Jim Al-Khalili has Strong Views on the Toughest Viewer Questions

i recently had an opportunity to interview one of my favorite science educators theoretical physicist jim alcaley he's a professor at the university of surrey and he has hosted many documentaries for the bbc in the uk and those documentaries have also been broadcast in the us i watched his documentaries for at least a decade now because i'm fortunate enough to have magellan as a sponsor of this channel they were able to put me in touch with jim for this interview so i was pretty excited to interview him he recently made a great two-part series exclusively for magellan tv called jim alcale's guide to life the universe and everything i found these to be some of the best documentaries i've ever seen he answers the kinds of big questions i like to ask such as how did the universe come to be how did life start on earth what's the nature of space and time and how will it end the superb production of these documentaries and jim's storytelling style is highly entertaining i can't thank magellan enough for this opportunity magellan is a new kind of streaming documentary service created by the filmmakers themselves you'll not only find jim's fascinating videos on the big questions of science but also on other subjects like history nature and travel magellan has a special holiday offer right now for arvanash viewers you can get a buy one get one free gift card for an annual membership by clicking the link in the description i really encourage you to click the link in the description and i really thank you for nothing else than to check out jim's superb news shows jim did not disappoint one of the great things about interviewing him was that he was willing to answer just about any question i asked him and he was not afraid to have some really strong opinions on controversial topics and i asked him some tough questions like these you don't want to miss what he has to say the fascinating interview is coming up right now what is the origin of consciousness the the honest answer is we don't know yet but if you talk to people who are thinking seriously about this now uh they will tell you first of all it's not magic there is no pixie dust that's sprinkled on on your gray matter that makes you suddenly sentient self-aware and conscious i think the the smart money these days is that it's an emergent property your brain is made of atoms and and then the atoms make up neurons and they are connected with each other um there's still something that we don't understand that we know we don't yet know how to build a computer that can be conscious because of the complexity of the connections inside the brain but we believe it's something that's emergent by which i mean not evident if you break everything down if you just break it down to individual neurons and say this one's connected to this one and this one this one therefore if you have complex enough connections you will get consciousness it's a property that emerges that only becomes apparent once you have billions and billions of neurons and that is a property of consciousness that we have yet to to figure out but i think we will i don't think there's any magic involved there's no mind body sort of duality it is only laws of physics going on in the chemistry of the brain nothing more supernatural than that do you think that um artificial intelligence uh or future machines could become conscious do you think that that is a possibility yes i see no reason why not there's no one has ever given me an argument to suggest that that is not possible after all if our brains are finite in size and complexity or very complex are only made of atoms they obey the laws of physics and chemistry then why shouldn't a machine be able to do the same thing it wouldn't be simulating a brain it would be thinking unconscious maybe not the same as a human brain but it would be just as conscious in terms of being self-aware there's no reason why you shouldn't yeah i mean the argument is that there's something special about biological systems that cannot be replicated with uh you know binary binary systems that we find let's say let's build a computer that isn't based on binary systems uh you know i think if if if it can be made out of soft squidgy biological material there's no reason why it can't be made out of any other material provided it has the same properties they will all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry does god exist i doubt it very much i'm because of my background my father was a muslim my mother was a christian neither of my mother was more devout than my father um you know church going evangelical christian my father was sort of more agnostic but i've in a sense fallen between the two stools and also my background in science really has meant that i'm not religious uh i'm not a strident atheist in that i will accuse anyone who has a religious faith as being stupid because i think that's wrong and arrogant and silly a lot of very clever smart wonderful people friends of mine have a religious faith that's very important to them but for me i feel i can describe the world around me without the need of any supernatural creator where does time come from why does it exist um if we went back 20 30 years one might say it's part of the fabric of the universe space-time einstein's theory general theory of relativity is basically an equation which has matter and energy on one side and space time on the other and there's an equal sign between them so there will be no matter and energy without space time there'd be no space time without matter and energy so it's there from the start i think these days there are a number of researchers who are questioning just how fundamental time is you know is is space time the fundamental thing four dimensional four-dimensional space-time and we can't think of space and time separately that's what einstein taught us or does time emerge from space does space emerge from time do do both emerge from something more fundamental in you know when you look at some of these candidate theories of everything you know are there atoms of space-time are there um is everything just to do with connections is everything just information so i think these are sorts of fundamental questions that we don't have an answer to that this is where physics and philosophy is overlapping and collaborating more and more these days uh and it may be that what we once thought was a question that was answered time is fundamental part of the fabric of the universe that may have to be revisited maybe time isn't as fundamental as we thought do you think that entropy is the cause of time the forward you know yeah and i i see entropy as more to do with it being that's a useful measure for us to to say something about a system when our knowledge and information about it is incomplete so entropy for me is a useful tool a way of telling me something about a system when i don't know when i don't have full the full information about it i don't see entropy as a fundamental feature of the universe from which something like time emerges i think entropy is something built upon more fundamental ideas what those fund