:24Lester Nare?

  But Einstein to me feels like Messi is an alien.

• 1:21:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Lester Nare?

  He's absolutely an alien.

• 1:21:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:32Lester Nare?

  But he's still, you could still, he's still, he's still like, you know, in the same region.

• 1:21:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:40Lester Nare?

  There's, there's distance.

• 1:21:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there's distance.

• 1:21:42Lester Nare?

  But like Cristiano Ronaldo's like, people say, people argue.

• 1:21:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:46Lester Nare?

  I think with Einstein, no one argues.

• 1:21:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no one argues.

• 1:21:48Lester Nare?

  He's the one.

• 1:21:50Krishna Choudhary?

  He's the one. In the 1900s, he's the one.

• 1:21:52Lester Nare?

  He's the one.

• 1:21:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Lester Nare?

  And so, you know.

• 1:21:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Lester Nare?

  It's so word for word, bar for bar, what people actually say.

• 1:21:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, hear it from Niels Bohr himself about how ridiculous Einstein was.

• 1:22:05Lester Nare?

  No rose colored glasses, no postmodern interpretation.

• 1:22:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, the guy's like, no, this is insane. How is this a single human being? All right. Speaking of ridiculous single human beings.

• 1:22:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:22:19Krishna Choudhary?

  The greatest work in scientific literature is Newton's Principia and our library would not be complete without a copy of Newton's Principia. This is the beginning of the scientific revolution as we see it today, where we think of the universe as understandable. We think of the universe as something that mathematics can tackle and describe in a way that is unprecedented before him. Okay. He said that the same laws that apply on earth are the ones that apply in the cosmos, right? He said, the same way that the apple falls from the tree is the same way that the moon falls towards the earth.

• 1:23:04Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not that he noticed the apple. He was like sitting under the apple tree and he's like, oh, I got hit by an apple. Apples fall. Everyone knows apples fall, right? Galileo described how all apples and like, you know, balls of lead will fall at the same rate. That wasn't the key thing. The key thing was the way that the apple falls is also the same way that the moon is falling. And if I were to include the three laws that he came up with, the fact that the moon is moving and it's, it's just falling in the direction of the force. There's a force that is centripetal, that is one over r squared.

• 1:23:41Krishna Choudhary?

  All of those things. He also invented calculus, by the way, on the way.

• 1:23:45Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:45Krishna Choudhary?

  To, to, to describe everything about the world.

• 1:23:49Lester Nare?

  Calculus was a side hustle. It's like, I need something to explain it. Let me just invent.

• 1:23:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And, and what I really love about this is like, when he was describing, for example, Kepler's laws and, um, describing how the moon falls and how a comet goes around the sun, he didn't actually use any calculus. He just used geometric constructions, like the stuff, like the compass and needle stuff from way back in the Greek days. That's what he used to describe all of the mathematics because he knew the calculus was going to be this new thing and he didn't want to over index on this new thing that he invented, lest people say, oh, you just made up some stuff to like this. But here it's like, no, it's just geometry and the few rules that I made. It's absolutely beautiful.

• 1:24:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And like the work that he did, you know, he described Kepler's laws, which were established like 50 years earlier with just pure geometry. He's like, there's a triangle and the triangle has this much and that's why it's going to fall this much and the areas are going to be equal to when it's closer and when it's farther away. Absolutely incredible. The genius of this guy, and he's another one of these Einsteins where all of his peers were like, what is going on?

• 1:25:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Krishna Choudhary?

  How is this a real person?

• 1:25:03Lester Nare?

  Alien.

• 1:25:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Joseph Bernoulli, the guy behind Bernoulli's principle. He was like, what, what is this guy?

• 1:25:11Lester Nare?

  Which is like, again, crazy to even say.

• 1:25:13Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a guy who has a thing named after him and he's talking about Newton like, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:25:18Lester Nare?

  I don't know.

• 1:25:19Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know.

• 1:25:20Lester Nare?

  I just came up with one thing. He came up with everything.

• 1:25:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:23Lester Nare?

  Out of whole cloth.

• 1:25:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Absolutely amazing. Yeah. Newton's Principia, the greatest, the greatest work in scientific literature and I will stand by that.

• 1:25:30Lester Nare?

  Some, some of the most legendary additions to the esoteric collection in the library, our second shelf of three. Again, the library is a living document and so we have three remaining books that we will go through as we place our esoteric collection onto the shelf. And if you wanted an excuse to migrate from being an audio listener to watching the podcast on video, coming soon to Apple Podcasts, but already available on YouTube and Spotify. We're having a great time today.

