Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

1. 0:02 – 0:59

   Setting the stage: why consciousness is the target topic

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      All right, here we go. Three... (clears throat) Boom, and we're live. How are you, sir?

   2. SPSir Roger Penrose0:09

      I'm fine, pretty good.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:11

      Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

   4. SPSir Roger Penrose0:12

      That's fine. My pleasure.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      Who roped you into this?

   6. SPSir Roger Penrose0:16

      I think, I suppose James Tagg, probably. (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      (laughs) I, uh, am a big fan of your work. I've read much of your work. I've seen many of your interviews and videos online. And, uh, one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about, that I find quite interesting is consciousness.

   8. SPSir Roger Penrose0:33

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:33

      And your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation, but that there's something more to it, and what, what you think this more could possibly be from a scientific perspective, which is unusual 'cause a lot of people have some theories about consciousness, but they're usually crazy people like myself.

   10. SPSir Roger Penrose0:53

       (laughs) Well, I mean, we're all conscious, and so we may have theories about it.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:58

       Yeah.

2. 0:59 – 3:00

   Three formative Cambridge influences: relativity, quantum, and logic

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose0:59

      But, uh, no, the ideas came by somewhat roundabout route. Uh, I, I went to Cambridge to do graduate work. It was mathematics. I was working on pure mathematical subjects, algebra, geometry. But I thought, you know, "We got three years, I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting." So I went to three talks particularly, which had a big influence on me. One was a talk by Hermann Bondi. It was on general relativity, cosmology. Wonderful talk with very sort of animated presentation he had. And then there was a talk by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. And his talk... well, his complete... wonderful talk, too. It was... Wonderful lectures as well, but in a completely different style. He was very quiet and precise in what he said and everything. And in the very first lecture, he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics. So if you have a particle and it could be in one spot, or it could be in another spot, then you have all sorts of states where it can be in both places at once. And he... That's sort of strange, but you got to get used to that idea. And he illustrated with this piece, a piece of chalk, and I think he broke it in two to illustrate it could be in one spot or in the other. And my mind sort of wandered at that point. I don't know what I was thinking about, but I wasn't concentrating. And about a few minutes later, he'd finished his description, his explanation, and I had some vague memory of something about energy, but I didn't understand what he said and I've been totally mystified by this ever since. So I, I suppose if I'd heard what he said, he would have said something to calm me down and, and make you sort of accept it in one way or another. But as it was, it seemed to me this was a, a major issue. How on earth do you have things that don't behave according to what quantum mechanic says? Like cricket balls and baseballs and things like that. Anyway, that's two of the talks. The other course was

3. 3:00 – 8:25

   Gödel’s theorem and the claim that understanding outruns algorithms

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose3:00

      a course by a man called Steane, who talked on mathematical logic and he explained things like Godel's theorem and Turing machines, Turing machines being the mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based, or all computers basically. And, uh... (clears throat) Uh, the thing about Godel's theorem... You see, I'd heard... I used to have a colleague when I was an undergraduate, Ian Percival, who also became a scientist later on, and we talked about, uh, logic and, you know, how you could make these kind of mathematical systems which worked out logic. And I'd heard about this Godel's theorem, which seemed to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove, and I didn't like that idea. But I... when I heard the... when I went to this course by Steane, and he explained what it really says. And what it says is, suppose you've got a method of proving things in mathematics, and when I say things, I mean things with numbers. The one famous example is Fermat's Last Theorem. Uh, there's the Goldbach conjecture, which isn't yet proved, that every even number bigger than two is the sum of two prime numbers. That's the sort of example of the thing. It's just sort of mathematical things about numbers, which you can see what they mean, uh, but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue. But the idea i- often is in mathematics, you've got a system of methods of proof, and the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer check whether you've done it right. So you... these rules, you know, they could be adding A and B, it's the same as B and A and things like that.

   2. JRJoe Rogan4:54

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SPSir Roger Penrose4:54

      And you, um... if you give... you, you say to the computer, say, "Here is a theorem," like Goldbach conjecture, and you see whether it can be proved and you say, "Maybe I've got a proof, and this follows these steps." And you give it to the computer and it says, "Yep, you've done it right. It's true." Or maybe it will say, "You've done it right and it's not true," or it may not say anything. It might just go on forever. But these are the sort of outcomes, and the point about it is that if you believe that these procedures do give you a proof, in other words, that if the algorithm says, "Yeah, it's true," then you believe that it is true because you've understood all the rules. You looked at the first one and said, "Yeah, that's okay." You looked at the second one and said, "Um, oh, yeah, I see. Okay, that's great." And you go all the way down, and as long as you're convinced all those rules work, then if it says yes, that's something you believe. Okay. Now, what Godel shows as he constructs a very specific sentence, a statement which is a number thing, like, like the Fermat's Last Theorem or something, a thing about numbers which-What he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things, then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true. But you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure. Now this was amazing to me, because it tells me that, okay, you cannot f- formalize your understanding in, in a, a scheme which you can put on a computer. The, you see, this statement which Godel comes up with is something you can see on the basis of the same understanding that allows you to trust the rules that it's true, but that it's not actually derivable by the rules. It, you see it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules. And this, to me, was amazing. And I thought, "Golly, you know, what's understanding? What does it mean? Is it something following rules? Is this an algorithm?" Well, this more or less says it's not an algorithm, because whatever it was, there will be something that you can still see as true even though you don't get it through the algorithm that you had in the first place. So this was a, oh, there are a lot of subtleties about this too, which people argue about endlessly, but it was pretty convincing to me that this shows that we don't think when we understand something, th- that what's going on in our heads is not an algorithm, it's not following rules. It's something else. It's something that requires our conscious appreciation of what we are thinking about, um, thinking as a conscious thing and understanding is a conscious activity. So I formed the view that conscious activities, whatever they are, not just that kind of thing, but, you know, um, playing music or, or falling in love or whatever these things might be, are not computations. There's something else going on. And then I thought because I, you know, I'm... Like to think of myself as a scientist and I think that what's going in, in our heads is according to the laws of physics, and these laws of physics, um, pretty good. They seem to work well in the outside world, and so I believe that the laws

4. 8:25 – 11:27

   From physics to mind: where non-computability could enter nature

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose8:25

      that work in our heads are the same as those laws. So I began to think about it. Well, what about Newton's mechanics? Well, you could put that on a computer. What about Einstein's special relativity? You could do that. What about Maxwell's wonderful equations, which tell you how elec- electricity and magnetism operate, and light, and radio waves, and all these things, that all follows this beautiful set of equations that Maxwell produced. You can put that on a computer. Okay, you may have to worry about approximations, and, you know, these depend on continuous numbers rather than discrete things, but I didn't think, "That's the answer." Then I thought, what about general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that. Well, y- y- we're familiar now with LIGO, this detector which has detected black holes spiraling into each other from distant galaxy, and how do we know that those signals are black holes spi-... well, because of calculations. People have put this thing on an algorithm, and you know what those signals look like. So Einstein's general relativity, sure, you can put that in a comp- on a computer. What about quantum mechanics? Well, there's the famous equation of Schrodinger which tells you how a quantum state evolves. You could put that on a computer too. It's difficult in many ways, there's many more parameters you've got to worry about, but it's just as computable as these other things. Well, you see, I then remembered Dirac's lecture, you see, and how it is that these things that work in the quantum world don't seem to work a- at the level of classical big things, and it all depends on this process of what's called measurement in quantum mechanics. And the measurement process is something you learn how to do, but it's not the Schrodinger equation. It's something else. And Schrodinger himself was very intrigued by this fact, that his own equation gives you nonsense, and y- y- the famous Schrodinger's cat where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time, he produced that in an example simply to demonstrate that, roughly speaking, his equation gives you nonsense under these circumstances. So there's something else, and the something else goes beyond our current quantum mechanics, and it tells you what happens when the quantum state makes a decision between, well, it doesn't follow the Schrodinger equation, it's one thing or the other. Now, everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics, but they think, "Oh, it's what's called making a measurement and you're allowed to do something different," but that didn't make sense to me. And so I had the view that, okay, there is a big gap in our understanding, and if there's something in the world which isn't something you could put on a computer, that's where it is. So the view, I've held that for a long time, and, uh, that there's something non-computable, something beyond computation involved

