EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,040 words- 0:01 – 0:58
Setting the stage: Until the End of Time and the “whole cosmic story”
- JRJoe Rogan
Three, two, one. Brian Greene, ladies and gentlemen. How are you, sir?
- BGBrian Greene
Good, thank you. How are you?
- JRJoe Rogan
Thanks for doing this, man.
- BGBrian Greene
Oh, it's my pleasure.
- JRJoe Rogan
I've-- I've enjoyed your work for many, many, many years, so, uh, I really appreciate you coming in here and talking.
- BGBrian Greene
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I j- Like I was telling you, I just started your new book.
- BGBrian Greene
And how's it going?
- JRJoe Rogan
It's going well. It's, uh, hasn't confused the shit out of me yet, but I know it's coming. (laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
It will be coming, no doubt, no doubt.
- JRJoe Rogan
With all your work. So the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe, to the end. That's essentially what you're summarizing.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, that's the, uh, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book. I, I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing, how it started, how things like you and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free will and whether we have it, and then on to the future, what's gonna happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far, far future.
- 0:58 – 2:18
Entropy doesn’t just mean chaos: how order forms (stars, gravity, structure)
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, uh ... I'm, I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of commingle to, to create life. And when you think of entropy, a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
But that's the- not necessarily the case.
- BGBrian Greene
It's only part of the story. I mean, entropy kinda gets a bad rap, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
It's the thing that you want to avoid, but somehow the laws of physics don't allow you to avoid it. It's this disintegration, it's this decay, it's this drive toward disorder, and that's kind of true. But the reality of the situation is more subtle, because overall, entropy needs to go up. But that doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way. And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever. Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they are pockets of order that naturally form, but as they form, they increase the entropy in the surroundings. So the net entropy goes up even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object in the sky appears. And it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place. Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse. The universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder, and that would be it. There wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity.
- 2:18 – 4:59
We’re “star stuff”: supernovae, heavy elements, and continuity from particles to people
- JRJoe Rogan
Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange, that you have this thing, uh, d- and ours is fairly small, right? It's a million times larger than Earth.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it's gonna burn for billions of years, and it's just hovering there.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it creates all the life.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, it r- literally is responsible for all the life.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And when they supernova, that creates the actual ingredients for life, which is even more strange. Like you can't have biological carbon-based life if it's not for a star exploding.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, I mean, we often, in a poetic way, say that we are made of star stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
I guess that was Carl Sagan, who ... But you can also say that we are, are made of, you know, nuclear refuse, right? We are the detritus-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... that, that the death throes of a star puts out into the universe and it rains down on planets, and at least on one such planet, that stuff comes together and yields life. So it is a cycle. I mean, I don't wanna sound like The Lion King here, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
... you know (laughs) , it- that's really what it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, what I'm so interested in about in getting into your book is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that, that have to take place in order for all this life, in order for this universe to be what it is and then where it's going to go.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, um, the remarkable thing and sort of the m- the main point at some level is that, look, we're special entities. We can think, we can reflect, we have emotions, but ultimately, you and I and everybody else, we're just bags of particles that are governed by physical law. And so there's this continuity between the stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the heavens, and us. We all come from the same fundamental ingredients and the same fundamental laws. Now, some people find that that gives them, I don't know, a sense of, uh, desperation, a sense-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... that we're not special, a sense that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless. But, you know, my view on this is, it's spectacular that we're made of the same stuff that makes up this bottle of water or any of the wonderful little statues that you have on this desk, because that means that how remarkable that collections of particles can do what we do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
And I think that's really the way of looking at the continuity. We don't need to be endowed with some special quality by some external entity. You don't need that. Particles can do miraculous things, and that is the message that I think you can draw from a more complete understanding of where we came from and where we're going.
- 4:59 – 7:01
Mortality and motivation: Denial of Death meets cosmology
- JRJoe Rogan
That- th- the fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant, that, like, what is the point?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
This sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with, right?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's something that y- you touch upon really early on, that this, th- this thing that makes us unique is that we know that we're gonna die.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, yeah. That, that, to me, is the vital distinguishing feature of our species. You know, we can reflect on the past, we can think about the future and recognize that we're not gonna be here in the future-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... at least for some period of time. And it's, um ...It's an idea, and its powerful motivating influence is one that has been explored throughout the ages. Uh, Otto Rank, who was one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, uh, developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do. And then when I was, uh, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've ever heard of this book.
