Faith & the Physicist: Aliens, Astrobiology, String Theory, and the Search for Meaning

Two theoretical physicists helped design landmark surveys of 1,600+ scientists on the deepest unsolved questions in physics — and found almost no consensus at all. From string theory's shockingly low support to physicists admitting their models run on "belief," this episode exposes the faith hiding inside science. Adam Frank (University of Rochester astrophysicist and astrobiologist) and Niayesh Afshordi (Perimeter Institute / University of Waterloo cosmologist, co-author of the APS Physics Magazine "Big Mysteries" survey) join Brian to unpack what physicists actually believe versus what they can prove. We cover: - Why string theory pulled a shockingly small share of the vote against loop quantum gravity - What a Bayesian "prior" reveals about every scientist's hidden beliefs - Why one branch of physics quietly became unfalsifiable - How sociology and "tastemakers" can hijack scientific consensus - Why AI might become the field's unlikely savior. There is no sane statistical analysis that doesn't have a prior — that's your belief. Timestamps: 00:00 – Why scientists owe the public real answers 04:00 – Splitting time between research and outreach 07:55 – The survey that "rankled" Brian Keating 09:18 – Are physicists secretly just like Spock? 12:05 – Are we living in an anti-scientific age? 16:56 – Why most scientists refuse to go public 21:36 – Should "belief" ever appear in a survey? 23:12 – Is string theory really 21st-century physics? 26:20 – When sociology hijacks scientific consensus 28:39 – The hidden "prior" behind every experiment 33:01 – String theory's shockingly low vote count 39:03 – Four levels of belief, from data to faith 41:39 – Inside the 1,675-physicist mystery survey 46:12 – Kingmakers, tastemakers, and physics cliques 54:12 – Is advanced tech indistinguishable from magic? 59:23 – Could AI become physics' long-awaited savior? 1:01:47 – What's next for Adam and Niayesh ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M. A. G. I. C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 02

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• 1:00Brian Keating?

  My two friends, Professor Adam Frank and Professor Niyash F. Shorty of respectively, University of Rochester and Perimeter Institute, University of Waterloo. How are you, boys?

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Doing well.

• 1:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, doing great. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

• 1:18Brian Keating?

  Smoke's not too bad for you guys, I hope, on the East Coast. You know, we're usually the ones with the smoky forest fires, but you guys have all the fun this summer, it seems like. We're enjoying a characteristic day here in Southern California.

• 1:31Speaker 04

  It's been clear for a bit. It was a couple of weeks ago that we had the smoke, so right now it's okay.

• 1:36Brian Keating?

  Well, the reason we're here today is because you guys are two of the most interesting, not only scientists in what you do, but you guys see it as your mission, perhaps the way that I do, that we scientists have a moral obligation to share what we do with the public because they pay our salaries. I don't even care if you're privately funded like I am, pretty much. We're all serving at the gratitude or gratitude towards the public and they're our boss. And you guys, in particular, do heroic work in communicating real science without pulling punches to real people without dumbing it down. And I just want to acknowledge you guys for doing that. And maybe just start with that. What do you think about this statement?

• 2:21Brian Keating?

  I'll start with Niayesh. I feel like what we do as scientists is important, but sometimes it's not significant. In other words, I'm searching for some ancient photons. Maybe they'll be important to understand the primordial universe. Niayesh, you also study the primordial universe, but also high-energy particles, forces and fields. Adam studies the existence of life throughout the cosmos. All these things affect Joe Sixpack here in El Cajon, Joey Bagadonuts over there in Rochester or Toronto. So what do you see as our obligation, Niayesh? And then Adam, what is our obligation as citizen scientists?

• 2:56Speaker 05

  Well, that's an excellent question. And it's, I want to say that we are kind of like the canary in the coal mine, that we, I mean, the society is this huge, humongous thing that operates and requires a certain set of skills. And in particular, we need to kind of foresee what's coming down the road, how it could survive things like catastrophes, pandemics, climate catastrophes, all sorts of things, bad things that could happen. And also the good things can potentially happen, artificial intelligence, technology.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  All of these things are things that, I mean, the society needs. But to get there, to avoid bad things and get the good things, there is a method to it, right? You have to learn from your mistakes and build upon your successes. And really, if you want to summarize this, this is the scientific method, right? You want to learn from experience and build upon that. You don't repeat your mistakes, build a model, a model that works. If the model doesn't work, you modify it, you find a better model. If the model works, you fortify it and you kind of make it better and better. And that's what science does. My idea is

• 4:23Speaker 05

  that what we do, even though we look at very abstract things, is that we are really perfecting this scientific method in the corners that it hasn't been really pushed and explored before, in places where the scientific method may not be developed yet. But then when we develop it, it's ready to be used. It's something that everyone else can plug and play for their Nintendos or for iPhones. Eventually, that's when it come down the line. But somebody should start basically developing this method somewhere. And I think we are kind of the pioneers that are doing it for the first time.

• 5:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you just left off the highest form of technology, which is the podcast, right, Adam? Adam, you, and I want to recognize you, you've been writing for longer than either Niayesh or myself in the public and communicating for some just incredible content that you put out. But you two are also a working, practicing scientist like Niayesh. And I'm curious how you divide your time. You just received an enormous and well-deserved grant from the Templeton Foundation to really explore these ideas that I quite frankly think you are one of the major expositors of and certainly among the best. So how do

• 5:40Brian Keating?

  you view your time between splitting it, between popularization, shall we say, communication, which is a form of scientific marketing? I think it's good to be honest about it. It redounds to our benefit, but it should redound to the public's benefit. So how do you divide that? Because I know my first book was being written. I asked my department chair, who's the son of a Nobel Prize winner Nikolai Basov, who co-invented the laser. I said, you know, so I get some time off from writing a book, right? And Dmitry, his son, said, "No, but we'll try not to punish you for writing a book."

• 6:18Brian Keating?

  How do you view your, how do you break down your time? Take me through a day in the life of Adam Frank, Professor Adam Frank.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  You know, I find them very, they're interwoven, right? And, you know, I've, you know, I always tell young students, you know, doing this kind of science communication is super important, but it's more important that you have your scientific career, right? I mean, especially when you're young, you know, is that your first job is to produce new knowledge and then your second job is to talk about it. So, you know, I just, but what I find is that my popular, the stuff I do popular is usually a reflection of what I'm doing research anyway. I mean, in order to understand what I'm doing in research, I'm constantly thinking about it. And I'm just, there's a voice I have, you know, the Jersey voice or whatever, that I'm kind of translating. So for me to understand it, for me to understand,

• 7:05Speaker 04

  I'm going back to general relativity right now to do some stuff. And to understand it, I just have to put it into language that makes sense to my 14-year-old self, you know, in Newark, New Jersey. And so then that just becomes part of the writing. So I find them very, you know, they link up. And then, of course, you know, this thing that we're dealing with right now in the United States with the science denial, which the insane levels of science denial, you know, I'm a patriot. You know, the countries that have the highest levels of prosperity, you know, are always those that embrace science. And you can see over time how that changes. It's like, you know, if you were interested in science in the 1500s, you went to Italy. If you were interested in the 1700s, you didn't go to

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Italy anymore. And, you know, the things that are happening to American science right now are just sort of, you know, are just mean that, you know, it's going to be somebody else in 100 years, not us. And so I feel a real responsibility to like, you know, sort of, and I know you do as well. I've seen some of the stuff you've done, like with the moon landing ridiculousness. I feel like that's a real responsibility.