5. 11:27 – 13:46

   Computers vs human understanding: why Penrose wrote *The Emperor’s New Mind*

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose11:27

      in our understandings of things. So that's a view I held for ages. I didn't do much with it, I just held the view until... Now, I think there was a, a radio talk between Marvin Minsky and Edward Fredkin, and they were explaining about what computers can do, and they were talking about, okay, you have a computer, two computers talking to each other over there, and you walk up the room. In the time you've walked up the room to the computers, they have comput- commun- communicated with each other more thoughts than the human race ever has done, you see. And I thought, "Well, I see where you're coming from, but I don't think that's what's happening." In, in human communication, human understanding is something different from what computers do, and consciousness is the key thing. Consciousness is something different from computation. So I've held that view, but then when I heard this talk by Minsky and, um, and Fredkin, I thought, "Well, I had ideas of writing a book sometime in the long time in the future when I'm retired." This was some while back, I say. (laughs) And I thought, "Well, may-... this gives it a focus."And so I wrote this book called The Emperor's New Mind, which was supposed to be saying, "Well, you know, we, um... uh, l- everybody seems to be thinking one thing, but, uh, the little kid notices that" (laughs) -

   2. JRJoe Rogan12:46

      (laughs)

   3. SPSir Roger Penrose12:46

      "that the emperor doesn't have any clothes." So it was the, uh, that theme of that story which was the basis of the book. So, I say, "Okay, maybe lots of people think that what we're doing is computing, but if you stand back and you say, 'Well, no, there's something else going on.'" So that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness, but I wrote this book thinking that by the time I got to the end of the book... You see, it was, it was all about, mostly about physics and mathematics and things like that, but I was really aiming for this thing about what's going on in conscious thinking. And I thought, "Well, I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on, and by the time I get to the end of the book, I'll know pretty well wh- what it could be." I didn't. (laughs) I got to the end of the book, and I just sort of tapered off, rather, with something a little bit unbelievable, and that was the end. Now you see, I'd hoped that this book would stimulate young people to get interested in science and that sort of thing, that mathematics,

6. 13:46 – 15:39

   Enter Hameroff: microtubules as a possible quantum substrate for consciousness

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose13:46

      and that was fine. And when the book was published, I didn't get letters from y- young kids. I got letters from old retired people who... the ones who'd (laughs) had the time to read my book. Okay, well, that was a little disappointing, but okay, I'm glad the old retired people liked my book. But the other thing was, I got a letter from Stuart Hameroff and this letter said, more or less, "I think you don't appreciate that there's something else going on." Not neurons. I mean, the neurons, I could see, you couldn't isolate the quantum effects and the, the, the... you get the... what's it called? The environmental decoherence would happen, and you'd get no way of keeping the quantum state to the level that you need in this picture, so I realized I didn't have it. But Stuart Hameroff pointed out to me these little things called microtubules, and he'd built up a theory that microtubules were absolutely fundamental to consciousness. He had his own reasons for believing that. I'd never heard of them at that time, but then I checked up... You know, I get lots of letters from people who maybe don't make sense sometimes, the letters. And this one, I thought, "Well, is this another one?" (laughs) But then I realized these microtubules are there, and they look like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics up to a level where you, you could expect the, the quantum state to sort of collapse. That's the terminology people use in quantum mechanics.

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:14

      And microtubules, they're inside brain neurons?

   3. SPSir Roger Penrose15:17

      They are indeed.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:18

      And this is a recent discovery? Fairly recent?

   5. SPSir Roger Penrose15:19

      No! We've been going on for... They're actually in lots of cells, you see. People often complain, "Oh, they're in your liver too, not just-"

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:25

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SPSir Roger Penrose15:25

      "... your brain, so-"

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:26

      Right.

   9. SPSir Roger Penrose15:26

      "... why isn't your liver conscious?" And all that. But this has to do with the organization of them and the nature of them, the particular kind of microtubules, how they're- how they're arranged, which is different in the brain.

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:36

       How, well, how does it vary in the brain compared to other cells?

7. 15:39 – 20:41

   Microtubule structure, brain regions, and the conscious/unconscious divide

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose15:39

      I think one big difference, although I'm not... Stuart emphasizes it so much, there are two kinds of microtubules. They're the ones called the A-lattice and the B-lattice. And the A-lattice ones are the very symmetrical ones, they're tubes and, and they look the same all the way around. They've got a very beautiful arrangement of these proteins called tubulin, and they make a very nice arrangement, which is connected with Fibonacci numbers and things like that. So, they look a bit like fir cones, but they're all parallel, they're not... they don't, um, taper off. But, um, uh, the thing is, in the brain, I think most microtubules are probably what are called B-lattice ones, and they don't have so much symmetry. They've got a l- a, a sort of seam down the... one side, and they're very important in transporting su- substances around cells and so on. And microtubules, all sorts of things, they don't just do what, what Stuart and I think they may be doing in the brain. So, the idea is that, in the brain, they're organized differently and they... probably the ones that are important are the A-lattice ones, which are the very symmetrical ones. And f- for a long time, people couldn't see the difference in... um, because they look very similar. Um, and they may well be the ones that happen to be in pyramidal cells as a particular kind of cell. So, you know, one of the things int- interested me a lot is how it is that not all parts of the brain are the same in this respect. You see, you've got the cerebrum, this is the part at the top and, you know, divided down the middle and that... when you see brains, that's what you normally see with the convolutions in, in, in it. But right underneath and at the back, there's a thing called the cerebellum, which more... looks more like a, like a ball of wool or something, and the cerebellum, I don't... I... there may still be argument about this, but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious, and it has comparable number of neurons, far more connections between neurons than the cerebrum, and it's what takes control when... maybe when you're driving your car and you're thinking about something else, and you, you don't... you're not thinking what you're doing, because it's unconscious, and the unconscious control... You know, a pianist who's very expert and moves the fingers around and plays a note with her little finger, that pianist doesn't think, "Well, I gotta move that muscle this way and this bone that way," and so on. And it's, it's all controlled unconsciously, and a lot of this unconscious control is done somewhere else in the cerebellum when you, when you get really skilled. So, uh, it seemed to me, okay, you've got different kinds of structures, different... And it could well be that these pyramidal cells, which have a particular organization of microtubules, are the ones that... where the consciousness is really a- coming...... coming to light mainly. I don't know. There's a lot which is, which is not known about this, controversial and all sorts of things. But the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently. So it's not just how many neurons, how many connections are there, because there are more in the cerebellum. So it's not that, it's something else.