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- BGBrian Greene
It was, it was big in the '70s. It won, actually, the Pulitzer Prize in the '70s. And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do. And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today, Until The End of Time, it's, um, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting. Because it's not just we that are going to die, it's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time. Our, our best theories suggest to us that even protons, the very heart of matter, there are quantum processes that, in the far future, will ensure that every proton disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles. And at that point, there's no complex matter around at all.
- 7:01 – 9:39
How long is the future? The ‘Empire State Building’ timescale for cosmic events
- JRJoe Rogan
What, what, what timeline are we talking about here?
- BGBrian Greene
Well, pretty, pretty big, long timeline. In fact, I like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved. Um, I like to use the Empire State Building and imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times out of the previous floor. So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor, 10 years, second floor, 100, and so forth. So you're going to exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building. And, uh, in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years. And, uh, as you go forward, you are looking at things very far in the future. And to answer your question, we think, and I underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas, protons will decay roughly in, say, by the 38th floor, so 10 to the 38 years into the future.
- JRJoe Rogan
So we can relax for a little bit?
- BGBrian Greene
You can relax for a little bit.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
But here's the, here's the thing. The amazing thing, obviously, is, um, uh, it sounds trite, but time is relative, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
So any duration that seems long, it's only long by comparison to another duration. And on, say, the scale of the entire Empire State Building, up to, say, 10 to the 100 years into the future, which is what the peak would represent, 10 to the 38 years is like less than the blink of an eye. I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
... it's nothing, um, those scales. So you sort of have to be careful with your, your intuition if you're willing to entertain the kind of fantastically long time scales that you necessarily need to if you're gonna think about the very far future.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, um, we anticipate that, uh, all complex structure will fall apart, so if there are any stars left over, we believe that by the 14th floor most stars will have used up their nuclear fuel. There'll be, there'll be dark embers just sort of, you know, smokey out there in the cosmos, but if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor, they will all just dissipate into their particulate ingredients. So it's hard to imagine past, say, floor 38 that there's gonna be any life or any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe. So the window within which the universe as we know it exists is kind of small when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline.
- JRJoe Rogan
So impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long, but yet so small?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like in, in the human mind?
- 9:39 – 13:40
Why our intuition fails: evolution tuned us for survival, not quantum reality
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. It's very hard to hold these durations-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... in mind. I mean, I don't, I don't feel like I ... I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I don't feel like I have an intuition for the durations that we are talking about. In fact, the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps me to sort of give some relative sense of when things of interest will happen in the universe. But, you know, we're good at understanding days, weeks, months, years, the times of, you know, conventional experience. We have no basis for understanding the universe over these scales that we've never experienced. You know, and that's true not only for time. It's also for space, right? I mean, we have very good intuition about everyday phenomenon. I mean, if I was to take this bottle of water and I throw it at you, you'd catch it, you know where to put your hand. You wouldn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going. But if I was to do the same thing with electrons, you don't have, and neither do I, a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how a particle like an electron behaves. And that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics, and because of that, our intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave. In fact, I like to say those of our forebears wandering around the African savanna who started to think about electrons and quantum mechanics, they got eaten, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
They're the ones whose genes didn't propagate onward. And therefore, those of us who are the beneficiaries of the survival of our ancestors, we're good at understanding Newtonian physics, but we're not good at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the world.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever is next after human beings will be able to understand these concepts 'cause if you-
- BGBrian Greene
It's a... Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... stop and think about what a human is, we've only really been this for X amount, 100,000 years.
- BGBrian Greene
That's right, and it's a, it's a good question, and it's a tough one. I like to imagine that as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality or whatever, augmented reality, whatever version of that kinda technology takes over in the far future, we might be able to experience these-... distinct realms in such a powerful way that our innate intuition may begin to shift, to change, so that we grasp the quantum realm the way we grasp Newtonian physics. I can at least imagine that as a, as a possibility. Um, what it would take to actually get there, and whether our species will ever last long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't know. But it's all about experience and survival. We have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the world. We've been programmed by evolution to survive. And those are two radically different propositions, 'cause you don't need to know the true nature of reality to survive. It's a distinct attribute, and one that is not necessarily one that has any survival value, to understand black holes, or the Big Bang, or general relativity, or quantum mechanics, or entropy, or thermodynamics. These qualities we develop as we go forward and try to understand the world, go beyond mere survival and figure out things that excite us. But it's not something which obviously has any survival value.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, but it may someday.
