Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

Joe Rogan 0:02 All right, here we go. Three... (clears throat) Boom, and we're live. How are you, sir?

Sir Roger Penrose 0:09 I'm fine, pretty good.

Joe Rogan 0:11 Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

Sir Roger Penrose 0:12 That's fine. My pleasure.

Joe Rogan 0:14 Who roped you into this?

Sir Roger Penrose 0:16 I think, I suppose James Tagg, probably. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:19 (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.

Sir Roger Penrose 0:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 0:33 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.

Sir Roger Penrose 0:53 (laughs) Well, I mean, we're all conscious, and so we may have theories about it.

Joe Rogan 0:58 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 0:59 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

Sir Roger Penrose 3:00 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.

Joe Rogan 4:54 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 4:54 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

Sir Roger Penrose 8:25 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

Sir Roger Penrose 11:27 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) -

Joe Rogan 12:46 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 12:46 "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,

Sir Roger Penrose 13:46 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.

Joe Rogan 15:14 And microtubules, they're inside brain neurons?

Sir Roger Penrose 15:17 They are indeed.

Joe Rogan 15:18 And this is a recent discovery? Fairly recent?

Sir Roger Penrose 15:19 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-"

Joe Rogan 15:25 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 15:25 "... your brain, so-"

Joe Rogan 15:26 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 15:26 "... 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.

Joe Rogan 15:36 How, well, how does it vary in the brain compared to other cells?

Sir Roger Penrose 15:39 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.

Joe Rogan 18:41 And do they know this from observing the brain through FMRI or something like that during particular activities, like how-

Sir Roger Penrose 18:47 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.

Joe Rogan 18:56 Right. But how would they know what... which part, portions or act during these particular activities-

Sir Roger Penrose 18:58 Oh, which is conscious. Well, I, I don't know that they do know that well, I guess. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 19:03 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 19:04 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.

Joe Rogan 19:17 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 19:18 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-

Joe Rogan 19:51 I, I understand what you're saying.

Sir Roger Penrose 19:52 Yes.

Joe Rogan 19:52 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.

Sir Roger Penrose 20:00 Yes.

Joe Rogan 20:00 And some activities don't seem to be conscious.

Sir Roger Penrose 20:03 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.

Joe Rogan 20:19 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 20:19 So I'm not saying that the whole thing is capable of being conscious. It's they seem to be differences in different parts.

Joe Rogan 20:26 But are you convinced that microtubules are responsible for consciousness or it's, uh, a primary theory?

Sir Roger Penrose 20:34 (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.

Joe Rogan 20:41 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 20:41 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.

Joe Rogan 21:01 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 21:02 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.

Joe Rogan 21:23 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 21:23 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.

Joe Rogan 21:49 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 21:50 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) .

Joe Rogan 22:19 Right, unconscious.

Sir Roger Penrose 22:19 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.

Joe Rogan 22:35 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-

Sir Roger Penrose 22:50 Well, I think it's probably a simplification of, of what's going...

Joe Rogan 22:54 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 22:54 But that's, that's a good, uh, first (laughs) , first step, yes.

Joe Rogan 22:58 Consciousness becomes, as a subject, it's very, it's, it's very susceptible to woo, right?

Sir Roger Penrose 23:05 Indeed. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:06 It gets... it's one of those weird ones-

Sir Roger Penrose 23:08 Yeah. Yep.

Joe Rogan 23:09 ... where people want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness.

Sir Roger Penrose 23:14 Yes.

Joe Rogan 23:14 And they start... it gets-

Sir Roger Penrose 23:16 Yeah. It's a murky area.

Joe Rogan 23:19 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 23:19 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.

Joe Rogan 23:28 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 23:29 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)

Joe Rogan 23:37 Yeah, I am too. I'm, uh, very skeptical because I just... I understand the inclination that people have to lean towards the woo.

Sir Roger Penrose 23:44 Yes.

Joe Rogan 23:44 That it's very fun.

Sir Roger Penrose 23:45 Yes.

Joe Rogan 23:45 It's... for whatever reason, people are inclined-

Sir Roger Penrose 23:48 Yes.

Joe Rogan 23:48 ... to, to lean towards... did you ever s- you saw that movie... I don't know if you saw it, uh, What The Bleep Do We Know?

Sir Roger Penrose 23:54 Oh, yes, I did. That wa- that w-

Joe Rogan 23:55 People love that kind of stuff.

