Weird science?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good morning.

Chris Is it morning? It is morning. I mean, that's sort of one of the things that I'm still trying to figure out when it comes to, you know, podcasting. Because, you know, when this is recorded, when it's uploaded, God knows when people are listening to it, right? Is it jarring to talk about the here and now? Should we try to be completely time and spaceless? As if we're hanging in a dark void together?

Scott It's interesting. I interviewed this... World-class philosopher this week. A guy who's been somebody I've admired intellectually for years. He wrote a memoir, and they actually pitched the book to me. I was like, I'd love to do this. Nicholas Wolterstorff. But he said that early on in philosophy, inspired from Kant, he learned that what philosophers do is sort of study the necessary versus the contingent, right? Like that art historians study the contingencies of this artistic development or that. And the philosopher handles that what is, you know, they're necessarily for there to be art. He said he basically learned that that's kind of bullshit, that distinction. Most of his work was transgressing the boundaries of necessity and contingency. So, you know, this is a podcast where we will transgress many boundaries. One of them will be necessity and contingency. So indeed, it is morning, it's cold, March 1st. My wife lived in Moscow for a few years. She taught at an orphanage and she said that on March 1st, you said to all the children, congratulations for making it to March 1st.

Chris I can't believe that's not a Canadian tradition because it totally should be. I was back in Canada just last week taking part in a town hall debate that was organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Service, sort of our PBS. On immigration. And I got off the airplane in my home city and I almost just turned around and got back on the plane. It was so cold. It was like minus, you know, 30, 35 Celsius. So it's actually the point on the temperature scale where Celsius and Fahrenheit converge. That's not right.

Scott People shouldn't live like that.

Chris Well, I mean, I did it for years, but I guess I've grown soft the years and years that I've lived outside of that temperature.

Scott And it's been a really long winter. There was an article, again, to Necessity and Contingency in Commentary Magazine about American exceptionalism. And the guy's like, a lot of what makes America exceptional is luck. Like, it's big, it's got a lot of natural resources, and the ones that are really valuable, like mineral resources, we can find north and south, and they're not military threats. And most of this big landmass is in a temperate climate, which is the most productive, you know, on many fronts. It's just like listing all these things, like, England kind of ignored it, so they learned self-government skills really well. As opposed to, like, Spanish colonies... Which were hands down, top down, very autocratic. And then when they become independent, they're like, we really haven't practiced self-government. Like, it's just, it was like so much of what made America like unique was just like contingent. It was very, you know.

Chris Yeah, that's very interesting. And I love... Yeah, like whether you're in a temperate zone or a tropical zone has all these giant implications for just one, how pleasant it is to be there, but also the incidence of disease. But I didn't think of that here in the UK, that part of the Sort of obstinate independence that is just part of the political culture in this country has to do with, you know, sort of being this little barnacle on the edge of Europe that really no one had time to pay attention to and focus on.

Scott Right. And also, it led to a lot of things, like less military threats because you're not bordered by people. And also, there's this interesting sort of local government predominance, like these local lords, local things. So you learn this kind of e pluribus unum governmentally that I think is very intriguing.

Chris I mean, I guess you could summarize it this way. I don't think in Roman times that being made, you know, the governor of Britain was a promotion. No. I don't think it was a step up. No. It was more like, yeah. Hello. Hello, governor.

Scott But on to science. Let's talk science. We were deciding what we're going to talk about today, and we decided you just said that you wanted to talk. And I'm going to quote you to you. He says, let's talk about science, big picture physics of the universe, and how to integrate that perspective with the here and now of our lives, the running theme of necessity and contingency. Hey, I mean, good on you to connect that. It was not purposeful.

Chris It started with weather, but then I— Yeah, weather, if this idea of contingency and necessity might be the meta-theme that's going to run through all of this. But I guess, I mean, you must have had that, right? Whether it's a— Just a step back and looking at a bigger picture of the world. I mean, we've all had that experience, right? I mean, unless you're just a particularly boring person. But at least looking up at the stars, especially if one's ever traveled to a place where there's very little light pollution, and you really get to see why it's called the Milky Way, because there's just this kind of background glow of these billions and billions of stars. And I suppose then the question I thought, let's just kind of hum and hawn this for 20, 30 minutes is, so what do we do with that? How do we, I mean, is it just a kind of, you know, a kind of a form of elevated entertainment and a kind of, hmm, that was nice?

