i'm after times when you're watching going on the ground the whole team here hope you're all safe we're away until wednesday the 22nd of april but in the meantime

we're screening somebody a favorite episodes of the sofa coming up in this show with a global pandemic weighing heavily on the mind of the only animal in the known universe aware of its own mortality humans we are the theoretical physicist who helped bring string theory in the multiverse into the public eye professor brian greene about what we can learn about our debts from the ever present cosmic chaos that could imminently destroy our reality plus why is modern physics like magic why is human consciousness cosmically income preventable and his free will just a man made construct in a reality based on probability all this more coming up in today's going underground let's not go straight to professor brian greene of columbia university whose book until the end of time mind matter enough search for meaning in an evolving universe is out there brian welcome to going underground we don't have until the end of time obviously to talk about his book but we could talk for ages i know every interviewer will say that they read the elegant universe the fabric the cause

mostly in reality. this me consolidate some of those ideas but it is very different only about why death and should be is the beginning of the book yes i'm a previous books are really about explaining cutting edge science and bring it out in an accessible language this book is more about trying to take the ideas of cutting edge science and show how they are relevant to our understanding of who we are where we came from what we might be doing the motivation for our behavior and what may happen in the very far future and you say that death is a very specific and whole empowering idea for you and for all of us and for quantum mechanics we have well certainly when you realize that we are the singular species on the planet that knows about our own impermanence knows about our own mortality you recognize that it is a powerful force and driving the behaviors that we humans execute and what i do in

the book is i'd juxtapose that realization of our own impermanence with the realization of science that the universe is impermanent so there's a wonderful interplay and reflection between the cosmic version of this idea and the human version of this idea that people may think they know what entropy is maybe maybe some of yours wouldn't you seem to say entropy is a key to our and it is of daily life and the unit absolutely is i try to lay out the entire history of the universe from the beginning to the closest that we can get to the end there are 2 principles that govern that unfolding one principle is evolution which is familiar to many people but the other is entropy which is this notion that the universe has a tendency to go from order to disorder from structure to disintegration things tend to wither away and we're talking about the very end of the universe that kind

of disintegration that withering away. is a dominant force in the far future and yet there is order out of the disorder in there are pockets of order that can momentarily form on the cosmic timeline and that's what you and i and this on the earth that's all that the structures are there momentary way stations in the evolution from the orderly beginning at the big bang to the disorderly future of what we will see as the universe unfolds and we are in the middle we ourselves pockets of that order out we are going to momentary pockets of order we exist by taking in orderly structures from the environment you know i'm the ginsu i eat plants nuts fruit my body processes those orderly structures allowing me to maintain my order for a small period of time as my body then releases disorder through heat and waste to the environment we are conduits that the universe uses to create disorder in the environment allowing us to persist for a short period of time they've written

a lot about the probabilistic new science i don't know whether that's the correct term i want to make years i just wonder since is so much history of science in the air as well as history of a hot history of religion whether you're reflecting the times we live in because it surrounds it newton was a product of protestantism trinitarianism in the nigeria 5 russian revolution whether you or your the reaganomics have a probability or a market it's a marketplace of things well yes and so i think metaphorically absolutely and there is a deep interplay between our scientific understanding of the world and the way that that seeps into the cultural understanding of the world but quantum mechanics which is the proper name for this probabilistic look at reality emerged from experiments and observations in the early part of the 20th century when we tried to take

newton's ideas and apply them to atoms. newton failed newton was unable to describe the data he wasn't aware of it of course that emerged in the early part of the 20th century so we physicists were forced to develop a new understanding of the micro world the small things and that understanding is quantum physics and you're right at its heart is a probabilistic description of the world newton would have said this is what will happen in the future based on our knowledge of how things are today quantum theory says that that's not actually how reality of volves quantum theory says the best you can ever do is predict the probability of one or another outcome happening in the future and our observations confirm that idea there was a program the other day here about paul dirac asking why this great british scientists will build a new new people said it's because quantum mechanics is so difficult to explain his relativity which is pretty difficult. i don't have the heart of the occult i mean you're known for being able to communicate these complicated idea you know direct

was a man who was very short on words and i think that's part of why he was in his well known but yes quantum mechanics is stranger than any theory that came before because it is so counter to our experience we look out at the world and it seems to have a single definite disposition you are sitting right there that seems to be the reality that i am experiencing but according to quantum mechanics when i look away the reality actually devolves into a probabilistic haze of many possibilities and only when i look back and measure the world does it snap to attention have the definite disposition that we're all familiar with that is a radically strange description of how the world actually is our observations confirm it even though our experience seems to be at odds with the latest version you might have to explain a very very briefly but the 2 slit experiment do you think it still terrifies everyone as it did when it was 1st committed about the way the observed here and

