Why You're Wrong About Time: A Cosmic Reality Check

I joined @PeterMcCormackShow to dig into one of physics' deepest unanswered questions: what is time, and why does it seem to move in only one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself.
We cover:
- What may have existed before the Big Bang
- Why something can't truly come from nothing
- How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments
- What dark matter actually means
- Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong.
Chapters:
4:24 — Does Time Actually Exist?
8:14 — Why Interstellar Gets the Physics Wrong
18:10 — Can Something Really Come From Nothing?
29:21 — Science Never Proves Anything
32:12 — Is Dark Matter Just Made Up to Fix the Equations?
42:07 — How We Could See Before the Big Bang
52:17 — Mortality: Why Humans Know Life Is Precious
1:00:07 — Time Isn’t Scarce. Attention Is.
1:03:25 — UFOs, Disclosure & the Problem With “Belief”
1:16:29 — Why AI May Never Reach Superintelligence
The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness.
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Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
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