Entropy and Coherence Could Change Everything We Know About the Universe! w/ Dick Bond [Ep. 487]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Could entropy and coherence change everything we know about the universe? How does quantum information flow in the cosmic superweb? And will quantum mechanics reveal our universe’s deepest secrets? Today, I’m joined by the one and only Dick Bond, a theorist who has helped reshape our understanding of dark matter, entropy, and quantum mechanics, to discuss how every aspect of the universe could be a result of quantum mechanics. Dick is a renowned astrophysicist known for his significant contributions to cosmology and the study of the universe's large-scale structure. He has worked extensively on topics such as dark matter, dark energy, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and quantum cosmology. We also have a treat for you at the end of the episode, as Dick will grace us with a lecture titled Entropy in a Coherent Universe: Quantum Information Flows in the Cosmic SuperWeb. Don’t miss out! — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:29 Lecture preview 06:42 Training the next generation of scientists 10:59 Influences and early career 15:18 The role of entropy and coherence in quantum mechanics 20:41 Challenges in communicating science 31:32 The multiverse and quantum mechanics 36:22 The role of information in physical reality 40:34 The Hubble tension and dark energy 47:10 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Dick Bond: 💻 Website: https://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~bond/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  This is a story about the universe. But more than that, it's a story about how we came to know the universe. For nearly 50 years, one man, J. Richard Dick Bond, has shaped the way scientists see reality itself. He helped build the standard model of cosmology. Not in isolation, but in friendship.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Friendship is what actually drives great science.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  But now, as teens grow more massive, theories get stranger, and a new generation loses sight of the why behind the what. Dick Bond fears that we're losing something deeper.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  You have to maintain your technical chops, but you also have to be able to see the big picture.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  In this conversation, we'll cover everything: entropy, coherence, then the quantum universe, dark energy, the Hubble tension, and what comes next. But never forgetting the forgotten power of scientific friendship. This isn't a story just about physics. It's about the people who dared to ask, what is the universe really made of? And who are we, those that try to understand and wrestle with it? This is Professor Dick Bond, and this is Into the Impossible.

• 2:02Brian Keating?

  Dick, it's lovely to have you here at UC San Diego. Thanks so much for coming out and making the trip. I know it's hard to come from Toronto to San Diego in the winter.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  It's a tough call, although you haven't made it absolutely sunshiny while I've been.

• 2:14Brian Keating?

  Well, I've got a lot of questions for you, but the first one I have is this talk that you're going to grace us with later. Tell us about that. Tell us about this wide-ranging talk.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  What it is that made what you might call the golden age of cosmology, which I have been furished to be apart from, from the emergence in the 70s, it actually emerged in the 60s and even earlier, as you'll hear. But the thing that made all of the work happen and all of the great discoveries is not just an intellectual game. It's the friendships that underlie the interactions of scientists, which caused the creation of this great thing. It was essentially a movable feast of friends going from place to place, all interacting together and developing

• 3:06Speaker 03

  things. And as we were developing the basic ideas, which have become the standard model of cosmology, which dark matter plays an extremely important role, and after that, dark energy. But I think I won't be able to get to it in the meeting today, in the, in the talk today. But I organized a conference that was seminal in the subject of the cosmic mypoit background there and there to you.

• 3:35Brian Keating?

  Back in 19.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  It was 87.

• 3:38Brian Keating?

  Seven, yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  It was called Delta T over T, which was a play on the fractional temperature that we're trying to get to in those days and have gotten to with extreme precision. But the second T was spelled T E A because I was in Canada and it was. A tea thing, but what it did and why it was so interesting is that it, I used it as a vehicle to bring together, for the first time actually, theorists and experimentalists. Because in those days, the people that were into the cosmic microwave background experiment were deep in their labs and they weren't really connecting That's right.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  to the astro aspects, which have now become, you know, totally taken over. But they were into the devices and all of that. And so this was the great day and had the wisdom of getting Dave Wilkinson. Like real advisor, that's right. Yeah, he, he and I basically choreographed this. And so the drawing power of the experimentalist and the theorist was perfect. And to this day, it's remembered as one of the great events. And in fact, I was just at Hopkins a short while ago. And Chuck Bennett comes up and he says, it was the greatest meeting he's ever been at.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  And it was mainly because it was creating a field and a coherence that hadn't been created before. I mean, there were kind of random associations with the microwave background before, but it was never done as if it was a subject on its own, which is what we made. You reified it, you made it in reality. But what it also signaled is that we were trying to tightly couple the theory and the experiment, which is a new phenomenon. Because usually the experimentalist or observers would deliver information. And then the theorists would play around with the information, but it wasn't tightly coupled. That's right. And the history of the microwave background is we made it tightly coupled.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So there was a, a joint work of the theorists and the experimentalists. Uh, and what I came to call the analysts. Because we spend a lot of time taking the huge data stream that we get and analyzing in order to draw the perfect cosmic information that we can get from it. And so the whole story. In your career, it's all part of that flow. And we're all very proud of what actually happened. The only thing now is that the teams have become so large.

