Could The Universe Come from Absolute Nothing?

You spent your entire life studying the origin of the universe. Yes. How could everything come from us? That's the most important question in all of science. So our sun and the earth came from something like this. The earth was not created from the earth and our universe could have formed from it. Brian Keating is a scientist whose name could stand alongside Einstein and Hawking. A professor at the University of California, San Diego. Co-inventor of the legendary Bicep Telescope and the leader behind the world's largest astronomy project. A man who once came within reach of a Nobel Prize for discovery that could have changed astronomy forever. My mission is to understand how the universe began. It doesn't even have a Big Bang the way that we think about it. There are other different types of universes that can emerge from non-Big Bang and those are some of them. You know, it's crazy how far people have gone in trying to understand reality. Those are all legitimate scientific ways to discover something beyond visual range, beyond the horizon. Right. We understand how the universe began, but what came before that? That there are four different types of multiverse. Many people wouldn't even say it's a multiverse, but that's our whole reality. It's incredible, but it's very simple. Data from the DESI telescope suggests that cosmic dark energy is awakening. Does that mean that the universe could collapse at any moment, even in the middle of this podcast? That terrifies me. The same thing happened in the vacuum, not of a particle accelerator at CERN, but in the universe. Horrifying thing to think about. In the Chinese sci-fi novel, The Three-Body Problem and the TV series based on it, aliens show one of the main characters artificial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. That signal may contain clues to the origin of the universe. And my guest today is a man who in 2014 came within the reach of a Nobel Prize while searching for the answer to that mystery. Dr. Brian Keating, it's a great honor to have you here with us. You are a very special guest, but for people who don't know you yet, could you tell us what you do and what your mission is? My mission is to understand how the universe began, and I do it using actual instruments, experiments, hardware, technology. I don't use fancy theories. I don't speak about the extra dimensions of reality. I don't talk about nonsensical, hyperbolic, foolish kind of explorations into the fanciful, because those may sell books for certain people, but they're not actually what true working astrophysicists care about. What we need in science is not more ideas and theories and speculations. We need more hard, factual data. So my team, my colleagues and I, are working with the biggest, most expensive experiment ever built of its kind. We do it all over the world, in exotic places like the South Pole, Antarctica, and the high mountains of Chile, and even outer space. And our instruments bring back the data that then humans can glimpse for the first time. Perhaps, what came at the beginning of time? And to me, the question that most keeps me up at night in front of the telescope is, what came right before the Big Bang? I have to say, my viewers are very interested in this topic. I mean, how did we get here? How did the universe begin? What was before that? But before we talk about it, could you please tell us the Nobel Prize story? What happened in 2014? In 2014, the experiment that I dedicated my life to up until that point as a scientist released data that it had done what I wanted it to do, which is to glimpse the origin of the universe, not using light, not taking an actual picture, not looking at the universe as you could see it, but as you might have been able to feel it. The waves of gravity that are produced during the Big Bang explosion should have left an imprint on our detectors that we can see today. And we claim we saw that. We said we saw the exact signal in what's called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Surrounding the Earth, surrounding every star, surrounding every galaxy is an invisible bath of heat. That heat came about because of the fusion of the very first elements on the periodic table. This is predicted by the great Russian cosmologist George Gamow that there would be a leftover signature. An explosion, if you will, leaves a heat relic behind. And in fact, we claim we discovered not only that relic, that heat, but the imprint of the universe's birth on that heat. There was just one thing in our way. There are many, many different signals that can masquerade and portray themselves as the Cosmic Microwave Background's polarization, the signal that we look for. And this was a contamination. So, if I understand correctly, something went wrong with the data and in the end it didn't confirm your theory. What happened there? That's right. The operative word that you use is confirmation. When you see something that you want to see, there's a bias to exclude things that would be arguing that you didn't see that. And you fall in love with the idea, the seduction, that you may be the first person to ever discover something and you may be the next Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Zeldovich, whoever you like, the most brilliant person alive. And that in science, because science is so hard and it takes so long to do stuff, you dedicate your life to something, it's very hard to overcome the temptation to believe that you're right when in fact there's evidence screaming at you that you might be wrong. You're one of the leading researchers on the origin of the universe. So, I have to ask you the big question. How did the universe come from nothing? Well, it might not be so surprising. If you think about the progression of human knowledge in astronomy, starting off, we thought we were the center of the universe. