The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

Andrei Linde is one of the world’s leading cosmological theorists, and is the father of much of Inflationary Cosmology. After Alan Guth developed the original idea of Inflation, Linde, who had been active in this area while working in Moscow, realized a way to make a workable theory out of it, resolving a major problem, called the ‘Graceful Exit’ problem. After that, he made the striking realization that Inflation is inevitable, even in relatively simple theoretical models, and moreover that Inflation will in general be eternal, spawning an infinite number of ‘pocket universes’, as Guth calls them, over an infinite amount of time. While there is much talk about multiverses in the context of string theory, it is the Inflationary Multiverse that is most well motivated, and is currently the most widely accepted picture of the global structure of space and time at the present moment. Andrei is not only an incredible creative scientist, he is a charming fellow. I have enjoyed my interactions with him since I first met him, about 40 years ago. He is one of a handful of leading Russian scientists who were snapped up by the US after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since arriving in the US he has helped lead a vibrant program in Cosmology and String Theory at Stanford University. I was very excited to finally be able to have a dialogue with Andrei for The Origins Podcast. His teaching schedule precluded doing something each time I had reached out to him in the past, so I felt very fortunate when the stars aligned, or at least his teaching schedule and my recording schedule aligned. What resulted is a fascinating conversation with a remarkable scientist, and a lovely conversationalist. We discussed his own experiences in Russia and then again after emigrating, as well as Inflation, Multiverses, and the state of modern cosmology. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

I first met William Shatner a little over 19 years ago when we were filming a TV inspired in part on my book, The Physics of Star Trek. The show was ultimately titled, How William Shatner Changed the World. I am not sure what I expected when I met Bill, but what I got was something completely different. After a brief period during which I felt a bit like I was being auditioned, and which I passed after we filmed a scene in which I was required to use a teleprompter to spout a long series of Star Trek technobabble, we settled in to begin to discuss the world, and I fell a bit in love. Bill reminded me in many ways of my Uncle, who had long been my favorite relative, and the patriarch of our rather small family. His humor, his confidence, his energy, and his curiosity emerged from the crumbling armor he had originally amassed to potentially protect from him what he may have expected to be a pestering nerd. (And which, for all I know, I may have been). As the days wore on (I think we spent 3-4 together in total), we began to talk about science and the world, and I was impressed not just with Bill’s intense curiosity and enthusiasm, but his native intelligence. Once again, I guess I had not been prepared for that. A decade later, and perhaps seven or eight years ago, we spent a week on a Star Trek Cruise together. He of course was the headliner, and I gave some science lectures, and ended up doing two programs on stage with him—one on the program, and one more impromptu. While perhaps billed as a dialogue, the provided an opportunity for Bill to pepper me with questions about all things physics, trade jokes, and overall have a blast. I suspect that is the norm. He invests everything he gets involved in with the same joy, and charm. So, I was over the moon, when after discussing the possibility of doing The Origins Podcast for over 2 years, Bill finally, in a weak moment, I assume, agreed. It took about 30 seconds for the same sense of fun and joy to take over, a deep friendliness to be transparent, and for Bill to basically take over. From there, I held on to my chair and just tried to enjoy the wild ride. It was fun, and informative. I had 5 pages of questions to ask him, and I managed to sneak in about 3 or 4 questions. Instead the conversation went wherever it went—most often to questions about the Universe—and it was one of the most enjoyable 90 minutes I have spent in awhile. It also gave me a chance to reconnect with Bill, and I don’t plan to wait another decade before doing it again. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

This is the second podcast dialogue we are airing with renowned astrophysicist, Astronomer Royal, and former President of the Royal Society, Lord Martin Rees. The first time I sat down with Martin for the Podcast we discussed his life in science, and topics ranging from the state of modern cosmology to the potential conflicts between science and religion (which he views as minimal, and I don’t). Martin’s thinking, and his expertise, go far beyond these topics however. Based on his experience at the Royal Society, as an elected member of the House of Lords, and working with the Center for Existential Risk at Cambridge, Martin has thought carefully about the challenges we face as a society in the 21st century, and how science can be marshaled to help us address these challenges. He has written a new book on the subject called If Science is to Save Us. I thought it would be useful and interesting to sit down with Martin to discuss the ideas he raises there, and our conversation turned out to be so wide-ranging that we are presenting it in two separate episodes of the podcast. This is the first release, and I am sure you will find his thoughtful and incisive comments both provocative and inspiring. As always, I benefitted greatly from my conversation with him, and I hope you do as well.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