   2. JRJoe Rogan18:41

      And do they know this from observing the brain through FMRI or something like that during particular activities, like how-

   3. SPSir Roger Penrose18:47

      Uh, I don't know. I would imagine partly just examining it when... from dead people and looking at brains and trying to estimate how many neurons there are in it.

   4. JRJoe Rogan18:56

      Right. But how would they know what... which part, portions or act during these particular activities-

   5. SPSir Roger Penrose18:58

      Oh, which is conscious. Well, I, I don't know that they do know that well, I guess. (laughs)

   6. JRJoe Rogan19:03

      Hmm.

   7. SPSir Roger Penrose19:04

      But the co-... the cerebellum, there is a bit of an argument about that, uh, th- whether it's completely unconscious or not, but it seems that actions that's, that are carried out by the cerebellum, you, you don't... you're not aware of what you're doing.

   8. JRJoe Rogan19:17

      Hmm.

   9. SPSir Roger Penrose19:18

      But I mean, s- you know, if you're the tennis player who has to think very carefully about where the, you know, what, where to tilt the ball. Now, the control of what you're doing, so overall control, is probably done with the cerebrum. But the cerebellum is controlling the detailed motions, how the fingers move and all that kind of thing, and then you make sure that if you... the player thinks they're gonna hit the ball down, down the line there, and then the, the rest is done under the con- uh, control of an unconscious procedure. I may, I, I may be simplifying, but that's also-

   10. JRJoe Rogan19:51

       I, I understand what you're saying.

   11. SPSir Roger Penrose19:52

       Yes.

   12. JRJoe Rogan19:52

       So you're saying that th- there's... we don't totally understand, but w- we know that there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different activities.

   13. SPSir Roger Penrose20:00

       Yes.

   14. JRJoe Rogan20:00

       And some activities don't seem to be conscious.

   15. SPSir Roger Penrose20:03

       Yes. Yes. I mean, I think it's probably the case... no, I'm, I maybe... I don't know. I, I shouldn't make a statement when I don't really know. But certainly, there are lots of different parts of the cerebrum which may be, which may be not conscious too.

   16. JRJoe Rogan20:19

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SPSir Roger Penrose20:19

       So I'm not saying that the whole thing is capable of being conscious. It's they seem to be differences in different parts.

   18. JRJoe Rogan20:26

       But are you convinced that microtubules are responsible for consciousness or it's, uh, a primary theory?

   19. SPSir Roger Penrose20:34

       (laughs) I think they're the, one of the best candidates. Uh, you see, I don't think it's only microtu-... I don't know.

   20. JRJoe Rogan20:41

       Mm-hmm.

8. 20:41 – 25:09

   Anesthesia as a probe of consciousness—and the risk of ‘woo’

   1. SPSir Roger Penrose20:41

      I, I'm not sure what Stuart Hameroff's view on this is. He certainly thinks that microtubules are exceedingly important in consciousness. And I think he's right, that's the feeling I get. And he's done a lot of work on trying to find, uh, what anesthetic gases. It's an important, one of the important ways you can tell things about consciousness. And most of it, you can't, it's just hearsay and whatever it is.

   2. JRJoe Rogan21:01

      Hmm.

   3. SPSir Roger Penrose21:02

      But one of the important ways you can tell something about consciousness is what turns it off in a reversible way. And Stuart's job is, uh, do... you know, he's an anesthesiologist. He puts people to sleep. Well, I think he would complain if I say putting it to sleep because under anesthetic is actually different from sleep.

   4. JRJoe Rogan21:23

      Right.

   5. SPSir Roger Penrose21:23

      But you make them unconscious in a reversible way, you wanna make sure you, (laughs) that you can wake them up again. And, uh, i- it's obviously a very skilled thing, but I guess a lot of his colleagues might be skilled at doing it, but don't be asked the questions about what they're actually doing from the point of view of the biology and the physics and so on. So Stuart was really interested in that question, partly, I think, things like how mitosis, cell division.

   6. JRJoe Rogan21:49

      Hmm.

   7. SPSir Roger Penrose21:50

      And he was very struck by the way that the chromosomes all li- line up and that there's these, this microtubules which pulling them. And they're a really big part in, in, in, in the structure of cells and how they, how they behave and so on. But why their consciousness? Well, I guess it was an experience with, with, um, putting people under anesthetics and the fact that the gases which put you to sleep and they're... again, I shouldn't say to sleep, but (laughs) .

   8. JRJoe Rogan22:19

      Right, unconscious.

   9. SPSir Roger Penrose22:19

      Put you under anesthetic, are, are very unconnected chemically, they're different kinds of things, be... yet they still seem to have the same effect. And to understand what it is that they affect is, uh, you know, that's hi-... a lot of his interest is to do with that.

   10. JRJoe Rogan22:35

       So just by putting someone unconscious and registering what parts of the brain are n- no longer active, this is what they're using to sort of s- reverse engineer by turning those parts on, that's what enables consciousness? Is this the-

   11. SPSir Roger Penrose22:50

       Well, I think it's probably a simplification of, of what's going...

   12. JRJoe Rogan22:54

       Yes.

   13. SPSir Roger Penrose22:54

       But that's, that's a good, uh, first (laughs) , first step, yes.

   14. JRJoe Rogan22:58

       Consciousness becomes, as a subject, it's very, it's, it's very susceptible to woo, right?

   15. SPSir Roger Penrose23:05

       Indeed. (laughs)

   16. JRJoe Rogan23:06

       It gets... it's one of those weird ones-

   17. SPSir Roger Penrose23:08

       Yeah. Yep.

   18. JRJoe Rogan23:09

       ... where people want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness.

   19. SPSir Roger Penrose23:14

       Yes.

   20. JRJoe Rogan23:14

       And they start... it gets-

   21. SPSir Roger Penrose23:16

       Yeah. It's a murky area.

   22. JRJoe Rogan23:19

       Yes.

   23. SPSir Roger Penrose23:19

       And there's no clear borderline. Well, see, see, Stuart runs these consciousness conferences and he's very broad-minded. He has people all sorts of different views like the ones you mentioned.

   24. JRJoe Rogan23:28

       Mm-hmm.

   25. SPSir Roger Penrose23:29

       And it's not necessarily his view, but he likes to get a broad perspective on what's going on. I, I, I'm a bit more narrow-minded than he is on these matters. (laughs)

   26. JRJoe Rogan23:37

       Yeah, I am too. I'm, uh, very skeptical because I just... I understand the inclination that people have to lean towards the woo.

   27. SPSir Roger Penrose23:44

       Yes.

   28. JRJoe Rogan23:44

       That it's very fun.

   29. SPSir Roger Penrose23:45

       Yes.

   30. JRJoe Rogan23:45

       It's... for whatever reason, people are inclined-
9. 25:09 – 35:01

   Animal minds and continuity of consciousness across species

   1. JRJoe Rogan25:09

      And different than every other conscious animal.

   2. SPSir Roger Penrose25:13

      I'm not so sure about that.

   3. JRJoe Rogan25:14

      No?

   4. SPSir Roger Penrose25:14

      I think the difference isn't that big.

   5. JRJoe Rogan25:16

      Really?

   6. SPSir Roger Penrose25:17

      I mean, okay, we, you know, we use language to a degree. I mean, some animals use language to some kind of degree.

   7. JRJoe Rogan25:24

      Hmm.