• 8:07Brian Keating?

  There's, it's so much easier, you know, Brandolini's Law, the production of bull crap is 100 times easier than the refutation of it. So the world is filled with unrefuted bull crap. But, you know, today, I think what I'd love to talk about, we can talk for hours about, you know, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and undermining science. Maybe that'll be a different stream. But, you know, today, I think what really kind of rankled me a little bit is a couple of surveys, one done by your co-guest today, Niayesh F. Shorty, who's had a book out last year. That was one of my most favorite episodes, certainly my favorite book. One of my favorite books is in the back shelf in the background

• 8:48Brian Keating?

  behind the Boca. And it was about the war, the battle over the Big Bang. And he didn't stop there. I would have taken a year-long sabbatical, but Niayesh is more energetic and vital than I am. So he did a survey along with Phil Halpern and a few others that we'll talk about. And it was sort of, it was, I have to be honest, it was somewhat shocking to me. And I did use the highest form of communication besides the podcast is the tweet, the X post. And I took to X and I wrote in my newsletter an article about it and how, you know, it was, some of it is shocking. And I don't want to review, I don't want to do a spoiler alert. I want everyone to read Niayesh's wonderful paper they wrote with his colleagues. But first, Niayesh, I want to get your reaction to some of these

• 9:32Brian Keating?

  things. We're going to be talking about like what I call faith in the physicist. So how do we get meaning? How do we find meaning in a universe that seems to be cold and indifferent and maybe lifeless, although Adam is much more of a life maxer than I am, certainly? So I want to take these two different views. And as I say at the bottom, I might not survive the hour between you two, Brainiacs. But there's one view that, you know, science, you know, are very logical. We're data, we're Spock. We're very cold and calculating. We apply the scientific method. We act rationally. We don't allow faith or belief or, you know,

• 10:11Brian Keating?

  kind of anecdotes to enter into the fray. On the other hand, some view physicists as human beings. Yes, it's true. You know, as I say, how do you know a physicist is outgoing? Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. But, you know, they do. We have the same kind of proclivities. We have beliefs. We have talismans. We have superstitions. And I think to deny that is not really, A, engaging with scientists as they are as human beings, and B, kind of putting on this hopelessly, you know, burnished, hagiographic halo. So let me start with you, Adam. That, which ones of these views do you think is

• 10:53Brian Keating?

  true? Or is it some sort of mixture? Or do you have a third view? What, where do you view what scientists do versus what we believe?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I completely agree that, um, you know, the job of science is not to believe things, but to, you know, sort of construct arguments based on data and theory that allow us to have public knowledge. That's what science really is, is about public knowledge. Um, uh, and I think, you know, some of the things that we're going to talk about here point to something in particular in physics that has happened over the last, you know, 60 years or so with, and I want to make this very clear, with a very small branch of physics, right? There's, you know, a lot of when we're going to be talking about string theory, everything. That's a tiny branch of physics, which really has gotten itself because of the lack of data. It all comes down to technology and the lack of data

• 12:16Speaker 04

  has gotten itself into a position where that is very driven by belief. It is, it is, because of its nature, it has divorced itself from, you know, experiment. And experiment is what keeps our, our feet to the fire. Uh, so I think in that case, you know, we can have this conversation about what's happening. But in general, I think what has made science and physics so successful is that in general across, you know, all of its fields in general, is that there's a very tight coupling between whatever theory you want to have, whatever belief you have in your theory, and then having your theory get its butt kicked by new data. And, you know, I've had that experience. It's a very humbling experience. It's a very useful experience to have. So, you know, science is, we all have,

• 13:02Speaker 04

  and this is something to come to later, physicists and science in general has, there's, there are metaphysics. There are philosophical backgrounds that are often not spoken of or not acknowledged. And that's been a big part of my work recently and some of the philosophical work I've been doing. Um, but, you know, the belief itself, like, yeah, it's absolutely important for physicists to be really, uh, um, quite honest about when we're engaging in belief and, and our willingness to have our beliefs, you know, dropped by the role of experiment.

• 13:35Brian Keating?

  Naish, do you feel like we're in an anti-scientific age perhaps because of the, you know, natural human propensity to believe things without evidence? Or do you think that science can save us from, you know, this kind of demon haunted world that, uh, you know, Carl, Carl Sagan, who's every bit Adams, you know, kind of predecessor Adams filling Carl's shoes very nicely? Uh, do you think that we live in an anti-scientific age and that it's sort of always been thus? Or do you think there's something unique about this time period? And do we have a role to play in that?

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Uh, I, I mean, I, I think I consider myself a scientist and I think we definitely play a role in this. Now, whether the current times are more anti-scientific than in the past, it's really, I mean, a tough thing to say. Uh, given, I mean, this, this is a very hard historical kind of question and requires, I mean, careful examination. One can kind of look at anecdotes here and there and say, maybe in some senses, things get worse, some other things get better. Uh, we have certainly, uh, advanced in, in knowledge. Uh, that's for a fact. We know more than we used to do. So in principle, if we could, uh, make more informed decisions, that's our prerogative. We can make more informed decisions.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  Uh, we have to develop the technology and methodology really to do it, to find how a society can behave more rationally, given, uh, the vast amount of, uh, understanding that we've gathered across, uh, uh, well, across the board about ourselves, about societies and about, about the cosmos. Now, that being said, scientists are humans. So this cartoon of separating like scientists into, it kind of, whenever, when you start talking, remind me of the Big Bang Theory, not just because I also, the name of the, my, my book is Big Bang, but it's really kind of pushes that, uh, that cartoon to the extreme. We say that, okay, you have this scientist, uh, like Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory,

• 15:37Speaker 05

  who is like a perfectly rational scientist. And it kind of went, push it far enough, you see like how ridiculous this is. You cannot be perfectly rational as a human. That such a thing doesn't exist because humans are humans. Uh, so, so, yeah, absolutely. We, we have human tendencies. And as much as we want to divorce ourselves, or if, I don't think necessarily many smart people would, would want to divorce themselves from human tendencies. And we are humans after all. And these human tendencies, the ones that driven societies for thousands of years, all sorts of religions and beliefs and cults and of, of all sorts and kinds. Uh, they are there and they play a role in, uh, in how science works.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Uh, but it's not the only thing, right? So the social dynamics that's, uh, that part of humanity is there, but there is experiment. And that's, as Adam and you were highlighting, and I definitely a big fan of that, experiments. And it's really just the humility, if you want to say, the humility that you could be wrong. You could be proven wrong one way or another. That's the important thing. And that's kind of what helps us get, get along, right? If we don't have the humility of accepting defeat, then we're going to a defeat of our ideas, anything, basically. Then we're going to keep fighting, right? And then that's, uh, that's what's kind of what's different is that maybe in the olden days, then, uh,

• 17:05Speaker 05

  we didn't have really humility of accepting that maybe some of our dogma were not, uh, were not right. So we kept fighting for it. And, uh, I think what, what's, uh, what's modern about science is that we have the humility of accepting maybe we have these grandiose ideas about nature or life or anything, but we can put them to the test. And if the test disproved them, then we, we accept that and move on. Um, so I think that's, that's, that's the difference. And when we can, well, if, if we put that in front of our mind that these tests are necessary and part of progress, then I think we can do better than we did in the past.