Sir Roger Penrose 23:57 That was a little worrying to me, that one.

Joe Rogan 23:58 A little bit?

Sir Roger Penrose 23:59 (laughs) Yes.

Joe Rogan 24:00 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 24:00 Yes, indeed. No, that did worry me, yes.

Joe Rogan 24:02 Yeah. (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 24:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:02 Well, it's, uh, it's just... you know, it was written... the movie was made by a cult leader.

Sir Roger Penrose 24:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:07 And it-

Sir Roger Penrose 24:07 No.

Joe Rogan 24:08 ... it gets a little squirrelly, right?

Sir Roger Penrose 24:09 You're absolutely right. And I-

Joe Rogan 24:11 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 24:11 I was... I, as I say, I was distinctly worried by that movie.

Joe Rogan 24:14 Yes. I'm, I'm sure you were.

Sir Roger Penrose 24:15 Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 24:15 A lot of people that I know that were like yourself were worried.

Sir Roger Penrose 24:18 Yeah. Yep, yep.

Joe Rogan 24:18 But it's... this is something that everyone contemplates, like, what makes you conscious?

Sir Roger Penrose 24:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:23 What is the soul? Is it a real thing? What is-

Sir Roger Penrose 24:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 24:26 ... what is your consciousness? Is it simply just your own biology trying to calculate your environment and looking out for its best interest and trying to procreate and move forward with the, uh, the, the genes that it has?

Sir Roger Penrose 24:37 Yes.

Joe Rogan 24:37 Or is it something m- almost mystical?... or far more complicated-

Sir Roger Penrose 24:42 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 24:42 ... maybe even instead of... The word mystical might be tainted.

Sir Roger Penrose 24:45 Yes.

Joe Rogan 24:45 Maybe something far more complex than we're currently able to understand.

Sir Roger Penrose 24:49 I think, to some extent, I would agree it is, because it's certainly different, I mean, to have some internal perception of the external world and, and being-

Joe Rogan 25:00 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 25:00 ... able to think abstractly and all these things. It's surely different from the way a baseball runs through the air and what, what makes it spin and...

Joe Rogan 25:09 And different than every other conscious animal.

Sir Roger Penrose 25:13 I'm not so sure about that.

Joe Rogan 25:14 No?

Sir Roger Penrose 25:14 I think the difference isn't that big.

Joe Rogan 25:16 Really?

Sir Roger Penrose 25:17 I mean, okay, we, you know, we use language to a degree. I mean, some animals use language to some kind of degree.

Joe Rogan 25:24 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 25:24 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.

Joe Rogan 26:18 Wow.

Sir Roger Penrose 26:18 Now, what does that tell us? There's something going on which is not just some machine behaving (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 26:24 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 26:25 ... like a robot. There's some, some feelings there that-

Joe Rogan 26:28 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 26:28 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 27:15 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 27:16 Commu- communication of some kind.

Joe Rogan 27:18 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 27:19 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.

Joe Rogan 27:35 Yeah, and this exists in wolves as well, so, very, very similar behavior, and they do-

Sir Roger Penrose 27:41 I can believe that.

Joe Rogan 27:41 ... seem to have, uh, not just verbal but non-verbal communication. They seem to have some understanding of what the task is-

Sir Roger Penrose 27:47 Uh-huh. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:47 ... 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-

Sir Roger Penrose 28:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:01 ... of the, the pack rather.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:03 Interesting, isn't it? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:03 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.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:15 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-

Joe Rogan 28:23 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:23 ... and things and dolphins, w- we know about them, but I imagine it goes quite far down, I should think.

Joe Rogan 28:28 How much have you studied, uh, octopi?

Sir Roger Penrose 28:31 They're fascinating, aren't they?

Joe Rogan 28:32 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:32 Yes. No, I haven't. There's a new book about them which I haven't got the chance to read yet (laughs) . I want to read it. I think they're, they're highly intelligent.

Joe Rogan 28:40 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:40 Yes.

Joe Rogan 28:41 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:41 And they're different.

Joe Rogan 28:41 I've only been really paying attention to them for a few years.

Sir Roger Penrose 28:44 Oh, okay.