   8. SPSir Roger Penrose25:24

      There's a huge difference in degree, I'd agree with that, but whether it's a difference in kind, I'm not at all sure. Um, you know, you watch these nature movies, and I remember seeing one about elephants, and this was about how the elephants were... Uh, they're always, uh, they're always led by a female elephant, and that's not relevant to the story, but they were trying to go from A to B. I don't re- remember what it was. And they, there was a, there was a whole herd of them and they would be doing that. But then at a certain point, they d- made a detour and they went off to a place where the leader of the elephant herd, her sister had died. And their, the bones and the tusks, I suppose, were there. The bones, anyway, were there, and the elephants picked them up, handed them around and, and seemed to caress them and move them around, and then they went back to join to the, the route that they were before.

   9. JRJoe Rogan26:18

      Wow.

   10. SPSir Roger Penrose26:18

       Now, what does that tell us? There's something going on which is not just some machine behaving (laughs) -

   11. JRJoe Rogan26:24

       Yes.

   12. SPSir Roger Penrose26:25

       ... like a robot. There's some, some feelings there that-

   13. JRJoe Rogan26:28

       Yes.

   14. SPSir Roger Penrose26:28

       ... we can appreciate. Um, another one I remember was one with these, uh, hunt- A- African hunting dogs, and the dogs... You see, there was a, uh, a route where some antelopes would tend to go, and they had to go across the river, and when they got to the point where they cross the river, they might slow down and, and make their way to get across. Now, these hunting dogs, you could see them. I think it was taken from the air, and they would go along towards this place where the river was and then they would break into two. So half of them would go one way towards the... And they would hide just where the river starts, and the other half would go and chase the antelopes. They'd go and bark and make an awful noise, chase them right there, and then the other ones would pounce on them. I mean, there's something there which is, you know, they, they've been working it out between themselves how to do it.

   15. JRJoe Rogan27:15

       Yes.

   16. SPSir Roger Penrose27:16

       Commu- communication of some kind.

   17. JRJoe Rogan27:18

       Yes.

   18. SPSir Roger Penrose27:19

       And I think there's, uh, what you'd call understanding. Okay, m- at a more primitive level than, than human understanding, but nevertheless there is something... There's no sort of clean dividing line, in my view. It's, it's, it's pretty continuous.

   19. JRJoe Rogan27:35

       Yeah, and this exists in wolves as well, so, very, very similar behavior, and they do-

   20. SPSir Roger Penrose27:41

       I can believe that.

   21. JRJoe Rogan27:41

       ... seem to have, uh, not just verbal but non-verbal communication. They seem to have some understanding of what the task is-

   22. SPSir Roger Penrose27:47

       Uh-huh. Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan27:47

       ... and what their roles are in the task. And even though there's n- not as many variables, maybe, as human life, there, there definitely seems to be a conscious awareness of, first of all, their, uh, their position in the hierarchy of the tribe-

   24. SPSir Roger Penrose28:01

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan28:01

       ... of the, the pack rather.

   26. SPSir Roger Penrose28:03

       Interesting, isn't it? Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan28:03

       But also their, what their objective is. This is, this is not a, a selfish objective, it's a group objective, and they, they operate as a group, and they do move like those African dogs that you were talking about.

   28. SPSir Roger Penrose28:15

       Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, uh, it's fascinating, all that, yeah. And there's a lot of indication that, uh... Well, certainly chimps and elephants-

   29. JRJoe Rogan28:23

       Hmm.

   30. SPSir Roger Penrose28:23

       ... and things and dolphins, w- we know about them, but I imagine it goes quite far down, I should think.
10. 35:01 – 39:35

    Quantum mechanics: two mysteries—entanglement vs measurement/collapse

    1. JRJoe Rogan35:01

       Well, the, this, the, the phrase quantum is another one that's fraught with woo.

    2. SPSir Roger Penrose35:07

       Indeed. (laughs)

    3. JRJoe Rogan35:08

       Right? When ... And some people, uh, like Deepak Chopra and the like, they love to use that word because as soon as you use that word, you can kinda get away with almost anything afterwards.

    4. SPSir Roger Penrose35:19

       That's right. It suggests ... Yes, I have to say I have ... Quantum mechanics is a strange thing, and it's, I, I sorta blame it for certain things. I don't want, I'm, don't want to be unfair here. I'm not saying ... When I say I blame it, it gives some people the impression, "Okay, the fact that your theory doesn't make any sense, there's nothing against it." (laughs) You say crazy things.

    5. JRJoe Rogan35:38

       Yeah.

    6. SPSir Roger Penrose35:38

       Quantum mechanics is crazy, so why don't you accept some other crazy theory? Of course, quantum mechanics has the virtue that it does agree with an awful lot of experiments.

    7. JRJoe Rogan35:47

       Hmm.

    8. SPSir Roger Penrose35:47

       It gives you huge insights into things that, that one didn't have before. So just the fact that it's crazy isn't, isn't enough to, (laughs) to make, to make it something you should study seriously.

    9. JRJoe Rogan35:58

       Well, um, i- uh, well, it's very, very difficult to understand, even for people who study it.

    10. SPSir Roger Penrose36:04

        Yes, indeed.

    11. JRJoe Rogan36:05

        So for someone like myself, um, trying to pay attention to this without devoting my entire life to it-

    12. SPSir Roger Penrose36:11

        Yeah.

    13. JRJoe Rogan36:11

        ... and it gets ... It's becomes a big problem 'cause there's-

    14. SPSir Roger Penrose36:15

        You see, are there two ... I, I, in one of my books, I try to explain there are actually two mysteries in quantum mechanics, and they get muddled. One of them is the whole subject is pretty crazy, yes. But it's coherent and it makes sense, and if you study it properly and you say, "Okay, that, that makes sense." And this includes things like, um, nonlocal effects where you can have two things nowaday- now even s- thousands of kilometers apart and you can see these quantum entanglement effects, so they're-

    15. JRJoe Rogan36:45

        Yes.

    16. SPSir Roger Penrose36:46

        ... they're, they're still in some sense connected with each other even though they're that far apart, which is pretty amazing.

    17. JRJoe Rogan36:51

        That's baffling.

    18. SPSir Roger Penrose36:52

        That's baffling, but that's part of the comprehensible part of quantum mechanics.

    19. JRJoe Rogan36:56

        Yes.

    20. SPSir Roger Penrose36:56

        It's muddied up-... because there's the other part which has to do with this collapse of the wave function, and standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense. (laughs)

    21. JRJoe Rogan37:05

        Hmm.

    22. SPSir Roger Penrose37:05

        But people get them muddled, in my view. You think because this doesn't make sense and that doesn't make... well, it's all a bit crazy and so anything crazy is, is, is up for grabs. But it seems to me that quantum mechanics, the things which are crazy and they do hang together and the theory works and you understand that, that's fine, but the things which involve the collapse of the wave function, that's not fine because we don't have the right theory yet.

    23. JRJoe Rogan37:29

        Hmm.

    24. SPSir Roger Penrose37:29

        That's why it doesn't make logical sense because it's not the right theory yet. That's my view. I mean, I'm a minority in saying this. Most people who study the foundations of quantum mechanics say, "Well, we haven't got the right interpretation right yet. We, we have to think what it means," and so on. They don't think, "Well, hmm, maybe it's not quite right. Maybe there's something... when these effects get big enough, something else comes in and we, we need a new insight, a new theory." So that's what I think.

    25. JRJoe Rogan37:58

        Now in something like superposition, where something can be both still and in motion at the same time, as soon as you say that-

    26. SPSir Roger Penrose38:06

        Yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan38:06

        ... to, uh, the common person like myself-

    28. SPSir Roger Penrose38:09

        Yes. Yes.