• 1:26:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:06Lester Nare?

  You're missing how amazing, uh, these look. And Krishna holding the book up so he makes sure it gets in the clip on Instagram.

• 1:26:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I only did that for the second one.

• 1:26:17Krishna Choudhary?

  For long time listeners of the podcast, you may have noticed the platonic solids as our sort of emblem, as our logo. You're going to see it in the top right corner of our videos. The platonic solids are something that we chose early on, at the very beginning, when we started this podcast, we were thinking about like, you know, what is, what is a symbolism that encapsulates what we're trying to do?

• 1:26:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:26:47Krishna Choudhary?

  The platonic solids are introduced in Plato's Dialogues, which I have a copy of here. This next shelf, the third and final shelf is going to consist of philosophy in a broad sense. And again, it's a living document or it's a living library. So if you guys have other books that you want to include there, please let us know. But for now, we've got three. We're going to start with Plato's Dialogues. This is a copy from way back that includes, um, both Timaeus and the Republic. Okay. So, um, in Plato's Dialogue, Timaeus, he introduces these platonic solids and he says

• 1:27:28Krishna Choudhary?

  that these are the shapes that are his answer for the question, what is the universe made out of? Now, I like that for the reason that he's even asking that question, right? It's kind of cool that someone's asking, what is the material, like what's the stuff made out of? And he says, everything is made out of platonic solids. There's some hidden geometric building blocks that make up the world. And Timaeus is kind of like a first attempt at, you know, what we as physicists try to chase all the time, which is a unified field theory.

• 1:28:06Lester Nare?

  Theory of everything.

• 1:28:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? A theory of everything. Well, Plato had his version of a theory of everything. I mean, it's, it's wrong. It's not made out of shapes, but I mean, if you ask string theorists, they'll say, yes, it's made out of shapes. It's just that the shape is in 11 dimensions. Okay.

• 1:28:21Krishna Choudhary?

  But the, the, the, the philosophy is there.

• 1:28:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Where like as physicists, we want to find unification. And I think Plato was one of these philosophers that really suggested that very early on. What I also love about Plato is the fact that, you know, in his Republic, there's the very famous allegory of the cave, which talks about how.

• 1:28:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Human perceptual senses have a limitation. Okay. The fact that, I mean, let's go over the allegory of the cave. The idea is that there's these philosopher kings or whatever that are creating real shapes. And the shapes are getting projected as shadows on a wall. And all we humans are doing are looking at the shadows and thinking that they're real. This is how the matrix comes out to be, right? Where it's like, all of our senses are actually fooling us into thinking that there's a hidden reality underneath. I mean, the deeper and deeper we go into physics, it turns out there's a lot of truth to that idea. Right? The other reason why I love platonic shapes is just the geometry of it is so cool.

• 1:29:34Krishna Choudhary?

  The fact that there are only five of them and no more. Right? There are only five three dimensional objects where every single face is exactly the same. You've got the tetrahedron, which is the triangle with a bunch of equal at four, equal lateral triangles. You've got the cube, obviously with square, square, square, square. You've got the octahedron, the dodecahedron. And Plato in Timaeus, he constructed this like mathematical cosmology where the physical world was consisting of these shapes. And each of the shapes had to do with an element that the universe is made out of. Like the tetrahedron was fire. The cube is earth. The icosahedron is water.

• 1:30:17Krishna Choudhary?

  The dodecahedron is the cosmos itself. And then there's like an ether, which is crazy that he thought of an ether. And then we borrowed it in the 1900s to describe how electromagnetism worked. Turns out that's not exactly true. But again, it's like, it's very cool to see like, you know, from 2000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, this trail of intellectual thought still coming down. The idea that the universe is understandable at a first principles level from building blocks. I think that's very cool. And so that's why Plato gets on our philosophy shelf.

• 1:30:52Lester Nare?

  Shelf. The inaugural selection, the inventor of the concept of Legos.

• 1:30:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:30:58Lester Nare?

  And then one day the fire nation attacked.

• 1:31:03Lester Nare?

  For those avatar fans, the last airbender avatar in the audience.

• 1:31:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, that's exactly right. So, you know, we're going from Plato, which is this idea that realism, a true reality exists in the realm of forms. There's this idea, like the theory of forms. If you've seen that very famous painting, I think it's by Raphael. It's in the Vatican where Plato, it's, it's all of the Greek philosophers in a single painting. My favorite, actually, my favorite philosopher, Diogenes, who was just a troll, is like in a corner there.

