306. Fear of a Black Universe (3)
2 (22m 29s):
People with, you know, listen, I saw that you, in your book, you talked about dark energy. Let me tell you what I have. I've been working on this for 15 years. Here's my, and here's a PDF file of it. I would love to talk with you. You know, I'm available to talk to you finally and think things like that.
1 (22m 47s):
Here's my phone number, right?
2 (22m 50s):
Oh yeah, no, I've got, I've gotten phone number. I've gone, you know, said, Listen, I can one, you know, one, one guy wrote me said, Listen, I live, you know, in Texas, I'm happy to drive up to Providence Amit, you
1 (23m 1s):
Wow.
2 (23m 2s):
I said, Okay, let's, let me think about that.
1 (23m 6s):
Yeah, yeah. Again, the problem is where, what you mean by outsider, you mean outside inside the box in the col train kind of way. Let me just tell you a story. One of my favorite Fineman, well, Steve Gould stories that he told about Fineman, I mentioned this on the podcast,
2 (23m 25s):
I love Fineman stories. Yeah, go,
1 (23m 27s):
Pardon, pardon for the repetition. But Feinman saw that Googled was coming to Caltech to give a talk. And he called the office and said, you know, let's have lunch together. And of course, Gould was like, Oh my god, Lunch with the great Fineman. Yeah, sure. So Fineman proceeds at lunch to explain to him some ideas he has about evolutionary theory. He's been thinking about, about, and according to Gould, and one of his famous 300 essays he wrote for Natural History. And he says, Well, basically he was describing sexual selection, which we've known about for a hundred years, right? And he, and he told Fineman, you know, this is an idea that's, you know, we've kind of had for a while. He goes, Oh, well I don't read anything cuz I want to come to it completely fresh. Right? Just a totally new perspective on things.
1 (24m 8s):
So sometimes that's good, but sometimes you're just repeating what's already been done, right? So there's the rub, right? How do you know what's already, you gotta know something in your field, like what's already been done? Where are the frontiers? You have to know what the non frontiers are to find the frontiers.
2 (24m 23s):
Well said. I like that. That's, Yeah. Let me, yeah, let me riff on that a little bit. That's correct. I think like knowing the rules so that you can properly know how to break them. Well, I don't know. I don't know if the notion of properly breaking rule, but, you know, understand, like, you know, so for years I've been working on the cosmological constant problem, which is a very, you know, you know, conceptually insoluble and technically insoluble problem. But I had tried, you know, pretty much everything in a book and learned and read hundreds of papers, including Steve Weinberg's over a hundred page review of the cosmological constant before I even started thinking about other ways around.
2 (25m 10s):
I think it was very important for me to learn all the attempts by my colleagues, like over the years as much as I could. So, I mean, one of the things I tell my students is like, if we're attempting a new project and a new research project in some topic, I said, you must go and download every single, almost every single paper, right? Technical paper that's been written on that. And understand all the attempts have been tried there. I mean, the idea that I'm gonna just like that somehow on one, I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, if you're like some super genius like Al Einstein or fireman, I guess you can pull that off. But I'm not that right? I need to know what, what has been tried. I need to also, I call that working within the tradition, right?
2 (25m 54s):
So I think that, you know, there are some standards here that we have to have, and there's a knowledge base that needs a toolkit. And one way I like to put this is a following. If I'm a painter, I have a canvas, I have a palette of colors, and I'm now going to paint something creative with, with, with these tools. You know, I think like throwing, you know, the idea of I'm, oh, you know what, I'm gonna throw these colors away, right? The red, green and blue, and I'm just gonna take mud or whatever and paint with that, you know, and say, I'm, that's different than saying for me, the, the notion of my notion of outsider right from the inside is I am not throwing away the colors.
2 (26m 41s):
I'm keeping the colors. I'm just expanding my colors. I'm expanding my palette to include other tools, other, you know, other approaches, you know, other, you understand. So that's kind of what I'm doing. So I, I'm still painting within, you know, I'm still using red, green and blue into canvas, right? I'm just, I'm trying to expand the toolkit and see if something works. Like, and you know, 99% of the time it doesn't work actually. All right. But that's, that's, that's part of the game. It's a, it's a, it's a strategy. It's a strategy for research. That's where I look at
1 (27m 15s):
It. Yeah. Yeah. I loved your chapter on creativity and I wonder since, you know, Einstein played the violin and feinman played the drums and you play the saxophone and and so on. Is, what's the link do you think, between music and physics or maybe more broadly, science and art or music or something like that and creativity?
2 (27m 34s):
Yeah, I think the act of, for me, the act of, I think it's, it's twofold. I think anything that one engages in that's like, that is not, you're a writer and you know, like for example, but like, maybe you like to go and roll a boat for like a few hours every day, every other day. I think getting away from the problem, getting away from the task at hand, there's something when you get away from it and how, whichever way you get away from it, be it blown in a horn, be it going on long runs, going on a hike, flying a plane, I don't know. But getting away from it, there's something where you, you can truly go offline, you know, and, and come back with a, with a new approach or maybe new insights that you can't will, right?