Or is there some way that we can integrate, you know, what is real from that sort of cosmic perspective into, you know, our much more immediate reality? I think that's kind of the big question that... That underlies, you know, that we kind of confront any time we look up at the stars. This sort of question of, yeah, this is great, but so what? How do I integrate these perspectives into my life?

Scott Yeah, I think that, so I have several thoughts on that. Like, I think on one level, there's... I knew you would.

Chris I knew you would. Okay, I'm getting out my pen.

Scott There's an author I recently interviewed who is... It's interesting that Aristotle thinks that because we're rational animals and that the universe seems like it exhibits a rationality, that there ought to be teleology to it, that as we study it, it ought to make sense. And somehow what you know about science ought to connect somehow with what you know about mathematics and politics and ethics. And these sciences are all... But he felt more at home in it, right? And he had this famous phrase, if your philosophy conflicts with the doxa, with the common sense of how things seem, change the doxa, right? Change the theory.

Chris Wait, what was that word?

Scott The doxa, like it's in Greek, delta, omnicron, chi, alpha.

Chris You've just gone to a whole new level of... New Testament Greek, baby.

Scott My Hebrew is not nearly as good as my Greek because my Hebrew... If my Hebrew teacher would have been a better person... If it was my mother, I would have been a better person. My Greek teacher was a taskmaster and I learned it better, but... But Doug said how things seem. So here's the thing about our perspective on science. We know more about frogs, right, or stars than Aristotle could have dreamed of. But he would say, then, why frogs? What are they, essentially? And how does that connect? And then we're like, well, that's not what science does. You've got to go down the philosophy or the religion. So when we, you know, the sort of fact-valued economy, we try to break apart, you know, sort of empirical things and whatnot from meaning questions, I think that we wind up in a state of alienation. And exactly what you're saying, you have these, like, this sense of wonder. This philosopher I interviewed, it's a great, great title for his memoir, In This World of Wonders.

Memoir of a Life in Learning. And so part of, I think, what makes a great philosopher is wonder, right? Chesterton talks about like the difference between like a four-year-old and 14-year-old at the zoo. And what is it? Like at four, everything is a snuffleupagus. Like a cheetah seems as fanciful as a unicorn. When you're 14, you're on your phone, right? There's no more wonder. Ah, there's just cheetahs. Of course the world has cheetahs. So like, I think that that sense of wonder Deepens as these things become part of a fabric of meaning. And I think the way we approach things, like the natural sciences, often rob us of a sense of connecting things. They call it the quest for a theory of everything.

Chris And I suppose that's maybe one of the conflicts within science itself. How much of this is it a kind of an empirical expedition to discover what is the limits of what we can explain just using the laws of physics and mathematics and probability and statistics versus when do we need to have some kind of outside meaning to make sense of things? And I kind of get the sense that, you know, within the scientific community, certainly like within the sort of the theoretical physics community where they're trying to kind of figure out like what is creation and where did it all come from? I suspect that there is a kind of a real tension there between sort of feeling like there is an order to things that is difficult to explain, but also not wanting to, you know, quote unquote, give up. Because it seems like a kind of giving up, if you just say, well, I mean, this is as far as we can go with the laws of physics, and the rest is either magic or beyond sort of the human brain's capacity to understand, so we'll just stop. I mean, I don't think that anyone who does hard science is just wired to stop searching for empirical explanations.

I guess I've been grappling with this ever since one of the last books that I read was by Leonard Susskind. And Leonard is one of the founders of string theory. So kind of back in the 70s, he started to come up with this new theory of what is the elementary thing out of which everything else is composed. And so that was his Claim to fame. But in the last few years, he's turned to writing more popular science books so that people like me can kind of grasp what are these complicated problems that physicists are working on today. And he says, so the biggest question in physics right now, as he views it, is basically trying to explain, trying to figure out why our universe is as finely tuned as it is. So it turns out that there are all of these quite basic properties to the universe, like the strength of the pull between the nucleus of an atom and the electrons that orbit around it.

You know, the strength of gravity. And he says that, you know, what we discover is, so one, we haven't found any good reason why these sort of basic constants are what they are, are the value that they are, and not something else. So we don't know why they are the levels that they are, but what we do know is that if those levels changed even a little bit, we would not exist. Because either the chemical processes, biological processes wouldn't work, or galaxies wouldn't have sort of billions of years to form and unfold so that intelligent life and Darwinian evolution and all of that would have just, you know, enough time scale to produce intelligent life. But so long story short is the better, more deeply we understand how the universe is tuned, The more we realize that we are in this tiny zone of many different laws of physics lining up just so to make intelligent life possible.

