The 3 Body Problem, Aliens & How The World Ends - Dr David Kipping

Dude, I love your YouTube channel. The number of airplane flights that I've been on, delays, sat somewhere where I wish that I wasn't listening to your YouTube channel has been insane. So thank you very much for what you do.

Likewise, I've been listening to your podcast for a while, and you have so many great guests, so much wisdom on the channel, as the name suggests. So I really appreciate being on here as well.

You got tenure. Congratulations.

Yeah. That's a big- big deal for me personally, to hit this landmark. Yeah. I don't know if too many people know what it means, though. I think tenure is a- is a term which may be, outside of academia, it's unclear what that really means.

Yeah. But it's like a- you're allowed to research whatever you want now and no one can tell you no.

(laughs) Right. Uh, ultimate freedom.

Yeah.

That's kind of one way to think about it. It's- yeah, it's supposed to be, I think, ideally that it gives you the ability to pursue much more high-risk endeavors. So maybe as a tenured track faculty, which is what I was before, you're kind of living like day to day. Like, you're- each project has to deliver something within the next quarter, the next year, and everything's kind of very short term, which is how a lot of corporations work, of course. But when you get tenure, you get to think about going truly long term for something which is 10, 20 years, for the rest of your career, and that's exciting. I'm- I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with my tenure, but it's an amazing gift to have.

Speaking of high-risk, explorative conversations, did you listen to Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan?

I did. I was actually listening this morning, I was in the gym and I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's video, which was a response-

Me too. Me too.

... to it. And the- and I think Neil did a great job in being very respectful and thoughtful and polite, but at the same time, forcefully pushing back, uh, about many of the things which, uh, were questionable in- in this treatise that- that Terrence had come up with.

What did you make of the conversation with Joe? 'Cause there's been a lot of, uh, I think- it caused a lot of ripples. Uh, a lot of people were very excited, and, you know, it seems like it's upended or some people believe that it was able to upend mathematics, and, you know, there's sort of a narrative, it's personified there, keeping the real information from us, type thing. What did it feel like as someone who kind of lives in the world of maths and- and physics listening to that conversation?

Yeah. I- I only saw snippets of the conversation, but I will say that it's not unusual to see a reaction like this. I know it's kind of blown up on social media, and- and in social media world, perhaps it's unusual. But in my world, I receive letters every day coming through my- through my post box with theories and ideas. I get, of course, many, many blind emails, cold emails saying, "Here's my theory of everything. Please check it out. You know, I've proved that Einstein is wrong." This kind of stuff. It's very, very common to, not just myself, but many academics, we are used to this. And I think Neil is in the same boat. I'm sure he gets tons of those kinds of pet theories sent to him as well. And so, you know, they range from, uh, from some of them are just a complete crapshoot, to some of them, there's some serious thought in it. And I think Terrence actually did try to put some thought into it, despite the fact there was many missteps and, uh, misrepresentations of- of other information that- that predates his ideas. However, I think it is true what Neil said, that it is really important that we don't kill that- that idea, that- that love and that passion, because I was that person once. I remember when I was probably 11 years old, I wrote a theory, uh, and I sent it to my- I gave it to my physics teacher at school, and I said to him, "I think I've proven, there's like a new relativity theory that I've proven." And it was something about clocks ticking at different rates to different observers, and it was kind of like a proto-relativity. So I hadn't actually (laughs) I'm not claiming like I, you know, independently invented relativity or anything. But I wasn't aware of relativity, and it just struck me that somebody approaching a clock close to the speed of light would see the rate at which it ticks be very different to someone flying away from the clock. And so does that have some in- interesting implications about time? And so I wrote one of those crazy, not crazy, but, you know, not- not well-informed, let's just say-