- BGBrian Greene
It may.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what's interesting-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... is also how relatively recently people have been pondering these ideas-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... in a, in a sort of a quantifiable way, where you can write things down and sort of express it with other scientists and try to figure out w- who's right and who's wrong in terms of these calculations. But human beings, I mean, w- when did we really start pondering the, the, the scope of the universe? When did that-
- 13:40 – 17:56
Science as a collective human achievement—and how education can kill curiosity
- BGBrian Greene
Pretty, pretty recently. I mean, if you, uh, if you think about the beginnings of modern physics, you know, you can start with, uh, Galileo. You can start with Newton. But in any event, we're talking on the order of hundreds of years. And the amazing thing, in hundreds of years, we've gone from a complete lack of understanding about how anything in the world actually works, to the development of Newton's equations, where you can make fantastically accurate predictions about solar eclipses, or lunar eclipses, or motions of the planets, and so on. And then, you know, a couple hundred years after that, we migrate from that understanding, which is basically an encapsulation of the patterns that we can all discern with the naked eye. We develop a whole new body of physical law called quantum mechanics, which is so completely counterintuitive, which describes the world in terms of qualities that we don't ever see with the naked eye. But nevertheless, we can use the math to make predictions, and the predictions are borne out by experiment. And that progression only took, say, a couple hundred years. And that's where we've gotten. So it's kinda spectacular that, you know, we beings who are just coming of age here in the Milky Way galaxy can sit down with a piece of paper and a calculation, a pencil, and we can figure out magnetic properties of particles like electrons to 10 decimal places. That's shocking. I mean, it's stunning, and it's something that I think all of us should be very proud of, that our species has been able to accomplish that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Somehow or another, I don't think I'm responsible. (laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't feel proud.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't feel like any of my people-
- BGBrian Greene
You, you-
- JRJoe Rogan
... were involved.
- BGBrian Greene
... you've contributed your part.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
No, it really is a collective effort.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
Um, and, uh, that's the beauty of science. In the end of the day, it's not that most scientists are ever going to be remembered. You stop someone in the street and ask them to name a scientist, yeah, they may say Hawking. They may say Einstein. That's kind of it, I think, for most people. And I don't think that's a bad thing per se, because it's not about the personalities or the people that have pushed the frontiers of understanding. It's the fact that we've got this body of insight that continues to grow and continues to allow us to manipulate and understand-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... the natural world. And I think that's really what it's all about.
- JRJoe Rogan
Don't you think that there are some personalities, like yourself, uh, like, um, Feynman, like, uh, I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson, that because of their personality, because they're sort of, they're charismatic people, it actually makes more people intrigued about these possibilities and makes more people attracted to the ideas?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, no doubt. And, and I think that's a, that's a vital point, because without that impetus from outside the traditional educational system, I don't think we would have the kind of interest in science that I can feel growing, you know, in the world around us. I mean, the unfortunate thing in the educational system is that we teach toward examination. We teach toward assessment. And if you wanna figure out how to flatten a kid's interest in these ideas, just teach them stuff and tell them, "You're gonna be tested on this on Tuesday. You're gonna have to spit back, you know, everything that you've learned." So I find it kinda heartbreaking, the way in which so much intrinsic interest in these ideas ... And you can see it in a five- or six-year-old, right? I mean, I like to say we begin as little scientists. We're exploring the world. We're trying to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BGBrian Greene
... figure things out. And then we go into the educational system, and it's not by, by malice. It's just by the nature of how we teach in the, in the current, you know, uh, approach to educational philosophy, that so many kids wind up seeing these ideas as a burden.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BGBrian Greene
So, "I don't wanna have to spend time learning about parts of the cell or-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
"... how to balance reactions." I see it with my own kids. You know, I've got a 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, and all they are motivated by is next Wednesday's quiz. And I'm like, "Hey, these ideas, they're, they're kind of exciting. They're kind of wonderful." They're like, "No, no, Dad, Dad, Dad. I just wanna know enough so I can..."... you know, do well on, on the quiz. And once the quiz is over, they just sort of leave the ideas behind.
- 17:56 – 31:10
Greene’s path: early math obsession, Oxford detour into literature, and broader thinking
- JRJoe Rogan
When did these ideas become attractive to you?
- BGBrian Greene
Well, I was, I don't know, uh, n- not unusual for a scientist, but unusual, I think, in the, in the spectrum of kids in the world because at five or six years old, I was just captivated by mathematics.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Five or six?
