What Is Humanity’s Place in the Cosmos?

For all of history, humans have been fascinated by the heavens above us. We’ve used the stars to navigate Earth, to predict the future, and to understand our place in the larger scheme of things. Changes in our view of the cosmos—from the Copernican revolution that “uncentered” the Earth to the discovery of the Big Bang and the recognition that the universe is expanding—have invariably changed our view of ourselves. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with the astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan about the latest scientific view of the universe and what it says about humanity’s place in the order of things. Natarajan is a world-renowned theoretical physicist who has made important breakthroughs in the study of black holes and dark matter; she is also a scholar of the history and philosophy of science and the author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos. Along the way, David and Natarajan discuss the place of emotion in scientific research, why science alone can’t solve human problems, and the greatest space movie ever made. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00David Brooks?

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35David Brooks?

  I was like any other eight-year-old. I looked up in the night sky and I was transfixed. Later, I discovered astronomy involves math, and so it's not for me. But I never lost my taste for the poetry of the night sky. So I'm super excited to talk about the existential issues that peering through the universe raises with one of the world's leading astrophysicists. Priya Narasimhan grew up in New Delhi and in high school developed a method to map the night sky over that city. Now she studies black holes and other stuff out there in our ever-expanding universe. But what's great about her is that she isn't just a bunch of data and equations. She's a deeply humanistic thinker who ponders all the existential questions the universe poses and writes about them with lucidity and grace.

• 1:17David Brooks?

  I'm pleased to welcome Priya Narasimhan to this table. Priya Narasimhan, welcome to The Permanent Questions. Thank you so much for being here.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

• 1:32David Brooks?

  Now, I am fascinated by how scientists find their field. So how did you find the night sky?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I don't have such a dramatic story, but it's one that's sort of filled with a lot of wonder and awe, because you know, the night sky is basically, you don't have to go anywhere. It's there for everyone, right? And I think that when I was a young child growing up in India, I was a very curious child. So I was always pestering my parents with questions and ultimately my parents bought me a telescope and a microscope. And I made my choice. I was always fascinated with stars and you know, the moon, usual kid stuff. I felt attracted much more to the night sky because I think you couldn't reach out and touch.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  There was something about it being not quite available in the same way that you could make a little specimen in a glass plate and look at it under the microscope. The fact that it was somewhat unreachable and elusive, I think was what sort of seduced me. But I don't think I actively thought about becoming an astrophysicist at that age. I was clearly interested in science, there was no question about it, and physics. And I think I had a sort of, you know, interesting, very blessed in terms of the opportunities that I got. My parents are academics, so I was, again, you know, won the birth lottery, a house full of books and people, interesting people.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I got a Commodore 64 at home before anybody in India ever had a computer. So I learned to program myself. And there was this fantastic woman scientist, Nirupam Aragwan, who came back from the US to run the Nehru Planetarium in Delhi. And so I was an amateur astronomer, so I would go there. And when I heard she had come and, you know, she was really encouraging young students to read more about astronomy, I showed up, you know, young teenager, I said, well, you know, I have a computer and I can calculate and I want to do some research. Can I do some work for you? And so she said, okay, what do you love? So I've been obsessed with maps and atlases and cartography my entire life.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  And even as a child, you know, atlases were sort of my favorite of the sky and the earth. So she said, okay, what's your favorite? I said, I love that sky, you know, map that is produced in the newspaper in Delhi, monthly night sky, what can you see? She said, okay, make me a map. Make me the star map, right? And so then that was a lot of work. I had to teach myself spherical geometry and, you know, I had to learn to program properly, input a lot of data about the positions of the stars and the planets and their orbits. And finally, I did it.

• 4:21David Brooks?

  What's up with you and maps? Like you call your book mapping, and there's a lot of maps in there, like, and you mentioned as a girl, you were interested in maps, like, why do you think maps have a special interest?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  One of the things that always fascinated me, you know, if you look at old maps, especially the sort of, you know, the Explorer, Voyager, sort of voyages of exploration maps, at some point, these chaps would map and say terra incognita. I love the fact that they said, we don't know what that is. And it's that same impulse that as a child I had, so something that's kind of unknown had like magnetic seductive value for me. And I was like, oh, wow. So there are things that are really not known. Some things are exquisitely mapped, you know, land routes, you know, shipping routes are mapped, you know, cities and, you know, down to villages.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  And then suddenly there's like a terra incognita. Then I went to MIT, but then at MIT, I studied a lot of different things. You know, I was very interested in philosophy of science. I'd encountered Thomas Kuhn, who had retired at that point, but he would come and...

• 5:31David Brooks?