• 6:22Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  That is difficult to maneuver. Makes it difficult for young people to find their way. But the outcome of the experiments has been outrageous.

• 6:34Brian Keating?

  Oh, I mean, it is. It's incomparable.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  It is the golden age of cosmology, without a doubt.

• 6:39Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  And that's going to continue. And I'm sure that you people have heard on your podcasts that Simon's Observatory is on its way to do further miracle.

• 6:53Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  But it's not the only thing. There's a lot of things that are happening, not just in the microwave background, but in the large scale structure. So the model of the microwave background where theorists and experimentalists got together, we were also able to inject into large scale structure observations of, they were called redshift surveys. And so I must say, a lot of very good friends of mine were involved in all of those transformations. And of course, experimentalists and observers became very close friends.

• 7:27Brian Keating?

  Yes, it's a beautiful.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay and Workforce Management.

• 7:58Brian Keating?

  Way to describe it. And I remember meeting you 10 years after that conference. You invited me and Peter Timby, who was David Robinson's star graduate student, in addition to Suzanne Stang and many others. And you invited us to CETA, the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, some other acronym in French. But I remember meeting. This person, I was reminded of the saying, I was a brand new student, I was a student also of Robert Brandon Berger, as well as Alexander Polmirev, a great Russian physicist.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  And I know quite well.

• 8:25Brian Keating?

  Spirit of Zeldovich. And I remember him telling me that when some Russian physicist, maybe Zeldovich, met Stephen Hawking, they said, we thought of, or Stephen Hawking met Zeldovich, he said, I thought you were like Burbaki, like a collective, a tsunami. I thought that about you. It was a, how's this guy, you know, who would later take us out for beers and to the Toronto Blue Jays, who beat my beloved Yankees, if I recall correctly, from over 25, almost 30 years ago. What is the experimental minimum? Not the theoretical minimum that Leonard Susskind, past guest on the show, has talked about. What is the minimum about an experiment that a theorist should know?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Well, my view is that we are not training very well these days because everything, by force of advancement, everything is becoming so compartmentalized. And so these great phenomenon, which are these collectives of theorists and experimentalists together, they have a tendency to make the budding young scientists into somewhat cogs in a wheel. So the thing that behooves us is to make sure that, yes, you become focused and you do, you know, the key technical work, but you cannot lose sight of the one thing that impasses people to go into the subject,

• 9:47Speaker 03

  which is that you have to have the big picture. And the big picture has to be with you every single day while you're working on this. You can't be, you know, just doing your programming or whatever, because then it becomes quite similar to the kind of work you might do in this so-called real world of Google and other things, who are very, very interesting problems now. And it is essential for us to make our subject attractive. But why do people get attracted to the subject? It's because we ask the big questions. But the thing is, that isn't what you do day to day, or that is a tendency not to do day to day. But I think that we have

• 10:27Speaker 03

  to get back to a way of rethinking graduate education and postdoc education for that, because I played a very big role.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  That's the, uh, the future is, is going to be that we make well-rounded people who can still do the detailed expert things and, and, uh, you know, you try and do that with the general courses that become somewhat more specific, but there needs to be much more attention to that to make sure that people come out

• 11:01Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  with the ability to look at, you know, the entire story as opposed to the details of one story. I mean, you know, often, science used to be described as, um, there were a bunch of bricklayers and then there were the architects and the architects were the, the ancient beings in the subject. And, uh, I don't think it's that way. It's, everybody is making the architecture and everybody is laying the bricks. And if the architects lose sight of the laying of the bricks, then they have lost sight of what it was, that was their essence in getting into the subject.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  So it goes both ways. You have to maintain, you know, your technical chops, but you also have to be able to see the big picture. But I think that's everywhere at every level of development, even in reaching into high schools and, uh, early university career that, that this kind of vision of how to think about life, the universe and everything is something that, uh, science does extremely well, except it's not doing it as well as it should.