- BGBrian Greene
Definitely, yeah. My dad, my dad was not an academic. My dad was a composer. He was a vaudevillian. He was a, he was a comedian. You know, he would, in the early days, would go around the country and, uh, with a harmonica group and a stage show, that, that's what he did. You know, he liked to say that he was an SPHD, a Seward Park High School dropout. You know? So at, at, at tenth grade, he just hit the road. But he loved scientific ideas. So he taught me the basics of arithmetic when I was about five years old, and then I would ask him to set me problems. And he'd give me these 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers, I'd write them out on big construction paper, and I'd spend the weekend just calculating away on these huge, you know, arithmetical problems of no interest to anybody on planet Earth. But to me, the fact that you could learn a little piece of, of math and then do something that nobody had ever done before, that was exciting to me as a kid, and that's really what got me going.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you chose the right path, clearly.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's your personality, whatever it is that attracted you to the ideas.
- BGBrian Greene
You know, well, you always wonder about that. I don't know if you wonder. You know, I always wonder, uh, how can you not? What, what would have happened if, uh, X would've transpired instead of Y?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
Um, in fact, I have to say, when I, when I graduated college, I had sort of a, uh, a period of, uh, I don't know, depression is too strong a word for it, but, uh, a period of, "What have I done? I went to college, I could have studied all the great ideas of the world, and all I did was get a technical education where I could solve Schrodinger's equation and solve Einstein's equations." And I felt like, "Wow, have I just, like, squandered the greatest educational opportunity that one could have ever had because I was so completely focused on just trying to understand physics and mathematics?"
- JRJoe Rogan
How'd you get past that?
- BGBrian Greene
Well, I was lucky. I was given a second chance. I, I, I won, uh, a scholarship to go to, to England, to Oxford. And in- ostensibly, it was to study physics. But when I got there, I realized that I was completely free to do whatever I wanted to do at that point, and so I took a year to study literature. I went to the physics classes, so I was sort of showing up, but I wasn't focused on it at all. And instead I was focused, I got a, you know, in England, they, it's a tutorial system. So I got a, a tutor, which is somebody at the college that sets you assignments and you write papers. You literally go in and you read your paper out loud. It's not something where you just turn it in and it gets graded. So it's a very personal experience. You write something and you're actually delivering it to this individual that is gonna help you in your educational journey. And so that's what I did for a year. And at the end of that year, I kinda said to myself, "Okay, I've got it. I, I understand now what it would mean to study these, these other subjects." And I sort of felt like, "I'll be able to do this on my own if I continue to be excited about it." And I went back to physics with a vengeance, and basically in that second year completed my, my doctorate in, in that year and, and moved on from there.
- JRJoe Rogan
So this time that you took off, this year, well, you didn't really take it off, but you changed paths.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, changed paths, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
How beneficial was that for you? Do you think that it-
- BGBrian Greene
Hugely.
- JRJoe Rogan
... it helped you to sort of appreciate what your original subject of interest was as well?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah, hugely so, because, you know, i- i- it's funny. It's the flip side of something I often encounter with people that are interested in science but don't know the math. And they always say, or some say, "I'm never really gonna understand this body of science because I don't know the mathematics." And I try to convince them, "Look, at some level that's true. If you really wanna do research in the general theory of relativity, you've gotta learn differential geometry and all the tensor calculus. But if you are really interested in the ideas, you really can grasp the ideas without the technical background." So I try to demystify something that can seem, um, impenetrable because you haven't entered the field. And I think the same thing happened to me in reverse for the more humanistic explorations. It had this aura of, of grandeur that, um, I was unable to penetrate because I'd never really immersed myself in the ideas. And by spending a year in those ideas, it didn't diminish them in any way, but I felt like it brought it back down to Earth as another journey toward truth, another pathway toward insight, and one that you don't have to have a degree in. You don't have to know the ins and outs of the academic version of that subject to understand it and grasp it and, and spend some time thinking about it.
- JRJoe Rogan
So do you think that for people studying anything, particularly those studying science and mathematics, which is very rigid disciplines, do you think that they all could benefit from sort of expanding their education into philosophy or art or-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... something that, uh, that uses your mind in a different way?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. Um, some.
- JRJoe Rogan
Some.
- BGBrian Greene
There are some people in the, in the physics and mathematics community who are so intensely focused that it would almost be a shame to pull their attention away-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Right.