• 1:31:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Funny, my favorite, even though Plato is awesome, just from a personal perspective, my favorite philosopher is Diogenes because he invented trolling. There's a famous story where Plato said, I, I'm paraphrasing, but Plato said, how do you define a human being? It's a featherless biped. And then, and then Diogenes got a chicken and plucked all of his feathers. And then came into Plato's like lecture and he was like, behold, a human.

• 1:32:12Lester Nare?

  Diogenes the degenerate.

• 1:32:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Dude, he's so degenerate, right?

• 1:32:17Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, he trolled Alexander the Great.

• 1:32:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? When Alexander the Great was like, what can I do for you? He's like, step out of the sun for me. You're, you're in the way of the light. Like to Alexander the Great, like this guy did not care. So I love that about him. It's not someone that I, let's say aspire to be.

• 1:32:34Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 1:32:34Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's, he's still funny.

• 1:32:37Lester Nare?

  Well, you, sometimes you gotta be the original contrarian.

• 1:32:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was the original. Anyway, so Plato, in the, in this giant painting by Raphael about it, about all of the philosophers in the school of Athens, there's Plato and Aristotle. And Plato is pointing at the sky because he's saying that the true reality is in this world of forms. Right? And we're just, we're just peons looking at through our senses, some random nonsense.

• 1:33:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:33:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:33:11Lester Nare?

  Some representation.

• 1:33:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So, yeah, some representation based on our senses.

• 1:33:14Lester Nare?

  But not the true form itself.

• 1:33:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Well, he was kind of late to the party.

• 1:33:18Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:33:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Because a thousand years ago, the Hindus.

• 1:33:23Lester Nare?

  Of course.

• 1:33:24Krishna Choudhary?

  In the Upanishads, wrote exactly this down. Okay? The Upanishads are something that I grew up learning about.

• 1:33:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a school of Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta, which is this non dual representation of the world. The fact that consciousness and the material world are one in the same. They're not actually separate. This is very different from, I think, Western philosophy. It talks about a creator having created creation.

• 1:33:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:33:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:33:53Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, God said, let there be light and there was light and then it was all good.

• 1:33:58Krishna Choudhary?

  In, in, in Hindu philosophy, especially in Advaita philosophy, Advaita means non dual. Advaita means two, and then is like a non. There, it's one in the same. Like the, the creation and the creator cannot be separated.

• 1:34:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:34:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? I really like that, but that's, that's from a more philosophical point of view. In the line of, in the line of Plato and his idea of forms and the idea that the senses are limited, the Upanishads definitely talk about that a thousand years earlier. There's the Shvetashvatar Upanishad that talks about the origin of Maya. Maya is this idea that when we talk about the world as an illusion, it's, Maya is the illusion. That's the Hindu sort of word for it, the Sanskrit word for it. It's defining this as like a cosmic mechanism that turns some singular reality. Right?

• 1:34:59Krishna Choudhary?

  A singular reality into all of the manifestations that we see here today. And, you know, a lot of times, now this is where I'm, I'm going off on a personal limb. A lot of times people think of Hinduism as a polytheistic religion because we've got millions of gods and all this other kind of stuff. But, you know, if you, if you go down to this level, it's this.

• 1:35:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:35:21Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a singular reality that is getting manifested in all these sorts of forms. Right? There's all these forms of the divine that you can worship and things like that. You don't have to worship. I don't know if I worship, but like this idea that like all of the manifestation and all of the richness that we see in the world is from a singular reality. I really like that concept.

• 1:35:43Lester Nare?

  Not all of the gods have admin privileges.

• 1:35:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:46Lester Nare?

  There, there is only one super admin.

• 1:35:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, he's a, he's distributing.

• 1:35:54Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:35:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But all of the other ones are really just.

• 1:35:57Lester Nare?

  An extension.

• 1:35:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Them. He, he or she or them.

• 1:36:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Like being like, like, just like trolling.

• 1:36:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. In the world.

• 1:36:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? There's another Upanishad that I really like, which is the Kano Upanishad, which maybe we'll talk about in some sense. That deals with the question of consciousness. The Kano Upanishad is really the who, who punished it. Like who am I? Who are you? And what is all this? Right? It's talking about who is the seer behind the eye? The eye is like this instrument that is.

• 1:36:28Lester Nare?

  Exactly.

• 1:36:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Like taking in photons and then creating an image.

• 1:36:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Krishna Choudhary?

  But like, who is the, the thingy?

• 1:36:33Lester Nare?

  And then interpreting it.

• 1:36:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Lester Nare?

  And then like, who defines how it's interpreted?