• 12:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's not sustainable, that's for sure. And speaking about, you know, early education, early influences, I recall that you were very heavily influenced by George Gamow and, and also by, uh, your, uh, interactions with, with your advisor, Willie Fowler. And I'd love to talk about those two men and how they influenced.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  You're gonna get a blast on that today. And that you bring up Gamow? That is amazing. I don't know how you knew that I'm a Gamma five.

• 12:40Brian Keating?

  Some research.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  You will see that Gamma plays a role, but he's, I'm not the only one he played a role in. I did the most brilliant, brilliant. A general book, it was called One, Two, Three, Infinity. Can you think of a better title than that? It is amazing. And he was trying to do a grand unification in essentially late 40s, early 50s of how you could think about how everything came together from the early universe through to the formation of life on Earth and geology and all of that. And so he was trying to bring everything together, which is of course, I think what we all are trying to do. But he did exceptionally well. And so, for example, many famous physicists

• 13:25Speaker 03

  were influenced, you know, if, if you look at a somewhat younger grouping, they were probably influenced and got into science by Star Trek or something like that. But there were the books from an earlier time that played a huge impact. And, and the One, Two, Three, Infinity had a big impact. It wasn't just on me, it was on Glennis Farrar at NYU, but David Gross and I just completely resonated, resonated on Gamow. And so you're gonna hear this today, I probably shouldn't be repeating it, but I will, because this will leap us into where I am going with my thinking and where I think many people have

• 14:05Speaker 03

  gone before. Schrodinger wrote a book called What is Life back in the 40s, and it was transformative. It was the reason that physicists rushed into biology, but it impacted Crick and Watson. Yep. Over physicists. And it's all about entropy, which is what you're gonna hear about today, but is called neg entropy. And so, but I won't go too far there. What I will say is the thing that I found that was quite delightful is that Gamow was just this polymath who did everything. But he picked up on the DNA story and organized an entire grouping of

• 14:49Speaker 03

  scientists, a special grouping of scientists, to talk about DNA. It was like a network. And there was some kind of brown ties or something called themselves. That's right. I have nothing but admiration for his creativity and his, his far ranging ideas. And, you know, Hoyle came up with Big Bang as a

• 15:15Speaker 03

  As a bad word, if you like. Sure. Uh, but you know, Gamoff was right in the center, but so was Hoyle. Yeah. I love Hoyle, uh, but Gamoff is, is up near the top. I'm going to be talking about a number of these characters today because uh, they really set the stage and one of the things, and we're going back now to an early part of the conversation, which is that flow of information and development of it from let's say the, um, well, from let's say 1900 on through the quantum development and what they were thinking and how they saw

• 15:55Speaker 03

  things in the 30s, into the 40s and into the 50s is something that we are, a lot of people are kind of losing sight of. Yeah. And that's a shame because you know, they, because if you look at the old papers and the old books, they were looking at things and they didn't know everything, but they were trying to do it and not make statements that were going to be clearly false. But then there was no choice but to take leaps, which they did, and that's what Gamoff did. Uh, but you know, he also predicted them a cosmic microwave background going back to early.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

• 17:03Brian Keating?

  Alfred, right? Passed away relatively recently and then the, the part of that kind of motivation for the question about, you know, how you train your philosophy of training students to be interacting with experimentalist has always been good. I kind of view you as sort of the theoretical version of our good friend and beloved colleague Lyman Page who. is sort of the counterpart. He's a master of experiment, National Academy.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And one of my best friends.

• 17:25Brian Keating?

  One of the closest friends to many of us. He's like an uncle, you know, he's been on the podcast many times as well. But I always think he trains his students to also think theoretically and not to do new theories. I don't think of my students have to come up with some new theory, but they have to understand that they're at the level of a graduate student. Or else they're kind of plumbers and there's nothing against plumbers. We need them to. Uh, but the, but the fact is we, we can't have people doing stuff and not understanding why they're doing it. And to me, you've always had your why. You've always understood what exactly you're trying to answer. And I think the question that in most in like is most an enigma about me is how do you about you rather from me is how do you choose what you do? What's the most interesting topic to you right now? Is it the Hubble? Because you never follow these fads, even this talk today.

• 18:05Brian Keating?

  Which, you know, as the late, great Andrew Lang, my mentor used to say about you is a talk that, you know, only Dick Bond could give. And sometimes only Dick Bond can understand. I remember you speaking at Caltech, but we shall see if I can do a little bit better in my. We loved, uh, we love, uh, having you.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Well, I'm famous for, uh, being able to put the entire universe on one slide.

• 18:27Brian Keating?

  Exactly.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Uh, and just riff.