- BGBrian Greene
... from the deep dive that they're gonna do for the rest of their lives.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
And the contributions that they're going to make and have made are, are substantial and, and exciting. But for, I think for many others, and certainly for me, I mean, look, I-... as most people do, but not all. But I learned early on that I'm not gonna be an Albert Einstein. You know, I can make contributions, and I have had contributions to fields like string theory and, uh, and cosmology, but they're never gonna be at the level of shattering our understanding of the world, things that people are gonna talk about 500 years from now. That's unlikely. And I think for somebody like that, who's able to make contributions, but pulling away from the technical work is not gonna extract some vital insight into the nature of the world that otherwise wouldn't be discovered, I think there is great value in doing exactly what you're saying. Because by broadening your perspective on what the work you're doing is actually revealing, it's part of the human quest for understanding. And seeing it as an isolated discipline, where it's all about the next equation and the better unified theory or the deeper understanding of the Big Bang, uh, to see that as isolated from the human quest for understanding, I think, diminishes the work that we as physicists actually do.
- 31:10 – 35:23
What happened before the Big Bang—and did time itself begin?
- JRJoe Rogan
Here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone like you. What do you think was happening before the Big Bang?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a deep question, and a, and a, and a subtle one, and there's sort of two ways that I like to think about that question. One is, it could be that, uh, the Big Bang was an interesting event, but not the first event in the totality of reality. It could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of our part of space, but it could be that there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part, and that grander realm may have been there for a far longer period of time. It may have experienced its own Big Bangs, maybe a collection of Big Bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past. So it could be that the answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang is, a lot of other Big Bangs, or a lot of other quantum events that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality than we have direct access to. However, another answer is that the very question may not make as much sense as the words seem to suggest. We know how to parse that sentence. We know what it means to talk about the moment before the Big Bang, because we know how to talk about the moment before your birth, or the moment before the Civil War, or the moment before any event that happened in the world. We fully understand the meaning of that kind of sentence. But it could be that when it comes to the Big Bang, the sentence actually doesn't mean anything. It could be that the Big Bang was the place where time itself started, and, uh, Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to get this across. He said, "Look." I'll dress it up a little bit. Imagine you're walking on planet Earth and you pass by someone. You say, "Hey, can you point me in the direction of north? I wanna walk in the northward direction." They point you, you continue to walk, you pass by somebody else, say, "Hey, which way is further north?" And they point you in that direction. But when you get to the North Pole and talk to somebody there and say, "Hey, how do I go further north?" They look at you and say, "Whoa. That question doesn't mean anything, because this is where north begins." There's no notion of going further north than the North Pole. And it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time. Talk about a billion years ago, or ten billion years ago, but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang, that may be where time started, and you can't go further back in time than the very origin of time itself.
- JRJoe Rogan
That freaks me out.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
See, that, that's one th- that, that gets in your head, you know? What do you mean, beginning of time?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why would time have a beginning?
- BGBrian Greene
Good.
- JRJoe Rogan
R-
- BGBrian Greene
And it could be, it could be that time is an emergent quality of reality. I'll give you an, an analogy for what I mean by that is, we all know what temperature means intuitively. Something's hot, you feel it. Something's cold, you feel it. Your body understands those concepts. What physics has done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion of the particles making up the environment. So if the molecules are moving really quickly, you've got a hot environment. If the molecules are really moving slowly, it's a cold environment. So temperature emerges from the motion of particles. So if you have like one particle, you can't really talk about it being hot or cold, because you need a conglomerate. You need an agglomeration of particles to be able to talk about their average motion. And in that sense, temperature is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas, the molecules and atoms that make up reality. Maybe that's true of time. Maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns, but fundamentally, maybe there are atoms or molecules of time which, when not arranged in the form that we are familiar with, don't yield time as we know it. Time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment, but doesn't even apply in other environments that are configured radically differently.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa. That's a heavy one.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- 35:23 – 42:35
What caused the Big Bang? Inflation, repulsive gravity, and dark energy today
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a heavy one. What also is a heavy one is, what caused the Big Bang?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, why would something smaller than the head of a pin-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... become everything that we see in the cosmos?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. So there are ideas for the answer to that question. Look, all of this is tentative-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BGBrian Greene
... because it's very hard to do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning. We have astronomical observations that we need to be sure are compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth, so, so we as good scientists do what needs to be done to try to test these ideas. But the idea that I think most physicists or cosmologists buy into at the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations. The usual form of gravity that you and I know about is the attractive version. You drop something toward the Earth and it moves downward because the Earth and the object pull on each other. That's the ordinary gravity that we experience every day of our lives. But Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to also be repulsive.... it can push outward as opposed to just pulling inward. And this is something that we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky object like the Earth is always the attractive variety. The gravity created by the sun, again, a compact object, is always the attractive variety. But Einstein's math shows that if you don't have a, a rocky object that's isolated in space, but rather energy that is uniformly spread through a region of space, that that kind of entity yields repulsive gravity. Why is that important to your question? If the very early universe, that little, tiny head of a pin that you're talking about, if it was filled with a uniform bath of this energy, we call it the inflaton field, the name doesn't matter, but if was filled with that energy, it would've been subject to repulsive gravity. What does repulsive gravity do? Pushes everything apart, causes everything to rush outward. So the bang of the Big Bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything apart.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical? Have we observed any sort of element in the universe that...