  Thomas Kuhn wrote the book, The Structure of Science.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  ...scientific revolutions. So at the time, string theory, which is sort of very abstract mathematical, sort of theoretical ideas about, you know, what happened before the Big Bang. So that's sort of the domain of string theory. And I was well-placed to kind of do that because I had a strong mathematics background as well as physics. But I was not interested in those ideas because they were not testable. They were not experimentally testable. And somehow, to me, the excitement always was in being sort of prove, make predictions and have them tested, you know, that kind of back and forth, to me, was what was exciting about science, right?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  So instead, I deferred PhD admissions at MIT in physics and started PhD in history and philosophy of science. Because I always liked to write. And I've, you know, I was slightly torn always also between the humanities and sciences because I love to read, I love poetry and love history. And I think Thomas Kuhn also influenced me deeply in the sense, you know, his book was something I read with great interest, but even then I felt that there were bits in his wonderful book that still missed things. And that's because he was not a practitioner.

• 6:55David Brooks?

  Yeah. And the basic idea, correct me if I summarize this wrong, is that science moves forward in paradigm shifts. You've got a paradigm, Newtonian physics, it's working, working, working, and suddenly the data starts not working.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:08David Brooks?

  And then somebody comes along, chops up the Newtonian paradigm, and we get a new one.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And that it's all revolution. So I think I, even then, I felt that that was a simplistic sort of view of how science progresses, because it's a combination, it's a complex combination of evolution of ideas and revolutions, right? And that the practice of science was something that really interested me. And I realized that, okay, now I really need to learn to read and write like a humanist. I was going to look at simulations, and in particular, in cosmology and astrophysics, because, you know, cosmology and astronomy, astrophysics are very interesting science, right? They're not your standard science because you can't do controlled experiments.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  The night sky, there's a supernova that goes off there, that's all you have. You cannot summon it up tomorrow again, unlike chemistry where you can keep mixing, you know, reagent A and reagent B like a millions of times anywhere around the world. So that fascinated me, the fact that these fields were somehow kind of edgy in terms of our definition of the scientific method and so on. And so I wanted to understand this process of what the simulation is really doing. Is it, is it actually testing, validating theories? So it turned out, that took me to Princeton, because there was one person at the time who was alive, who knew John von Neumann and all the computational greats, and it was

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Martin Swarshjai. Martin Swarshjai is the son of Carl Swarshjai, the person who discovered the black hole solution. While he was, you know, a soldier at the front, World War I, Einstein had just given his set of lectures on general relativity in the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He could not be there, but he heard and got a copy of the lectures. And within days, he found the first solution, exact solution to his theory. Einstein even didn't expect there would be an exact solution, right? Anyway, black holes.

• 9:12David Brooks?

  Which is what was your, it was maybe your main field to study.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Exactly. So, you know, during this conversation with him, he was like, what are you doing this for? You have to be doing science. And then I told him what I just told you, that I couldn't find a thesis problem that I found enticing enough. And that's why I was kind of exploring other things. And he said, what do you like? So I said, I like building storylines for the universe, you know, how things happen and make predictions, use all the data we currently have, make a prediction for future data. That's the kind of thing I like. So he said, well, I know the person you should work with. And his name is Martin Rees, and he's a professor at Cambridge. And so I ended up there, I ended up working with Martin, and I am ABD in that PhD still.

• 9:55David Brooks?

  A major career failure. You mentioned earlier in our conversation that you didn't learn the microscope because you didn't want to be able to touch the thing you're studying. Well, now you've chosen to study something you can't even see, and that's black holes. Like no one has ever or will ever see a black hole. And so what was the interest and obsession with black holes?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you can ask any kid what they are obsessed with, what they think is the most enigmatic thing in the universe, and they'll tell you it was black holes. I also work on dark matter. So all these invisible entities that seem to fundamentally shape our universe, right? Their true nature is not well-understood. So that's already a sort of an invitation to kind of go there and try to understand. And the draw about black holes is really the most, they have the most bizarre properties.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  And as you said, you never quite directly see them. You only indirectly infer their presence, just as dark matter. You sort of indirectly infer the presence of vast amounts of dark matter in the universe. Bulk of the matter in the universe, eighty-six percent is dark matter. And so the only way you kind of infer the presence of dark matter is the gravity that it exerts. Similarly for black holes. So the only way we infer the presence of black holes is because they are places in the universe where there's extreme gravity. And so they bend light. All matter bends light, but when the matter is very densely, compactly arranged, it very severely and dramatically bends light.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So we actually see that around black holes. But most importantly, what black holes really are are sort of, you know, they represent the sort of limits of our knowledge. And I'll explain what that is, right? So a black hole is basically a place where matter is so concentrated and gravity is so intense that nothing can escape sort of this sort of sacred boundary. It's called the event horizon. Not even light, if it crosses it, can actually escape it. The gravity is so intense, right? And they seem to be ubiquitous in nature. Almost every galaxy in the universe, including our own, harbors what we call a supermassive black hole.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  It's a million times the mass of the sun that's sitting at the center. And the question is, why are they there? What are they actually doing? How did they form? How did they grow? So this is sort of the big, open questions. And it's this idea of extreme gravity. And of course, you know, it was Einstein who completely reformulated gravity. Uh, you know, we moved away from the sort of neat kind of idea of Newton's gravity. You know, it's the force between two masses and it's mediated by the distance between them, one over r squared. Newton was never able to explain why. Why do two objects that have mass actually feel this force?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  How is that force mediated? That's why Einstein is so, um, his theory is just so remarkable. And his imagination is just, you know, all making.