what the very baseline fundamental ideas are i don't think we know yet but entropy is one another one of those emergent properties like temperature right temperature has no existence when you go down to individual atoms this temperature is a is a it's a macroscopic emerging property when you have lots of atoms bouncing around and it's the measure of their kinetic energy entropy is in a sense is like that or although the second law of thermodynamics the law that says entropy always increases is hugely fundamental and you know even einstein said quantum mechanics might be wrong even relativity might be wrong but the second law of thermodynamics that's never going to be overthrown so the second law entropy increasing is fundamental but the concept of entropy itself as a quantity uh i don't think that's fundamental right so there's some cause for entropy we need to determine what that cause is perhaps and that could be related to the flow of time but not the concept of itself yeah and entropy can mean different things uh you know one of the things that we're studying at the moment you know with my research group is quantum entropy you know in in the quantum world entropy is rather different from the entropy of uh things decaying things balls rolling down hills you know batteries running out of charge me getting older and that sort of thing which is we think that you know shuffling a pack of cards stirring your cream into your coffee that's that that's the measure of entropy tells us there's a direction to time in that in in that case down the quantum world entropy is a measure of information flow as a measure of you know how much information the system has in itself how much of its information has leaked into its surrounding environment so entropy takes on a different meaning but it still has that connection with the direction of time which is the fascinating link all these different measures of entropy all are all connected with the flow or an arrow of time in some sense okay so they're they're connected but we don't quite we haven't really gotten to the fundamental of what that what the nature of that connection is absolutely absolutely okay okay so it remains a question mark indeed uh which in quantum mechanics interpretation do you abide by are you like sean carroll who you know is totally into many worlds or uh i don't have i mean i when i listen to people like sean carroll he's very persuasive and and you know i could listen to him i think that's that's a good point yeah yeah you explained that really well but that's you know good scientists and good communicators that's what they do best you know you read a book by you know richard dawkins or or or physicist like carla rivelli people who are good or stephen pinker right you read books by people who are good at communicating ideas and they can be very persuasive when it comes to quantum mechanics one i'm i'm with sean in that i'm i i believe in objective reality i'm a quantum realist so i i don't like the copenhagen interpretation the standard interpretation that was developed by the founding fathers boar and heisenberg and paulie which was a very much sort of a pragmatic positivist view that look quantum mechanics is a means of making predictions about the results of measurements for me that's not what physics is i side with einstein here physics is about learning how things really are that they are a certain way there isn't a universe out there whether or not we humans um you know agonize over it there's a real world out there that behaves in a certain way and it's our job as physicists to try and figure it out now whether the universe splits into branches or whether uh you know one of the other interpretations right i'm not sure the interpretation that i i'm most fond of that's not the same as saying that's the one i believe is the correct version of the cast is bohmian mechanics de broy bone pilot wave theory so this is sort of hidden variables non-local hidden variables and i like it i just i just find it i know it has its problems but every interpretation has its problems um but birmingham mechanics is somehow neat it describes one universe it describes the real world out there that behaves in a real way whether or not i'm looking uh and and is affected when i interact with it but there's a lot of stuff that needs to be figured out if birmingham mechanics really is the way it's it's the one that i'd like to think is correct the idea of non-local hidden variables does not bother you in bohmian mechanics no because for me quantum mechanics is non-local and and you know when people say well birmingham mechanics is non-local therefore we don't like it what they're basically saying is the non-locality of quantum mechanics we've sort of hidden under the carpet it's just in the math you know you a way function describing two distant particles and if i make a measurement here i affect something over there um that is still non-local right it's still you know the it should it happens instantly it isn't you know and that's what einstein didn't like about quantum mechanics that it was so non-local you didn't like the idea that over here could affect something immediately over there but if for me if quantum mechanics really is describes the world that is non-local maybe the world is non-local that's a problem with birmingham the non-locality is a problem it doesn't we don't yet know how to get a quantum field theory version of bohmian mechanics or relativistic version of birmingham mechanics so you know i wouldn't i wouldn't push my argument too far right right what is there any new insight or new theory that would give us you know a paradigm shifting insight into the nature of the universe there are lots of speculative ideas that fall into the category of theories of quantum gravity and i think most physicists working in this this area would say and i and i'm not that's i'm not an expert in theories of quantum gravity or cosmology that's not my area because my background comes from nuclear physics so i'm rather more traditional in that i'm using quantum mechanics in other areas i'm now developing an interest in this new area called constant thermodynamics but i you know i i don't have a sort of a catalog of of past papers published in this area but it does seem to me that um those working in these areas are coming up with different proposals there was a time 10 20 years ago when string theory and m theory really looked like that was the way to go that was going to be the the paradigm shift you know 10 dimensions and or maybe 11 dimensions and you know everything is down to vibrating strings or brains um that's not so clear now so you know and it's in your string theory and loop quantum gravity are the two leading contenders for a theory of everything my view is that doesn't mean it's correct it's just my own personal view is that very often when people are looking for fear of constant gravity they are considering quantum mechanics quantum fuel theory and they're considering general relativity they're not considering thermodynamics and my view is that thermodynamics complexity emergence those sorts of ideas are going to have to be brought into the