• 18:30Brian Keating?

  So what is the most interesting in the universe?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Well, it is exactly what I'm talking about today because it's a grand unified vision of how everything fits together.

• 18:37Brian Keating?

  Dark matter, dark energy.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Well, all of that fits in, but the main underlying, uh, set of issues are the concepts of entropy.

• 18:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  And coherence, that's entropy in a coherent universe, but I see it everywhere. But the coherence is associated with organization of counting things. Entropy is about counting things. And the other ingredient that goes into quantum mechanics is phase and phase differences.

• 19:05Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  And the phase is what builds coherence. It can be large scale coherence or small scale coherence. And when people think about entropy, they think about, um, random and they usually think about macroscopic.

• 19:18Brian Keating?

  Coffee and cream mixing.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. But in fact, it's actually quite microscopic. And. It is the two together that make quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the queen of everything. Everything flows from it. And it flows from those two entities, the entropy and the phase. This is not commonly embraced. It could have been. Uh, but it does, you know, and codify itself in a wave function of the universe, if you like. But you can say that word, but that doesn't give justice to the fact that it describes everything, including all of life and all of the ideas associated with humans.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  That all that has to flow from essentially this quantum thing. And so what I see is that every single aspect of the development of the universe is nicely cast into this framework. And it gives me an underlying vision to try and describe along the lines, if you like, with a little bit of hubris perhaps attached to one, two, three infinity, where you're trying to do a, well, you're trying to do a great leap at the approaching end of my scientific career. When I was young, I thought I should be a writer. I don't like to write that much, but I write to myself all the time.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  That's my mechanism. But, uh, I said, you know, you can't really be a writer without understanding uh, the leading edge of human thought about the universe. And so that was how I decided that physics was the path. But it was always with the view that as one approaches the end, you take a great leap. And the most likely situation is your leap is not going to be accurate. But if you don't do it, then you aren't going to try and have internally in your own mind, done an internal unification. And the whole development of human beings is to try and internally unify under, hopefully, a

• 21:32Speaker 03

  A force for the good arrangement, but that is, you know, what the development of a human is about. It's to have a coherent view in which all of the little entropic, if you like, little fluctuations that go on all the time in people's brains are somewhat transcended and you can see things in some relatively clear way. So this is a non-trivial thing and it could, you know, it could be that the universe is all about a big cosmic joke, or it could be a simulation, or, you know, all of these ideas are possible. And,

• 22:10Speaker 03

  but we have to proceed as if the science of reason, which is really what we're doing, reasoning about things in the universe, that that's a, something that is actually giving you answers, as opposed to it being you're going off and

• 22:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah, actually, one question I always get from my audience is, you know, why don't you push back on these theorists like Neil Turok? And I do, and it's always with love and respect. But the fact is, you know, for laypeople that do watch the podcast, I mean, we have Nobel Prize winners and we have high school students. But the, but the point is, you know, when you hear about so many speculative things, wormholes, black holes, time warps, traveling, uh, black holes, dark energy, dark matter, and then the popular trope is, well, how can we trust you guys? Because you don't know what, you say you don't know what 95% of the universe is, and that you're going to speculate about how time travel and string theory and brains and M theory and all these things can revolutionize physics and give us the future that we all love and deserve. How do you push back on that? The

• 23:11Brian Keating?

  notion that what you do as a theorist is often, or your fellow colleagues, if not you, is not as often grounded in the cold, hard experimental reality that's at least falsifiable?

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Well, you're bringing up an interesting point, which is, uh, that you aren't, but I'm going to pretend that you did.

• 23:28Brian Keating?

  Yeah, okay.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  I do not like, and colleagues I know very well, but their basic thing is

• 23:39Speaker 03

  To learn something and then immediately turn around and try and become the high priest, delivering information to the masses. Whereas if you're a scientist and a true scientist, you're incredibly, have to be incredibly humble about not knowing and that it's a process where you're trying to know, but you don't have the audacity to say, "I know the answer." You say, "This is, you know, where we're at now." And I think that in terms of delivering information about science to the public, a little more humility is important. I mean, I understand the reasons for, you know, trying to speak with authority, but