• 17:46Brian Keating?

  Mm hmm. I think the, you know, part of the reason, in addition to my affection for you guys, intellectual affection, my, my, um, man crush on your minds, how we say, is, uh, is that you guys both, uh, you know, aren't afraid to wrestle with these questions that I think a lot of our colleagues are. To be honest with you, very few of my colleagues will talk about these things. Very few of them write books, very few of them go on podcasts. Um, and, and that's not to, to say that they, they should do more or less or whatever. It's just an observation. And I think, you know, to some extent, they, they view what we do, or I'll just speak for myself, as unserious. And yes, you should be doing only a science and, and you should pay professional, there should be like communicators or leave it to Neil deGrasse Tyson to do this or Bill Nye.

• 18:31Brian Keating?

  I, I, I don't think that's true. I think the greatest scientists in history, we're all great communicators. They all, uh, uh, interacted with the public who pays their salaries and so forth. Uh, but the, you know, part of the reason I think is because of what you guys do. Uh, Adam, you're, you know, kind of focused on this, uh, interesting question of the existential, you know, behavior of life and throughout the cosmos. And are we alone? And, and what is our future? And, uh, and where, where do we go from here? And, and the work that you've done and how it informs maybe policy or thought, and, and as you said. And Naish, you're, you're studying the biggest things in the universe, i.e. the universe, maybe other universes, multiverses, and the smallest things, particles, forces, and fields.

• 19:14Brian Keating?

  I, is that just because of, is that a selection effect, guys? You know, because of what we study? Uh, in other words, if we were studying, you know, pneumatic superconductor behavior and, you know, type two phase transitions, you know, maybe we wouldn't be doing this. Is this, is this a function of the, of the subject matter? In other words, we have just great scripts, you know, and, and we're just, you know, kind of middling. I'll speak for myself again. I'm a middling actor, you know, that has a great script and is directed by Christopher Nolan. Where does this come down? I mean, should, is all of science, you know, kind of, would you write, could you envision a paper, a survey, Naish, about, you know, condensed matter physicist attitudes towards, um, you know, type two phase transitions? Or is it, you know, is it truly a universal interest? And any, any sub-branch of science could, could, uh, engender the same passion?

• 20:01Speaker 05

  That, that's an excellent question. And, uh, I mean, this, this question of where we come from and what is, what underlies everything? This is kind of very, very basic to our, uh, our quests for, uh, I mean, there are some very basic questions that capture our imagination, where we come from, where we're going to go. Are there others like us out there in the cosmos? And, and I, yeah, I don't know. But I guess it's, uh, why I don't care maybe as much about what type of superconductors are going to be the first that will be room temperature. Maybe I should care more about that. Uh, but, uh, I mean, my, yeah, it's, it's a good question. I mean, I think if you do that survey, I mean, I've done,

• 20:46Speaker 05

  like the survey that we did, we asked different questions. And some questions, many people don't have an opinion on. Um, and like, for example, I mean, like, there was that one version of this survey. I mean, you may, as you may know, there's one big question astrophysics. Uh, like, where did supermassive black holes come from? There are these huge black holes. You see at the center of Milky Way, there are like, uh, some first black hole that image has, uh, billions of solar mass.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+ plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  And it's a big mixture in astrophysics, like what is the first black hole? And we actually surveyed like people in a black hole conference, which we're supposed to care about black holes. But a lot of people, I mean, a large fraction of them didn't really have an opinion about. Okay, so are there, maybe there were primordial black holes, maybe there were, I don't know, direct collapse or like the first generation of a stars and but many people didn't care about it. I don't know. It's, it's a, I guess it's part of society that we have conversations about things that captures our imagination. And I suppose the thing that are there others like us out there or where we came from and where we're going to go, they're just ancient

• 22:28Speaker 05

  questions that that we've talked about for generations. And that's why that captures our imagination. And then everyone has an opinion about it. And then of course, some of these that we have answers for, like the only question that basically we had, we had a consensus about is like, what is the meaning of the big bang? And that's the one that we have a lot of observations for. We have cosmic microwave background, which is the first glow of the big bang. And it tells us that universe was much hotter and denser at early times. And that's, that's the amazing thing that even these.

• 23:03Brian Keating?

  It's most important features. That's how I pay the mortgage around the Keating House.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Very important for all of us. And I think it's just that there is a lot of fragmentation and opinions, even on these big questions, but then they can be settled with observations. And that's the great thing about scientific method, that there might be a lot of disagreements, but we have a way to settle them. And in for some of these questions, we actually find an answer and then the community basically settles down on the experimental answer.

• 23:36Brian Keating?

  Adam, in both surveys that I wanted to talk about, the Vickers at All Nature Astronomy Survey from 2025, and Niayesh, Halpern, and the two other co-authors, I'm blanking on their names, but Niayesh will tell us later. The word belief appears, to be honest with you, it appears early and prominently once in Vickers survey on a professional astrobiologist and Jason Fields, belief in, in the existence of extraterrestrial life. And it appears only once in Niayesh's survey, the Big Mysteries survey. And that's around, it's actually the only place it appears, it says it does not necessarily imply belief in a physical

• 24:20Brian Keating?

  reality. And this is has to do with the big bang, or you know, physical realism. But, but my question is, what, to what extent should belief appear ever in a, in a scientific survey? I joked that, you know, it's, it was, it's sort of embarrassing. It's a question I shouldn't, you shouldn't answer. Like, to me, it was saying, you know, Adam, do you believe in astrology? And a lot of people took umbrage at, you know, at me and said, you're, you're being overly pedantic and it's, you know, professors, you know, emeritus, it's distinguished professors around the world, took, took umbrage and said I was manipulative and disingenuous and a lot of nasty things that are par for the course

• 25:01Brian Keating?

  on public discourse. But, but tell me, Adam, does belief belong as an option that a scientist who's serious should even consider as a response to a surveys like this?