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, said the natural tendency of matter was to fall to the center. And therefore, since we see things as if we're at the center, we must be the most important matter in the universe. And that led scientists astray. For thousands of years, people believed the earth was the center of not just the solar system, not just the galaxy, but the universe. And later, we discovered, actually, we are orbiting around the sun. And it's interesting. The sun is not the center of the universe. It's not even the center of the galaxy. There's not even just one sun in our galaxy. There's a hundred billion plus. And guess what? There's a trillion galaxies in the universe, each roiling with a hundred billion suns. So, if you add up the numbers, we're nothing. We're almost insignificant. Now, take that one step further. If there's not just one planet, if there's not just one star, if there's not just one galaxy, if there's not just one cluster of galaxies, why should there just be one universe? That's the essence of the multiverse. The multiverse suggests, just as we're not the center of anything, we're certainly not the center of the universe. Therefore, let us explore the possibility of multiple universes. And it seems to be, from many different directions in science, pointing us in that conclusion that we should take it seriously. Maybe not literally, but seriously. And so, I don't want to speak, again, like these breathless people like Michio Kaku or Brian Greene, the hidden fabric of reality, all these metaphors. Okay, those are nice, but where's the data? Is it just a facade meant to keep people thinking that we're making progress in science? Or, is there something legitimate at its very core that we, with hardware, with instruments, with technology, and tools like telescopes, can we get data and discover the truth? What happened the day before the Big Bang? That's the most important question in all of science. And if we move on to the possible ideas about the origin of the universe, which one do you find most convincing? How did it all begin? As a scientist, the most dangerous thing to say is, I believe that. You should never say that, as a scientist, that what you believe. I don't care what you believe. I care what you know. I care what facts you have. And so, for me, it's fine to speculate about these different things, such as the multiverse, but we need evidence. And the evidence right now is, so far, inconclusive. That's not a bad thing. As a scientist, that's very exciting. It means that we can build new instruments to detect these signals that would reveal the presence of not just one other universe, but maybe an infinite number of universes. That, to me, would be incredibly exciting. The evidence that we might get with the Simons Observatory, that instrument is poised to perhaps give us evidence that the theory of cosmological inflation took place. Now, this is a theory proposed in 1980 by a man named Alan Guth, and this is the theory that the universe began from an unknown, undiscovered, so far, quantum field called the inflaton that fluctuated in a vacuum state. In quantum mechanics, things can fluctuate into and out of existence in the vacuum. And these fluctuations can produce matter, and they can convert matter into energy. And there's no conservation of matter. Matter can be created and destroyed at will. We do it thousands of times a second in our particle accelerators. And so, the same thing happened in the vacuum, not of a particle accelerator at CERN, but in the universe at whole, which would have to be the multiverse, because it's only possible to have inflation, it seems, if there is a multiverse for the inflaton to live in before it fluctuated to create our universe. Then the universe comes into existence at a specific time. And then there's downstream predictions, observables, fields, and forces that we can measure. We might discover that with the Simons Observatory, that one of the signatures of this process called inflation happened. And that's the thing that we claim we did discover in 2014 and had to retract six months later. That's the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. That experiment is still ongoing. In other words, we and they are still trying to discover this signal, the aftershock of the Big Bang's inflationary epoch. Is there any way to prove we live in a multiverse? There are ways to prove the multiverse, so to speak. You could actually come into contact. Just like you could prove that there's a boat over the horizon, it could come over the horizon. You could see it, even though right now you can't see it. Or you could hear it. Maybe it makes a really loud explosion. Or it sends out some waves in the ocean that you then detect and trace back to that boat. Those are all legitimate scientific ways to discover something beyond visual range, beyond the horizon. But in this case, we don't have evidence for that yet. So in the next year and a half, we hope to get data which will not again prove or disprove, but it may give us the first hints that inflation, this physical process, took place. And it'll be the earliest evidence