And so, he says, on that frontier, there's basically two possibilities. So one, maybe we do need to bring in some kind of anthropic principle. That the reason that all of these variables in physics are so finely tuned is because they need to be finely tuned in order for us to exist.

Scott This is the watchmaker theory. Paley, dude, this is every natural theologian loves this stuff. Okay, yeah. Come on, how can you be an atheist when you look at the... I mean, in general, I don't find most of those arguments theologically or philosophically necessarily completely persuasive, but they're existentially very compelling.

Chris So yeah, I agree. Which is not nothing. So the other possibility is if you want to stay in a kind of agnostic, scientific, empirical, statistical mindset, Then the other possibility is that there are many, many, many different universes, which is to say that, you know, all of the different possible values that these fundamental constants in nature, you know, force of gravity and the strong forces inside the nucleus and all of that, You know, probably do occur somewhere in the megaverse. And if we assume that there are, you know, a kind of a meaningless number of all these possible universes actually populating the megaverse somewhere, then the fact that we live in such a finely tuned, in such an improbable universe, with such an improbable... Coming together of all the right laws of physics just becomes inevitable. It just becomes the law of large numbers. If there's a 1% chance of something happening, but we run the experiment 100 times, then it's not at all surprising that that thing happens. It's just the law of large numbers. And so similarly, he says the numbers are much, much bigger. He's kind of like... You're talking 10 to the 500, like this cosmically big number.

But if there are that number of universes, then the fact that ours exists is no longer improbable, no longer requires some kind of anthropic explanation of how are we so lucky. It's just inevitable that this universe will exist too. And, you know, and I think that, and I'm like, fuck, fuck me. And that has the answer to all that.

Scott I mean, William James, I forget, like, psychology of religious belief, I think, right? He says, you know, well, people, like, need predestination for, like, when they need, like, a moral holiday. They need to relax, and they're not in control of their own. And then they need doctrines of free will when they need to actually exercise more responsibility. So you sort of take these different ultimate sort of metaphysical stances based on what you psychologically need. Now, hello, my name is Captain Reductionist.

Chris So it's kind of like, you know, if, okay, yeah, so if nothing matters or if I need to take responsibility for something, you look at it differently.

Scott But that's sort of like, if you're feeling like the need for the mythical meaning, you go to anthropic, and then if you want to be more skeptical and you're worried about over-mythologizing, then you go to the multiverse thing that says, well, this, you know, it was bound to happen. By the way, the multiverse thing is so important when you reboot comic superheroes, like DC and Marvel. It's like... Well, the Superman that can only leap over tall buildings and sing about, he was Superman in one universe where Superman in that Earth couldn't fly, he could just leap like the Hulk. But then in this universe, Superman can really fly, and then one time the sleeping Superman meets the flying Superman, and multiverse is necessity for any comic book writer.

Chris Yeah, I don't know how to build off the comic book comment. Although, you know, the Star Trek universe, which I followed quite closely, is getting really confusing for me right now. I don't know if I can reconcile all the timelines in my head. But back to this theme on sort of, you know, empirical versus meaning and the tension between those. It does seem that the distance between those two perspectives is getting greater and greater. There was a great book back, oh, I don't know when he published it. I'm thinking of Carl Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot. Did you ever read that? I never read Pale Blue Dot. So you're familiar with Carl Sagan, right? Yeah. The famous popular astronomer. And Pale Blue Dot, the book, is actually a reference to a photograph.

Scott Popular astronomer is the equivalent of C-list celebrity or D-list celebrity.

Chris I didn't mean it.

Scott Although Neil deGrasse Tyson might have blown that up.