• 1:36:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:37Lester Nare?

  The way you interpret, the way I interpret.

• 1:36:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And what is the consciousness? Is it the same?

• 1:36:41Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:36:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Is it the same entity that is, I mean, it's, it's, I, I don't, I'm not going to say that I'm an expert in it. I'm still reading a lot and I'm still trying to understand the whole thing. But it's, it's crazy cool that like, as humans, we've been thinking about this from different points of view. Right? Plato's been thinking about the forms. The Upanishads have been thinking about the illusion. And now we get to modern quantum mechanics.

• 1:37:04Lester Nare?

  What is real?

• 1:37:06Krishna Choudhary?

  With what is real? This is an amazing book. This was actually in one of the comments where people talked about like, what's a, what's a book that we should have? This is something that I already read and I'm a huge fan of this book. Adam Becker, PhD in astrophysics, I believe. Absolutely wonderful exposition of the state of reality and that question of what is real in quantum mechanics? Is it the wave function? Is the wave function a real thing? If the wave function is a real thing, what the hell is a collapse of a wave function? Right? How come it collapses for me? And then does it also collapse for you? But then you're collapsing at a different time. So how does your collapse know that mine collapsed? Right? And it goes over the Copenhagen interpretation.

• 1:37:51Krishna Choudhary?

  It then goes over Einstein's qualms with the Copenhagen interpretation in a way that is a lot more subtle than people give Einstein credit for. They say, oh, Einstein just didn't like quantum mechanics. Well, there's really good reasons why he didn't like quantum mechanics. And this goes into that. And then he goes into the bomb interpretation with the pilot waves. And he goes into the Bell, Bell's inequality that we covered in the America 250 episode. And he goes into some of the real implications. Also Everett's multi worlds interpretation and the many worlds interpretation where there's just one giant wave function. The reason why I like Everett's many worlds interpretation is because night, like, you

• 1:38:34Krishna Choudhary?

  know, kind of selfishly, it aligns with my pre existing philosophical theories that I've learned from the Upanishads, which is there is one reality.

• 1:38:43Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:38:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And we are all seeing manifestations of that one reality where, well, according to Everett, there is one universal wave function that we are all entangled with. And I am entangled with the observation, like when, when I observe a photon here versus here, it's because I am entangled with the photon. And so I observed it here because the part of my wave function is entangled with observing the photon here. There's another part of my wave function that is entangled with the photon being observed over there. And that went over there and I can never get access to it.

• 1:39:15Lester Nare?

  And then that universe Spider-Man is Tobey Maguire.

• 1:39:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Lester Nare?

  This universe Spider-Man is Tom Holland.

• 1:39:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah. This is where Marvel and everything comes in. But yeah, the reason why I'm an Everettian and a many worlds person is because, you know, I come from the Eastern philosophy of like. A one wave function universe, a one reality universe. And that comes from my reading of the Upanishads since I was a child. So these are the three that are going into the philosophy shelf. And there's only three. So if there's more, if there's some Buddhist stuff that aligns with that philosophy. I know there's some Mahayana Buddhism that goes into the world being an illusion. I'm not fully aware of Buddhist philosophy, but if you've got, if you guys have some ideas, please let us know.

• 1:40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  If there's any other philosophical books that you'd like us to, to put on the shelf, please let us know. But now I think you guys kind of have an understanding of, you know, what we're going for. And it's not that we're only going for this interpretation.

• 1:40:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:40:16Krishna Choudhary?

  If there are other interpretations that are compelling, I would love to read it. I'm not sold because I don't know what's going on.

• 1:40:23Lester Nare?

  And that's being, being okay saying, I don't know.

• 1:40:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:40:28Lester Nare?

  I don't know.

• 1:40:29Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a weird question. And it might be beyond science because the scientific method relies on observation.

• 1:40:35Lester Nare?

  Right. And if what, how do you rely on observation on something that's unobservable?

• 1:40:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to question what the act of observation is.

• 1:40:44Lester Nare?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:44Krishna Choudhary?

  So.

• 1:40:45Lester Nare?

  Yes. This is, the last note I'll make on this, what is real?

• 1:40:51Lester Nare?

  For those who are

• 1:40:54Lester Nare?

  interested in a visual, a visual example of this idea of the Everettian interpretation, is the movie Cloverfield Paradox, which got really bad reviews. It's in the Cloverfield.

• 1:41:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, I didn't watch it because it got, I, I loved Cloverfield.

• 1:41:12Lester Nare?