On Nov 15th and 16th, 2022, The Origins Project Foundation hosted their first public events in North America at the beautiful Orpheum Theater in Phoenix, AZ (we had hosted an event in Iceland in September during our Greenland-Iceland Travel Adventure). There was no better way to begin this new series than with a dialogue onstage with Richard Dawkins, and that was the substance of our first night’s event. As all those who have followed us will know, Richard and I have done many dialogues together, onstage and online, and so it was important that this dialogue be new and different. Richard had just published a new book entitled “Books do Furnish a Life”, which is a compilation of essays he had written about other scientists and writers, and also transcripts of dialogues he had had with numerous people, including me. I decided this new book would provide a wonderful opportunity to jump off in new directions, and it turned out to be just that. The response from the audience and from those who had seen many of our previous dialogues was very positive, and we came off stage feeling like it was one of the best public conversations we have had. I hope those of you who watch it, or listen to it, here will agree. Following our 90 minute dialogue onstage we asked for questions from the audience, and after an intermission, we answered many of these. This Q&A will be offered as an exclusive post for Critical Mass paid subscribers, to thank you for your support of our efforts. It will remain behind the Critical Mass paywall for 1 month, and then will be released to the general public. I hope all of you enjoy this conversation, and Richard’s remarkable enthusiasm about science and writing, and his insights about the world. In a future post, we will release the video record of the second night’s conversation, a panel discussion with leading physicists about the current state of cosmology. Finally, later this month we will open our newest travel adventure, a trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Island, for booking for the general public. Critical Mass subscribers will have an advance opportunity to book one of the 36 berths on this voyage. Stay tuned.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Physics at Caltech, a title many physicists would cherish. He is widely known in the field for his work as a theoretical physicist spearheading the field of Quantum Computing, where he is Director of Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, but his expertise and contributions span a far broader spectrum of topics. His background is in theoretical particle physics, gravitation, and cosmology. As a graduate student, his seminal work on the cosmological implications of magnetic monopoles in Grand Unified Theories helped lead Alan Guth to develop his theory of Inflationary Cosmology, in part to resolve a cosmological conundrum John first elucidated. Since that time, John has explored condensed matter systems and the physics of black holes, made a famous bet with Stephen Hawking, and coined the term “quantum supremacy”, to describe a metric that might reveal the first time a quantum computer resolved a problem that a classical computer could not resolve in a feasible human timescale. As Director the Caltech Institute, John leads one of the most vibrant programs exploring quantum information and quantum computation, and I was happy to have the opportunity to connect again with my old friend and colleague to discuss this rapidly evolving field, about which so much is written in the popular press, and which may impact on all of our lives in the 21st century. In our discussion we tried to separate the wheat from the chaff, to discuss the future of the field, its current state, and challenges and opportunities. In addition, we discussed his own scientific career and the physics areas that have excited him, and what helped drive him to become a physicist in the first place. It was a fascinating discussion and I am sure you will be both entertained, and enlightened. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Tim Palmer graduated from Oxford with a PhD in mathematical physics, working on general relativity, and got a postdoc to work with Stephen Hawking. He turned it down and moved into the field of meteorology, and then moved on to Climate Change studies, where he pioneered the development of what is called ‘ensemble forecasting’ to predict both long term climate change, as well as short term weather predictions. This technique has now become a standard in the field, and is necessary to properly account for possible chaotic behavior in atmospheric systems. Even simple classical systems can be chaotic—implying that even minute changes in initial conditions can sometimes produce dramatic variations in their later evolution. The canonical hyperbolic example is a butterfly flapping its wings in Kansas might later cause a violent storm on the Eastern Seaboard. On first glance, it may seem that this would imply all predictivity must go out the window, but over the past 40 years techniques have been developed for dealing with the so-called ‘fractal’ distributions that often result from chaotic dynamics, and as a result, it has become possible to constrain the range of possible long term outcomes of chaotic behavior. Tim Palmer has recently written a new book, entitled The Primacy of Doubt, which provides a wonderful discussion about the importance of accounting for doubt and uncertainty in a wide variety of systems, from weather to medicine, and even includes discussions of there possible implications of his ideas for the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and gravity. While I am more skeptical of his nevertheless intriguing latter arguments, Tim and I had a fascinating and informative discussion about his own experiences as a scientist, and the importance of explicitly incorporating a range of initial conditions when exploring weather and climate predictions. For many people, uncertainty is something to be avoided, but in physics, uncertainty is an inherent part of our understanding of the world, and it must be faced head-on. Being able to make quantitative predictions with likelihoods that have meaning requires it, and science is the only area of human inquiry where we can state with great quantitative accuracy what the likelihood is that a given prediction will be correct. This is a triumph of the scientific process and deserves to be better understood. In this regard, there are fewer better guides than Tim Palmer, and it was a delight to spend time with him on this podcast, which will enlighten and entertain.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Exploring the unintended consequences of human technology with Elizabeth Kolbert, including reversing river flows, engineering solutions in New Orleans, conservation efforts for rare species like Devil's Hole pupfish, and the urgency of addressing climate change through innovative solutions like genetic engineering and solar geoengineering.