• 24:24Speaker 03

  I think what's more important for the lay public to see is that the scientists are struggling, just like everybody else, with, is with answers of, you know, the reason for being and all of that and how it fits in. And, uh, and it is not good to try and say, "Well, I know and I am going to deliver the cosmic truth to you." Uh, and I hope that I will tickle imaginations today with the idea set, which I think is really good if I do say so. But it is, hopefully, what it's going to do is to trigger people to have, you know, these synaptic gap explosions to try and make their own connections.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Because nobody is ever going to make the same connections, which is the way of, in fact, the way of science. Everybody's following a path and the paths have a correlation or coherence among them, but, uh, they're different. And so everybody's unification internally is different and you have to respect that.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  I mean, it's also true that, you know, I'm sure you've seen it. You get uh, these things from what we used to call cranks who would, you know, I have a theory. Plan A theory is the best theory. Plan A, yeah. And, uh, and so that's another example of someone who is trying to understand, and that's admirable, but then before they've actually understood, they say, I'm going to deliver things so you can all applaud me. I just don't like that. I didn't.

• 26:04Brian Keating?

  He stood. Yeah, I, I agree. And there's also an arrogance about, uh, it takes, well, first of all, it takes chutzpah, it takes arrogance, a little bit of moxie to confront, after all, our enemy has an infinite amount of resources, Mother Nature. She's not running out of troops to assail us anytime soon, right? We're waging this infinite war against an army that's always in retreat, but, but it's, it's possible to make progress. And I think some of that comes from having, you know, gumption. So on one hand, Einstein would say things like, if the, uh, 1919 eclipse survey turned out to not demonstrate the deflection of starlight, well, then I would feel sorry for God because my equations are right. On the other hand, he would say, you know, I am, uh, I'm supremely stupid and, and I know nothing. It's just, I know, know that I know nothing.

• 26:48Brian Keating?

  Sort of summarizing that, or Feynman would say thing you probably ran into him many times. And he would say things like, you know, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you don't really understand it. And then when he was asked by the Pasadena Star News, the day he won the Nobel Prize to explain, he said, look, pal, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize, would it? So how do you balance this? Seiberg has said things like, if we discover something that's not consistent with string theory, well, just call it string theory. How, how do you reconcile the, the arrogance, but the balance between arrogance and humility that you display, but so many of your theoretical counterparts have to say do not?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not sure that, uh, I actually really like the people that we've been talking about.

• 27:27Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Feynman.

• 27:29Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Was outrageously interesting, but I'm going to extol today the incredible virtues of his thesis advisor, John Wheeler.

• 27:38Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  And Bohr, Bohr also playing a big role in the story of today. But Feynman I did know, and he was fantastic. And the thing that what you would like for people to see, and people did see or hear, how the mind is operating to the extent that you aren't looking into it, but you're just seeing. So I'm going to tell, I don't know why, but I'm going to tell a little tale about it.

• 28:03Brian Keating?

  I have to hear about Fowler, too.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  I was a Feynman scholar at Caltech. And so I met with him on a number of occasions and he taught me advanced quantum mechanics. It had a big impact on my way of thinking.

• 28:16Brian Keating?

  Well, it was.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Because it was a very natural way of thinking and it was irreverent. And irreverence was what you really need in trying to deal with Mother Nature, who doesn't necessarily applaud your irreverence, but it's the best way to approach it. I started in supernova and it was because neutrinos, which are, you know, some of the fundamental particles that

• 28:47Speaker 03

  equivalent of photons in many respects and gravity ways. So I was an expert in neutrinos and gravitational collapse that ultimately produced supernova. And Feynman was going to give a talk to Boy Scouts of all things in Pasadena. So he had me come over in order to core dump what I knew about neutrinos and supernova, because that was one of their most important applications. You know, I gave him this spiel. I think I thought I was somewhat clever in those days, but I was still with humility, especially if you had the.

• 29:24Brian Keating?

  Scale it to the Feynman standard, right?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, if you've had the great.

• 29:29Brian Keating?

  The Ilagmapirouel.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  The great experience of seeing Feynman and Gelman in action on a daily basis, then you learn humility just from that.

• 29:41Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  But in any case. So I give him this whole spiel about, you know, gravitational collapse and how it was all working and that. And we had, you know, kind of fooled around with the multi-dimensional aspect of it. But he sort of looks off into the distance, but you can see he's looking at a whole landscape of action occurring in his mind. And he comes back and he says, Raleigh Taylor instability. And then, within a year, Raleigh Taylor instability became the subject in supernova theory. And, you know, how did he get there?