    29. JRJoe Rogan38:09

        ... my brain glazes over and, uh-

    30. SPSir Roger Penrose38:11

        Yes.
11. 39:35 – 42:29

    Penrose’s core caution: avoid mystical ‘quantum mind’ leaps

    1. JRJoe Rogan39:35

       Now, when you discuss consciousness and the mystery of consciousness, and then you take into account some of these characteristics that are being displayed in the quantum world, do you think that perhaps some of them are interchangeable or, or similar to consciousness itself, that there is some sort of a connection that human beings share in some s- some strange, unique-

    2. SPSir Roger Penrose40:02

       Hmm.

    3. JRJoe Rogan40:02

       ... and mis- or n- not-

    4. SPSir Roger Penrose40:04

       Yeah. (laughs)

    5. JRJoe Rogan40:04

       ... not understood way yet?

    6. SPSir Roger Penrose40:06

       I think one has to be careful about these things.

    7. JRJoe Rogan40:08

       Hmm.

    8. SPSir Roger Penrose40:08

       And sometimes do, well, even Niels Bohr, who is one of the founders of these ideas, um, and sort of, uh, he tried to make a philosophy out of quantum mechanics and y- what do you call it? It's, uh, um, complementarity and so on. I think that's going a bit far. I don't really see-

    9. JRJoe Rogan40:28

       Hmm. 'Cause there's no evidence for it as of yet.

    10. SPSir Roger Penrose40:29

        I don't think so. I think it's a bit misleading, that one... You can see analogies between things, but I don't see for myself that, that it sh- should be taken much further than that. But I, you know, maybe there's more there.

    11. JRJoe Rogan40:44

        But you're open to the possibility, should new information be-

    12. SPSir Roger Penrose40:47

        Yeah, yeah. I mean, if it comes to things like, uh, you know, when people talk about entanglements and things, quantum states can spread to long distances.

    13. JRJoe Rogan40:58

        Hmm.

    14. SPSir Roger Penrose40:58

        Does that mean that human beings' minds can stretch to long distances and so on? So there's people who will raise questions like that. I don't think so myself. I think that's, that's pretty far-fetched.

    15. JRJoe Rogan41:09

        Hmm.

    16. SPSir Roger Penrose41:09

        But you, you know, you might wonder, well, could it be that there is some quantum state which is shared between in- different individuals? It's hard to see that could be unless they were... well, I mean, if they were identical twins, I suppose they were once in one cell at one time. (laughs)

    17. JRJoe Rogan41:24

        (laughs)

    18. SPSir Roger Penrose41:24

        But you'd have to preserve that information all the way through, and I don't-

    19. JRJoe Rogan41:27

        Hmm.

    20. SPSir Roger Penrose41:27

        ... I just don't see how that could happen. So I- I'm not a fan of trying to use quantum ideas sort of directly in, say, human behavior or something. I think the ano- those analogies are pretty far-fetched, partly because the sort of mathematics you use in quantum mechanics is very specific to quantum mechanics and doesn't really apply to macroscopic behavior, as far as I can see.

    21. JRJoe Rogan41:55

        Is this something that is, uh, that y- you're as- asked about most often?

    22. SPSir Roger Penrose42:01

        Y- you mean in my research altogether, or?

    23. JRJoe Rogan42:04

        J- just amongst-

    24. SPSir Roger Penrose42:06

        Ah, quantum mechanics.

    25. JRJoe Rogan42:06

        ... common people like myself.

    26. SPSir Roger Penrose42:07

        Uh, it's only one of them. But you see, it's slightly misleading when you're thinking about what my interests are.

    27. JRJoe Rogan42:14

        Hmm.

    28. SPSir Roger Penrose42:14

        Because I had this... as I say, the... I explain more or less the history of my ideas there, and I did write a book, or at least another one after that too. In fact, I guess I've written three books about that, although one was taking down lectures and so on. Um, but it's not what I do mainly.

    29. JRJoe Rogan42:29

        Right.

12. 42:29 – 56:27

    Switching to cosmology: black holes, singularities, and Penrose’s theorem

    1. SPSir Roger Penrose42:29

       My main research is, is, is on cosmology, uh, well, thing... there's this area called twistor theory. I won't necessarily go into that. But it's meant to be foundational quantum mech- uh, foundational physics, not necessarily. But general relativity, I mean, the... I guess the work I did originally was... or people paid attention to was in, in general relativity and black holes, what a black hole is, why we have the idea that they're there at all.That sort of thing, I worked on that at one point.

    2. JRJoe Rogan43:01

       Cosmology as a whole is one of the most terrifying concepts to me.

    3. SPSir Roger Penrose43:06

       (laughs)

    4. JRJoe Rogan43:06

       'Cause I just, when I start thinking about the size and scale-

    5. SPSir Roger Penrose43:10

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JRJoe Rogan43:11

       ... of everything, I get to a certain point and my brain just sh- shuts off, there's not enough juice.

    7. SPSir Roger Penrose43:18

       Well, it's pretty huge.

    8. JRJoe Rogan43:20

       (laughs)

    9. SPSir Roger Penrose43:20

       One is, has to think on a pretty huge scale, but it's like so many things, you, it looks so mind-boggling at first, and then when you get used to the idea y- you can sort of play around with the ideas and maybe forget how mind-boggling it should be (laughs) .

    10. JRJoe Rogan43:35

        I was watching a documentary on super massive black holes and they were discussing how the size of, this is, I don't know if this is still a f- a current theory, this documentary was a few years old, but they were saying that the, there's a super massive black hole inside of every galaxy that's one-half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy and that they, there's, the, one of the theories was that inside these super massive black holes could be an entirely different universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with their own black holes, and, and that it's infinite.

    11. SPSir Roger Penrose44:05

        Well, you see, I have a fairly, an idea which I think the mainstream does still regard as a bit crazy, but not like that. I don't think you're gonna have much fun inside a black hole. The black-

    12. JRJoe Rogan44:17

        No parties in there? (laughs)

    13. SPSir Roger Penrose44:19

        Uh, not, not much. Well, you could have a really big black hole, and there's a lot of time in there.

    14. JRJoe Rogan44:23

        Yeah.

    15. SPSir Roger Penrose44:23

        A really big one. If you, if you were in a spaceship, you could, you could have a few parties before you-

    16. JRJoe Rogan44:28

        (laughs)

    17. SPSir Roger Penrose44:29

        ... hit a singularity, yes. But I'm not sure I recommend it (laughs) . Um, no, uh, yeah, I mean, black holes are remarkable enough and, but, I mean, the th- thing I did which was in, well, 1964 and then published in '65 was to show that black holes, well, I'm using a terminology that wasn't around at that time, that the black holes colla- it was colla- gravitational collapse. You see, the, this, the history went back to originally I guess Chandrasekhar, an Indian scientist, when he was not quite 20 I think, I can't remember if it was 19 or 20, and he was, uh, going to England to study physics, astronomy and so on. And he worked on this problem about what holds white dwarfs apart. These are these very massive stars, the companion of Sirius. Sirius is a white dwarf. And, uh, he was doing calculations to find out, uh, whether they, uh, what... The interior is a very particularly struc- structure of matter, and he came to the conclusions if they had a bigger mass than a certain amount, which is about, uh, a bit less than w- one and a half times the sun's mass, they wouldn't be able to hold themselves apart, and so they would collapse. And he didn't speculate on what had happened, he just went on his list. I think it was some very modest comment he made, is when, uh, we are left speculating on possibilities (laughs) or something.