• 13:15Speaker 03

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• 13:24Speaker 04

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• 13:34Speaker 05

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• 13:43Speaker 06

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• 13:47Speaker 07

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• 14:22David Brooks?

  This is a question about the process of scientific discovery. And so Einstein has one year. In nineteen oh five, he's twenty-six years old and he publishes four, literally universe shaking papers. Like, how the hell does that happen? Where one guy in one year, which he never replicates. Like, what, what's going on in that process of discovery? Are there periods of where a scientist just goes through some extraordinary burst of creativity? Why sometimes artists do?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  I think it tells you something about the entire non-linearity of that kind of creative imagination, right? Clearly, he has been mulling over, thinking about, I mean, each paper was a major conceptual shift. Super radical, complete break from anything that the physicists had been thinking about or mathematicians had been thinking about. And a lot of it, strangely, Einstein was not necessarily a very gifted mathematician, yet enormous physical intuition. But a lot of his work is this sort of deep marriage between sort of mathematics, geometry and physics.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  And so I think in a way, what, you know, when I think about what might have been the extraordinary capacity that his mind had was synthesis. Synthesis of ideas that seem completely disconnected. And somehow he saw the connections between them. And he was able to use the language of mathematics and physics and sort of articulate them and connect them to reality.

• 16:02David Brooks?

  I want to get back to black holes. Now, um, to me, they're, especially reading about them in your book, they're kind of creepy. They're the corpses of stars. So they're corpses that suck everything around them and kill them. And that's kind of creepy. Uh, so I'll just put that out there. Uh, but the second thing I wanted to ask you about, you had a breakthrough in the early formation of black holes, which I'm going to ask you to summarize.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Black holes come in a lot of different sizes. So stellar mass black holes are basically the corpses of dead stars. So you have a star that is, you know, at birth, maybe born with eight, ten times the mass of the sun or higher, it will inevitably live its life out and leave behind a black hole. Those black holes are few times the mass of the sun. And the black holes that we are seeing in the centers of galaxies are millions of times the mass of the sun, to even billions. So the big question is, how do you grow a black hole from that size all the way to the ones that we see ubiquitously in the centers? So then, you know, the universe itself, we have a clock.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  So we have thirteen point eight billion years. So suppose the first stars explode. So that's the amount of time that you have to kind of grow them, right? And so you're making built models, how could you grow them? You could grow them, you know, they could collide with each other and become bigger. They could eat a lot of gas around them, they could get bigger. And, you know, that was the prevailing idea, that you would grow them from these light seeds, the stellar corpses, and you would make the supermassive black holes. But then something interesting happened observationally. People started finding these billion solar mass black holes further and further back in time, which meant that you did not have enough time in the universe to grow from these little seeds to those monsters. You just did not have time.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  So there had to be some other way. And that's what motivated, it was that data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It was a sky survey that was done from the ground, telescopes on the ground. And they were finding these quasars. Basically, quasars are actively feeding supermassive black holes. So just gobbling up all the gas. So basically, the reason you see the light, they're very bright beacons. You're not actually seeing the black hole itself. What you're really seeing is the dying gasps of the gas that is being pulled in by the gravity of the black hole that's getting heated.

• 18:23David Brooks?

  Even creepier now. It's even creepier.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Heated and heated, moving faster and faster. And that starts to glow because it's being heated. That's the glow that we detect that shows us such a high temperature that it has to be a black hole's intense gravity that's pulling it in. So those are the quasars. So when a black hole is feeding, you see it as a bright beacon, even out to the largest cosmic distances. But if it's not feeding and it's sitting there, you don't see it at all, right? So these quasars were being found. And that's when I, you know, thought, okay, this, and it wasn't just one freak object. They're finding populations of these guys very early in the universe. So there has to be some solution. How would you make them? So I know it sounds really crazy, but I tried to piece together

• 19:10Speaker 02

  what got me going on a particular line of thinking. And I think I kind of have figured it out. I don't know if you've spent time in England, but the taps are a real issue. They don't have mixed taps. So if you want hot water and cold water, you basically have to turn both of them, you know, and you have to do this. They don't mix the taps, right?

• 19:28David Brooks?