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Okay, first, if you don't mind, I'm on a rewind a little bit to get to this question because I want to actually discuss the question that you asked right beforehand. And there's one thing about this survey that I think is important, at least for me, right? Because it's going to separate the sort of belief from the not believed part. In many ways, a lot of the problems that are the questions that are asked here to me are very 20th century physics. They're not 21st century physics. They're 20th century physics. You know, the sort of the, the emphasis on sort of, you know, what we call fundamental, you know, like this, you know, the theory of everything, you know, the black hole information paradox. These are problems that are sort of left over from a particular worldview that physics

• 25:55Speaker 04

  had in the, you know, second half of the 20th century about what was fundamental and what was important. You know, back in those days, you know, you were taught that like high energy was the highest field anybody could go into. Anybody who didn't go into high energy somehow, you know, had, you know, you know, wasn't good enough or whatever. And there was a residue of that that carried on, that in a way sort of led the field into a strange directions. Like, you know, we could talk about string theory, for example, which, you know, I was around watching this from when I was a graduate student. It was one talk after the other about string theory. It's going to be great real soon. And it just hasn't played out. It just, it just has not been successful. It does, it's done interesting things mathematically, but there's very hard to claim that string theory turned

• 26:35Speaker 04

  out. Or the whole idea, the very idea of a theory of everything, like why, why is that? Who said that's the most important problem in physics? So I actually think that some of these problems really reflect a kind of culture of physics that was of a time, you know, if you, if you ask people, is gravity the most important problem in 1850? They were like, no, we're doing, you know, thermodynamics and we just learned about electromagnetism. Physics is what physicists do. And I think the 21st century, there's a whole bunch of problems which are not on this list, which are going to be the central players for 21st century physics, like complexity theory, right? You know, complexity theory, look,

• 27:19Speaker 04

  actually, here's an interesting, go, go look at the last 10 Nobel Prize prizes. None of them are, you know, or virtually none of them are about these questions, right? Or not the, they're, they're certainly not about, you know, black hole information paradoxes or string theory. You know, one of the most, you know, the 2024, I think it was Nobel Prize was for artificial intelligence. A physicist, you know, Hinton, who worked on artificial, I think that life and complexity theory is going to be, and, and the nature of phenomenal experience. How does matter, you know, generate something that has phenomenal experience? That's going to be the central problems for physics in the next century. So, you know, and that's, so just to make the connection out of belief, many of these

• 28:04Speaker 04

  problems fall into that category, a sort of narrow branch of physics that has been called, we used to be called high energy, now sometimes gets called fundamental, where we've just run out of data. There's, we, you know, we don't have any data. We, it's not clear when we're going to get data. And so then it starts becoming actually about belief. You get a sociological effects happening that, you know, whoever is thought to be the smartest guy in the room for 20 years becomes the one that everybody kowtows to, and that person decides research directions. And so that's where like, yeah, you shouldn't have belief and we need to recognize when we're being driven by those sociological factors. But again, most of physics is not there, but you know, quantum information theory, complexity theory, exoplanets, you know, condensed matter, they're doing fine.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  They are very, you know, there's no belief happening there. There is theory and experiment working together. So I'm sorry if I went off on that.

• 28:53Brian Keating?

  No, no, that's, that's excellent. Yeah. And I, you know, I don't pay attention to Nobel Prizes, Adam. I don't know if you, I hardly ever talk about it.

• 29:04Brian Keating?

  Niayesh, so if I were to ask you, you know, do you believe in astrology, which you didn't do, I'm, I'm not at all accusing you or Vickers at all, although it is in their paper in the abstract essentially. But, but tell me, Niayesh, if I were to ask you, you know, Niayesh, do you believe in the gambler's fallacy? Do you believe in astrology? How would you answer that? And how should somebody answer that maybe is a more important question?

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I, I guess I'm trying to get to the main theme of this question. By the way, the co-authors of our, our survey, I just wanted to put that out. There was Matthew Rini and, and Michael Straber, they were actually from American Physical Society Physics Magazine. Now, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm kind of torn here because on the one hand, Adam was attacking our survey.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  No, I wasn't attacking the survey. I was just, I was identifying that these questions, I think are not, it's understandable why you chose those questions, but I just don't think those are the questions that are going to be, are going to matter for the 21st century.

• 30:08Speaker 05

  I mean, at some level, we get to decide what we care about. And I mean, there were 1,600 people who cared about filling this survey and they cared about those questions. Obviously, there are lots of others who, who don't. And then there are others, I mean, I care about lots of the other problems like complexity and AI and the future of physics. But yeah, so I mean, I think we all have the right to kind of have, care about different things and then have opinions about them. The other question is the belief in astrology and such, I mean, anything. I mean, this question of belief that we should, should we have it or should we not have it? It's, it's an interesting one because again, there

• 30:47Speaker 05

  is this cartoon of science, which is you have to be open minded. And in, it actually, it's funny when you start doing like a statistics and data analysis, it comes back at you like with full force. There is this thing called Bayesian evidence or Bayesian analysis. And in it, basically they have, you have three things. You have prior, you have the data or your likelihood, and then you have posterior. So prior is what you have without, before doing the experiments, what you think are the reasonable range of your parameters, your models, what are, that models are reasonable, what models are not reasonable. Likelihood

• 31:31Speaker 05

  is basically you do and do an experiment, you make a measurement, and then you multiply these two, and then you get, you get the posterior, which is basically the constraint. We said this model, your data prefer this model over that model.

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• 32:15Speaker 05

  And you may wonder, okay, if you, if you think about this ideological word in which you need to be open minded, you shouldn't have any prior. And if you actually talk to anyone who does this, it's just meaningless. People talk about flat priors, that, okay, no, no model is better than any other model. But even that's a prior. You could do the change of parameters and then you get a different, that means it's a different prior. So saying that you are open minded, that you have no prior is just meaningless. There is no, there is no analysis, there is no reasonable saying, a statistic analysis that you could do that doesn't have a prior, and that's your belief.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  So everyone brings their belief, and different people will have different beliefs and different prior. That's not, that's not a bug, that's a feature, right? The real thing is that they're all gonna do the same experiments, or different experiments, and at the end of the day, they should arrive, that kind of is gonna narrow down their priors, and eventually, the posterior, if you have good enough data, is going to be independent of the prior, or almost independent of the prior. And that's, that's, that's the key, or that's the measure of the success, is that we have to be, when I say you have to be humble, and you basically make yourself vulnerable,

• 33:40Speaker 05

  your prior beliefs vulnerable to this invasion of data, or incursion of experiments that could narrow down, or push your prior to somewhere that data takes you. And, and then if, if, if, if your models are right, eventually, different priors all converge to the same point, even though, even though you start from different places. So yeah, I think that's the way science works. We have to admit that there are these beliefs, but also you have to be vulnerable, let yourself be judged, basically, by observations, and then hopefully those will correct your incorrect beliefs.

• 34:16Brian Keating?

  So there's a Nobel winning economist, I forget his name, in the seventies or eighties, and he wrote, among many things, I don't think this won the Nobel Prize, but two rational actors, you know, using Bayesian reasoning, as Naish just explicated, they can't agree to disagree. In other words, you do get locked into an inevitable conclusion. It's like saying, you can have your own opinions, you can have your own, you know, data or facts, right? But, you know, in this case, it seems impossible, not only, you know, this is a metaphysical or meta-psychology question, or sociological question, you're asking them these questions and surveying them properly, scientifically, rigorously, you know, far better than a lot

• 35:00Brian Keating?

  of the social scientists could do, right? I think it's fair to say, you can crush them. But, but at some point, I mean, don't you have to say, like, wait, you are answering a question, which, for which, you know, you might have some, you know, notion, or preference, or taste, like, I hate fish, guys, you know? Everyone always says, have you tried this type of fish? Have you, I've said, what's the highest compliment you can pay to somebody's fish dish? It's that it doesn't taste like fish. You know what else doesn't taste like fish? A hamburger, you know, so, I don't like fish, you know, you're never gonna convince me. At what level does the, like, do you look at them and say, what the hell are you saying? Like, again, let's, let's use string theory, I don't wanna dump on string theory, and people think I'm like, oh, I'm just parroting these lines of these

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Let's dump on string theory.