that you could ever get, tracing back to about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. No one could ever claim to observe something earlier. So it's incredibly exciting. Again, it won't prove, but it will give a lot of informatic weight to the conclusion that our universe had an inflationary epoch, which then says there was likely a multiverse type scenario. It's amazing how much we've already learned about reality. You mentioned the Big Bang theory, but are there other ideas about how the universe began? Yeah, so the Big Bang is one of many different possibilities. It was believed for a long time the universe was static, unchanging, never born, never going to die. Even the proponents of that, of which one of them was Fred Hoyle, who I mentioned earlier, even they realized you cannot have a perfectly static universe without things moving or changing. So even they had to create what was called a quasi-steady-state universe, where matter was being created every so often. Once every thousand years, you would create a proton out of nothing. And it was a brilliant idea. It did make the universe slowly start to change, but there was no Big Bang. It was always existing. It was smaller yesterday, but it existed forever. And it's so big that even if you extrapolated back by a large amount, it would still be finite in size. So in that case, their theory was one to match the data, and so I give them credit for that. That's been falsified many times over by many different types of astronomy observations. There's another model where the universe comes from what's called the Big Crunch. There was a universe, just like our sun. In this part of our galaxy, our galaxy is about eight to ten billion years old. Our sun is only about four and a half billion years old. I have here in my pocket a meteorite, which I do give out. Here's an actual meteorite. So our sun and the earth came from something that looked like this. This was a meteorite. It's very heavy. It's made of iron and cobalt and nickel. It's highly magnetic. I do give them away on my website. Most of the time you have to live in the United States, but see the website for more details. This object was created not from the earth. It was created from something else that blew up many hundreds of millions or billions of years before our sun was formed. So too, our sun formed in the galaxy, and our universe could have formed from another universe in what's called the Big Crunch. In other words, instead of making a supernova explosion that produces iron, you have a universe that collapses, explodes like the supernova does, but creates a universe. So there's different models that suggest that can happen. There are some that produce a singularity, which is a point of infinite gravity over infinitesimal size, much like a black hole, and there are some that don't produce singularities. The ones that don't produce singularities will not produce the waves of gravity that we're trying to see with the Simons Observatory. Therefore, if we do see those waves, it falsifies the Big Crunch hypothesis. Remember I said I can't prove it, but I can falsify it. So you can disprove these other scenarios, static universe, steady state universe, and the Big Crunch universe, and what's called the bouncing cosmological model. You can falsify them. You can't prove them, but you can falsify them. So scientists have to be creative. And so yes, there are other different types of universes that can emerge from non-Big Bangs, and those are some of them. Yes, science should always stay open to new ideas and ready to question old ones. But when it comes to the basics, can we say with high confidence that the universe will keep expanding? A very vast amount of data, of hard evidence that the universe is expanding, has been expanding, and will continue to expand for some time. We don't know the ultimate destination of the expansion. Will it continue forever? Will it stop? Will our universe eventually reach a maximum expansion and then collapse? That is a possibility. We can say with extreme confidence that the universe has been expanding for approximately 13.8 billion years. That expansion rate is measured using a variety of different tools, techniques, simulations, many different tools from thousands of different data points, perhaps at this point a million different pieces of data, all confirm the universe is expanding. It's one of the most accurate known scientific facts. It used to be when you looked at Wikipedia, which is not a great scientific reference, but if you looked up science, okay, you just typed in science, it showed you a picture of the Big Bang theory. In other words, it could be anything, right? It could be biology, it could be some aspect of engineering or whatever. No, it had the Big Bang. Now, that's humorous to me because when I started in graduate school 30 years ago, we didn't know if the age of the universe was 10 billion years old or 20 billion years old. We knew there were things in the universe that were older than what we thought the age of the earth, etc. Now we know that age down to a few decimal places. That's all happened thanks to hard data that my colleagues and I produced over just the last 30 years. If you had told somebody this 100 years ago, when Einstein, Hubble, Lemaitre, Gamow, all these people were working on the Big Bang theory, they would have laughed at you. They would have said, this is philosophy. You'll never have data, but now we have data. We all agree the universe is expanding. It's a very fringe and