  Very backward civilization.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Marvel, right? They colonized my country and I'm like, what? Really? These people did with their plumbing? So when I was a graduate student in England, I developed a habit and joy of taking baths. So I would take these baths, you know, in, in India, it would be considered, you know, sitting in your own dirty water, but I love baths. And, you know, when you take the plug out of the bathtub when you're done, then the water goes in really fast, but it swirls and goes down. But before it swirls, there's a little bit of water that goes directly in. So I'd noticed that, and I thought, oh, that's interesting. So that, I think, was something that I thought about, which was,

• 20:11Speaker 02

  can we make a black hole from directly collapsing gas bypassing the formation of a star completely? And the question is, could you make a really big black hole? Something that's bigger than 10, 15, 50 times the mass of the sun? And so it turns out, the physics actually permits you to do that. You could, if you had a lot of very dense gas, which you do have in the early universe, then it would settle down typically, because it has spin, it would settle down into a disk. So that's kind of the configuration you would settle down into. Because there's a lot of angular momentum or spin. And then there are instabilities. It's a lot of gas, it's a massive disk, it would get unstable.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  And it would get unstable, and stuff would just fall to the center without fragmenting. Because if the gas cools and fragments, that's the way you form stars. And so you want to prevent the formation of stars, right? So you want to make it unstable, but very quickly, you want it to go so unstable that all the material will go in, and then you would have the bathtub-type situation. So you would directly collapse a lot of gas and make a black hole. And so that unlocked the key.

• 21:27David Brooks?

  But the interesting thing to me is, as I understand it, you published this paper, you got this breakthrough, and it takes another 17 years for it to be verified. Fortunately, it turned out you were right by, I guess, the Webb Telescope?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, James Webb, yeah.

• 21:41David Brooks?

  What was it like to wait 17 years to be vindicated? And then what happened the moment you found out you were right?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  So, you know, I am not really a usually patient person. But, you know, science teaches you that you have to be patient, so.

• 21:55David Brooks?

  So tell us about, I assume the Webb Telescope's going up. I assume you know your theory's about to be tested.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so 2017, we wrote a paper which made the most clear-cut prediction. So, you know, since you can never quite see a black hole, the way you know how a black hole formed is the special relationship that black hole would have to its host galaxy. So if a black hole formed from this heavy seed, then the mass of the black hole would be larger than the mass of the stars at that stage, very early stage, right? And that is the opposite of what we see in the nearby universe. So the mass of the black hole in the Milky Way is a four million times the mass of the sun. The stars outweigh it by four orders of magnitude. So, you know, the stars really rule the day. So this would be completely the opposite. So 2017 wrote this paper, and it came out.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And I don't know if you remember, James Webb was cancelled so many times because it was budget overruns, you know, technically challenging, all of that, right? So when we published that paper, actually, it was one of those cancellation moments. And so, you know, I was excited that we made these very clear-cut predictions. We predicted a spectrum and said it should look like this on Webb, and the telescope was cancelled. And I remember being very dejected and then thought, well, you know, it's had nine lives, maybe it'll come back. So anyway, it did come back again. And this object, UHZ1, was found. And it had precisely the relationship that we had predicted in our paper in 2017 between the mass of the black hole, mass of the stars, and the properties of, you know, what would be the spectrum

• 23:30Speaker 02

  and the fact that it should also be seen in the X-ray. So it was then detected by the Chandra Space Telescope, which has X-ray eyes. So that was, that was like an unbelievable moment. This is the moment that, you know, as a scientist, you kind of live for.

• 23:45David Brooks?

  Now, you've thrown around accurately a lot of big numbers about stars that are orders of magnitude bigger than our own. And the biggest number of all is, I gather, there are two trillion galaxies roughly in the universe. And each one of those has, I don't know, hundreds of millions of stars? Or you could have, so we're talking about huge spaces and numbers. And this is like the key fact of the universe. It's just gigantic. And so does this fact make human existence seem insignificant to you?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  As a theorist, a person who builds models, one of the great capacities I have is to sit on the fence. I can argue both sides, and I will let the data call out, right? So I think humans are simultaneously really significant and insignificant. They're insignificant, just as you say, in the grand scheme of things. We are one tiny planet, you know, and one solar system of billions and billions of them out there. But the way in which we are significant is that, you know, with this one kind of cantaloupe-sized gelatinous organ in our heads, we have figured all of this out.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  And so it's really hard to say we're really, utterly insignificant. We are significant. And I also like to think, you know, when we think about the big problems that the Earth is facing with catastrophic climate change, I think we are really significant, because we can do something about it. I like this idea of cosmic stewardship and agency. I think we do have agency, we are not exercising it enough. So I do not want to relegate us to being sort of insignificant. I think we're very significant because we can actually shape our own realm. And we've had the, you know, intellectual capacity to figure out so much.

• 25:38David Brooks?

  You had a sentence in your book that was startling, surprising to me. I did not know this, and I'm going to read it to you, and you can explain it. "All the calcium in our bones, for instance, was once synthesized inside the cores of stars and spat out violently during such supernova explosions on their demise." So that suggests to me I'm part Ukrainian and part star. Like, if the calcium in my bones is like.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:02David Brooks?

  And so how did that work?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  You know, I think this is what is so remarkable about the universe, right? So in the very early universe, and literally in the first three minutes, all the hydrogen, helium, everything in the periodic table, only up to lithium-7 formed. Because the universe is expanding and cooling, so it's no longer the furnace that can synthesize any of the fuse or form any of the higher elements. Everything else formed in the center of a star.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Everything in the periodic table, including calcium, iron, everything, right? And it exploded, the stars exploded. They literally split and spilled their metals into the atmospheres. And stars formed from that gas in that atmosphere. So the first generation of stars did not have all the heavy, did not synthesize all the heavy elements, right? They were mostly hydrogen and helium. So every subsequent generation gets you further and further out in the periodic table. And that's because you're polluting the hydrogen, the gas, the rest of the gas that's around when a star explodes,

• 27:14Speaker 02

  with these new chemical elements, and you're enriching them. It's this cascading thing too, right? So, and there's so many coincidences in this, right? That when you think about, you know, we've ended up as humans in this kind of life form, there's like so many chains of random things that have happened.