yeah. by observation well you know what happens in science is an idea is brought forward because it's required by the data everybody scrambles to understand it it can be terrifying because the old order is ripped out from under us and we're forced to have a new view of how the world actually works but then you know 80 or 100 years later students are brought up in these ideas and they seem almost 2nd nature so the idea is that confounded albert einstein in the 1930 s. students now learn about it say my quantum mechanics course not yeah of course that's how the world works so it's a change not only in our understanding of the math and the equations it's a change in mindset that naturally happens as physics changes and evolves to give or take all the un solved problems right now in physics and there are a lot of. it is the current belief and theory and i knew these different terms

theory believe all these are different ideas in the book that observations are changed by the activities of ation yes so the idea is that the world has a disposition that is influenced by interactions and when we observe something we are interacting with it and that interaction affects it and this is an idea that was pretty far in to say isaac newton because the observations and the things that we were looking at were not affected much for and all of us always leave you would get near as you see right that's true too but but on the large scale of every day interactions our observations don't really affect things because they're so big but if you're talking about observing an electron or an atom that act of observation can have a radical impact on it and that is a new idea that comes from quantum physics and what are the implications that you explore in the book about information for information out of this you know well we are basically information processing machines and that's an unfamiliar way of

thinking. about human life in human consciousness but your brain and mind are nothing but collections of particles governed by physical law that have such an exquisite organization that we can take in information from the world we can process it and that's conscious awareness and that conscious reflection can affect how we then subsequently behave so in a way we are again conduits for information we take in from external world we process it and we give back information based upon our behaviors you said that you don't talk that much about cutting edge physics but you do mention recent work and you compared to a swing yeah bri and i was there within the context of information again that maybe destroyed again so people have struggled for a long time to address the question of whether life is a very unusual phenomenon in the universe or whether it is an every day run of the mill phenomenon that we should expect to happen far out on distant planets as well

as we know about it here on planet earth and one idea is that in a situation where you have a source of energy like a star and you have a planet like the earth in which there are wrong and greedy and smaller kills an atom is floating around it may be the case that those atoms naturally change volved in a manner that allows them to take in the energy from the star in a more effective way and we are very effective at taking energy from the environment that's what we do for a living that's what human beings are and so it could be according to this theory that life is the natural outcome of a star bathing a planet with heat and light and therefore if this theory is true it may be that life is quite commonplace throughout the cosmos ok well while life whether it be corona virus or anything else may be easier to understand tell me about how you've changed as you explain in the book about your ideas of consciousness you said that you used to think it was conscious experiences what it feels like doing is going to

be in. ration processing in the brain you know you've changed it so i've changed and i've actually returned so it's an interesting journey that i have been on i had a kind of flippant response in the early days when people would talk about consciousness and the reason it asked me is i was working on string theory that was called the theory of everything and the just strings in the brain that's right to everyone everything should include the brain and consciousness of people would ask me about my response to that point was it's just information processing that's why we have those inner experiences that we all know about you know we can love and grieve and feel and respond and reflect and it's just particle motion in the brain i still feel that way but now it looks like a computer it well and now i feel it in a somewhat more refined version of a computer when you think about the brain and its internal workings there is a puzzle why would particles that themselves don't have conscious awareness be able in aggregate to create conscious awareness that is

a very strange state of affairs and people scientists neuroscientist philosophers still struggle with this idea we've not resolved it but i have certainly come to the perspective that the resolution when it comes will show that we are nothing more than particles governed by physical law and that a byproduct of having a certain kind of organization of choreography of motion of those particles is the sensations of everyday human life and therefore i do not think that you need anything external to the particles in the physical forces to account for the inner world of conscious awareness that you and i and everybody else experiences because you do mention in the book a big multinational soft drink manufacturer how is it you think well give actual companies are so quick to be able to evade this call just this which we haven't even been explained through science of subliminal level well you know when you've got a bottom line to me it can be a very powerful motivating force. do you think that one reason there oh oh.

so many competing theories of the movement is that the physicists who are all in the day job or the mathematicians realize everything is so probabilistic well i think it's part of it i think the other thing is we're talking about extraordinarily deep and profound questions we're talking about what is it that makes us humans what is it that makes us special and there are so many ideas that people have kicked around for this my own feeling is that a 1000 years from now or maybe even a 100 years or maybe 10 years depending on the rate of progress we're going to look back at this era and kind of smile and say how quaint that so many ideas were put forward to describe this mysterious experience of consciousness when all it was was physics acting on particles and that's all we need. more from present run greed after this short break.