not accepted opinion to say the universe is not expanding. There's zero evidence for it, effectively. Okay, so right now we're sure that the universe is expanding, but is it possible that one day it could start shrinking and everything could disappear? Probably not in a couple of days, so yes, keep paying your taxes. But in a few billions of years, to a cosmologist, days, years, they mean nothing. It's literally irrelevant. If you take the entire history of the universe and put it on a clock and said, what time is it now? If now is exactly at midnight, human beings came about one second ago. So it's almost completely irrelevant. A day is basically irrelevant. However, it is not the case that we know for sure the universe will never collapse, deflate, as you are suggesting. In fact, there's evidence recently from an instrument called the DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which is a telescope, which measured the positions of galaxies and their dynamics and their motion through what are called acoustic oscillations and other fluctuations in their signal. They seem to suggest that there is a chance that the force that's keeping the universe to accelerate now may be decreasing, and it may eventually go away. There's a mysterious substance that Einstein originally proposed in 1915 called the cosmological constant. He was a brilliant person, but I love to talk about Einstein, not only because he was so smart, but because he made so many mistakes. People think that scientists make no mistakes, but as you know, the word in Russian for scientist means someone who was taught. To be taught means you have to be ignorant of something. You can't be taught if you think you know everything, and a lot of my colleagues think they know everything, so it's hard to teach them, but let's leave that aside. When Einstein came up with this idea, he was going on data. The data were that we lived in a galaxy. We didn't know if there were any other galaxies in 1915. We thought the Milky Way was the whole universe, and he saw that there were no motion of the distant stars and distant other objects called nebulae, but we now call them galaxies, and he saw they weren't moving towards us or away from us. Therefore, he concluded the universe is static, but wait a second. Newton, who was Einstein's hero, said everything in the universe attracts themselves according to the mass and the distance between them squared. One over the distance squared. So you and I separate across the table. We're separated by so many feet. That feet, if we double the distance and you go farther away, that goes down by one quarter, but it's still attractive. Gravity is only attractive. If you sprinkle matter throughout the universe, eventually it will collapse. So it cannot be stable to have a universe that's static unless there'd be like balancing a pencil on its tip forever. So Newton knew that was impossible. Certainly Einstein knew that was impossible. So he said, hmm, my laws of general relativity are incomplete. I have to add some energy at every point in space and time, a type of vacuum energy, mysterious, filling the universe with this minuscule, it was a very tiny amount of energy, but it was enough given how big the universe is. There's a lot of volume in the universe, so even a small density leads to an enormous total amount of energy. He called that the cosmological term, the cosmological constant. We call it vacuum energy. And he said, actually, this is the thing that keeps the So that held for 12 years. Einstein was very smart. He had won the Nobel Prize eventually in 1922, and people regarded him as the smartest person who ever lived and whatnot. But by the 1920s, people started to say, actually, it doesn't seem like that's possible to have this dark energy term. The universe isn't actually static. In fact, the universe, when you look at the galaxies that are farther away, Hubble, Edwin Hubble, who was friends with Einstein here in California, in Los Angeles, where Einstein would spend his winters, Hubble was operating a telescope right here in Mount Palomar, Mount Wilson in Southern California. So we could go see it later on, you know, if you want to. This telescope showed the galaxies are not static, that they're all moving away, some of them near the speed of light. And so Einstein, he was willing to say, I was wrong. In other words, he didn't fall into that same trap that I fell into 100 years later, confirmation bias. He's a much better scientist than me. And by doing that, he said, I was wrong. That was the greatest mistake, the greatest blunder I ever made. Hubble showed the universe is expanding. And the term dark energy fell out of favor for almost 100 years until the late 1990s, when a few team members and people that I know from my podcast have discovered that the universe is actually not just expanding as everyone knew by that time, but the rate of expansion is accelerating. In other words, when you push your gas pedal on your car or your electric vehicle, it goes at a certain speed. But imagine you continually keep pushing the pedal down farther and farther, you accelerate. That was happening to these galaxies. Over time, they were getting farther apart, but at an increasing rate of speed change. That was then when we discovered dark energy has to exist. It's real. Einstein was wrong that he was wrong. Do you understand how amazing that is? Einstein's blunder that he said, it was my biggest mistake to put the cosmological constant into my equations. Later, 100 years later, a team of