• 27:32David Brooks?

  So if I talk to a string theorist and ask them, or you, well, what happened before the Big Bang? Would they have an answer?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  They don't have quite an answer in terms of a detailed scenario that can be physically validated, empirically validated. But what they could tell you, and especially now because there's been a real renaissance in the field and lots of progress, they can tell you something about why the specific initial conditions that we need for the Big Bang, we need a very specific set of, and that's been a kind of a problem. If you need exactly that to get the universe that we have, then why them, right? And so now they have, they can give you an explanation for how to generate a set of initial conditions.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  So one of the things they're still grappling with, right, is our universe has four dimensions, three spatial and one of time.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  And so they have to, a theory of before the Big Bang and of the origin of our universe has to explain why we end up with four dimensions. So they're not there yet in terms of, they have theories which have a larger number of dimensions. So they have to bring them down to four. And, but there's been enormous progress. And I think, do we know exactly what happened before the Big Bang? Not quite, but we have some ideas. And the ideas, in my opinion, still have a ways to go because I think there may be ways in which they can be empirically tested. We just haven't figured that out yet. It's a matter of time, I think. I mean, I'm an optimist, by the way.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  So I really think that there possibly could be observational signatures that could tell us about.

• 29:25David Brooks?

  That would be a big deal.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Totally, totally. Because, you know, it also connects on to the idea of whether there could be other universes, et cetera.

• 29:31David Brooks?

  So all these coincidences, for us to be here having this conversation, lots of things had to go right. And so like gravitational force, molecules had to hang together, we had to have the right kind of, like, we needed liquid water, like, all sorts of things had to go right. And so there, the unlikelihood of us being here is super high. And so there's two theories about this. One is that there's some element force in the universe who's fine-tuning everything to make the universe friendly for life. And that would be, you could say, a religious belief. The other theory is that there are an almost infinite number of different universes, and we just happen to be the lucky one. We hit the Powerball jackpot.

• 30:16David Brooks?

  The first time I heard about the multiple universe theory, I was at a dinner party, and it was astrophysicist telling us this story. And I remember he said, so there's an infinity or near infinity of universes. And at one of them, there's a table just like this, filled with people just like us, having a conversation very similar to us. And I remember internally thinking. So you're trying to provide a theory that's an alternative to God, and this is the most parsimonious one you can come up with? Do you believe there are multiple universes? Can we ever know?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  I believe, and the operative word here is believe. I believe in the multiverse. Because it's a very comfortable, I know, it sounds really strange to you, but it's a very comfortable place to intellectually be because you have an infinity, and it's the nature of infinity, right, that is so profound and deep that anything and everything is possible and anything and everything can be produced. So yes, there could be another universe where David Brooks and Priya are sitting, but you know, Priya's not wearing a blue blouse, she's wearing a red blouse, and you are wearing a tan coat, right?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  So every possible kind of instantiation that can happen is allowed to happen. And I think part of why many of us scientists actually find this comfortable even is that the kind of fine tuning, we don't have an argument for the precise kind of fine tuning plus randomness, plus randomness that is needed, right? I think it was Stephen Jay Gould who argued that even on Earth, if we just turn back the tape of evolution and we run it back forward again, we may not end up with sentient beings that look like us. There's so much randomness in evolution, even with the same conditions on Earth, we

• 32:14Speaker 02

  may not have ended up with the panoply of, you know, flora and fauna that you see on Earth, right? So that's one thing to keep in mind, that there's a lot of randomness and serendipity and how you end up with a particular kind of life form. It's not just the fine tuning, it's all the sort of the intervention, sort of intervening random events and occurrences that occur to produce the universe. So the comfortable position to understand that scientifically is to say, look, there is a probability distribution. You could have any kind of expansion history, and what we have is one draw from that.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  So all the conditions that we needed are one random draw. And what's comfortable about that, it gives you the randomness piece also. It gives you the fine tuning plus the randomness. And so therefore, by construction, you could have an infinite number of universes. Anything is permissible. I know what you're gonna say, because you're like, you know, you guys are always saying Occam's razor when it suits you, and then you're like, I don't particularly care about parsimony, right? So yes, I mean, I think, yes, we do, we're not always consistent.

• 33:27David Brooks?