Joe Rogan 28:44 I have a good friend, my friend Remy Warren was, uh, doing a television show-

Sir Roger Penrose 28:48 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 28:49 ... um, called Apex Predator, where he studied the, the way different animals hunted. And he started studying the way octopus and, um, uh, cuttlefish and all these different-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:00 ... th- d- different, uh, octopi and w- the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual, the, the, not just the look but the texture of their skin-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:10 Gosh.

Joe Rogan 29:10 ... instantaneously, and how this is not really understood how they, not only how they do it, but how they know-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:17 ... what they're, what's below them when they're copying-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:20 Yes.

Joe Rogan 29:20 ... that they somehow or another can figure out how to blend in almost perfectly with their environment.

Sir Roger Penrose 29:25 It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:27 They also can open jars and they can climb out of tanks.

Sir Roger Penrose 29:30 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:30 There was one guy had a, he had a camera on his tank because he had two tanks-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:36 Yes.

Joe Rogan 29:36 ... and one of them had very expensive tropical fish and the other one had his octopus, and he was trying to figure out what was happening to his expensive tropical fish, so he put a camera on it. And the octopus was climbing out of the tank-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 29:49 ... walking across the ground, climbing into the other tank-

Sir Roger Penrose 29:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 29:52 ... killing one of the fish, eating it, and then going back into his tank.

Sir Roger Penrose 29:55 (laughs) Yes. Yeah. That's pretty good.

Joe Rogan 29:57 That's heavy.

Sir Roger Penrose 29:58 Indeed. Well, there's one I saw about oct- uh, I think I heard the description or I read it. I, I think I read it, about there were some experiments on testing the intelligence of octopuses or... And they had a, a little thing. They, they had to pull a chain and then open a door and get food out. And this octopus was thinking, "Uh, I'm getting fed up with this thing." And so he yanked the chain and it came right off, and then it rose to the top and started squirting all the people in their white coats. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:23 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 30:23 So (laughs) I thought that was pretty good, you know. There's something else going on than just-

Joe Rogan 30:28 There is something going on.

Sir Roger Penrose 30:29 Yeah. Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 30:30 Now, when you, uh, uh, if you weren't pressed for, to, to, to put, uh, to figure this out in some sort of a, uh, a paper that you had to display in front of scientists. If you were...

Sir Roger Penrose 30:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:41 If you were like, you're trying to figure out, like, what do you think it is? Like, what d- what do you think consciousness is?

Sir Roger Penrose 30:49 Well, you see, I, I mean, to... It's going too far to think, you know, I know what the, what the answer is or anything like that.

Joe Rogan 30:54 Of course.

Sir Roger Penrose 30:55 I just, I just think that this-... issue of having some kind of quantum state which preserves itself up to a certain level, and the microtubules at least suggested something where you could isolate them from the outside and the symmetry of these things is important, and there are other structures. It's, I suspect it's not just microtubules. I suspect ... There are these, um, thing called clathrins. These are, are molecules which inhabit the synapses, and, um, you can ... And the thing about these ones is that they're incredibly symmetrical. They're like a, a soccer ball, you know? They ... You have these pentagons and hexagons and at each vertex, you've got a protein, it's called a triscalion, and they join themselves along the edges of the, of the pattern of the soccer ball. Okay, but it's just a, it's just a, a, a, a substance. I mean, it's made of these proteins, and what are they doing hanging around in the synapses? I don't know, but they ... The symmetry has a key role. There's a thing called the Jahn-Teller effect in quantum mechanics which tells you that when you have a, a, a s- highly symmetrical structure like that, then there can be a big gap between the lowest energy level and the next one, and there can be information in this lowest energy level which can be s- shielded from the higher energy levels. So this is a sort of suggestion that some kind of quantum phenomenon is going on in a serious way, uh, and there's a lot to understand there. I mean, synapses themselves are kind of strange things, you might think. If you were going to build a brain, why don't you just solder the wires together at the connections, you see?

Joe Rogan 32:36 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 32:36 What are you doing having this thing with all the chemist- chemicals transferring this information from one side to the other?

Joe Rogan 32:42 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 32:42 I don't know, but it's something very needed for, by the system, and it's all tied up with these clathrins there and, and cytoskeleton structures, which microtubules are one of the main constituents, so you see ... I don't know. There's a lot to learn, I'm sure.

Joe Rogan 32:59 So it seems like there's, uh, a bunch of different factors. There's the biological understanding of the brain itself.

Sir Roger Penrose 33:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:04 And then there's the understanding of the, the actual s- nature of cells and of reality itself.