    18. JRJoe Rogan45:57

        Mm-hmm.

    19. SPSir Roger Penrose45:57

        But then that was in the 1930s, I guess, around about 1930, and much later just before the war, um, Second World War, 1939, well I say a bit later I guess, 19, um, 39, there was a paper by Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame and Snyder which is a student of his, Hartland Snyder, and they produced a model which was a, well, a solution of the Einstein equations which describes a- a cloud of dust which collapses and becomes what we now call a black hole. So this was the first clear picture of collapse to a black hole. Now, in their picture they made two huge assumptions. Well, one of them is dust, the material, that means it didn't have any pressure and so you could imagine when it gets close to itself it might push away if it had pressure on it in any way, but this was just dust. That was one thing, but more important that their model was exactly symmetrical, so it was just spherically symmetrical, all the matter falling in, the dust particles would be focused right into the central point. And so it's not so hard to believe that you get a singularity where the density goes infinite, the curvatures go infinite, and your equations go crazy. So at that point when the dust reaches the middle point, okay, it's not so surprising because it's a very contrived situation. So I think a lot of people thought, "Well, perhaps we shouldn't take it seriously." They, I think they weren't sure. But then there was a paper by two Russians called Kalatni- Lifshitz and Kalatnikov, and they seemed to have proved that you didn't get singularities in the general case, that somehow it would swirl around and swish out again, you see? So that was a possibility. And then there was this discovery I think in 1962 when Maarten Schmidt, a Dutch astronomer, okay, Dutch-American I think he, where he was living there at the time, I don't remember, but he observed what became what we call the, the first quasar. So this was an object which was irradiating an awful amount of energy, far more than a- an entire galaxy, but it seemed to be a very small thing. It couldn't be much bigger than the size of the solar system, if even that big, because it, variations in brightness indicated that they had hit the speed of light could... Size of it had to be comparable with, uh, the speed at which the variations in- in- in, um, in brightness came about. So it seemed to be an object that was enormously energetic, producing more energy than a whole galaxy and varying with such a degree that it must be fairly small, and this raised the question of whether it was small enough to be what we now call a black hole. In other words, its, um... There's a thing called the Schwarzschild radius...... Schwarzschild was the man who first discovered the solutions of Einstein's equations, which described this spherical body. But he didn't extrapolate it inwards to what's called this horizon. We call it a horizon now, it used to be called the Schwarzschild singularity and people began to realize that it wasn't really a singularity, it's more something you could imagine falling through. I guess it was Lemaître who first made clear... that clear, but not many people paid attention. But that was the idea of a black hole and it looked then is that these quasars could be having some black hole in the middle of them and I remember John Wheeler, who was at Princeton then, very distinguished scientist, and he got very worried about these things and he talked to me and he got worried about it and, "Do we believe? Is there a singularity in the middle? Do we believe? Lifshitz and Kleinkraft that they sort of swirl around and bounce out, what are we supposed to think?" So I started thinking about this problem and since... at that time, well, you see either people... when you want to solve the Einstein equations, either you make a lot of assumptions and it's a symmetrical... li- like the Oppenheimer-Schneider model, you assume it's got very special properties and then you can maybe solve the equations, but only very, very special cases and the computers weren't powerful enough to tell you very much about what happened. So I started thinking about this problem and realizing that I'd have to think about it in a different way and so I used ideas which involve ideas from topology and things like that to show that there had to be a singularity in the middle, provided that the collapse had reached a certain point of no return. I guess, uh, to get some idea of... I don't know, it's just not too misleading (laughs) , there's a- a mathematical theorem called the- the Hairy Dog Theorem (laughs) .

    20. JRJoe Rogan50:48

        Hairy Dog Theorem?

    21. SPSir Roger Penrose50:49

        Yes. I mean, that's just a jocular terminology.

    22. JRJoe Rogan50:53

        Right.

    23. SPSir Roger Penrose50:53

        But you think of, uh, something which is topologically a sphere, that means, you see, i- you imagine a dog shape, but you could sort of move it around with a piece of plasticine until it looked like a sphere. It doesn't have holes in it. Okay, forget about his digestive system, you see? You're thinking about the surface outside.

    24. JRJoe Rogan51:10

        Mm-hmm.

    25. SPSir Roger Penrose51:11

        And then you're... uh, the problem is you try to comb the hair on the dog all the way around and the theorem says there's got to be somewhere where the hair doesn't lie flat. A- a- and you try it on a sphere, there's got to be a point where- where the hair makes a kind of singular point. So it's a bit like that. You have no idea where the singularity is but you know from general topological reasons that there's got to be one somewhere and that was the sort of argument that- that I produced and, uh, I guess a lot of people had a little bit of trouble because they'd never seen this kind of argument (laughs) and a lot of people picked up on it, in particular Stephen Hawking and, uh, i- it became, for a while, a l- uh, many people were working on it. I guess it's not so popular now because probably we've run out of theorems (laughs) .

    26. JRJoe Rogan52:00

        Uh, uh, uh, the idea of a singularity, like, uh, is... when you see something like a- a quasar or th- the- the center of a- a galaxy-

    27. SPSir Roger Penrose52:12

        Mm-hmm.

    28. JRJoe Rogan52:13

        ... um, and we- we're talking about a black hole, when you say a singularity, what- what exactly are you- do you mean by that?

    29. SPSir Roger Penrose52:20

        Well, the normal expectation is that you have a place, like in the middle of the Oppenheimer-Schneider dust cloud, that a point there where the density becomes infinite and so the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite. So you have a place where the equations run away and they go to infinity and you say, "Well, something's gone wrong." But maybe initially it was in these very symmetrical cases, but- but you could show by these indirect arguments that somewhere something's got to go wrong. You can't continue the equations of Einstein and they get stuck-

    30. JRJoe Rogan52:58

        Right.
13. 56:27 – 1:08:31

    Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC): from heat death to a new Big Bang

    1. SPSir Roger Penrose56:27

       (laughs) Well, you see, it's part of a story which, um... oh, I don't know, about 15 years ago I must have... years are passing by, I can't remember how long ago now. So I had this idea... You see, the universe as a whole is expanding. Now, um, early in the, this century, I... don't ask me dates again, um, some people, by observing supernar- supernova star, exploding stars very, very far away, they found out that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. And some people found this very mysterious. On the other hand, it's in all the cosmology books because there is that expectation. You see, in 1915 Einstein produced his general theory. In 1917 he introduced what's called the cosmological constant. So you think of a... uh, it was called lambda. You think of a, a v-shape turned upside down, which is a lambda. And he introduced this term for the wrong reason, because at that time people weren't... there was some indication the universe was expanding, but not very clear, and Einstein, uh, I guess maybe didn't know or didn't believe it, and this. It... Hubble's observations hadn't yet c- come to make a convincing case of the expansion. So Hei- Einstein thought, "Well, maybe the universe is static." It's kind of philosophically nice to think that it's sitting there all the time. And he couldn't make it do that, uh, so he had to introduce this term called the cosmological constant. And he did that and then not while... very much longer after this, Hubble showed that the universe does seem to be expanding and Einstein regarded this lambda term as his biggest blunder. Which is an irony because it turns out that this term is probably the explanation for the expansion of the universe that we now see. So it's what, what people call dark energy. I don't like the term very much because it's neither dark nor proper energy in any clear sense, but still. Don't... let's not worry about that. (laughs)

    2. JRJoe Rogan58:45

       Right. It's a... it's a, it's an odd term.