  So I want to talk a little more about scientists. And some scientists, one of the most impressive things, I read this in your book, that there was a British pastor in 1783 who founded black holes, who had at least the idea of them.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  This idea of black holes, you know, it's not quite, you know, Einstein's idea, but it came out of Newton's idea, which is, you know, at that time, light was believed to be particles, corpuscles of light. So he thought, well, what if you had a body that was so massive that it actually captured all the light corpuscles, which means light would not escape it? And so I think, you know, that was the idea of the, sort of the early idea of an object from which light could not escape, not quite a black hole, but yeah. So what is interesting, when you look at the history and sort of the progression of scientific, radical scientific ideas, there often have been people, I don't even know

• 34:23Speaker 02

  what these people were thought as in their time, maybe they were rebels, maybe they were outcasts, I, you know, who knows? But they've had the most radical kind of ideas for their time. And what we are doing, in some strange way, is following those very same kinds of traditions, right? So for example, Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy were very advanced. And already well before, you know, Copernicus, in India, astronomy and astrology were related,

• 35:02Speaker 02

  as was in the West, you know, astrology and astronomy were very deeply related. For the flexibility to make calculations, both a heliocentric and a geocentric universe, the universe at the time was solar system.

• 35:20David Brooks?

  Meaning sun-centered or earth-centered.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Sun-centered or earth-centered. So you had both those ideas there. And similarly, even in calendars, you had a solar calendar, you had a lunar calendar, you know, so there was a lot of, you know, this idea of many things holding many different potentially contradictory ideas, right? And I think in a way, that is what a scientific temperament is, the ability to hold them and then actually zoom in and figure out, discern on the basis of data, on the basis of empirical data, which one is well-supported and is correct.

• 36:01David Brooks?

  Was there a moment when science was invented? For a long time, as I understand it, people didn't understand themselves doing science, they were doing philosophy.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Philosophy, yeah.

• 36:11David Brooks?

  It was, like, everything was philosophy. And then there's a certain moment in history, you can tell me when it was, whether it was with Bacon or with Copernicus, when science breaks off and says, we're different, we do empirical, we do data, like, so did somebody actually come up with the idea of science?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  I don't actually think that science was invented at a moment, and I think, I think science, as I just mentioned, is a way of thinking. It's a temperament. And I think that pre-exists Bacon and Copernicus, and I think that every ancient civilization, not just the West, China, India, all these great old civilizations, Mesopotamia, I would say that this scientific temperament and this, a way of interrogating the world with questions, I think that predates the Enlightenment, it predates all these guys. And I think, I think it's human. So I think science probably got invented when humans were able to stop thinking just

• 37:11Speaker 02

  about survival and were, maybe even part of survival was sort of, you know, figuring out strategies, right, is also a kind of a stepping out, it's a stepping out of your sort of immediate world and worldview and being able to think beyond.

• 37:32David Brooks?

  Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, understanding the stars is pretty essential for survival, especially if you want to go someplace.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  They were navigating with the stars, right, for a very long time, before they were able to actually chart them or make instruments, yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 07

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 38:21Speaker 01

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• 38:51David Brooks?

  So I want to follow up on the scientific temperament. And there is a popular stereotype out there that scientists are like these cold computers. And that has sometimes been my experience, but more often, the opposite of my experience. And I want to read you a passage, again, from our friend Einstein, which, it's about the motivation, about why somebody would become a scientist. And he writes, "Only those who realize the immense efforts and above all the devotion, without which pioneering work in theoretical science cannot be achieved, are able to grasp the strength of emotion, out of which alone such work is possible. The scientist's religious

• 39:35David Brooks?

  feeling takes the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law." And I like that because it shows the passion, like, it's hard. And so like, how would you describe either your motivations or your colleague?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Scientists have often erred in their post facto accounts of discovery, talking about this sort of cold, objective pursuit of knowledge. And I think that has actually been to our detriment, because science is a human endeavor, very much like art, like writing, you know, any other creative endeavor, it's very much the same. And there's a lot of passion. Scientists bring a lot of passion to what they do. And even the practice of science, what is intriguing is the way in which objectivity and subjectivity get intertwined

• 40:29Speaker 02

  in the practice of science. I think scientists have been over careful about, you know, pushing sort of objectivity and therefore the privilege of scientific knowledge and what that, you know, confers in terms of truth and validity and so on. But what is more amazing to me about about science is when you unpack the practice of science, right? Is it this, it's this combination of objectivity and subjectivity that actually, with all that mess, there's rigor. And that is the hallmark of science. That's what set science about. So for example, one part of science that I think that Kuhn, many of the other philosophers of science

• 41:12Speaker 02

  have really not paid much attention to, partly because, you know, as I alluded to early on, if you're not a practitioner and you're not embedded in doing the science, coming up with a radical idea and witnessing all the obstacles you have to face, the criticism from peers, the waiting for the data to validate, etc., till you're really embroiled in there, you don't actually see it. And that is the process by which a group of scientists who have enormous domain knowledge adjudicate, arrive at a consensus. It's obviously subjective, but there is a rigor to it. And that rigor comes from the fact, another sort of underappreciated

• 41:53Speaker 02

  fact, is that, you know, science and a scientific idea, there's the content of the idea, and there's the context of the idea. The context is inseparable from the content. And I think a lot of scientists, when they talk about science, they live it because they do the science, right? But when they talk about it, they tend not to recognize. And I think that's where we opened ourselves up in the 80s and 90s, to the social constructivist criticism of science. Where you had, you know, incredible minds like Latour, like Bruno Latour, who was saying things like, there's no content in science, everything is context, right? And that's a real reduction of, you know, it's an extreme reduction of science.