2 (28m 21s):
You need to get a, So I think for me, music has functioned that way. My readings of, of Einstein, it seems that it functions similarly for him there going away and playing his violin or improvising on his piano. And, but yeah, you know, I've definitely thought a lot about, maybe also there's something cognitive that we yet don't understand about the engagement with music and doing things that are kind of like, you know, tasks that require that, that involve things like theoretical physics and mathematics. The, the, it, it, it, it feels like there's some, there's a way in which, and again, I don't, I don't know how it works and why it works, but I do know that when I, when I engage with my instrument, and it doesn't even have to be going and playing gigs, just simply like picking up the horn and playing through some scales.
2 (29m 17s):
And it is something about that that enables me to be a little bit better at, at my physics. And my physics is the, is theorizing. Yeah,
1 (29m 30s):
Yeah, yeah,
2 (29m 31s):
Yeah. And calculating,
1 (29m 33s):
Yeah, that's right.
2 (29m 34s):
Well, one thing I could say, yeah, one thing I could say, yeah, there is one thing I could say about that. So I'm a very visual player, so as you know, I, you know, when I play my sacks, I mean, there's a sense in which like, you know, you, here's, here's a scale, here's a major seventh, here's a dominant da, da, da da. And there's a point in my plane though, where I really do try to let go of that and visualize, you know, visualize what I'm playing. And I think that the act of visualization and that task, cause a lot of my physics is also a, you know, you're trying to always get a picture, you know, literally a mental picture of the problem that you're, you're, you're trying to attack.
2 (30m 18s):
So I think that's one place in, I think in common that they have, for me at least. Yeah. Those,
1 (30m 24s):
Yeah. So you mentioned the cosmological constant. Does that have to do with the accelerating expansion of the universe? And that's the mystery that hasn't been solved. Why is it accelerating?
2 (30m 35s):
Absolutely. That's exactly what it
1 (30m 37s):
Is. Okay. And, and the, so the
2 (30m 39s):
Value, the, this constant, the value of it, it's magnitude, how large it is actually is in a one-to-one correspondence with how the rate at which the universe is accelerating.
1 (30m 50s):
Hmm. You know, but in an explosion isn't, doesn't the explosion accelerate at first before it decelerates? What if we're just in the early stages of the Big Bang explosion and it's still accelerating? I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm just throwing that out there.
2 (31m 5s):
Yeah, that's a good, that's a good analogy. And in fact, that's the early acceleration when, and so there's a stage in the early universe where there, where that did happen is called cosm conflation. Cosm conflation is similar to what's going on today, except in cosmic inflation. That acceleration in the early universe after the bang was much, you know, that rate of acceleration was much higher, you know, you know, trillions of times higher than what's observed today. So the, the mystery is that, you know, it accelerated and then slowed down, underwent like what appears to be constant, you know, vanish and acceleration, just constant velocity and then accelerate again.
2 (31m 49s):
And then the weird thing is that it accelerates actually when we, when, you know, our form of matter comes on the scene, right? Cause remember in the early stage of the universe, it was so hot that matter couldn't co Adams couldn't form cuz it was so hot, right? There were buzzing around. And as it expanded, cool, then there was a chance for atoms to form, right? For electrons to get trapped into the proton, right? And then after all that happened and stars and then, you know, planets and things came on the scene, the universe decided to accelerate again. And so there's this coincidence or this why now problem, Why is it doing it now?
1 (32m 24s):
Interesting. And what are the leading explanations for that?
2 (32m 28s):
Aliens, I'm just kidding, Alien. Hey, it could
1 (32m 31s):
Be maybe they've got some accelerating machine that's so powerful.
2 (32m 36s):
Well, my buddy, my buddy John Lanier in the book, as you know, my, my buddy journal, we had, we decided to have a spoof idea about that actually the universe is accelerating because aliens are actually building virtual, very advanced virtual reality video games to their, you know, for their pleasure. And the, the way they do it is by actually using a, using this vacuum energy to this cause it's a form of energy to power their, their virtual reality video games.
1 (33m 8s):
You know, you have that, that section in your book. But I actually think, you know, if that was, that's as good a thought experiment as any like that we're living in a simulation and so on. But if that were true, it seems like it, we should be able to measure the energy being consumed to motor that kind of virtual reality. It would take a huge amount of energy, right? The computing power and so on, that this is like the attempts to detect a Dyson sphere around a star. And that would be evidence of civilization instead of just looking for radio signals coming in. That would be something else. Or debris coming into our solar system like Avi Lobe is looking for.