Sir Roger Penrose 33:11 Yes, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:11 That this is being more illuminated by science with every new discovery.

Sir Roger Penrose 33:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:16 You know, we're getting a better understanding, deeper and deeper-

Sir Roger Penrose 33:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:19 ... as to the, the very nature of matter and of, of the, the, of these structures themselves.

Sir Roger Penrose 33:24 I, I think it is getting deep into the, into the way the physical world operates and things that we don't understand about it just yet. Yes. I mean, the biology is one side of it, and I ... You know, coming as an outsider, I get struck by certain things. I mean, quite familiar with the fact that the right side of the cerebrum controls the left hand and the left hand, the right hand.

Joe Rogan 33:45 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 33:46 But then you look at this, and it's not just that. What about the soles of your feet? Right at the top. What about your eyes? The, the signals right at the back.

Joe Rogan 33:54 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 33:55 You'd think this is the most ridiculous construction. You, you've gone to the worst possible place.

Joe Rogan 34:00 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:00 There must be a reason. And the cerebellum is different 'cause cerebellum, it's the left side controls the left side and the right side, the right side. So there's something going on which involves these signals going, having to cross each other or whatever it is. I don't know.

Joe Rogan 34:15 Well, we'd like to think that there's a reason, but then we look at other biological life forms-

Sir Roger Penrose 34:18 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 34:18 ... and they look kind of preposterous, like a platypus, for instance.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 34:22 You look at that and you go, "What is that?" Is that a-

Sir Roger Penrose 34:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:24 ... experiment? Is that a prototype that just ran wild?

Sir Roger Penrose 34:28 Who, who, who's knows?

Joe Rogan 34:29 Yeah, it's-

Sir Roger Penrose 34:29 Well, I guess you gotta think of it in terms of natural selection-

Joe Rogan 34:32 Sure.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:32 ... of some sort.

Joe Rogan 34:33 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:33 And I guess the (laughs) circumstances there, I don't know-

Joe Rogan 34:36 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:36 ... in, in Australia or wherever you find, must be s- specific. Well, I guess the, a lot of that was because they were isolated from, from the rest of the ... So you get sort of strange animals in-

Joe Rogan 34:49 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:49 ... Australia and, and in New Zealand where a lot of isolation from, from the rest of the evolution is, so they did their own thing there.

Joe Rogan 34:57 Yeah, marsupials.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:58 Right, yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:59 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 34:59 Just intriguing, isn't it?

Joe Rogan 35:01 Well, the, this, the, the phrase quantum is another one that's fraught with woo.

Sir Roger Penrose 35:07 Indeed. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 35:08 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.

Sir Roger Penrose 35:19 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.

Joe Rogan 35:38 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 35:38 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.

Joe Rogan 35:47 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 35:47 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.

Joe Rogan 35:58 Well, um, i- uh, well, it's very, very difficult to understand, even for people who study it.

Sir Roger Penrose 36:04 Yes, indeed.

Joe Rogan 36:05 So for someone like myself, um, trying to pay attention to this without devoting my entire life to it-

Sir Roger Penrose 36:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:11 ... and it gets ... It's becomes a big problem 'cause there's-

Sir Roger Penrose 36:15 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-

Joe Rogan 36:45 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 36:46 ... they're, they're still in some sense connected with each other even though they're that far apart, which is pretty amazing.

Joe Rogan 36:51 That's baffling.

Sir Roger Penrose 36:52 That's baffling, but that's part of the comprehensible part of quantum mechanics.

Joe Rogan 36:56 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 36:56 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)

Joe Rogan 37:05 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 37:05 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.

Joe Rogan 37:29 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 37:29 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.

Joe Rogan 37:58 Now in something like superposition, where something can be both still and in motion at the same time, as soon as you say that-

Sir Roger Penrose 38:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:06 ... to, uh, the common person like myself-

Sir Roger Penrose 38:09 Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 38:09 ... my brain glazes over and, uh-

Sir Roger Penrose 38:11 Yes.

Joe Rogan 38:11 ... my eyebrows raise up and I go, "Okay, what is..." And then you're talking about entanglement, things hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart-

Sir Roger Penrose 38:18 Yes.

Joe Rogan 38:18 ... that are somehow or another interacting with each other in a way that we don't totally understand or we don't have a theory that absolutely explains in a concrete way.