three men and their team of 100 people won the Nobel Prize for discovering Einstein's saying it was a blunder was actually a mistake. Can you imagine that? You're fighting with your wife and you're like, oh honey, I made a mistake. I said I was wrong, but I'm actually right. How well is that going to go? It's very dangerous. Take it from me. I've been married probably longer than a lot of people. That's the point. A great scientist can admit when he or she is wrong as often and maybe more often than trying to take credit for when they think they're right. It's a shame. Einstein will never know that. Honestly, even with all his genius, it sometimes feels like he had a bit of imposter syndrome. That's right. I should say, we don't know if Einstein will never find out about this. I have friends that are working on longevity research, on programming, on AI systems. Einstein's brain was preserved and sliced into many, many pieces. We actually have Einstein's DNA preserved. Theoretically, there's no law of physics that prevents him from being resuscitated, resurrected as a brain maybe in an AI. I call it AI Einstein. I've actually taken a lot of his works and put it into a language model and tried to see if it's possible. If Einstein had an LLM, if he had chat GPT in 1915, could he have predicted all the things that we now attribute to Einstein? In other words, can AI accelerate the human creativity process? I've actually experimented with that. I've taken an AI and I gave it a lobotomy. I said, you can't know anything after 1915. It's very hard to do because almost every LLM has every book ever written, every movie ever, every frame of every movie, everything on you, all your podcast collab, they're all on there. All models, the highest frontier models, the foundation, they're all polluted with all the knowledge because what good is a model that doesn't know the current state of affairs? It's hard to make a model. We're making a model that has no memory after 1915. We're saying, could an LLM by itself with no human predict the Big Bang, predict the discovery of the strong nuclear force? Could it predict all these incredible things? Quantum electrodynamics, quantum mechanics wasn't invented for 11 years after 1915. It's very hard to do. Don't think that Einstein may never know about it. Don't feel bad for Einstein. He had a very good life, but you're right. He did have the imposter syndrome. He was an incredible human being. You said we may be living in the very early stage of the universe. That raises a question for me. Why do we find ourselves so early in the history and not much later? Could that mean that civilizations or even the universe itself may not last that long? What do you think? For me to think about, is there a purpose? Why are we here at this moment when we can comprehend when we could have been born at any other moment? That is an argument about the centrality of humanity that has no answer in science. There's no reason in science for why we're here right now. You asked me this question that can't be answered. Why are we here now? Some scientists want to explain it scientifically and say we're here right now because this process of creating multiple universes created so many universes that there's some probability that we would be in this universe to ask the question of why are we here right now, which you asked me. That's not really satisfying to me. It's not a scientific answer. It's appealing to this large number fallacy that there's so many universes, so guaranteed that you and I would be talking today on this day here. No, it's not exactly so relevant. They all joke about a million, billion monkeys typing on a billion keyboards eventually will write all the works of Shakespeare and Pushkin. No, that's not true. There's zero evidence for that. It's a fallacy of taking something that's incomprehensibly large and multiplying it by something that's incomprehensibly small. But if one of those is zero and the other one's infinity, it's a very ill-defined proposition. I can't answer that question, but it's amazing that at least for the first time in human history, Aristotle couldn't do this, Moses couldn't think about this, Jesus couldn't think of an answer. Are there scientific falsifications of the Torah, of the Bible, of the Koran? No. There was no way to conclude positively scientifically. Now, with all these different tools, we're at a point where we can say, well, maybe there are multiple universes. Maybe we can detect them. But let's wait until we have evidence, rather than just belief. Otherwise, we're just doing faith. And there's nothing wrong with it, but you have to be honest about yourself. Right. Now, string theory became very popular in the 20th century, and as far as I understand, the math there is incredibly complex. Does it help astrophysicists better understand reality? There's no one that would rather have an understanding of string theory than an experimental scientist. But the fact is, a lot of what the string theorists, again, friends like Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, people I've talked to many times, a lot of what they say is mostly making excuses rather than making evidence. So they'll say, well, you cannot see the evidence for string theory. Why not? Because in string theory, the hypothesis is that all particles are made eventually of strings, and those strings exist in dimensions that we don't have access to. You need ten dimensions, not three dimensions, left, right, up, down, back, and forth. We have