    3. SPSir Roger Penrose58:48

       Yes, I think so. It's all a little confusing because there's dark matter as well-

    4. JRJoe Rogan58:52

       Right.

    5. SPSir Roger Penrose58:52

       ... which is quite different, you have... mustn't get them confused.

    6. JRJoe Rogan58:55

       Yeah.

    7. SPSir Roger Penrose58:55

       But the dark energy, as it's called, or the cosmological constant, which as far as we can tell i- is completely consistent with the observations. It's a positive number, very small, but seems to be producing this expansion, and I'm quite happy with that viewpoint because it leads to a picture which I've been trying to plug for a while now. Maybe up to 15 years, I can't remember. Um, the idea, I, I... it's hard to explain (laughs) , but let me try. It came about because I was worrying about the remote future and I was thinking, "Okay, when these black holes are around and they're swallowing up all the stars and they're just sitting around, and what's the most next exciting thing happening?" Well, the Hawking evaporation. They're going to radiate away. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes have this temperature, extremely cold. I mean, th- these enormous ones are absurdly cold, much colder than anything made on the Earth. And, uh... but when the universe expands and expands and expands, it gets colder than the black holes and so those black holes get, become the hotting f- hottest things around and so they radiate away very, very slowly this Hawking radiation. And that carries energy and so they shrink, and they shrink, and they shrink, and finally they disappear with a pop. When I say a pop it's probably a pretty big explosion but, but, um, n- n- n- not that big from a cosmological, astrophysical scale. So they disappear. Well, it may have been pretty boring when you're sitting around waiting for the black hole to go pop, but afterwards that's really boring. So this was (laughs) a picture I thought of, being rather depressed by it, thinking that's, that's our, the fate, you see?

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:43

       Mm-hmm.

    9. SPSir Roger Penrose1:00:43

       The fate of all the interesting things happening, ultimate fate, is this unbelievably boring final state. Okay, this is an emotional argument but l- give me a bit of leeway. (laughs)

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:54

        Okay.

    11. SPSir Roger Penrose1:00:54

        So I began to think, "Well, it's not gonna be us who are going to be bored because we're not gonna be around. The, the main things that'll be around will be photons."... and it's pretty hard to borrow a photon-

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:01:07

        (laughs)

    13. SPSir Roger Penrose1:01:08

        ... for two very good reasons. One is, it probably doesn't have conscious experience, there's no way that's sure, so... But the other is more the science point, that the t- they don't measure time 'cause a photon has no mass, it travels at the speed of light, and c- w- the way relativity works, it means that clocks stop, if you like. So if it had experiences, it would... the moment of its creation would be one moment and the next moment would be infinity. And so they just zip out to infinity without noticing a thing. Now you see, I'd been doing work on this kind of thing, thinking more about gravitational radiation and how you measure its energy and things like that, and it was a very useful picture to squash down infinity. A useful thing to think about here, if you've seen these pictures by the Dutch artist MC Escher-

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:01:57

        Mm-hmm, yes.

    15. SPSir Roger Penrose1:01:58

        ... and there are those which are called Circle Limits, and there's a very famous one with angels and devils interlocking, and they get all crowded up onto the edge. Now, what you've gotta think about is that this is a kind of geometry called hyperbolic geometry, and the angels and devils live in that geometry. And the ones right close to the edge think they're the same size and same shape as the ones in the middle. Oh, you got it.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:02:21

        There it is right there.

    17. SPSir Roger Penrose1:02:21

        Great.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:02:22

        Yeah.

    19. SPSir Roger Penrose1:02:23

        And so, the, the idea is that if you look at it from the angels and devils point of view, that's infinity, that boundary.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:02:32

        Mm-hmm.

    21. SPSir Roger Penrose1:02:33

        But from our point of view, we can look at it and we have what's called a conformal map, that picture is a conformal map. What that means is that little shapes are quite consistently drawn, but they can be big or small, and you don't care about whether they're big or they're small, as long as small shapes are accurate, or angles, if you like, are correctly drawn. So it's what's called a conformal map, and that conformal map describes infinity. Now you can do the same thing to, to the universe. When I say do it, um, you can imagine it. (laughs)

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:03:07

        Mm-hmm.

    23. SPSir Roger Penrose1:03:07

        Where this remote future, you can squash it down, just like in the Escher picture, to a finite boundary. And as far as the things with no mass, they don't have a way of measuring how big or small it is. The Maxwell equations don't know the scales, they don't care. It's... they work just as well for small as for big, and you can stretch it in some place and squash it somewhere else, as long as the stretching and squashing is isotropic, so just as much one way as the other way, which means more or less that you keep what are called the light cones there. Let's not go into details here, but it means that, that if you have things without mass, and most particularly the photons, then that boundary is just like anywhere else, and the photons go zipping up to it, and so you might think they've gotta have somewhere to go. Okay, well, that's a... you don't have to think that, but that was the point of view I had-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:03:58

        Mm-hmm.

    25. SPSir Roger Penrose1:03:58

        ... that the photons need to... need somewhere to enter, in a way, but then where does it go? But then there's the other picture, which is the opposite end, there's the Big Bang. Now you can do a similar sort of trick there, which is stretching it out and making it into a boundary. And that can be done, too. I, I played around with these ideas for a long time, and the standard cosmology models, you can do it with. But the more complicated cosmology models, you might have one which is very complicated Big Bang, the general ones don't look like that at all. So you need a condition which tells you that the Big Bang was a very special kind that it was. It's all tied up with this thing called the second law of thermodynamics, and this all ties together with physics in a way which perhaps we don't have time to talk about. (laughs) But it seemed to me a really good idea to have the condition on the Big Bang that you could continue it in the same way. I should say the idea of doing this was a former student of mine, Paul Todd, who was a colleague of mine, and he used this as continu- a c- conformal continuation as a w- as a nice way of saying what the condition is on the Big Bang to give you what you want. But that's a huge condition, but it... nevertheless, it's what starts our universe off in, in a, a, a very special state, which, uh, is what we live off, in a way. It's the second law of thermodynamics needs that to, to get going. Anyway, l- uh, I don't know if you wanna worry about that. But anyway, the point was that it looks as though it's a good condition on the Big Bang that it also should be conformally like a boundary, which, if you had no mass, you wouldn't notice it. Okay, you've got particles with mass running around near the Big Bang, but as you get closer and closer and closer, the energy goes up, the temperature goes zooning, zooming up. They're zipping around at such a speed that the energy of their motion is much bigger than the E equals MC squared mass, Einstein's mass. E- e- the energy in, in the mass is a certain amount, but when they get so hot, you can forget about the mass.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:06:10

        Mm-hmm.

    27. SPSir Roger Penrose1:06:10

        So they, like photons, behave like, uh, particles without mass, and so they're just interested in the conformal geometry. So the crazy idea I had, not just only you stretch out the Big Bang and you squash down the infinity, but maybe our Big Bang was a squashed-down infinity of a previous eon. So I'm saying our eon began with a Big Bang, ended up with this exponential expansion. There was another one before us, there will be another one after us, there was another one before that, and so on.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:06:46

        So it's an infinite cycle of Big Bangs-

    29. SPSir Roger Penrose1:06:48

        That's the picture.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:06:49

        ... and constant expansion to the point where there's no more energy, and then somehow or another a big bang comes out of that again.
14. 1:08:31 – 1:12:44

    Testing CCC: ‘Hawking points’ in the cosmic microwave background

    1. SPSir Roger Penrose1:08:31

       But, uh, no, I wasn't quite happy with that. I thought maybe you could see signals coming through, so I had one idea about that. But more recently, and this is only just this year, um, s-... I have two Polish colleagues, that's, um, Krzysztof Meissner and Pawel Mrowiowski, and there is a, a Korean who works in New York called Daniel Ahn, and we, the four of us, have a paper which I think today or tomorrow will be the new improved version of this paper-

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:09:01

       Hmm.