Sir Roger Penrose 38:26 Well, it does as long as you don't get to the measurement issue.

Joe Rogan 38:29 Oh, the measurement.

Sir Roger Penrose 38:30 The entanglement part is pretty well understood.

Joe Rogan 38:32 But the measurement is the problem.

Sir Roger Penrose 38:33 The measurement part is not. You see, the, the puzzles about the entanglement is when you come to the measurement.

Joe Rogan 38:39 Uh-huh.

Sir Roger Penrose 38:39 You make a measurement over here and a measurement over there, and they can be, well, and now 1,000 kilometers apart.

Joe Rogan 38:45 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 38:45 The record was only 143 or something a little while ago.

Joe Rogan 38:48 Wow.

Sir Roger Penrose 38:48 But it's a, it's a long ti- a long distance. But there's hardly any movement of material, so the thing that... See, in the scheme I have which involves the collapse of the wave function involves a certain amount of displacement of mass. Now, if it's just photons, that's light, and m- these experiments tend to be just light, then there's no mass displacement in this state, and so, sure, what quantum mechanics says is fine by me. Okay, it is hard to get your mind around and I certainly agree with that.

Joe Rogan 39:22 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 39:22 But it's logical. What's not logical comes apart, but when you worry about the measurement issue and the collapse of the wave function, and poor old Schrodinger was very upset by this, quite right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:34 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 39:34 Yes.

Joe Rogan 39:35 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-

Sir Roger Penrose 40:02 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:02 ... and mis- or n- not-

Sir Roger Penrose 40:04 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 40:04 ... not understood way yet?

Sir Roger Penrose 40:06 I think one has to be careful about these things.

Joe Rogan 40:08 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 40:08 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-

Joe Rogan 40:28 Hmm. 'Cause there's no evidence for it as of yet.

Sir Roger Penrose 40:29 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.

Joe Rogan 40:44 But you're open to the possibility, should new information be-

Sir Roger Penrose 40:47 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.

Joe Rogan 40:58 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 40:58 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.

Joe Rogan 41:09 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 41:09 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)

Joe Rogan 41:24 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 41:24 But you'd have to preserve that information all the way through, and I don't-

Joe Rogan 41:27 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 41:27 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 41:55 Is this something that is, uh, that y- you're as- asked about most often?

Sir Roger Penrose 42:01 Y- you mean in my research altogether, or?

Joe Rogan 42:04 J- just amongst-

Sir Roger Penrose 42:06 Ah, quantum mechanics.

Joe Rogan 42:06 ... common people like myself.

Sir Roger Penrose 42:07 Uh, it's only one of them. But you see, it's slightly misleading when you're thinking about what my interests are.

Joe Rogan 42:14 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 42:14 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.

Joe Rogan 42:29 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 42:29 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.

Joe Rogan 43:01 Cosmology as a whole is one of the most terrifying concepts to me.

Sir Roger Penrose 43:06 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:06 'Cause I just, when I start thinking about the size and scale-

Sir Roger Penrose 43:10 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 43:11 ... of everything, I get to a certain point and my brain just sh- shuts off, there's not enough juice.

Sir Roger Penrose 43:18 Well, it's pretty huge.

Joe Rogan 43:20 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 43:20 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) .

Joe Rogan 43:35 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.

Sir Roger Penrose 44:05 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-

Joe Rogan 44:17 No parties in there? (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 44:19 Uh, not, not much. Well, you could have a really big black hole, and there's a lot of time in there.

Joe Rogan 44:23 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 44:23 A really big one. If you, if you were in a spaceship, you could, you could have a few parties before you-

Joe Rogan 44:28 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 44:29 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 45:57 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 45:57 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) .

Joe Rogan 50:48 Hairy Dog Theorem?

Sir Roger Penrose 50:49 Yes. I mean, that's just a jocular terminology.

Joe Rogan 50:53 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 50:53 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.

Joe Rogan 51:10 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 51:11 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) .

Joe Rogan 52:00 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-

Sir Roger Penrose 52:12 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 52:13 ... 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?

Sir Roger Penrose 52:20 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-

Joe Rogan 52:58 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 52:58 ... to the place where they go infinite or... What in detail happens, the theorems don't tell you, they just say that something goes wrong and that's what we call a singularity.

Joe Rogan 53:08 And if a black hole is larger or smaller, the singularity remains constant?