three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. They say no. If you embed those four dimensions of space and time inside of a ten-dimensional universe, then you can get out this magical, almost incredible, panoply spectrum of particles, of forces, of fields. The problem is, there's zero evidence for it, and people have been trying to look for this now. The first paper on string theory is 60 years old next year. There's never been this long of a regress or stagnation in almost all of science where people have said, this is the answer, we can't see it because we can never access these ten-dimensional objects, and they can't make a prediction that we can test because everything occurs on a scale that's completely inaccessible to my colleagues who build particle physics experiments. Now, is the math beautiful? Yeah, the math is very beautiful, but so was the math of Pythagoras that the universe was made of vibrating musical notes, or Kepler. Kepler thought the planetary orbits in our solar system were the way that they were because each planet had an orbital radius represented by a platonic solid. So, beautiful math means nothing. There's a lot more math than there is physics. It's almost magical. The things that come out of math that we use in science, I'll give you one example. When we communicate using microphones and digital technology, all of our reality right now in this podcast, all of the spectators, the viewers, everything they see is the byproduct of zeros and ones, on and off states of transistors, billions of times a second, flipping on and off. That's our whole reality. It's incredible, but it's very simple. You can get that simple, but no simpler. You can't make one code, unary code. You need at least binary code. Then you can make everything. You can create the universe. It's a beautiful thing, and it's almost like string theory takes the opposite perspective. Let's find the most complicated math that we can't even hope to have evidence for because it's curled up and wrapped up in dimensions we can't access, and hide this beautiful math. We'll say it has this great promise, but even the most staunchest proponents of it admit there's no experimental evidence for it. How much longer would we allow such a thing to go on in science? I don't know. It happens to be many people don't really study it anymore. There are other approaches that people are taking. They're also not really as well supported or studied because they also don't predict things that we can actually access in experimental language today. It's frustrating. Right now, we might get the best evidence for elementary particle and fundamental physics from the entire universe, from cosmology. Where the universe started with a big bang, it has great downstream ramifications for the smallest objects in the universe too. Yeah, I completely agree that observations and experiments allow us to make reliable conclusions, but maybe one day, string theory will help us better understand reality. Who knows, maybe AI will help like you mentioned earlier. Maybe. I'm not so sanguine about AI creating new physics. I think that we fell into a trap, and if I was an advanced alien mind, I would say, here you go, here are all these GPUs. Imagine this, you take a piece of silicon, you send some electricity through it, and now this thing can think. Oh, that's great, that's really amazing, and it's doing tremendous work. Then you talk to Roman about how it's going to destroy different careers but give opportunities elsewhere. It's wonderful, and it's devastating, and it's constructive, just like nuclear energy is. But here's the problem. These things were never designed to do physics. They were designed to do language. We can take the transcript of this conversation and translate it into Estonian. We could do whatever we want with it, some language they use in New Guinea, whatever you want. Humans are very adept at using language, speaking. We've been speaking longer than we've been writing. We've been speaking longer than we wrote cave paintings in the caves of France 35,000 years ago. So we're very good at language. The problem is, physics is not a language. It is using language, it uses symbols, but it itself is not a language. It's a description of the physical world. That's why I say if this alien species was an adversary and wanted to destroy us, that's what they would do, because it's never going to give us string theory in 12 dimensions, and it's never going to give us the answer to the multiverse. These are things that I think can only come from the human mind, and since we're not training as many scientists as we used to and our budgets are being cut, it's a very bleak picture, I think, for human scientists. AI helps me every day, don't get me wrong, as a scientist, but it does things that humans can do. I have yet to meet an AI that does something humans cannot do, at least in physical sciences. I hope this podcast inspires some people to go into science and support it. That's really how I see my role as a host. Back to multiverses, I know Max Tegmark talks about several different levels of them. Could you briefly explain what those levels actually mean? Yeah, so Max Tegmark is an old friend of mine. We've written papers together, and he has some incredible ideas. His main theory is that there are four different types of multiverse. There is what many people wouldn't even say is a multiverse, but really is the most plausible one, which is there's another universe, it's one light day away from our universe, and tomorrow