• 35:43Brian Keating?

  Of, of, you know, Sabina Hossenfelder, or whoever, and I'm just parroting, no, no, no. I do wanna, I've looked, I've talked to the, the most, you know, the biggest participants in the field, as I've tried to, I've had twenty-six Nobel Prize winners on the podcast, you know, incredible intellects, and when I talk to them, you know, the only coherent answer I ever got to the question of, and I think I told this to Naish on his podcast last year, to what experimental predictions could be falsified by string theory, from Kamaran Vafa, and, and he said, well, the string theory predicts the mass of the electron. I said, oh, really? It does? I didn't know that. And he's like, yeah, it has to be less than, you know, ten to the ninetieth Planck masses,

• 36:25Brian Keating?

  and greater than ten to the minus twenty-seven, but, you know, it's true, I guess, but in the context of the string theory survey, there were many options for quantum gravity. It wasn't a string theory survey, it was about, what are your opinions about quantum, quantum gravity? And the one that got eighteen or nineteen percent, the largest ratio of the two named options, loop quantum gravity and string theory, got with string theory, and then loop quantum gravity got evidence, and then there was a significant amount of people that said, gravity's not quantized, and then there was an overwhelming, you know, number, but not the majority, that said, you know, there's no opinion, I can't answer that question. When you saw that, how did, let's be honest, how did you react to that? How would you answer that question, Naish, first of all?

• 37:10Speaker 05

  Well, I, I personally, I mean, I have, I have like, different, like, different eggs in different baskets, if you want. So, so, yeah, I tried to be open minded, but really, I mean, there are lots of, my favorite, to be honest, is that violation of Lorentz symmetry, I think, at some fundamental level. That could be an idea, but, but there are lots of ideas out there, and I think we need to be open minded. Am I surprised? I think I was surprised by, I mean, how a small, the percentage for string theory was. None of these models that, we mentioned these hypotheses, none of them have experimental

• 37:51Speaker 05

  supports for them, so in that sense, community is kind of right to be skeptical of all of them, I mean, everyone has their own favorite, but nobody has really, there's no consensus.

• 38:04Brian Keating?

  Is there, sorry to interrupt, Naish, but, but I think I made your colleague and friend, Phil Hopper, mad, you know, when I made a video a year or two ago about loop quantum gravity being, having evidence against it, not, not being wrong, but having evidence against it, I got nasty emails, you know, from my friend Carlo Rovelli, you know, my co-author, or my co-narrator of Galileo's Dialogue audiobook, you can get that on my website for just, you know, twenty-two hours of listening pleasure, but, but it kind of made them mad, I think, and, you know, Phil's never talked to me again, although he didn't talk to me beforehand, but, but I'd love to talk to him about it, because I think it's, and Carlo, I should say, is coming back on the podcast in a couple of weeks. So, see, if he can forgive me, Naish, certainly Phil can forgive me.

• 38:48Brian Keating?

  But, but here's the point, is there not evidence against these, you know, if there was some, if there's a claim, do you believe that there's life on Mars? And then we send rovers all over Mars, and Adam, you can, you know, chime in here too, and we find there's no life on Mars, whatever that means, there's no life on Mars. And then you say, do you, what do you believe is the, is the presence of life on Mars? I mean, what do you say in that case? You say, well, it's not, maybe it's, it's mirror life, and we can't detect it. Yes, you could say certain things, but at some level, if there's evidence, if there's some evidence against a model, and there's no evidence, you know, experimentally for it, where does one go epistemologically? Naish, start with you.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think this goes exactly in the direction of prior, I said, that is that it doesn't go anywhere. Basically, if you say there is evidence for or against, that's, that's only the likelihood, but then it depends on your prior. And if you have a strong prior that there is no life in Mars, and you find some kind of marginal evidence, then it probably doesn't change your mind very much, because you could interpret it whatever you want. If you have a strong prior that there ought to be life in Mars, for whatever reason, I'm not sure why, then it's obviously, this is, it certainly confirms your belief, it's obviously, okay, there is evidence, so my, my prior, my belief was correct.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  And, and that's the thing, this is why we need, I mean, I think the role of priors, it's not that we need evidence, we need evidence that is more decisive than your priors, than your prior beliefs, and if we don't have that, then it's not gonna move anything.

• 40:23Brian Keating?

  So, Adam, how do you work at the different, I have on screen, you know, different levels of confidence, you know, four levels, evidence-based, metaphysical, you know, commitment, that you don't need, that maybe it's called philosophical abduction, not alien abduction that you're more familiar with, then there's like a working assumption, you know, it works, shut up and calculate, right? And then there's, you know, faith, basically, religious faith, you know, that's not conditional on evidence, and you're not gonna convince me to become a Jehovah's Witness tonight, but, but, you know, maybe, maybe there's some reason, good reason, I should switch teams or something. So, it's not which one is legitimate, but, but how, how do we not, you know, kind of,

• 41:06Brian Keating?

  you know, congratulate ourselves too much that we are these walking Wikipedias, dispassionate, you know, rational actors, when, like, like Naish is clearly pointing out, it's inevitable we'll have priors, but, but I kind of feel like, that's, that's, again, massaging terms to make us feel, oh, we're not, we don't have faith, Naish, we just have priors, and, I mean, yes, but, but is there also another, you know, another dimension at play, Adam?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Well, I think what really matters is that, as Naish was talking about, the humility, right? I mean, the difference between all three of the ones you were talking about, and science, is that scientists are willing, when confronted with data, you know, that, that goes against their cherished theory, they should be, this doesn't always happen, but they should be willing to be like, okay, I was wrong. I mean, that was the genius of the discovery of the scientific method, because, you know, human beings were very easily fooled. We fool ourselves very easily. And it was the development of science, and this idea of public knowledge, of a way that we could all sort of share in the creation of knowledge, and the validation of knowledge,

• 42:17Speaker 04

  that we would have a method that would allow us to, to recognize, like, oh, we were wrong. And so I don't think, like, there's any problem with saying scientists have belief, like, I had a theory for a while about how jets, you know, these, these long beams, these hypersonic beams of plasma were created around young stars, and I worked on that for like, five years, and it turned out I was wrong, right? And I certainly believed in it, I wouldn't have worked on it if I didn't believe that there was something useful about it, or that maybe this might be right, but when it came time to see that the data showed that there was a problem, then you step away from it. And that's only my point, so, so, please don't say I was, I was not criticizing what you've done, I mean, this is, it's a great, the, the, the survey is great.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  My point was that there, there are, you know, there are a bunch of questions there, and I'm really speaking more to sort of how the public views physics in particular, because you have people, like Eric Weinstein and everything, there's this, there's this conspiracy physics thing going on now, that, oh, physicists, they're just lying to everybody, and physics has stalled, this whole idea that physics has stalled, where really, it's this one branch, because of the lack of data, and there's, as I said, there's sociological reasons, that has in some sense stalled, and their belief, or these other sociological factors that don't have anything to do with getting your butt kicked by data, that has allowed it to sort of morph in strange directions, and string theory is just, I think, the poster child for that.