Sir Roger Penrose 53:13 It- it remains in- in there, it's-

Joe Rogan 53:15 Remains in there, but it's not measurable in terms of its actual size?

Sir Roger Penrose 53:18 Yeah, I don't know whether you can measure its size very well 'cause the size... that's (laughs) , that's an intriguing question. You might say the size has gone to zero-

Joe Rogan 53:27 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 53:27 ... but it could be quite com- complicated and irregular, not like the original Oppenheimer-Schneider one which saw just a... Even then, a point is the wrong point of view, but let's not go into that (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 53:38 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 53:39 No, it- it... there is something about the structure of these things you can say. They're not all the same, no.

Joe Rogan 53:44 The- the singularities are not all the same, but the black holes are not all the same, right?

Sir Roger Penrose 53:47 They're not all the same, but they... that's one of the strange things about black holes, is that if you let them settle down, they're not all the same to begin with, but there are not many different things they can settle into. They can have rotation, they can have a certain mass th- and the mass translates into the size of the diameter of the hole, and you've also got rotation, so they can rotate. And these are... Schwarzschild found the non-rotating ones and it was Roy Kerr, an Australian, who first produced the solution for a rotating black hole.

Joe Rogan 54:21 Rotating?

Sir Roger Penrose 54:22 Yes, a rotating one. But then, you see, the remarkable thing is that's what they settle down to. So there are good theorems which tell you that a general black hole, which should be very complicated, fairly rapidly will settle down and become one of these Kerr solutions, a rotating black hole.

Joe Rogan 54:38 I remember when I first saw that documentary and I saw the- when they were discussing the- the shape of these galaxies and that the center of it had this super massive black hole that was slowly devouring the galaxy-

Sir Roger Penrose 54:50 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:50 ... I mean, it's... (sighs) it- it is an unbelievably beautiful yet simultaneously terrifying idea is that there's this-

Sir Roger Penrose 54:59 Yes.

Joe Rogan 55:00 ... infinite power in the center, of infinite mass that's absorbing slowly but surely everything around it.

Sir Roger Penrose 55:07 Yes, well it's not an infinite mass. The mass is quite well-defined and it's not infinite. But yeah, oh, it's a good question. I mean, if you wait forever, (laughs) how much of the mass actually gets swallowed by the black hole?

Joe Rogan 55:20 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 55:20 You see, I think the, the picture is to think not just in one galaxy but a cluster.

Joe Rogan 55:24 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 55:24 You see, our galaxy has this 4 million solar mass black hole and we are on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy and... I don't know how long, but many-

Joe Rogan 55:35 But some time in the future.

Sir Roger Penrose 55:37 Yes. The black holes will probably spiral into each other and there'll be one big one.

Joe Rogan 55:41 So it's definable mass but in infinite density in that this point which w- they were speculating that this could possibly... in the center of these super massive black holes-

Sir Roger Penrose 55:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:52 ... if you could go through that there would be another universe.

Sir Roger Penrose 55:56 Well, you see-

Joe Rogan 55:57 Is that just total-

Sir Roger Penrose 55:58 ... that's a nice-

Joe Rogan 55:58 ... speculation?

Sir Roger Penrose 55:58 It's a nice romantic thought. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:00 Ah, it's more woo. Is it more woo?

Sir Roger Penrose 56:02 I'm afraid so.

Joe Rogan 56:03 (sighs) It sounds so good, though.

Sir Roger Penrose 56:04 Yes, I know, well y- it's a shame for science fiction because-

Joe Rogan 56:07 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 56:07 ... it makes a nice, a nice story.

Joe Rogan 56:08 Well, it's interesting that we try to make things more complicated than they are-

Sir Roger Penrose 56:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:11 ... because they're so complicated as it is.

Sir Roger Penrose 56:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:13 It's... well, like dark matter, for instance. It, it boggles the mind that we don't really totally understand what, 90%+?

Sir Roger Penrose 56:21 Well, th- that's a good question.

Joe Rogan 56:23 Yeah, what is that stuff? (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 56:25 Well, do you want me to tell you my theory?

Joe Rogan 56:27 Yes, please.

Sir Roger Penrose 56:27 (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)

Joe Rogan 58:45 Right. It's a... it's a, it's an odd term.

Sir Roger Penrose 58:48 Yes, I think so. It's all a little confusing because there's dark matter as well-

Joe Rogan 58:52 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 58:52 ... which is quite different, you have... mustn't get them confused.