Chris Yeah, okay. I've never watched any of his stuff, by the way. He's pretty funny. He's pretty entertaining. I mean, hey, it's astronomy. If you can't make that entertaining, you're just really bad at what you do. Absolutely. So Pale Blue Dot is a reference to this famous, I think it's like Voyager 2 photograph of the Earth. And basically, as this spacecraft was getting to the very limits of... And when it came back, you know, it is just this tiny speck of blue suspended in space. And it was really, at the time, and I think this was the 70s, kind of an iconic photograph to, I guess, inspire and challenge with the kind of, how small we are. Yeah. Right, let's get a different perspective on things. But in Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan talks about the great demotions. And what he means by that is, he says, well, you know, roll back to a time when we thought that the Earth was the center of creation. And then Copernicus, I mean, other people before him, but at least in sort of the modern lineage, it's Copernicus who really rams home the idea that, well, no, that's not quite true. The sun is the center of the universe. The earth just spins around it. So we had to kind of come to grips with that. But at least the Sun was the center of the universe. And then, you know, fast forward to the 1900s, I think 1910s, 1920s, you get Edwin Hubble, who does the research that shows, hey, do you know, like, actually the Sun is moving through space? You know, we're basically just orbiting around a fiery comet in a distant arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

But at least we're in the galaxy. And then it's like, oh, but there are many galaxies, so we're just a kind of ordinary galaxy. And the universe got bigger and bigger, and our place within it got less and less meaningful. And I think that now where the scientific mind is at is to say that... I mean, it's actually within the megaverse, you know, is maybe, if we want to understand what is the human condition, you know, we're not just a pale blue dot within the universe, but even our universe is potentially as ordinary as we once thought, you know, our planet was. I'm not explaining this very well, but it's mind-blowing to me how... How far away from the here and now it is now possible and rational to visualize the human condition?

Scott Yeah, and the finitude thing, I have a couple thoughts. I think it's Ingersoll, like a 19th century American humanist that said, love is the flower that only blooms at the grave.

Chris So like the finitude... Love is the flower that only blooms at the grave.

Scott So it's only in your consciousness of death and finitude that you can really love and be passionate. And I think there's probably something to that. But I think about like reductionism, you know, one of the things Walter Storf says in his book, this philosopher I interviewed was, he talks about sort of like when he was in graduate school, and he's a man like in his 80s, I think. Now, but when he was in graduate school, like, how logical positivism died. He's like, the problem was, like, you know, logical positivism, this philosophical movement that attempts to rule out religious or metaphysical theological claims or anything. So it's sort of this minimalist role for philosophy, and it tries to say, well, if a sentence doesn't describe something in the world that we can prove, you know, like, is it raining outside? Or is it analytic, like, all bachelors are male? Or 2 plus 2 equals 4, then it's not a meaningful sentence. And he described this story of a Midwestern vacuum salesman who comes and tries to sell a vacuum to this woman and says, look, let me plug in and it's going to blow you away. And he's vacuuming and she says, but it didn't pick up all the dust. There's still dust over there. And he says, no, no, no. If this doesn't pick it up, it ain't dust.

And that's what, like, La Paz was because the problem was not only theological metaphysical claims were ruled out, but ethical claims and certain scientific, you know, physics claims, certain claims of physics that couldn't, you know, didn't meet the criteria. It sort of, it became the snake that ate its own tail. But also there's this piece in the New Yorker, I'll put it in the show notes, called A New Kind of Theory of Everything. And I'll just read a quick passage from it. And the author says, Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They've searched for a theory of everything that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms. Atoms, upon closer inspection... And then this one thinker that the author is mentioning says that... In conclusion, that basically says that this thing should be turned on its head because basically, and I'll just summarize because I can't believe I can't find it. This is really bad radio. Basically, the author is saying in the piece that one of the thinkers, one of the physicists that they mention, is saying that what if the universe is not one big... Oh, here it is now. Arkani Hamed now sees the ultimate goal of physics as figuring out the mathematical question from which all the answers flow, as opposed to the other way around. The answer to the tenth of the level of the intellectual heaven, he told me... Thanks for watching!

Physicists have seen this as a problem to be overcome, but maybe the multiplicity is not a problem, right? All these questions get at the answer. I think that's just fantastic. And the critique of reductionism there, I think, is stellar. And part of these connections, right? That you're talking about, how do we connect this to everyday life? I think there's this great book by Christian Smith, who's a sociologist, and it's, oh shoot, what does it mean to be human or something, I think is the title. But basically, he was talking about how most of his colleagues in social science are very liberative in their politics, right? But that their anthropology, you know, how they view the human, if you listen to them strictly from their discipline, couldn't underwrite their political commitments, right? Because they're so, and he said, I think we need something like a soul-like quality. He's like, I'm not talking about anything religious or metaphysical, even though I'm religious. What I'm saying is that something like a soul that's an emergent property from... Our physics, our biology, our consciousness can't be reduced to it. And most of the people in social sciences wouldn't want to acknowledge something like the minimalist soul he's talking about. But their politics require it, right? And he uses emergent theory to say, like, you look at a house. Is a house bricklaying?