• 43:49Speaker 00

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• 44:17Speaker 04

  Um, but in most branches of physics, there's a very short distance between having a theory and, you know, having a, uh, an experiment. It's like four or five years, maybe. So, you know, that's why it's okay to talk about physicists having a belief, but it's the willingness to drop that belief when you're confronted by actual data, when the world allows you, we allow the world to speak for itself.

• 44:39Brian Keating?

  Mm-hmm. So we'll get into the, um, the astrobiology survey later, but I do want to focus on Niyash's, uh, survey with APS Physics Magazine. Um, you know, first because we have one of the, the lead author of it, and, uh, certainly, uh, the, the, the most familiar amongst the, the three of us. And just to summarize it, I have on screen here 1,675 respondents, 10 questions on the deepest open problems, although Adam is arguing, you know, maybe there are other open problems that weren't addressed, and, and maybe that has some subtle effect that needs to be disambiguated. I don't know. And there was only one answer, Niayesh, that, that cleared two-thirds, you know, kind of agreement, which is, which is amazing. Um, first of all, I mean, it's brilliant. I don't know how you had the time to do it with all the other stuff that you do.

• 45:24Brian Keating?

  Uh, but there's, uh, it was, it's really revelatory and it's important to do it, you know? The study of physicists is, is important, you know, it's just like the study, uh, you know, ornithology is very important to birds, but they don't know it. You know, the birds don't know that it's important to them, but, but it is, right? Uh, um, so, you know, what does it mean to be settled or, you know, to, to have consensus? Um, Niayesh, what, what does it mean to you that, that these questions of, of what answers are most presented as by textbooks most often as, as accepted? What does settled mean? I mean, do, do you believe, you know, what is, what is, what is truly settled science? Or, you know, as it's said on Twitter often, you know, the whole point about science is that it's never settled.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. This, this, that's, that's an excellent question. And indeed, science and, and in some absolute sense is never settled, but then there is, uh, there is progress. And usually when I teach like astronomy or anytime, usually I talk about science, I have this kind of a flowchart where like how, how a scientific theory is, is born. And you start from a hypothesis, you make a prediction, you, uh, you test that prediction. If it's successful, you kind of, uh, then you go back, make another prediction. If it's not successful, then, then you throw out the theory or you modify your hypothesis and so on. So that is, uh, I mean, that is how, at least a cartoon of scientific method.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  And I think the idea of success is that basically the more you go through the cycles of kind of tests and, uh, revision, the more mature your, uh, your theory is. And, uh, and it turns out, I mean, there are some, some theories are, are very mature, right? Many, the theory of superconductivity, the, uh, hyper, the, um, semiconductors, uh, the neutrino physics, um, and oceanography, lots of things. And Big Bang is among them. Um, as is, I don't know, the theory of evolution to some extent. There are lots of fossils that we've, we've seen. And so there, uh, many of these are very much, uh, uh, settled.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  They have gone through these cycles of verification and testing many, many times. Others, uh, haven't gone through them. And I think in, in fact, in our book, we have, we have a chapter, we call it Religion of Science, Science of Religion. And we are kind of distinguishing between what could be a proto-science, which is kind of a belief. That's exactly what Adam was talking about. It's kind of a seed, like a hypothesis you start from and you take it serious. It's kind of like your baby that it's your responsibility to help, help that baby grow. Uh, but at some point that you're, when it, when it's grown up, uh, then it's, it's, you cannot just keep feeding them forever. At some point, then they have to kind of, uh, live on their own.

• 48:13Brian Keating?

  Tell that to my teenager. Tell that to my teenager.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  My third world.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  I finger. Eventually. But in a, if things have worked out, if, if things go right, then they should, they should do their own, become independent, right? Um, that's, that's your responsibility, but, um, I kind of lost my train of thought. Uh, and this.

• 48:37Brian Keating?

  I think you're talking about maturity and, and then, you know, the sign of.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So that, that, that's kind of, that, that's the idea is that, that we have, we have to push our ideas. We have some responsibility to them. Uh, but then unless they actually go through the cycles of, uh, tests and verification, uh, then they're not really a theory. And then that's kind of how you build consensus. The more someone's idea goes through these cycles, the more people kind of start relying and trusting. It's like a building a creditor score, right? The more you borrow, the more you pay off your loans, the higher is your creditor score.

• 49:12Brian Keating?

  But is there, you know, what's called in, uh, Christianity and, uh, other economics sciences, for example, the Matthew effect, you know, the rich get richer, the consensus gets more entrenched. The, the, the, you know, Eric Weinstein's actually right, you know, that this, this is, there, there are forces. And Adam, you, you know, unknowingly, at least at some level, agreed to, to, as they say, to some extent with what Eric has asserted to me and many, and I always push back on Eric, he's a friend of mine. Uh, but, but, you know, that, that, the tastemakers and, and even in the design of a Niayesh's survey, you know, it didn't include certain things and it does include things because there's the kingmakers and the tastemakers. And, and there's a lot of anti, you know, kind of consensus, um, thought.

• 49:53Brian Keating?

  And it goes like this, you know, the peer review is corrupted, you know, peer review is, is, is horrible. Uh, tenure is, is, is doing this and that. Um, string theory, supersymmetry has done all this bad stuff and it's, it's corrupted the field or it's tainted the field in some sense. And then, you know, there are these notions of, well, what should replace it? And then you and I and Niayesh get, you know, a thousand emails a month about some theory that's, you know, submitted to us. Uh, and, and I actually take those ideas, by the way, and I have a monthly office hours, but you have to pay money to be a part of. I'm not going to review your theory for free. I've got a hundred other people's theories. And they all think they're right, right? They, they all know that they found the secret and that they'll share the Nobel Prize with, with me, but not the money or, or whatever. Uh, so I make them pay and a lot of them do. God bless them.

• 50:37Brian Keating?

  And we'll be doing another live stream for office hours soon. But anyway, guys, how do you dis, you know, distinguish? How do you, uh, disambiguate between, you know, the kind of, that's just your theory, that's just your opinion. And, you know, 97% of people thought, you know, thalidomide was good for mothers to take, you know, during pregnancy. And, and, uh, they're saying the same thing about global warming or dark energy and, uh, and so forth. How do you know when to distinguish the kind of science populism versus the legitimate critiques of things like peer review, predatory journals, pee hacking and, uh, and tenure, which, which I think has some negative externalities. Anyway.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  I would say, you know, I mean, this is where I really push back against the Weinstein thing. It's like, sure.

• 51:17Brian Keating?