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, he had spent a lot of time looking at turbulence in the 50s. But also, they all got schooled in Los Alamos with the development of the bomb. Not just him, Beta, and they were all doing incredibly practical things in terms, which were really great for the development of astrophysics and cosmology. Because it was, you know, applying some of the methodology of things that go bang in the night. And it's to, to science and to the universe at large. Anyway, he comes back, he says this, so I go back to Fowler, who's my thesis advisor, and I say,

• 31:07Speaker 03

  you know, I gotta drop everything and work on this. And he says, finish your thesis. Which I did. Sage advice. How was your thesis topic? It was, you'll hear, it was gravitational neutrino transport during gravitational collapse. But I gotta report, you're gonna hear routed too much about all of this because I'm going back to my core. And I'll tell you one of the reasons for doing that today, but I've been doing it because it's going to be this, hopefully, this book that I get around to writing.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  George Fuller, faculty member here, great guy, Mr. Neutrino. He was Willie Fowler's last graduate student and I was his second to last. So we knew each other there, we didn't work together. We're now working together, which is a fantastic, had a grand unification in his life. But he also got into the entropy game, like I did. Well, anyway, the bottom line is that he was a Mr. Supernova as well. And that's essentially, in a very broad way, it's what his career has been. And I have gone all over the map. But with always this sort of underlying grand unified way of looking at things,

• 32:24Speaker 03

  which is an entropic view, as will be described in more detail today. So trying to come up with a way of looking at things, which is, to me, a pleasure. Because every time you have a new idea, it's incredibly pleasurable. And the problem with science is you say, "Yeah, but everybody knows that." Which is not true, it turns out. But it's because if you can actually really get at an idea, then it looks like it's simple, in spite of the fact to get to that idea was not a simple path. But it then becomes, and so the mantra now is, "Well, it's all just quantum mechanics."

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, but Feynman, and we go back to him, once was quoted as saying, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics." Just like I said, von Neumann said, "Nobody understands entropy."

• 33:18Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters. So you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich, together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 33:47Brian Keating?

  Hello fellow, your fellow, well, he's Caltech undergrad, I believe. Stephen Wolfram says he now understands entropy. We won't, he now understands, well, quantum mechanics, time and entropy.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Well, maybe he's come up with the same ideas I have.

• 34:01Brian Keating?

  He might, yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  I don't think that's true. I actually, I actually, of course, overlapped with him at Caltech. And he had worked on, before he became Mr. Mathematica. He worked on baryogenesis, which is trying to understand why there is more matter than there is any matter. Which is a very subtle issue. And then I did some work on that as well, relatively early in my career, but I enjoyed it because I learned a lot from it. Anyway, so that was his development. And then he was into relating computers to particle physics.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  And that means that you are thinking of information at the same time as you're thinking of field theory. And my contention is, like Wheeler, who I'm going to quote today, is that everything is information. That that is the nature of physical reality, which is.

• 35:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, for a bit.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Well, it's more than that, it's more than that. It's just that, you know, we're all thinking of solid things, but in fact, it's almost like condensed information. That that's the way to actually think about the universe at large. And it's an uncommon view. But it's actually very deep because what it does, it brings information into the absolute forefront of one's thinking about how things develop. Which allows ideas to emerge, just like everything else may have emerged, but complex ideas, which have a coherence. Again, we're back to the word coherent. Anyway, so.

• 35:46Brian Keating?

  Yeah, well, that's what's called a teaser and a foreshadowing.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I don't want to get my talk.

• 35:52Brian Keating?

  No, we're gonna record that and that'll be released and we'll certainly do that. But I have to be a good host and I have to ask the hard hitting questions. So one of the questions that's hardest for me to kind of wrestle with has to do with the multiverse. There's a book over there from Fred Adams. You probably collaborated with him as George has, or at least run across him. And he has sort of this natural gift for explaining away some of the most interesting and devious, you know, problems in science, including the fine tuning problem and other things. But in particular, this obsession with the multiverse. What do you make of it? What is your take on the multiverse?

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Well, I am gonna, I am gonna talk about that. So I have been dealing with those issues since the mid 80s. In particular,

• 36:41Speaker 03

  once we did something that people are embracing more and more, what we did on what was called stochastic inflation, which was a way of understanding how you could create a universe that was arbitrarily large and possibly eternal. Although you will never be able to know it's eternal, because if it's semi eternal, you don't know where time zero is. And so you're just looking at sections. So you'd never know whether it's going to be eternal or not. And I actually don't think that eternality is probably feasible. But, you know, you cannot, as you said, you can't tell Mother Nature what to do. She knows. Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  But anyway, so for me, the multiverse is actually one verse. It is the universe that is interconnected in its way. And the interesting thing that and this is controversial.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  The way quantum mechanics works is that if you try and concentrate something too much, then it spreads it out. And it spreads it out according to what is called the uncertainty principle. It turns out to be a very general concept that's operating everywhere, which is not that much appreciated. Everybody thinks, oh, it's only the smallest scales, but it's not true. It's everywhere.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  And I will say something about that perhaps. But the concept is that somehow the realizations of the universe know about each other. They kind of make what in the trade is called an effective potential or multiple effective potentials that essentially try and channelize where the realities flow. So this goes back-

• 38:38Brian Keating?