  It got really bad reviews, but it, it dealt with this concept in a way that was intriguing. And it had, you know, it, it was sort of Marva, Marvelian a little bit, but it, it did it, you know, Earth was basically having a fuel crisis, an energy crisis. They built this giant energy producing apparatus in space. And this universe and this universe bumped up against each other.

• 1:41:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:41:45Lester Nare?

  And then hijinks ensues. And it's, it's, it really, it was, it really was an interesting way to visualize what would be the human experience of that, because obviously we don't have it on a regular basis, unless UAP are interdimensional. They may be.

• 1:42:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Come on, this is the one year anniversary episode. We're not going to not talk about.

• 1:42:08Lester Nare?

  I got it in here, I think, three or four times legitimately in this episode. Last thing I'll just note is when you're talking about the, the Maya as this, this concept, it's, it's, it's almost, it's, it's convenient.

• 1:42:19Krishna Choudhary?

  The illusion, the grand illusion.

• 1:42:21Lester Nare?

  It's funny that we talked about the Mayans earlier in the Amazon story and kind of that word root came back at the end here. We are again at the two hour mark. For those who are still listening, which apparently is many of you, because the stats are telling us.

• 1:42:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Lester Nare?

  Especially on, on Apple podcasts that many of you are listening all the way through, which we are super grateful for. Thank you for making it through. We had a little bit more of a relaxed episode today, just kind of meandering.

• 1:42:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Hey, we deserve it. It's been a year. Okay.

• 1:42:52Lester Nare?

  We wanted to sort of just enjoy for a second and not be totally over analytical about the substance, but it, it really is a blessing to be able to have so many of you all want to listen to these concepts, these ideas. Again, we really focus on frontier research and try to give the story arc, experimental design and an understanding of what are we actually talking about when we say we have a high temperature memorister, or that we've discovered a dark matter halo, or we, we model, MOFs, organic frameworks.

• 1:43:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, MOFs.

• 1:43:28Lester Nare?

  MOFs.

• 1:43:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Metal organic.

• 1:43:30Lester Nare?

  Metal organic frameworks from the Nobel prizes last year. We're going to cover the Nobel prizes this year again. We have a great episode that I'm excited about, about the summer transfer window for American scientists. I mean, these are things that I think we find interesting and entertaining to know about, and it's great to share them with you all, all the time. I will end with one last reminder. We're trying to build community this year, so please go ahead and head over to ffp pod dot com backslash survey, especially if you're still listening now, you are a part of the core audience, want to know about who you are, what you want to hear about. We don't know what to do for our community. Should we do an Instagram group? Should we do a Discord? A Discord, a TikTok group, a YouTube thing?

• 1:44:15Lester Nare?

  Do we do something on our own? You know, where do you all live? Apparently none of you are on X because we have no, none of you engage with us on X, which is fine, one less thing for us to manage.

• 1:44:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Lester Nare?

  But, you know, you guys always ask us questions and we've been really focused on just making sure the show is produced. And I think now we're ready to try to figure out, how do we make this a community of the, of the curious and help kind of all of us connect and share in a way where we can build something powerful than its individual parts. And with that, I think for the comment to leave in the comments, if you've made it this far, is which book in the collection is your favorite? If you've already read it or you're most interested by it, let us know in the comments. I will leave the final word to our resident PhD before we wrap up this incredible 50, episode 52, our one year anniversary. How many weeks in the year?

• 1:45:09Krishna Choudhary?

  52. Yeah, we did it.

• 1:45:11Lester Nare?

  We did it.

• 1:45:12Krishna Choudhary?

  I just have to say, thank you so much to all of our listeners, to all of the community that is FFP. I really, you know, when we started me and Lester a year ago, I don't think either of us had any idea of what this podcast would become for like us. It's really, it's really like, kind of become a big part of our lives, a welcome part of our lives. And the whole reason is because we've got a community of you guys trying to consume our content, share our contact. We really appreciate it. There, there's, there's no words to say, you know, just how transformative this whole experience has been.

• 1:45:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And we hope to continue this for many years to come. So please continue supporting us, giving us all of the shares. You know, talk, talk about us in your labs, talk about us in your classes, in your workplace. I know there's a lot of you that just do random things. There's always room to talk about stuff that we cover in FFP pod.

• 1:46:19Lester Nare?

  You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. And we will be dying as heroes in the quest to continue to cover frontier in the history of science in a way that is accessible to everybody. I am Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD and my Biffles, Krishna Choudhary. We love you all. Thank you again so much. Oh, we didn't yet put these books on the third shelf, but you'll see them on the third shelf in the next episode and we will see you all next week.