No. Is it mathematics? No. Is it architecture? But all these realities, like the emergent property of a completed house is not exactly each of its component parts. It's more than the sum. It transcends them. And yet, it couldn't be what it is without any of them. And I think that is where I think science, philosophy, quest for meaning are probably meeting more rather than being antagonistic in their relationship because the study of emergent properties and things like that, it helps us realize that a lot of the reductionist stuff always puts us in a false disjuncture.

Chris Right, right. It's sort of—it assumes many answers to questions that we are not even aware of. Right, right. And so, you know, that's very interesting. I mean, it's certainly something that I've just experienced in my teaching over the last couple of years that, you know, the question is so much more helpful to people than the answer, right? Sending people away with good questions to reflect on is a far more productive and generative learning experience than giving them the answers to things.

Scott This is why T.S. Eliot said description is always to be preferred over explanation because an explanation is meant to rule out other explanations, but descriptions are not mutually exclusive. You could say describe this piece of art or describe this statue or describe this... Thanks for watching!

Chris But then to take that one step further and to kind of recognize that maybe the biggest question is what is the question, which is to your point about maybe what physics ultimately needs to find for itself is. And I suppose every science and all of us need to find for ourselves is what really is the question. And I like framing it that way, that when we have that just personal experience of looking up at the stars, or it doesn't have to be the stars, right? Whenever there's sort of some kind of confrontation with awe and we're kind of struggling with, but yeah, but how do I bottle this up? What do I do with it? How do I put this into my reality rather than sort of... Wall it off because it has no place. Maybe the answer is to take it as an invitation to ask, what is the question? Which is to say that it may not provide answers of what should we value, what should we focus on, what should we pay attention to, but actually just reminding us that that is a question that we can ask ourselves is the important work that's being done.

We'll have to explore that a bit more because there is this, and we'll have to do it on a future podcast, but I think there is this general and oft-repeated wisdom that we need to see both sides of the story, shift our perspective, understand things from different angles, and that makes sense. But what I think makes less sense to us is, what do I do with that? What do I do with the perspectives that aren't my own? If I'm a scientist, what do I do with the perspective of the politician? Or if I'm a politician, what do I do with the perspective of the scientist? We just live in completely different conceptual realities.

Scott Hegel would say, man, the truth is the whole. The truth is the whole. To which Adorno would respond that the whole is a lie, which I'm with Hegel, not Adorno on that.

Chris Well, the truth is the whole, but then I think that what the experience of awe helps us to do is to have the humility and the reminder that we can't perceive the whole.

Scott We only have a part. And for Hegel, the whole is not accessible except through the particulars. It's not an end around particularity. This is why, for him, contradictions and tensions and things are not something that you should look to transcend. They're at the heart of knowledge and the truth. To wrap up, we're talking about what the practical import is. It's that if you really believe... If you want to be a reductionist, watch Wheel of Fortune. But the non-reductionist, you should watch Jeopardy! Because everything is the question. Who is? What is? Jeopardy! is the model that gives you the answer and you have to phrase the question.

Chris You heard about Alex Trebek's news, did you?

Scott No!

Chris He announced he has stage four pancreatic cancer.

Scott Oh my gosh!

Chris Yeah, so that's going to be his trial to fight it off. It was a really touching announcement that he made. He said he's got to beat it because he's contracted to host Jeopardy through 2022 or something like that. On another aside, I'm supposed to, and God willing, we'll meet him in October. I'm going to be delivering the fifth annual Alex Trebek lecture this year.

Scott Where is that going to be?

Chris It's actually going to be in Ottawa. He's Canadian. I'm going to come to that.

Scott I'm going to come to that.

Chris Oh, you should totally come. I'm sure I can get you a guest pass or something like that.

Scott You've got to feel great about yourself. Yeah, we can have him on the podcast. That would be great, dude. That would be great. That's the greatest thing. You heard it here first, folks.

Chris Dude, thanks for blowing my mind again.

Scott Hey, the feeling's mutual.

Chris Take care.