- BGBrian Greene
It, it is theoretical, but it's at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say causes it to migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works. So number one, Einstein's equations have now been tested over and over again in a whole variety of circumstances. The detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago was like the, the crowning triumph of Einstein's math. A hundred years ago, the math says there should be ripples in the fabric of space. A hundred years later, we finally detect ripples in the fabric of space. So we are very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics, and right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I was just describing. You've got uniform energy in a region, repulsive gravity. The other thing is, we currently witness that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down. Since the 1920s, everybody thought that, yes, the universe is expanding, but it will slow down over time. Why? Because gravity pulls things back together. You throw an apple upward, it doesn't go up faster and faster. It goes up slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back. Everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole. It's expanding, but expanding ever slower. The observations in 1998, culminated in 1998, which won the 2011 Nobel Prize, showed that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly. The expansion of space is speeding up over time. It's accelerating. How do we explain that? The best explanation we currently have is repulsive gravity. We believe even today the universe is suffused with a bath of energy. We call it dark energy. We believe it's uniformly going through space. I like to think of it almost like a, as a Turkish sauna. It's like the steam filling the sauna, this energy filling space, and that repulsive gravity, we believe is responsible for the observations that the distant galaxies are rushing away faster and faster over time. So it's circumstantial, but the case for repulsive gravity is quite strong.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what would have caused it to coale- what would have caused it to compress in- in- initially?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, why would all that matter be in this tiny-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... less than a pin-sized object?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. So I have no idea, and nobody else on planet Earth has any real idea other, but we do have theories. And one of the theories suggests that in the very early universe, it was a highly chaotic environment, very hot with all the fields fluctuating wildly up and down. And the idea would be that if you wait long enough, where it's hard to know what wait means in this environment, but don't press me on my definition of time back then, just sort of intuitively. If you wait long enough, on rare occasions, the energy will just happen to flatten out in a region, become uniform, and then that region explosively inflates, grows large. So, you know, it's, uh, imagine you're looking at, um, a- a- a bo- a- a- a- a pot of boiling water. The surface is, of course, widely undulating up and down, but if you wait long enough, very long time since you've never seen it and neither have I, there will be a little patch on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out. Why? That only means that the water molecules happen for an instant to be moving in just the right way to keep that little patch of water from wildly bubbling. It will happen. It's rare, but if you wait long enough, it will occur. Similarly, the wildly undulating fields in the early universe, if you wait long enough, a patch will flatten out. You get the uniform energy, plug it into Einstein's equations, that region explosively inflates, and I mean explosively. It can go from a size that's much less than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe in far less than a blink of an eye, in 10-30, 10-35 seconds. That's how powerful repulsive gravity can be.
- JRJoe Rogan
That is so baffling.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So before that, before this happens, you just have, in this theory, you just have all of this energy sort of r- randomly interacting with other energy in the universe with no physical objects?
- BGBrian Greene
Yep. Yep. It's just-
- JRJoe Rogan
And that could have been forever?
- BGBrian Greene
That could ... And, and in fact, that's the main point. There's nobody who was hanging around looking at their watch saying, "Good God, when is this Big Bang gonna finally happen?" (laughs) You know, so, so you can have this, uh, cosmological pre-show. You can have it last as long as you like. The only thing that you need to happen is that sooner or later, a region flattens out and then...... the cosmological show begins.
- 42:35 – 47:46
Multiverse implications—and keeping ‘weird physics’ distinct from woo
- JRJoe Rogan
And if we're looking at this model of the universe being this, uh, infinite universes-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... with d- different characteristics and d- different qualities to them, this could be happening throughout infinity-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... all over the place.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. And, in fact, this so-called inflationary cosmology is the technical name for the subject, says that. It says that it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region that we currently inhabit, it was just one of many such events. And therefore, there are other far-flung regions throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated, but the details can be different. The physical details can differ from what we are familiar with. And the differences can be small, temperature differences in one part of space versus another, or they can be far more significant. Even the, the particles that make up that other realm may be different from the particles that make up our realm. Their masses can be different. Their charges can be different. Their fundamental physical features can be different. So out there, in that wider cosmological landscape, it can be the Wild, Wild West of realities.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they don't have to worry about proton deterioration?