we could find it out, because light is the fastest something can travel the speed of light, and it takes a day to get to that universe, so it'll take one more day, and then that universe can give us information, and we can at least know there's another universe. That's the simplest level. There are other levels that start to come up. There's actually a level of multiverse within string theory called the landscape, where the vacuum configuration, which is what frustrates me so much about my conversations with Michio Kaku, is that he'll say things like, well, you have to specify what is the vacuum. I don't have to do that when I study electromagnetism. It's only when I study string theory that I'm not allowed to ask certain questions, according to him. So be that as it may, that's a type of multiverse. In quantum mechanics, there is a type of multiverse called the Ever-Ready and Many-Worlds Theory, which suggests that every quantum process occurs. In our daily thinking about, let's say, Schrodinger's cat, the famous experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a quantum decay of a radioactive particle. That radioactive particle can either decay or not decay, and so until you open the box, you don't know if the cat is killed by the cyanide that's released by the radioactive decay in this very abstract and not animal rights-friendly scenario. This takes place, so the cat cannot be considered to be dead or alive until observed. When you observe the observer, the act of observation collapses the wave function, causing it to be in one state or another, alive or dead, and then we say the cat is alive or dead. But up until that point, we cannot say that. A lot of scientists don't like that interpretation, so they came up with another one called Ever-Ready mechanics, which is one of the students of John Archibald Wheeler, who coined the term black holes. These events all take place, but they take place in different universes. In one universe, the cat is always alive, at least up until it dies naturally. In the other one, it's dead before you open the box. In one case, I asked my wife to marry me 18 years ago. In another case, I didn't, and there's both versions of me that exist in this the many worlds interpretation. The last level of his multiverse is that any mathematical object exists. For example, in particle physics, particles can be represented by purely mathematical objects called matrices. These matrices have different properties when they interact with each other, also like matrices in LLMs, but slightly different. These are complex numbers. The complex number, if you remember from high school, is the square root of negative one. It's called an imaginary number, and when you put that together with a real number, you get a complex number. In particle physics, you can represent these different particle interactions using complex matrices. They have different properties, and they're perfect representations of how they interact. These matrices describe how they behave, and it matches reality exactly. The only difference between the Newtonian description and the quantum mechanical Schrodinger description is the addition of this number square root of negative one. How is it that the square root of negative one is so important? I don't know. So, Tegmark says all these mathematical types of formalisms have a physics correspondence in what's called the mathematical universe. It's fascinating that whenever we talk about reality, we keep coming back to math, something abstract only in our minds. Why is math so deeply connected to reality? You know, that's one of the great questions of all of science. There's a famous paper written by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, and it's called the unreasonable effectiveness of math in the physical sciences. In statistics, you have a Gaussian distribution that describes, say, the height of people or IQs or whatever you want. That distribution seems to hold in many different places in many different circumstances. He asked the question, when you look at that Gaussian distribution, there's the number pi. That's weird. Pi, you know, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Why does that have anything to do with the property of an electron wave function and the property of the heights on average of trees in a forest? He said it's a great mystery. It's a good question that you asked. You're in good company. Nobody knows. I sometimes very cheekily suggest maybe we should look at every math object, not just as Tegmark does, but say, is there something we can do in the physics lab with it? If matrices work so well, how about we take this topological structure and then apply it to some object? People do that. I think it's a very fascinating observation. It sometimes gives you this false confidence that because mathematicians can prove and disprove the theorems, physicists can do the same thing. But we don't. We can only falsify things in the physical sciences. Dr. Ketting, have you heard about the holographic principle? Could you explain the idea behind it? The theory of the holographic universe really grew out of the black hole discoveries that were made by Bekenstein and Hawking a couple decades ago. Black holes are very interesting. You throw stuff into them, and all that happens is they get bigger. The surface area of the black hole contains all the information of what was inside of it. Right now, you and I have watches on, and we look at our watches. The watch has information on the face of the watch, but