• 42:33David Brooks?

  It seems like the verification process of a theory, that seems rational and you can linear, but the coming up with the idea in the first place, that strikes me as much more like coming up with a poem.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:45David Brooks?

  Like, it's an act of imagination. Now, I want to talk about something you've thought and written a lot about, which is the relationship between science and the humanities. And probably viewers and listeners have heard the phrase, "The two cultures." And I'm just going to give a one-minute history of what that phrase comes from. So in the after-World War II, there's this guy named C. P. Snow, who was trained as a physicist, so he's trained as a scientist. And he becomes a novelist, and he becomes a very good novelist, and he delivers a paper saying, "We've broken down into two cultures. One of them is the culture of the humanities, and these idiots don't know what the second law of thermodynamics are. And then there's the culture of the scientists, and these idiots can't read Dickens." Like,

• 43:27David Brooks?

  they're two different. And so it has a lot of resonance with people. It turns into a big discussion thing. And what Snow had said, in addition to the separation, was that the people of science, not his novelist buddies, but the people of science, they were building the future, they were contributing to society, and the humanists were just like failing and just being passive. Do you think that "two cultures" applies to our society now? And what has been your experience in bridging this chasm between these two?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  C. P. Snow's characterization of the two cultures is of a time. It was, at that particular time, the project of modernity, of science and technology changing the world. This was when the world was starting to get decolonized, there were big problems and vast tranches of societies and cultures, poverty, you needed machines, you need, you know. So it was in that context that, you know, he framed that two culture debate. And you're right, it had enormous aliens. So I think that, you know, what has happened, it's very unfortunate that the structure, academic structures, the ways in which universities

• 44:37Speaker 02

  and colleges are set up, right, by virtue of departments and this kind of specialization, sort of hyper-specialization, and this idea of expertise being characterized by hyper-specialization, right? I think that has led to silos of knowledge. And I think what is really damaging is that it's increasingly becoming very clear that all the global problems, you know, any problem that we as a society face, cannot benefit from just one point of view or one kind of

• 45:15Speaker 02

  intervention. It requires the combined knowledge across disciplines, a truly multidisciplinary approach, approach to the problem, because the problem itself is multifaceted and has to, you know, has a human part, has a technical part. At MIT, I also had this real pang of, you know, I come from a family with this lot of public service and people devoted to India. And I felt that I was being quite self-indulgent. So I saw this curious article about the World Bank having designed some hand pumps for water. And the result is they had installed them in many, many villages in South India, and, you know, they're drought-ridden

• 45:59Speaker 02

  sort of regions of the country. And the report said that these are not being used. Now, there's drought, but these hand pumps are not being used. So I said, "I want to look into this." So I went to India, it was my first encounter, actually, I was an urban child. So my family's from South India, although I grew up in Delhi. I went to this rural university and, you know, talked to them about appropriate technologies. And I went to a village to see this hand pump. And I had thought, this is going to be a fluid mechanics problem. There probably isn't enough water coming in, and I will figure out, I'll draw the force diagram, I'll figure out what's not working, right? So I get up

• 46:40Speaker 02

  there, and in five seconds, I know why it's not being used. So I pumped it, lots of water came out. So not a technical problem, it's just the way you had to stand. In India, it's women who do the bringing water, and they were sorries. And so it was very unbecoming to put your two feet as scans like this and then press it out. So no woman was, you know, wanted to be seen that way, it was sort of an obscene posture. And so I was like, "Oh, that's what's happened. That's why it's not being used." Everything is, it's all mixed up, right? And you can't see this is purely a scientific, you know, a scientific issue that will, that, you know, the best computers are going to solve this. I mean,

• 47:25Speaker 02

  all of the big problems, be they intellectual, be they real world that we are facing, need a flexible mental frame. So we operate, right, we build models as humans with mental frames. We have these frameworks that we carry around in our heads. And each discipline offers you, and this is the way I think about science and the humanities, they offer you different superstructures to sort of view the world, or different lenses to basically view the world. At the end, you need to put all the lenses together, and that's what gives you not just a richer view of the world itself, but also a richer set of tools and, you know,

• 48:09Speaker 02

  ways to intervene with the world, interact with the world.

• 48:11David Brooks?