joining me every thursday on the alex simon chill when i'll be speaking to guests of the world of politics school business i'm showbusiness. i don't trust medical authority at all ever and there isn't for that as i had this horrible autoimmune disorder growing up and it turns out it was completely alleviated with very drastic dietary measures and i went to a number of doctors to discuss what happened to me and i was basically laughed at like diet has nothing to do with our i mean disorders so my suggestion to people who have health issues they can't figure out if they're going to see a medical professional and they've been going for 10 years and they're still in the same place they should probably take it upon themselves to start testing things out testing out diet testing out exercise and try and figure out things on the.

welcome back i'm still here with professor brian greene very little about the multi of us in this book that's true was that well i was trying to be conservative and i was trying to focus on a story a big story but a limited story the story of our universe from the beginning to end and that's a big enough narrative if you will to occupy me throughout the course of this entire book but you're right an earlier burks i have wondered if it might be the case that our universe is not the totality of reality what if there are other universes out there or distant and far flung locations in this wider landscape of

reality and that's an interesting idea in its own right but here i wanted to focus on our universe its evolution and how life began how consciousness emerged and what's going to happen when we look in our universe into the distant future but it's a mission doesn't signal the fact that your a bad name how do you hear a lot of people absolutely not dinosaurs walking among snow there are many interesting stories to tell and this is a very focused one even though the palette of experience there has many colors because you use language to write the book obviously. this just take is up to where we are after about language because it goes you're using language rather than mathematics which underlies the words in this book and i consider mathematics itself to be another language a very highly specialized language but you're right people have wondered where did language come from and noam chomsky has some interesting ideas for the origin of language there are others who have a different approach

a more darwinian or. approach that language gives us a survival advantage when we can't communicate we can coordinate our actions we can function as a more effective group and that's really why we humans prevailed we are highly social as a species allowing us to do things that the individual would not be able to accomplish on his or who are known and therefore the language has been vital to that and therefore i am pretty convinced as many evolutionary psychologists who study this as a professional undertaking that language emerged because it helped us survive implications for free will which i know you also explore in the book i have very strong perspective on that perspective many people require all add i do not think that we have free will in the sense that i do not feel that we are the ultimate authors of our actions we are not the place in which our decisions fundamentally originate why do i say that again you and i just collections of particles governed

fully by physical law and therefore there is no opportunity for us to intercede in that mathematical unfolding in everything you do every decision you make every action you undertake is the motion of your particles there probably has to distribute a ballistic is true but here's the thing probability doesn't really help because if your particles are moving in a manner dictated by probabilistic rules then what actually happens is determined by chance random chance governed by those probabilistic rules and if i'm flipping a coin and that's determining how you behave and the choices you make i don't think you would consider that to be free will randomness is not foolish and choice and therefore i don't think quantum mechanics on this issue helps us at all even really macroscopic even on the macroscopic level i don't think it helps us because our intuition about free will is that we make the choice not some random. process makes

the choice and that is where the 2 ideas come into tension with each other well the muxes out there will be agreeing with you saying it's clus actually no wonder there's no free will. again there why death is pervading notably the language death pervades the free will death pervades the book yes itself in religion in literature you know why why is this such a theme in this well take religion as a good example if you look at any religion and you follow it further back in time you can trace its origin to our recognition that we're going to die milledge and emerges as a means of making us feel more comfortable coping with this idea of the possibility of an afterlife the possibility of resurrection the possibility that in the say a buddhist perspective that life is not even something that we want to hold onto if we can get out of the cycle of birth and rebirth them will reach another domain in

which we are one with the larger reality so you see right there that one of the dominant forces in the world religion emerges from the human recognition that we are mortal and that kind of pattern you can see playing out in so many domains of human experience and using the correlation suggests there is something deeper there in terms of a where affliction of quantum mechanics well you know i feel that at the level of the particles in the fundamental laws these ideas of death and meaning and value and purpose don't emerge so fundamentally there's no purpose there's no meaning but when you have aggregates of particles that can have conscious self reflection then these ideas matter and we begin to ask ourselves why are we here why do we die why is life finite and these considerations then drive us to develop religion and to develop art and to develop narrative and storytelling and myth making and so the