  How do you mean, what do you mean by realities? Oh, is that-

• 38:41Speaker 03

  So the Rayleigh experiment- The reali- So let me, an ideal reality of which probably cannot be attained would be to have the kind of reality that you always thought reality might have been, which was that everything is classical and it is perfectly determined and it is essentially a spacetime manifold, where the space could actually be quite large. I mean, it doesn't have to be three dimensions. It could be multiple.

• 39:11Brian Keating?

  Is it a Hilbert space or a real space? Like three-

• 39:13Speaker 03

  I'm talking about a real space right now. People don't usually think about that in the quantum level because what the quantum level is actually doing, it is saying, I've got probabilities of these realizations and that it almost thinks that the realizations aren't real, but they could be. But the main thing that what the equations of quantum mechanics show you is that if you try and concentrate information- Then the information will spread. And so a classic example of that is the hydrogen atom. Where instead of having the electron on top of the proton, if you tried to do that, it would immediately respond.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  And what you would get is the atom in a ground state or in an excited state. But the main thing is it's got a scale associated with it. And that scale is associated with the uncertainty principle that you cannot localize that well. But what does that mean? Does it mean that it was never localized? Or does it mean that it's a probability of this happening, not happening? And then the collective average is the non-localization. That's the standard view, if there is a standard view of quantum mechanics. But then the question is, is that real or not? And if it's... And then another aspect to make it even stranger is that if I view

• 40:38Speaker 03

  the wave function as a function of these quote-unquote realities, and the realities are kind of interacting, I mean, is... If you deal with a wave function, psi of x, where x is a position, what is the x? And you have an x here, an x here, an x here, and an x here. And what is describing is an ensemble of possibilities. That's... I mean, but we're used to dealing with this all the time in, uh, in science, ensembles of possibilities. But the question is whether that interaction is a real thing, or whether it's just that somehow we don't understand what's going on with the quantum mechanics. But the fundamental equation, Schrodinger's equation,

• 41:22Speaker 03

  says that there is a effect of pressure, it's often called the quantum pressure or quantum potential, that is a force which is beyond the usual classical forces that's responsible for spreading things out. And that that's actually part of the equation, it's a real force. But the way quantum mechanics is taught, the way physics is taught, is that it was all because of its historical development. Whereas if we were really clever, we would have started with the wave picture of the universe, and then worked our way backwards and gotten classical physics as an approximation to it. But of course, that's not the way it occurred. But trying to break people's minds out of...

• 42:07Speaker 03

  You know, that it's all classical and then you go into the quantum realm, rather than the quantum realm being the only thing there is and that the classical is basically limited, limiting behavior, that that's uncommon. I think it would behoove, and you'll hear that, I, I think it would behoove us to all look at it differently, look at it the other way. And I think Feynman was sort of on to that, right? He, he said it's all, you know, basically did say all quantum account, even though nobody understands, you know, his classic dictum is shut up and calculate as opposed to try and understand metaphysical things about the physics.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

• 43:19Brian Keating?

  If we had, you know, kind of to select top, you know, two or three greatest hits without the fact that you're so, you know, kind of predominantly, you know, immune to following trends and in fact, setting trends is more your forte. I see now a lot of trends, Hubble tension, as I said, multiverse, as well as things like, you know, speculations on the nature of dark energy. Because you're so integrated, tomorrow's a huge day in your career. It's a release of ACT data, public data release. So you played a huge role in the ACT experiment for 20 years plus. Tell me, if you could address one or two of those topics, multiverse, dark matters, nature, dark energies, evolution, the, you know, the unknown candidates for dark matter

• 44:02Brian Keating?