  I think it was Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "When all the problems of science have been solved, the elemental questions of human life will have remained untouched." And so I think, I think what he meant by that was that questions like, "What's the purpose of my life?" cannot be solved scientifically. But maybe the scientific frame can inform that frame. Maybe the distinction isn't as stark as that sentence seems to imply.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Scientists are in two camps, in terms of this idea. And I fall in the camp where we believe that, you know, science can answer certain kinds of questions. They're questions that are within the purview of science. Are there things that are outside the purview of science? Absolutely. And what do we need to think about them? We need other frames, other ways of thinking. And that's how I feel. Well, then I have scientist friends, very close friends with whom I have lots of arguments. So for example, the debates really are, right? So the emotion anger. So something angers me, something completely

• 49:16Speaker 02

  different angers you. The question is, will we know, will we ever be able to figure out what is the precise firing of all the neurons that are needed to create anger in Priya, right? Will we decode that? So I have scientist friends who think, "Oh, it's just a matter of time. We will figure it all out." I don't necessarily think that because I think that there may be in this process of figuring out what triggers anger also sits the definition of anger. And it may not be a universal definition, but you're used to universals in science. And, you know, so there's a lot of, to me, there's a lot of complexity and not every aspect of that could be answerable in scientific terms.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  So I think there are many of us scientists and often it's people who really try to bridge different ways of thinking and engaging with the world who feel that, yeah, you know, science does have its limits. There are certain kinds of questions that science can answer and there's some that science cannot answer. That's not a criticism of science. It's a way of thinking. It's a way of seeing the world. And yes, it is incredibly powerful. There's no question about it. And, and I think I have to say that now because we are living at a time where the sort of disbelief and mistrust in science is so rampant. That is scary.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  It's totally unwarranted and it's dangerous.

• 50:46David Brooks?

  So I have two random questions that I'm going to ask you. The first is Elon Musk calls you up, says, Priya, you're really into space. I'm sending all these rockets into space. Do you want to get on one? What would you say?

• 50:58Speaker 02

  I don't think I want to get on one. Okay, let me, let me preface, that's not from a lack of adventurousness, okay? It comes from rooted scientific reality. One of the fundamental problems that we have not yet solved is the impact of radiation on human beings. Okay. So even in the International Space Station, right, which is not far, which is really nearby, and I don't know if you saw that study with Scott Kelly, the twins, right? So the twin who was in space, his chromosomes got, the telomeres got altered. And that radiation exposure is a problem that we have not yet solved.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  And, and to say that, oh, we can make a colony there or whatever, you know, till we solve that fundamental problem. So, so my kind of caution of, you know, not really wanting to go anywhere, it's not safe yet. But I think there's a big, this is the big fundamental problem. And I am interested in this problem and, you know, I am going to spend some time thinking about it scientifically and intellectually. But, you know, I think that, that you can escape from this mess that you have made and somehow the future of our species is elsewhere. I don't know, I'm much more optimistic about what we can do here, what more we can do here and that we can mitigate a lot of the damage that we have already done.

• 52:17David Brooks?

  Yeah, I don't like cramped spaces. So the idea of living on some little plastic dome in Mars.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  If Elon calls me up and says, hey, do you want more money to do your basic scientific research? I will not refuse him.

• 52:29David Brooks?

  Now, the final question is, what's your favorite space movie?

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Interstellar.

• 52:34David Brooks?

  I'm glad you said that because that's the only acceptable answer.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Are you serious?

• 52:38David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  I love it. And not just because, I mean, I am a Christopher Nolan fan, as it turns out, but also because one of my friends and colleagues, he incidentally won a Nobel Prize as well, Kip Thorne, was a scientific advisor to that film.

• 52:52David Brooks?

  He wrote a book about the science in the movie.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so, you know, no physical laws were broken with all of that. But another remarkable thing happened with that, right? So there were calculations that they did in that movie about, you know, the ways in which light is warped by black holes. Double Negative, the company that did the visuals, they actually wrote a scientific paper. Talk about the two silos mixing, right? When have you seen a Hollywood studio and a Nobel laureate co-author a paper? They actually found something because they did the mathematics of all the ray tracing and the light bending. They found an effect that had not yet been scientifically noted before. So they published a peer reviewed scientific paper.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  And so for me, that is like the ultimate sort of dream team thing, right?

• 53:43David Brooks?

  Priya, I've learned so much at this conversation. Thank you for coming on The Permanent Questions and expanding our minds. Thanks.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for inviting me. This was a lot of fun.

• 53:56David Brooks?

  So I just feel like I had a graduate education in astrophysics and I loved it. And I want to focus especially on one question I asked her is, does all the vastness of space make you think human life is insignificant? And I have to say, having hung around with Priya for the last little while, I feel sort of the opposite. Like what she does and what humans do in exploring space and venturing into space and creating maps of space, it makes the case for human significance, to me, almost irrefutable. And so I don't feel depressed by the fact that there's all that vastness out there. And I'm sort of mimicking Psalm 8, if you know your Psalms. King David writes this psalm and he says, God, you put the stars above us, the work

• 54:41David Brooks?

  of consider the heavens, there's all this stuff out there. And then he says, and you have made us a little lower than the angels. And I sort of like that sentiment. We're not quite at angel level for sure, but we're still kind of impressive. And I leave this conversation filled with gratitude for that. Thanks so much for joining us for this week's conversation with Priya Nataraja. This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and aid possible by support from Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic's YouTube page, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work with my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.

• 55:40Speaker 07

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.