  Weinstein. You gotta say Weinstein. Just remember Einstein Weinstein, not, not Jeffrey Epstein.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, thank you. Okay, okay. I, I got issues. Uh, you know, I think like, you know, that's not, it's like, that is certainly not true of the vast majority of physics, right? That is true of this one tiny subdomain of physics where there hasn't been, and there, two things happened. There's been no experimental way to experiment, to validate these theories experimentally. And it's true that there was, it was super hyped, right? We had lots of books about it. There was lots of, you know, it became a sort of self-devouring media machine. And so there, you know, there's a story there as well. But other than that, that, this never happens in physics. Peer, as, you know, I've worked in a, I've worked in astronomy and now working in complexity theory. I've worked, peer review, it's imperfect, but it works pretty well, you know?

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Um, so I just really don't see in any other field than this branch of sort of this one part of high energy. And it's not even cosmology because there's lots of cosmology, which has huge amounts of data. And you can easily validate your theory. So the idea that like, this is some general problem with physics. Now, other fields have their, the pee hacking thing, other issues, but I'm talking about physics. Physics is on rock solid ground, other than, you know, these particular domains. And what I think is going to happen in those domains is that eventually people are going to wander away from them. If you're a young student, you're not going to go into string theory or quantum gravity because there's nothing to be done there. You're going to go into the, the branches, you know, you're going to go into quantum information theory, which is making, you know, um, quantum computers.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  Or you'll go into large-scale structure in cosmology because there's huge amounts to do there. This, this thing will be self-correcting. So this idea that there's this huge problem with physics, I think just takes one small subdomain. And then where, where there is a problem with belief and there is a problem with self-reification. Um, but overall physics is very healthy and is doing like crazy insane things. Look at what's happening with just exoplanets. Forget even astrobiology and the search for life. Like what we have discovered about other planets is phenomenal.

• 53:26Speaker 00

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• 53:54Brian Keating?

  Naish, when you see these claims made by, again, he's a very good friend of mine, Eric. He spoke at Perimeter not too long ago. But you see Sabina Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, your neighbor there, my good old friend, right? I mean, the troubles. I mean, how big is it really? Can we open up the kimono? Can we, can we agree the three of us to share our cabal? And what we do together that we only hire string theory? I mean, this is kind of ludicrous. And I pointed that out to Eric many times, as well as saying to him, which he hates when I say, you know, that peer review is the worst form of scientific generation, except for all the others, you know, like aping Winston Churchill. Because I think it's incredible. And I think he peer reviews.

• 54:38Brian Keating?

  I've told him, like, you get emails from people that have solved, you know, quantum gravity and that say you're wrong. Are you not their peers? And, and, you know, so we argue like brothers. But, but, but let me ask you, Naish, when you hear these things, I mean, it's sort of ludicrous. I mean, you guys at Perimeter, and you're at Waterloo as well, but at Perimeter, put on the hat there. I mean, do you, what are the hiring decisions like? You know, what do you think about? Like, do we need another ex-physicist? What kind of, do you get any mandates from above? You know, from research in motions, you know, trustees? Or how does it work at a practical level in a theoretical physics department of highest regard?

• 55:19Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, you know as well as I do, and I'm sure Adam does, that there's a lot of human dynamics involved. Now, I mean, I don't think there's a big conspiracy. But the fact that humans are humans, as you were saying, is, that is a fact. And the human dynamics group thing does exist. And, and it's inevitable. So this thing that it's only a problem in a small section, which is a string theory. I mean, for one, I mean, there are always extremes. So I think there's a spectrum. And a string theory or just quantum gravity happens to be, maybe by design, the discipline that's farthest away from the data.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  Whether such a discipline must exist. I mean, you would kind of say that there's also mathematics, which is, has nothing to do with the data. And it's a discipline. I mean, lots of people that spend time caring about mathematics have nothing to do with data. And a string theory is somewhere kind of, I mean, one kind of one, one interpretation is just basically is just a part of mathematics. And then it doesn't matter what the data says, right? That's, so they're just developing mathematical ideas and mathematical theories. And so I think it's somewhere in that spectrum. And then I think certainly as a physical theory, it's not, I mean, doesn't really belong, but as, despite the name theory. But as a mathematical discipline is, I think it could be

• 56:46Speaker 05

  as respectable of other mathematical ideas. And so I think it's, that's, that's, that's the spectrum. And now, I mean, in terms of the group thing, I think it is, it is a real thing, whether you could call it a religion or a cabal. I mean, I think, again, there is a spectrum, right? You have like a small cults and groups and a bunch of people who have similar ideas. And I mean, that does form anywhere. Like there are lobbies and parties and such. And then sometimes it gets bigger.

• 57:16Speaker 05

  But I mean, really, there are kind of, when at the level of a parameter institute or somewhere, or some other department here, University of Waterloo. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, there are some people who have a strong opinions and those, those opinions can tend to drive a lot of decisions.

• 57:34Brian Keating?

  Very good. Okay, I want to take some questions from the audience. Just a reminder, you have to be a member of the channel, not subscribe, but you have to pay a nominal fee just because there's so many questions here, also on X and elsewhere. So this question for Adam from my friend and longtime channel member, Steven Dedalus, who asks, what do you think of the famous words by Arthur C. Clarke? Okay, this is right up my alley. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Adam, my friend Michael Shermer has a corollary, which is that any sufficiently advanced, you know, technologies or aliens are indistinguishable from God. So maybe that's, that's a, that's a parlay I could, I could add in here. What do you make of this? That, this is really true.

• 58:18Brian Keating?

  Is, do we put so much emphasis on technology, worshiping it, everything that's doing with AI, which I want to discuss towards the end of the, of the conversation? What is, what is it like, sort of the most magical thing that you find about technology? And is, is it really like playing the role of a god nowadays?

• 58:35Speaker 04

  I, I, you know, it's a great quote, but I don't think it's true, especially in my role as an astrobiologist. You know, technologies leave imprints that are different from nature itself. So like, there's this, you know, one of the big moves right now in astrobiology is to find agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with, you know, the things we've done or that, how life evolved on Earth. And we're also now trying to do the same thing for techno-signatures. And the way you're going to think about that is in things like network theory or information theory, you're going to look for signatures or imprints that sort of tell you that something is going on here that is not from the level below, right? If, if the biosphere is built on the geosphere and the technosphere is built on the biosphere,

• 59:20Speaker 04

  you know, things that couldn't happen or, you know, at lower levels. So I don't think, I don't think, I think, you know, we, I think we'll be able to see advanced technology as a technology, as something, some kind of manipulation of the world that could not happen on its own.

• 59:37Brian Keating?

  And Naish, if I, you know, sometimes I ask you this question in the following way. If you had a monolith, if you had a, a device not unlike that in 2001, A Space Odyssey, which is where we get the podcast, the name podcast comes from 2001, A Space Odyssey, as well as the name of this podcast. All podcasts owe themselves to Arthur C. Clarke. So I won't tolerate too much bashing of him.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  I love Arthur C. Clarke, I'm just saying.

• 1:00:03Brian Keating?