richness of human culture. or is driven by this recognition that we have this finite existence within a universe that itself doesn't actually care about us the notion of caring and morality and values something that we impose on the external world and to me that makes it all the more wondrous that collections of particles governed by physical law can begin to worry and wonder and create and in that manner allow beauty and wonder to permeate reality so i want to get to the end of the universe as a 2nd as a ruining the end of the book it's more than not a spoiler alert but why do you think that what you just said doesn't go through in math teaching if you teach matrices it's guy was saying the other day they're going to teach the applications or matrices can relate to what you were just saying why is it the math teaching doesn't seem to reflect well i can give you a 1st hand reaction to that question which i consider to be a very important one when i teach mathematics when i teach quantum mechanics i'm

giving my students a technical education i'm just trying to give them the tools for solving problems and carrying on in the research that they may want to do as they carry on in their careers it's important to do that but when i teach for instance this book as i have been doing recently i reach the students in a different way i'm not just giving them technical training i'm allowing them to think about their own lives within the unfolding of the universe so it's science together with philosophy and psychology and understanding what it means to be a conscious being in this universe that we can have that believe in a relatively simple equation can reflect some of these ideas that you're giving week a day but when we teach this stuff our goal is that the students can use it to solve problems right so we give them problem sets do for homework we give them problems on an exam and we grade in a bowl and say exactly so we are assessing them based on whether they can use these

tools in a very limited way. solve these problems give us insight into this particular technical issue and what we don't do in the math class or the physics largely for lack of time and often lack of expertise on the part of the instructor we do not connect these ideas up with life itself and that's what i do in the book and that's what i do in a course that i teach students on this book and i've got to tell you when the students come in to talk to me during office hours they are emotionally engaged with the ideas as opposed to just cognitively engaged with the ideas it's a completely different educational experience for them and i have to say for me ok we'll just. finally obviously just as they're getting all excited last consciousness is going to everything is going to just take us through the death of the universe really reflects on the question that you asked early on about entropy so entropy is this tendency toward things falling apart for a while evolution can interplay with entropy and interesting structures like human

beings walking on this planet but ultimately in the far future entropy wins and that means that in this early in the future well in that even though it's called until the end of yes so you're referring no doubt to the extraordinarily far future when things might be able to begin a new but en route to that resurrection if you will there is a probability given it could end a lot of sense that the burden of living in a quantum universe any weirdness that has non-zero chance of happening could happen at any moment even with. us is that it's right that that's right so would that be a desirable outcome if he's going to win in 2020 perhaps it would be better if the universe and did but if you don't take those unlikely scenarios but rather look at the more likely ones and more likely one is that and roughly 5000000000 years the sun will swell of the gulf the inner planets and roughly a trillion years the distant galaxies were rushing away in roughly 100 trillion

years stars will use up their nuclear fuel and if you go all the way to say 10 to the 100 years that's a long time only 10 to 10 years since the big bang even black holes will disintegrate into a bath of particles everything will fall apart if you wait long enough and then we know if a muscular even go to there is there will be any multiverse is any being that even tries to undertake the process of thought will burn up in the end tropic waste that that thought generates so everything will go and therefore that's the future far far future that we're all facing because in your country there's been little debate about with a sigh. and even exists unfortunately your vice president who's in charge of a virus which is the state of scientific discussion and debate and policy circles in washington yeah well being invited in well i've had some conversations and look science is not respected at the highest levels of government in america and that is

utterly disgraceful it is tragic because science is our opportunity to transform the future the challenges we face and the opportunities that we have they're all scientific at their core and i'm talking about everything from climate change to alternate energy sources to personalized medicine to nanotechnology to artificial intelligence everything is science at its core and so to have individuals that don't respect science who are at the top level of decision making is tragic you don't think the evangelical right will leap on elements of this book quoted out of context and say brian greene he's the one he's he's showing us that science is just doing what we knew years ago well if they're saying it with knowledge and forethought fantastic if they're saying it i fear them i feel that they aren't and that would be my concern i mean that is a serious idea within americans as universe yeah this was didn't believe in

multi-verse was with us they lived at the same time as human beings yes so there are crazy things that people say and you have to realize that in this world of ours there are facts science does give us actual insights into the true nature of the world and the problem we come to a place where expertise is not respected everybody can have an opinion but here's the thing some opinions are wrong when you talk about certain qualities of the world there is right and wrong it's not a matter of what you think or what you feel no probability distribution no probability distribution of that's already happened the probabilities were already worked out and they were resolved by the virtue of what happened in the past. thank you thank you. that's. the most recent. will continue to. try to keep safe and make sure to join me on the ground by following. facebook instagram.

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