  as another, as another choice, leaving aside the thermodynamics and the stuff you'll talk about later. Classical astrophysics controversies that we see now. Stephen Weinberg once said, you know, physics is short on crises. Well, not anymore. That was back in the eighties. What's the top crisis and what's the, what's the worst trend that a young theorist could be sucked into, that you could potentially avoid them suffering the fate of trend chasing for its own sake?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  I think it's inevitable that people will do trend. I mean, that's the nature of theorists, unfortunately. And then the issue is, do they have good taste or do they not? But you know, there is the big pressure to get stuff out. That's right. So I'm going to talk in passing today about another way of looking at field theory and the universe at large, where the fundamental ingredient is scale factor, which is a tensor, anisotro- it's got anisotropic and anisotropic things. And its derivative, basically, is the Hubble. Hubble. Hubble tensor. Oh, Hubble.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Hubble's tensor, which is a function of not just positions, but positions in fields and time. And that that is a description of the gravitational underpinning of things. Why am I going on that little loop? Because I think it, well, it gives people a way to intuitively grasp what is actually going on with particle physics. Because it's all about strains and strain rates, which are called shears, and that the possibility that there's anisotropic, it's just that it's being done in a larger space, which is multi-dimensional. So, you know, we deal with the three plus one, three plus time.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  I'm going to sing the virtues today of something that is controversial imaginary time. But there's also more dimensions to generalized space, manifested in string theory, which is we're back to string theory. So while everybody else has been abandoning string theory, I'm embracing it. It's ridiculous. But from a much more intuitive way of looking at, I think. So that's why I'm, you know, pinging my ideas with people like, well, Lenny Suskind and, you know, the people that are deeply on the edge of thinking about the way information is working with quantum mechanics, which is a major, major, major topic. Anyway, what I see is, you know, great grandification.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  This is taking us a little bit away. We did multiverse, which...

• 46:45Speaker 03

  You know, I, I think about in my own way, as you'll hear, but Hubble tensions. So I, I mentioned that I was in Hopkins. Of course, I sat down with Adam Riess for the guest of the view. And, and asked me, of course, what I think, because unlike some of my friends, I am, you approach things in a somewhat conservative way, but you need a radical element if you're going to do something interesting. And so to me, if everything is described in terms of an isotropic inhomogeneous Hubble tensor, then, and that that's everything, well, it is quite possible that you have

• 47:28Speaker 03

  a big change, especially once you're entering the era in which the dark energy is sort of the dominator, which is like redshift less than around point five or point seven or so. So above that, it's, you know, like the cold dark matter dominated universe, but below that, you have all of this slowing up, but with an ingredient that we do not understand at all, or view is that it's related to the vacuum. But as I emphasized to Adam, it is all a phenomenology. It's not fundamental theory that we have, but it is how you learn about it.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  And you look at it with great respect, because to try and get, you know, a whole Hubble parameter thing, which I am contending, is the way to look at everything, is any information you can get about it, especially on the largest scales, is fundamental. And we're kind of not confused, but we're overly thinking about the isotropic component, and that it's only time dependent, but it isn't, because time and space are intermingled. Yes. Which means that if you are going back to redshift point five, where there are changes. Then you're also going way out in space. And so the question is, is the change actually spatial?

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Or is it timed? Or is it associated with? Well, there are many things. It could be. It could also be associated with density, which is actually what I think it might be. Which is that as the universe expands, the density falls. And if the density falls too much, you can have different physics which is going on. It's associated within. In dark energy theory, it's called screening. And our galaxy is supposed to be screened and give you kind of normal physics. But if you go outside of the galaxy a long way, where the densities are quite extremely low. Then you can have a modification. For example, one way to look at it is.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Going back to cold dark matter. The cold dark matter could be changing its form. In the extreme void regions. But it would be a late phenomenon. It wouldn't be an early. And now it changed the equation of state. Yeah, but it's not a phenomenon that would occur when the density is too. Is this what Penrose calls aerobons? Or is it related to these? Aerobons. Okay. Okay. So I should also describe something else. Although I should be up on everybody's literature. I like, as Feynman did. The pleasure of working things out myself. So that you enjoy the experience of coming up with things, even if other people have thought things.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Because you know that one way or another, you could make a connection to everything that everybody's been thinking. That's right. That's just the way of, you know, the time becomes right to think certain thoughts. But no, so I have not paid, in spite of the fact that I have great respect for. For Penrose. I don't pay that much attention. He made a misstep in his career. Which might not have been a misstep. He got completely enamored with a theory and then said. There are these entities that come from quote unquote before the Big Bang. I don't know if, did you get him on here? He's gone on many times, yeah. Well, he's probably riffed about that.

• 51:02Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah, many times.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Did he riff about consciousness?

• 51:04Brian Keating?

  Of course, yeah. I had on it Librarian Stuart Hameroff, who was inspired by his book, uh, his book, An Emperor's New Mind.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 51:12Brian Keating?

  I write him and that launched there.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management, built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.