you know that there's a lot more going on inside the watch that produces the image that we see on the face of the watch. A hologram is basically using the properties of film and coherent light to transmit what looks like a three-dimensional image from a two-dimensional piece of film. What the black hole analogy has is that the black hole itself, the surface area, is all that matters, not the volume. It's as if you went to the library, and you said, I don't care what the books are inside the library, all I care is the area of the outside of the library. That's all you need to know for a black hole. You throw a book in, the area changes, and you can know what the book says based on the black hole's surface area. What Juan Maldacena, Leonard Susskind, and other people have conjured up is that the universe could be existing inside of a black hole like that, wherein, yes, the outside skin of the black hole of our universe would contain an imprint of everything that goes on inside of it. Now, there's no evidence for this. I think it's a beautiful idea. One of the things I hope to talk about with Juan Maldacena on his appearance on my podcast for the second time today is whether or not there's ways that we can actually test that in a human lifetime. You may or may not know, black holes aren't black. They emit Hawking radiation. They have a finite lifetime, which assumes that the universe, if it's a black hole, will also have a finite lifetime, and it will also emit Hawking radiation. Can we detect the signatures of the Hawking radiation of the universe, which would give evidence, but not prove, remember that, it's not going to prove it, but give evidence that maybe the holographic universe is right? So can we then say that our three-dimensional world might actually be a projection of information encoded on a two-dimensional boundary? And that the universe itself could exist inside a black hole. Is there any real evidence for this idea? So you would have to have a very much larger signal from these. Even the most massive black holes, they have the weakest Hawking radiation. So it's sort of a trap. The smaller the black hole, the more intense the Hawking radiation, and the quicker the evaporation occurs. So there are those, like Sir Roger Penrose, who suggest that the universe doesn't have inflation. It doesn't even have a big bang the way that we think about it. But what does survive from different epochs, eons as he calls them, the universe expands and dilutes, and then what he calls conformally changes or cycles into another universe, where the only things that can go through the boundary from one universe to the other are black holes. And in that case, these primordial black holes become seeds, cosmic spawn, seeds that then populate the next universe. It's a beautiful idea. His idea is falsifiable. If we on the Simons Observatory detect these waves of gravity through the beam-mode polarization of the CMB, we will prove that hypothesis wrong, not right. I know you have to go soon, so let me ask one final question. Recently, there's been a lot of discussion around UFOs. Trump, Obama, Rubio, JD Vance have all spoken about UFOs in one way or another. Personally, I'm still skeptical. But what do you think? Could these phenomena point to something we still don't understand about reality? You know, what concerns me more than that is not extraterrestrial intelligence, discovering that intelligence exists off the Earth. I think right now I'm much more concerned with what kind of intelligence do we have on Earth. People talk about AI as a savior, as a god, as a demon. I've talked with many people, John Lennox, who believe it is almost a Christ or anti-Christ-like figure. And I have to say, again, we are kind of gods, in a sense. We have incredible power. We have incredible intelligence. But most of the things that I care about have nothing to do with intelligence. I mean, Wikipedia is a lot more intelligent than I'll ever hope to be. But I want wisdom. I think that's what we care about. I don't think these things are going to tell us anything about wisdom, about humanity, survival, things like that. It might be interesting. It might prove that it's possible to get through the Great Filter and prosper, as people have suggested. The existence of one form of extraterrestrial technology would be the most important discovery of all time. Right now, we don't even have evidence for a type of slime mold on another planet in our solar system, let alone in another solar system. The technology, the breakthroughs that it would take to get here, if true, would be amazing. But just as we went to the moon, we went around the moon last couple weeks ago on the Artemis 2 mission, which splashed down here in San Diego. Before that, they sent an unmanned probe, an uncrewed probe around the moon. And before that, it was 50 years ago. So the question is, do these things really need to send biological elements to the Earth? Is there something to learn from us? I don't think we're that advanced. We're certainly not the pinnacle of advanced evolution. We know that because we're creating more and more types of intelligence. But again, we might be the only form of wisdom in the universe. That terrifies me. If we're alone in the universe, it's not the intelligence, the SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that would trouble me. It's the falsification of the search for extraterrestrial wisdom. That's what we need more than anything. Not finding it, that's a really horrifying thing to think about.