Joe Rogan 58:55 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 58:55 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?

Joe Rogan 1:00:43 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:00:43 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)

Joe Rogan 1:00:54 Okay.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:00:54 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-

Joe Rogan 1:01:07 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 1:01:08 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 1:01:57 Mm-hmm, yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:01:58 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:21 There it is right there.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:02:21 Great.

Joe Rogan 1:02:22 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:02:23 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:32 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:02:33 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)

Joe Rogan 1:03:07 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:03:07 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-

Joe Rogan 1:03:58 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:03:58 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:06:10 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:06:10 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.

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 So it's an infinite cycle of Big Bangs-

Sir Roger Penrose 1:06:48 That's the picture.

Joe Rogan 1:06:49 ... 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.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:06:54 Yes, that's right. Well, that's the tricky part that people have trouble with, yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:06:57 It's universally accepted that the Big Bang was an event. There's no-

Sir Roger Penrose 1:07:01 Pretty well universally.

Joe Rogan 1:07:02 ... conflicting theories that are attractive?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:07:07 ... I would say nothing terribly popular. There are certain ideas which say you can continue into the, before the big bang. Paul Steinhardt and-

Joe Rogan 1:07:16 And what do they think that was?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:07:19 ... Turok. It's a, it's, it has things in common with my model, but it's not-

Joe Rogan 1:07:22 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:07:22 ... quite the same and, and you see, it still... Y- you see, there was a right, not long after Einstein produced his theory and this, Alexander Friedman, who was a Russian mathematical physicist, and he produced the first cosm- cosmology models, and one of these was a one which has sort of bounces, a big bang, it expands out and then it contracts again.

Joe Rogan 1:07:44 Yes.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:07:44 And then it bounces and contra-... And so that was one of his models. The only trouble is if you put irregularities into these models, you get black holes, and these black holes form a cr- an incredible mess at the end, and that doesn't join onto a nice smooth big bang at the next one, so you have trouble with those models. But still, people take these things seriously, and as I say, Steinhardt and Turok have a model which is like that. So, these are things one, one has to think about. My own view is that they don't take into account the, the, the black hole problem, which is that, uh, my one gets rid of that because the black holes all evaporate away by Hawking evaporation.

Joe Rogan 1:08:21 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:08:22 And, uh, so it forms a model. I used to give talks about this, feeling quite happy nobody would ever prove it wrong, so I can go on talking away at it.

Joe Rogan 1:08:30 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 1:08:31 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-

Joe Rogan 1:09:01 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:09:01 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 1:09:52 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:09:52 ... 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?"

Joe Rogan 1:11:42 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:11:42 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.

Joe Rogan 1:12:44 What are your thoughts on multiverses?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:12:47 Well, you see, this is different because-

Joe Rogan 1:12:50 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:12:50 ... this is, uh, well, sequential.

Joe Rogan 1:12:52 Yeah.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:12:52 So I don't call it a multiverse. They each influence the next one, and so they're not independent worlds.

Joe Rogan 1:12:58 Right, but indi- the, the, the possibility of independent...

Sir Roger Penrose 1:13:02 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-

Joe Rogan 1:13:14 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:13:14 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:13:25 What's unattractive about that to you?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:13:27 ... it doesn't explain what we see. See, you want a theory which explains the world we see.

Joe Rogan 1:13:32 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:13:33 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.

Joe Rogan 1:14:02 Mm-hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:14:03 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) -

Joe Rogan 1:14:21 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:14:21 ... and you don't see cats... (laughs) different worlds with cats and... Well, i- it's a long story.

Joe Rogan 1:14:27 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:14:27 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.

Joe Rogan 1:14:51 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:14:51 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15:38 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:15:39 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15:55 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:15:56 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.

Joe Rogan 1:16:18 It's... For someone like me, it's so interesting to know that there's still a considerable amount of speculation.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:16:25 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-

Joe Rogan 1:16:34 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:16:34 ... think mine are off the wall, you see-

Joe Rogan 1:16:36 (laughs) Right. Well, who's-

Sir Roger Penrose 1:16:37 ... and they think, "Oh-"

Joe Rogan 1:16:37 ... who's to say?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:16:38 "... okay, I'm, I'm, I'm an old man now, and so it's okay, you know, did thing, decent things in the past, but you shouldn't trust his views now," you see.