- BGBrian Greene
There may be realms in which they don't have to worry about protons falling apart. Um, uh, the wild, the really crazy idea is that if you're very careful mathematically in analyzing these theories, you realize that there have to be realms out there that duplicate ours as well. Many can be different, but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiated, occur out there-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... in other realms. So you come to these crazy sounding, sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this conversation out there in other distant realms-
- JRJoe Rogan
An infinite number of times.
- BGBrian Greene
... perhaps infinite number of times. And moreover-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
... small differences can also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions are interchanged at the table or, you know, maybe your name is, uh, you know, Joe Greene and I'm Brian Roegeen. Or there's, like, strange realities that can be taking place. And this is not an overworked theorist imagination. This is the careful, dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations. Now, I should say, there are some physicists who see this implication and say, "Whoa. You guys have fallen off the deep end. Your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're so far away that we will never interact with them, that's the kinda theory that we have been trained to avoid, to excise."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
However, the more f- you know, forward thinking, I like to describe us physicists say, "Hey, uh, math has proven to be a very valuable guide over the course of hundreds of years. And if this is where the math is taking us, it's at least worthy of our attention to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality actually behaves."
- JRJoe Rogan
Jesus. That's the weirdest one, the weirdest one. It's like when people talk about intelligent life somewhere in the universe, that you're out there-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... or a version of you or infinite versions of you.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. And it can, um, be disturbing. Like, what do you mean by you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BGBrian Greene
... if there are many of yous out there, each of whom has an equal claim on being you because they've had the same experiences-
- JRJoe Rogan
And-
- BGBrian Greene
... they have the same memories.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and maybe have made infinite vari- variations in the decisions that you've made through your life.
- BGBrian Greene
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you could meet a, a B- Brian Greene your age somewhere out there in the universe that's gone left-
- BGBrian Greene
Made the right choices.
- JRJoe Rogan
... when you have (laughs) - Or the wrong ones.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. Right. Exactly.
- 47:46 – 1:08:09
The Ramtha episode and The Secret: how pseudoscience markets meaning
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. Well, let me tell you, if you have a moment.
- JRJoe Rogan
Please.
- BGBrian Greene
Uh, so a couple years ago, uh, I was in middle of a big project. In fact, I describe this i- i- in- toward the end of the book, so you'll, you'll get to this little anecdote if you choose to carry on reading. Um, I was r- in the middle of a big project. And a speaking opportunity came in and I didn't properly vet it. You know, the money looked good and looked like a fine thing, and I signed off on it. And then a few days before I'm going, I realize it's to go to talk to Judy Zebra Knight-... who channels-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
... Romphah-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
... the 35,000-year-old Lemurian sage.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
And I, I said to, you know, the folks who, who should've been checking in on this, like the lecture agent, "I can't go." And they're like, "Hey, Brian, it's tomorrow. It's too late to back out." You know? And I was like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
"... Jesus Christ."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
You know, so I, I look at some videos online, and I see her on, like, the Merv Griffin Show, where, you know, she, she channels Romphah on live television. I don't know what year this was. You know, she snaps her head forward, it goes back.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
She changes her voice. It becomes like something-
- JRJoe Rogan
(gasps)
- BGBrian Greene
... between the Queen and Yoda, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes. (laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
It's this weird, weird place. And she goes, you know, "Hello, being," and she's talking to Merv Griffin, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
And he's talking about, like, an airplane. She goes, "What is airplane?" You know, it's that, that, that, that kind of thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy. (laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
Anyway, so I go.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
You know? And, uh, I show up, and the first thing I see is there are all these people walking around a grassy field with their arms out like this. And I'm like, I'm like, "Can they see?" You know? And I get closer, they're all blindfolded. And I'm saying that, "What, what is going on here?" And they describe that each person has a card around their neck where they've written down their life's dream. And an exact copy of that card has been put out on this big field, and they have to feel their way toward the matching card. And if they succeed, this shows that this goal or desire is gonna come to pass.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- BGBrian Greene
You know, and I'm saying to one of those guys, like, "So how's it going?"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BGBrian Greene
He goes, like, "Really good. You know, one person found their card, you know, in the last few..." I was like, you know, the odds or probability of that happening are kind of not, uh, unreasonable, but that's all that this is. And then they take me to, um, the blindfolded archers.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, Jesus.