    3. SPSir Roger Penrose1:09:01

       ... should be on the arXiv. And this, the title of the paper is, Are We Seeing Hawking Points in the CMB Sky? Now what's a Hawking point? You see, I talked about the black holes. See, in the previous eon to ours, assuming it's more or less like ours, there would be black holes in clusters of galaxies, huge enormous ones swallowing up pret- pretty well the whole cluster, and what happens to the energy in those black holes? Well, it goes out in Hawking radiation. Uh, it takes an age, a- ages and ages and ages, maybe 10 to 100 year, Googol years (laughs) or something, yeah, ages and ages. But all that energy in the picture comes out basically in one point. Think of that Escher picture, and right at the very edge, you see there are an awful lot of angels and des- devils squashed together there-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:09:52

       Hmm.

    5. SPSir Roger Penrose1:09:52

       ... so that the entire radiation from that single black hole will be squashed into that little point. And we're on the other side. What do we see? Well, there will be a big release of energy at that point, and that's what we call the Hawking point, and it spreads out. You see, what we see in the cosmic microwave background, this is radiation coming from all directions, and this radiation doesn't come from the big bang exactly. It comes from 380,000 years after the big bang, so there's a sort of last scattering surface where photons which are trying to get out finally, finally can escape and we see them. Now, that spread out from the Hawking point to what you see in the, in the cosmic microwave background in the last scattering surface, is something of the diameter of about eight times the diameter of the moon, no bigger, no smaller. Now you wouldn't see the whole thing because our pass cone where, where we, what we see, 'cause you cut across it, we don't see the whole thing, but we see probably most of it. So you could imag- imagine something from about four to eight times the moon's diameter, which is a small region which is highly energetic, more energetic in the middle and it ta- tapers off as you go to the edge, and we seem to see these things. The analysis that, um, that the Poles, they have the techniques, and the actual analyzing the data, this is the Planck Satellite data. It was done by Daniel Ahn, and then we look at the data, and we seem to see an effect which... See, what you do is you, we've got only one universe, that's what they complained about, said, "How do you know if something's real or not?"

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:11:42

       Hmm.

    7. SPSir Roger Penrose1:11:42

       Well, you make z- zillions of fake universes and you compare this with them, and there's a lot of technique about how you do this. But, um, Daniel first did a thousand of these fakes, and they were sort of two sizes of these... You look at these rings to see whether the temperature goes out from the outside to the middle, and there were two sizes, both within the size that I say, about four degrees across the sky, and, um, there was no evidence of them at all in the simulations, so this is a real effect. Okay, then people were skeptical of this for one reason or another, so Daniel did another, well, 10,000 altogether. And you, occasionally there are one or two which do, or two or three to be precise, where you see this effect in the simulations. But if you work out the probability that this is a real effect, you come up with a confidence level of 99.98% that this is a real effect. So we're waiting to see what people say about this.

15. 1:12:44 – 1:21:13

    Multiverses, dark components, and ‘edge’ research culture

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:12:44

       What are your thoughts on multiverses?

    2. SPSir Roger Penrose1:12:47

       Well, you see, this is different because-

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:12:50

       Hmm.

    4. SPSir Roger Penrose1:12:50

       ... this is, uh, well, sequential.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:12:52

       Yeah.

    6. SPSir Roger Penrose1:12:52

       So I don't call it a multiverse. They each influence the next one, and so they're not independent worlds.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:12:58

       Right, but indi- the, the, the possibility of independent...

    8. SPSir Roger Penrose1:13:02

       Yeah. Well, you see, there are two reasons for believing in multiverses. One of them is the quantum reason that maybe where you have the Schrodinger's dead cat and the live cat, they're in different worlds-

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:13:14

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SPSir Roger Penrose1:13:14

        ... and they're separate universes. I don't believe that argument. I don't think that's the right way to look at quantum mechanics, but many people do, and that suggests that you might have these multiple universes in some sense.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:13:25

        What's unattractive about that to you?

    12. SPSir Roger Penrose1:13:27

        ... it doesn't explain what we see. See, you want a theory which explains the world we see.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:13:32

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SPSir Roger Penrose1:13:33

        And the world we see, you get collapse, the, the state does. And to explain that, well, it's only because we've drifted off into some world and another version of ourselves has drifted into another one, and some see one and the others see the other, and they're all in superposition, it doesn't explain why you see one world in... and just has this kind of coherence. I mean, lots of people try, and there are many attempts at this sort of thing. It's, it's quite a widely held view.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:14:02

        Mm-hmm.

    16. SPSir Roger Penrose1:14:03

        And if you believe quantum mechanics, the, the collapse is not real and it doesn't happen, and all the alternatives, the dead cats and the live cat coexists in different worlds, that's their interpretation. That's a view. I don't think that... I want, I want an explanation for the world we, we, we live in (laughs) -

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:14:21

        Hmm.

    18. SPSir Roger Penrose1:14:21

        ... and you don't see cats... (laughs) different worlds with cats and... Well, i- it's a long story.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:14:27

        Right.

    20. SPSir Roger Penrose1:14:27

        I mean, I... It's clearly, it's a, a view you can hold to, and if you don't want a monkey with quantum mechanics, it's where you're led. So that's, that's right. That's the alternative. Either you don't make a single try to change quantum mechanics at all, and then you are led to this multi-world, many, many world picture. I think it even doesn't make that much sense, so you've got to be careful about it.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:14:51

        Hmm.

    22. SPSir Roger Penrose1:14:51

        That whether they are really like different distinct worlds, I don't think it really... My view is it doesn't really work, but let me not try and attack that. I think I have a different view, which is that the theory is not quite, quite right, right, and that, um, there is something which makes the, the collapse into a physical process, and, uh, the... There's, there's only one world. Now, the other many worlds view, which is... comes from a different reason, and that is that there he se- there seem to be various accidents, um, in... Well, maybe one of them being that the neutron is just slightly more massive than the proton. That's one. There are lots of other accidents we see that if they were a little different, then life as we know it couldn't happen.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:15:38

        Hmm.

    24. SPSir Roger Penrose1:15:39

        And so how do you explain this? Well, some people say, "Well, all these universes with different values of these constants all coexist. It's just we only see the one that we're in because the numbers come out right for us." So that's what's called an anthropic argument.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:15:55

        Hmm.

    26. SPSir Roger Penrose1:15:56

        Okay. I can see the argument. I don't like it much. It's sort of... I think we need a better explanation for why the numbers are what we see and so on. But that's... That, that one makes more sense to me than the other one. So, so I think one kind... maybe has to take that seriously, but it's certainly not the view I'm presenting here with this picture.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:16:18

        It's... For someone like me, it's so interesting to know that there's still a considerable amount of speculation.

    28. SPSir Roger Penrose1:16:25

        Yes. Oh, yeah. Well, it's, it's... There's a lot of speculation, but a lot of it is pretty off the wall, and a lot of people-

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:16:34

        Hmm.

    30. SPSir Roger Penrose1:16:34

        ... think mine are off the wall, you see-

Episode duration: 1:36:52