fall when people that developing theories like string theory or loop constant gravity they're not thinking so much about the second law of thermodynamics they're not thinking about notions like entropy or information flow or emergence and i think those sorts of ideas in a sort of vague fluffy sort of way i think need to be brought into the mix if we are going to find it have a real paradigm shift in understanding the nature of reality what do you hope that the james webb telescope finds um i guess my hope like a lot of people is that it will find conclusive signature of some sort of life on an exoplanet one of the things that jameson telescope is hoping to be able to see is capture light that passes through atmospheres of exoplanets if the planet passes in front of its home star it's sun you know between us and its star then and light from the star skimming through an atmosphere if that planet has an atmosphere that light will be affected by what chemical makeup the atmosphere has so for example if there's photosynthesizing organisms on that planet then they will affect the makeup of the molecules in the atmosphere which means that they will absorb different wavelengths of light in a way that would be a clincher that it must be something photosynthesizing in that planet for us to see the light with this property with this spectrum of radiation of wavelengths and my understanding is that the james webb telescope might be able to discern the properties of light skimming through an exoplanet's atmosphere that'll be great for most for most scientists when we talk about alien life we're not talking about you know sentient you know little green men human two arms into human like you know anthropomorphization anthropomorphizing all we would like is to know that life started somewhere other than earth and doesn't matter if it's single cell organisms like bacteria the fact that life emerges elsewhere would be enough for us exciting enough that would be huge would they would you know if an alien planet had their own version of james webb telescope would they be able to see that kind of signature on you know if they were to view earth's atmosphere absolutely yes and more because of course there's all sorts of life on earth and our atmosphere is affected in all sorts of ways for example just uh humankind's technology and this and then the the pollution and the chemicals that we're putting in into our atmosphere if they're clever enough aliens they will know those the chemical composition of earth's atmosphere couldn't have happened naturally there's this artificial chemistry in there therefore there must be some sort of civilization creating it so yeah they would they'd know that very quickly do you think we're living in a simulation no uh the argument that i've heard that persuades me is that if we are living in a simulation there are beings that have created the simulation that is us you know the matrix um but if that is the case how do they know for sure they're not in a simulation right so they should be no no better off than us in deciding that we know we haven't created simulation ourselves they know they've done that but why are they not a simulation and therefore why the beings who've created them not also the simulation absolutely infinite loop isn't it infinite loop and therefore the whole thing collapses just forget it that's a good simple answer um one final question a lot of people seem to believe that you know these these um videos that the u.s navy has released is somehow you know these are extraterrestrial beings from some other planet or they're unexplained and this proves that actually we're being visited by extraterrestrials what is your opinion of this i think if we are looking for proof of something extraordinary like visitors from from other planets then we need more powerful evidence than simply websites that show grainy pictures or hearsay or rumor or that the us government has hidden the information when aliens if and when aliens do visit earth we will all know about it let's hope they come in peace and and not want to overtake the planet the idea that they could have traveled you know hundreds of light years or whatever to visit us only to somehow you know with all the technology that that would require to somehow have been secreted away by the us government and you know i know i haven't had no problem with the u.s government but i could i can't imagine they'd be competent enough to hide something quite as as as complicated as this listen if you believe the aliens of us i'm not going to be able to convince someone otherwise because that's the the whole point of many of these um conspiracy theories as i would call them is that they are un provable you know or whatever evidence you provide that that you're not going to persuade someone that they're wrong so that that's simply my opinion and people can carry on believe them if they want to can you just talk about that again you have two videos currently uh on magellan tv that you made for magellan tv i believe right yes so these are so these are two new programs two hour long documentary two episodes it's partly a collection of archived material from previous programs that i've made but bringing them up to up to date with new materials so it's a synthesis of lots of different um subjects that i've covered in physics and chemistry and biology and astronomy and bringing them up to date to give a sort of a more coherent view of where we where our current state of knowledge is about the nature of the universe and the nature of reality so some of the material is from old bbc documentaries that i've made there's a lot of material that's new and up-to-date and really probably feeding off some of the research that i'm currently involved in it's a it's an exciting new story to tell this is exclusive to magellan tv it is it's it's the first one that magellan tv have commissioned uh to make purely for them you know they they have access they're showing some of my other documentaries that i made originally for the bbc but this is a new one for magellan only do you have plans for a series do you have like you know a series of videos that you plan to make or is this based on you know how these two videos do on magellan tv i'm waiting to see how they are um uh received by viewers waiting to see what magellan think i'm hoping that it'll be a collaboration that i can continue with magellan into the future but at the moment let's let's see how these go okay fantastic well jim i really appreciate your time and you know this was great uh my viewers are going to be really excited to hear some of the answers to their questions uh is there anything that um i can do further for you or answer any questions for you i don't think so i think it's been a very enjoyable hour and a bit and and uh it's been it's been fun it's been fun thanks again jim and my pleasure all the best to you and yeah i really appreciate on behalf of the general public uh your efforts to you know popularize science and make us a little little bit smarter you know ah i hope you're sure thank you very much [Music] you

2021-11-17 01:35

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