- 1:08:09 – 1:23:10
Consciousness: reductionism, the ‘hard problem,’ and psychedelics as data
- JRJoe Rogan
But I, I don't know what ... W- what do you think consciousness is?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think consciousness is clearly just a, a factor of brain tissue and, and energy, or do you think it's possible that what our brain is, is something that tunes into consciousness?
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. Um, well, I spend, I've spent some time thinking about this question. I think it's perhaps the deepest question that faces science or even humanity at some level. And, um, my own personal perspective is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy, gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a head. Do I have any proof for that? No. Does anybody have any proof for what consciousness is? Not at all at this moment. But the history of the reductionist program, where we've been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients and the laws of physics leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness. Now having said that, there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is if electrons and quarks and particles and laws of physics are all that there is, and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world, that quarks don't have an inner world, how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles, you can turn on the lights? How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience? And that's a deep question that science has not yet answered. My own feeling is, when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate. We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding, maybe it's a hundred years in the making, maybe a thousand years in the making, and we'll say, "Aha! When electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience." And that, to me, is the likely answer that we will find. But there are some very smart, well-respected people who go in a very different direction. There are some who say electrons and protons and quarks, they do have a fundamental proto-conscious quality. They themselves are conscious beings of a sort. Now, it's not like you're gonna have electrons that are crying or, or quarks that are anguishing. But if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle, and then you take a lot of the particles and put them together, the idea is that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with. I don't buy into that, but there are people who do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why, why do you pick a position?
- BGBrian Greene
Well, I- I take a position on this because ... I guess my view is, you look out at the world, and what you do as a physicist is you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing. And to move from our current understanding of the world to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and quarks are conscious, to me, is such a fantastically radical move, that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BGBrian Greene
There was a time, back in the 1800s, when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing. How could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being? They said that they can't. You have to induce a life force. You have inject vital ... You have to inject a life force, and that's what sparks the emergence of life on lifeless particles. I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today. I think most serious scientists say, "Yes, life is wonderful. Life is-"... in some sense miraculous, but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA, the complex cellular structures, the cells come together to yield the more complex multicellular organisms. And that's all that it takes to have something that's alive. No life force is necessary. That way of thinking about the world has gone away. And I, my own feeling is that that kind of progression is gonna happen for consciousness. Today it's utterly mysterious. How it is that I have this inner voice talking inside my head, how it is that I look around the world and I can see the color red and I can, and I can experience the color red. I don't just have sensors that can call that red. I mean, an iPhone can do that. I actually have an inner world where I feel that color red. Where does that come from? Hard to answer that question. But I think a hundred or a thousand years from now, we'll look back and smile at how-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BGBrian Greene
... we, in this era, invested consciousness with such mystical quality, when in the end, it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics, and that's all there is to it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, what's interesting too, to me, is that as a human being, my, my thoughts on consciousness are, are very deep and profound, and th- this, this idea like, "What is this thing?" But if I really break it down objectively, and animals have some sort of a, a consciousness, I mean, including they have instincts, right? They, they try to get away from danger. They try-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... to survive and procreate. And we developed something far more complex in our ability to express ourselves in language. And in doing that language, or i- d- during that in, uh, b- creation of that language, we developed all sorts of bizarre concepts. And we've developed all sorts of different ways to describe feelings and, and emotions and, and contemplate the future-
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... as well. And these things are continually getting more and more complex. If you go to single-celled organisms, work your way up to, you know, early hominids, and then get to human beings, you just see this ever-increasing-
- BGBrian Greene
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... form of complexity in, in every way.
- BGBrian Greene
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
And i- i- in the way that the things see the world, of course, it makes sense that there would be more complexity.
- BGBrian Greene
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
But we don't think about that when we think of a parakeet. We don't think of a parakeet as being conscious, but a parakeet, relatively speaking, is far more primitive than a chimpanzee, which is relatively speaking, far more primitive than a human being.
- BGBrian Greene
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it's just gonna continue to evolve, or if we survive, things will continue to improve due to nat- natural selection and-
- BGBrian Greene
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... random mutation and all, all the other factors, and will be something that makes this today look like-
- BGBrian Greene
Primitive.
- JRJoe Rogan
... the way we look at single-celled organisms or chimps or whatever.
- BGBrian Greene
Yeah. I can well imagine that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BGBrian Greene
I mean, because we see, you know, small changes in DNA, you know, tiny fraction of percent yields a radical change in what the being that has that DNA is able to accomplish. But at the same time, you, you made reference to psychedelic experiences.
Episode duration: 2:26:40
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Transcript of episode r4wQsmAtZoc