Joe Rogan 1:16:47 (laughs)

Sir Roger Penrose 1:16:47 So I, I guess that's what people think. I don't know. But you see, if it was just me, I could understand that, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:16:52 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:16:52 But I've got these poli- And then I've got an Armenian colleague who's done things on this too, and, uh, it can't be that we're all, all off the rails, I think (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 1:17:02 No, it can't be.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:17:02 It's, it's something out there, and now with the Hawking points, there's something people can really go out and look for, and if they don't see them, there's something funny going on somewhere. If they do see them, there's something else going funny on, which, which they'll have to think of another explanation, unless it's my explanation. They'll have to think of a, a different view from the current inflation view, which is in real trouble with these observations, as far as I can see.

Joe Rogan 1:17:25 Do you anticipate in any foreseeable time in the future, uh, a better understanding of dark matter and dark energy or, uh, uh, perhaps a better definition of what those things are?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:17:35 Um, yeah. Well, you see, I think... My, my own current view is that dark energy, as it's called, is the cosmological constant. Now, that's not an explanation, if you like, 'cause why is it go-

Joe Rogan 1:17:46 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:17:46 Why has it got the value it has? Why is it there at all? And there are certainly questions about that which I agree with. Dark matter, I didn't go into this, but in this scheme of mine, it has to be there. When I say "it," I mean that if you want the equations to make sense, which cross over from our remote future to the Big Bang of the next eon, you have to have a creation of a dominant new material which is scalar, and as I said, it doesn't spin, it's just ordinary particles, and that they only interact gravitationally. And that's what we see. But the theory, uh, that I'm putting forward would make these things very massive. They're about what's called the Planck mass. I don't know exactly, 'cause there's some freedom in this, something like the Prank- Planck mass, which people describe as, uh, the mass of a flea's eye. Don't quite know why they make it that. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:18:46 Whoa.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:18:46 But that's about 10 to the minus 5 grams, so you're looking at a, a 100,000th of a gram. So it's, it's sort of a, an appreciable size. It's not, you know, it's not like basic particles in physics.

Joe Rogan 1:18:59 It's measurable.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:19:00 It's the sort of measurable thing you could imagine you, you, you could get h- get hold of in some way. But that's huge for, for a fundamental particle.

Joe Rogan 1:19:09 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:19:09 So it's a, it's a wild idea from that point of view. But also, they should decay, and they should decay into gravitational signals which maybe could be seen by LIGO, maybe have been seen by LIGO and thrown in the rubbish bin because they'd be different types of signals from what people would expect. I wouldn't like to put my money...... anywhere there, but I'm liking, hoping that these dark matter particles are the ones that come f- from the theory that, that I'm putting forward. So that would be another consequence of this particular point of view.

Joe Rogan 1:19:47 And they've observed, correct me if I'm wrong, entire galaxies that they believe are... that consist of dark matter.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:19:54 There are... L- Let me see if I remember what it is. There are some galaxies the other way around, which don't seem to have any dark matter.

Joe Rogan 1:20:01 Oh.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:20:01 It's puzzling. There are other galaxies which have huge amounts. That's probably what you're referring to.

Joe Rogan 1:20:06 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:20:06 Whether they were only dark matter, you'd have trouble seeing them-

Joe Rogan 1:20:09 Right.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:20:09 ... because dark matter after all... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:20:11 It was just a measured thing, right?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:20:12 Yes. It may be. I, I don't know that one. It's quite possible.

Joe Rogan 1:20:17 Hmm.

Sir Roger Penrose 1:20:17 Yeah. I, I don't see why not. Um, they just have to have some reason why they clump together in this way. You see, it's quite possible if galaxies collide, then when you see the stars tend to go through, so they would accompany with... they'd accompany the dark matter. The, the dust in the galaxies tends to get st- and stay where it is. So if two collide, then you'd have a big pile of dust in the middle. But I think the dark matter tends to carry on through with the stars. I don't know, there may be some process which could produce just islands of dark matter. I, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 1:20:55 When you discuss the cosmos, maybe the single most intriguing possibility to us as human beings is-

Sir Roger Penrose 1:21:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:02 ... what other intelligent life, if any, is out there? And how interesting is that to you?

Sir Roger Penrose 1:21:07 Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:21:07 'Cause you spend so much time, uh, studying the