  How can you not? Well, he had some problems too, but, but let's not go there. Naish, if you had a monolith, if you had a piece of technology and you, you could sort of do what Feynman asked, like, what is the smallest, shortest sentence that contains the most information about the natural world? Feynman said, "Everything's made of whirling little atoms." What do you think is the, is the most, you know, highly compressed piece of magical knowledge that you've learned in your, in your career?

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  You're putting me on the spot now.

• 1:00:41Speaker 05

  What is the most magical thing? I mean, if, I suppose the thing is general relativity, the fact that gravity is geometry. I mean, I, I don't think I can think of anything more magical than that.

• 1:00:53Brian Keating?

  And even though it has these lacunae, these, these, you know, gaps that we don't understand, but that's where the fun is, right? Guys, when you guys have your students, you don't say like, work on the solved thing. You're like, when you see there's a flaw, there's something wrong. I always say flaws lead to new laws. Like, if you find something, because the steady state had all these flaws, my, my late great, you know, office mate, Jeff Burbage, you know, hated the Big Bang. Anytime someone come to speak and say the words Big Bang, he'd say, "Haramph." He would literally say, "Haramph," in a British, in a British, you know, kind of accent. Once I heard him, when I showed him what volometers look like, he said, "That's so cool. That's awesome." But that was about as far as I could get. You know, when, when we, when we learn that, you know, these things were taken for granted, the universe,

• 1:01:36Brian Keating?

  you know, I always say, if you put a ping pong ball with a year on it, back to 5,000 B.C., you know, when the Zoroastrians and the, and others were, were, you know, just developing science. He said, "What is the model of the universe that you believe in?" To the physicists of the time, right? And I actually would have said steady state or cyclic or whatever. And now we know it's very different. But that's only in the last hundred years. It's quite amazing, right? That, that we've done so much. And maybe that's why the public expects us, A, to, to produce technology on demand, like, you know, kind of slot machines that pay out Nobel prizes, or they expect this to be infallible. And I think, you know, what I see in your, in your kind of taste, both of you guys have exceptional taste as physicists,

• 1:02:20Brian Keating?

  for, for coming on the right podcast, of course. But, but also, and what you choose to do, like, Naish, you could do a million other things. You could be making 10 times what you make, you know, working in private industry or some hedge fund somewhere, right? But, but when you think about what you want to do, you only have this limited amount of time left. What is going to be your focus? Has this survey affected you and, and made you maybe reevaluate? What do you want to do? What are the remaining mysteries that you feel you could do? Because we only have finite energy, attention, and resources. Well, has it changed you at all?

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  I mean, you're kind of touching all the pain, pushing, pointing to the pain points, basically.

• 1:03:00Brian Keating?

  That's my job.

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, yeah, maybe I should, yeah, let's go over everything now and switch fields. But I mean, I, tell me, let me tell you something. I'm actually very excited about AI and how it's kind of revolutionized how we do kind of science and humanity in a different way.

• 1:03:19Brian Keating?

  How so? Say more about that. How are you using it on a daily basis? And do you use it for research? Or is it just like a super secretary?

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  It's, it's very much, I've kind of, I've, I've used it as like anything, like a super secretary, a student, a colleague, like any kind of, well, not necessarily, I haven't used it as a plumber yet, but almost all the other things that I will probably soon, but not yet. But I'm really excited about how kind of it's organizing, it's organizing knowledge in a much more systematic way. And I feel, and it's progressing so rapidly that I, I mean, I suppose it could be scary that it's, at some point it gets out of hand. That's obviously a Doomsday scenario.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  But I'm much more excited that, I mean, because we are, at the end of the day, our job as scientists to organize knowledge, right? To make sense of data, right? And AI is, can deal with data much better and kind of find patterns much faster than we can. And I'm, I'm kind of excited that it's going to start making connections that it was just maybe in a hundred years won't be possible for us. But it's going to start doing it. So I'm excited about that. And I mean, the survey just says that we need, we need a break. There's, we need, we need a savior. I don't know. In, in a good day, maybe AI is that savior. Maybe we, we managed to fail each other, but maybe AI will save us.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  Maybe that's a good point to end. I don't know.

• 1:04:58Brian Keating?

  All right. Well, on that note, I will like to both thank you and give you both an opportunity to, to let people know what you're working on, what you're excited about. Adam, you've got a newsletter and a new grant, and I'd like to hear more about that very briefly before we wrap up.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the newsletter is called Every Man's Universe, and I cover all the kinds of things I'm interested in, from the physics of life, you know, sort of philosophy, even, you know, human spirituality, you know, climate change and the human future, all that kind of stuff. And then, yeah, this new work we're doing on the physics, what we call the physics of agency. Because to me, you know, what's interesting to me about the survey, and again, I thought the survey was, was beautifully done, very expertly done, but what it points to, to me, and this is the role of AI, is that really the most important question in science and physics right now is why is life different? You know, the machine metaphor for life on multiple levels fails. It just, we see this all the time.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  And this grant that we're doing is to really understand, from a physics point of view, clearly life is made out of stuff, but it's not just stuff. You know, something else, something else, which is really more on probably the level of causality or organization. We need new, truly new ideas about the physical world to embrace life. So that's super exciting. I'll be covering that in the, you know, in the podcast, not the podcast, the newsletter. Also, we do have a podcast with Marcelo and Evan Thompson, my co-authors on the, on the book, The Blind Spot, called Life, The Universe, and All The Rest. So that's also.

• 1:06:33Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it seems like, yeah, the, the, you know, kind of convergence of chemistry, biology, and complexity is something that really hasn't been approached. And as you said, it seems like you're taking a pen optics and optic approach to it, from everything from the building blocks of, you know, information and complexity, all the way up to, you know, the highest form of life, which is, of course, the podcast. So, and the newsletter, both have, well, Niayesh, we got to get you a newsletter, my friend. You're too interested.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  You got to start one.

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  Too many things, too many things. But maybe I get fun of my AI agents to start a newsletter.

• 1:07:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's right. You can't spell, you know, Niayesh without AI, right? Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. Again, for what you guys do in the, in the, you know, pencil and paper, but also for what you do with your voice and your platforms, I think it's incredibly important that we have people at the top of their craft doing things for the sake of, you know, heaven or the sake of humanity, which is, which is what we owe people as citizen scientists, you know? Two different countries, but, but, but, but one major worldview, which is to promote good science and be honest and have integrity. And I just appreciate you guys and what you do, and I thank you for coming on.

• 1:07:55Brian Keating?

  We'll, we'll have to do a part two and, and maybe bring some other, other guests into the conversation as well. But thank you guys for staying up on a late afternoon post doing, I mean, you guys had a full day before you. I'm, I'm still in the middle of my day. You're on PhD committees, both of you guys, making me feel like I'm a slacker. But, but, you know, we do have the best, as I said, three-hour-a-week job in the world, the hardest, but also the best. Thank you guys so much. It's been a real honor and a pleasure.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  Thank you. It was a real pleasure. It was really fun. Thank you both.

• 1:08:23Brian Keating?

  Thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your night. Bye.

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  Take care. See you.

• 1:08:28Speaker 06

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• 1:08:47Speaker 07

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