In December it was announced that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition facility has achieved its first goal of “Ignition”, in which 192 powerful lasers focused on a small pellet of fuel led to a sustained fusion reaction for a fraction of a second that released more energy than it received from the incident laser light. Following on requests from many readers, I describe the science behind this experiment, and the wishful thinking associated with it, regarding the possible use of fusion as an unlimited power source for humanity in the future. This special holiday edition of Science Matters accompanies our last podcast, with Augusten Burroughs, which was about another kind of wishful thinking. I hope you enjoy this science as much as I hope you enjoyed that delightful discussion with a wonderful writer. Happy Holidays from Critical Mass, The Origins Foundation, the Origins Podcast, and from me. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

I want to be upfront. I love Augusten Burroughs. I fell in love with him when I first read Running with Scissors, and every time I have picked up anything he has written, I have that warm feeling knowing I will delight in the scrumptious experience that is associated with reading his work. Shortly after creating the Origins Podcast in 2019, I discovered that Augusten was going to have a new book coming out, and I contacted him to ask if he might come by the studio and do a podcast if his book tour passed nearby. To my great happiness, he said he would love to come by and would send me a prepublication copy of the book so I might prepare. So it was that I received Toil and Trouble: A Memoire, and discovered to my surprise that it was a memoir describing his, and his mother’s experiences as witches. I read the book carefully and tried to decide what to do. The dilemma was somewhat similar to that I faced when I wrote The Physics of Star Trek. I didn’t want to write a book that would simply say “This won’t work” over and over again. Similarly, I didn’t want to offer blanket denials of Augusten’s claims. Instead, I decided I would try and use the opportunity to discuss science and skepticism and apply those ideas to various examples in the book. After we finished the podcast, we weren’t sure when the right time to release it would be. I didn’t want to cast any negative shadows on the book during its initial release, and I wanted to time it appropriately after we had amassed a catalog of podcasts with scientists and artists that would give some perspective on the discussion we had. When we thought about a holiday edition podcast the dialogue with Augusten came to mind. I confess I had forgotten the details and was a little worried. I needn’t have worried, however. I had forgotten how much fun it was, and how much fun any conversation with Augusten can be. Moreover, he comes at almost all ideas and experiences with the characteristics of a scientist. He is realistic, skeptical, and willing to be wrong. It is so refreshing. We began the podcast by once again discussing his dysfunctional childhood, which he covers so beautifully in a number of his books. It is a fascinating dive into issues of mental illness, and victimhood, the latter of which he happily demonstrates is in the eye of the beholder. But the purpose of this discussion is to put in context the discovery, when he was a young boy, that he was a witch. A discovery revealed by his mother, who told him that he came from a long of witches after he has an experience that he would describe as a sort of remote sensing, associated with an accident his grandmother had. From there we discuss more modern examples. I truly enjoyed listening to Augusten again in the podcast, which presents, in my mind, a good example of how to have a difficult but respectful conversation, and how science and skepticism can and should be applied to wishful thinking—something that Augusten would certainly agree with. As Richard Feynman once said, after all: The easiest person to fool is yourself. Throughout, Augusten is charming and enjoyable, and listening to him describe his own experiences is alone worth the listen. I hope you enjoy this part 1 of our Holiday Podcast. Part 2 will be released after Xmas, and is a special holiday edition of Science Matters, where I discuss wishful thinking associated with a scientific development that dominated much of the media earlier this month. I hope you enjoy both, complementary discussions. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Cormac McCarthy is a literary icon. Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel All the Pretty Horses, and the Pulitzer Prize for his apocalyptic novel The Road, Norma’s earlier novel, Blood Meridian has been labelled The Great American Novel. Many people did not know that this cultural giant is also fascinated by, and amazingly knowledgeable about science. Reading his newest books, The Passenger and Stella Maris (released this week!), however, and that becomes obvious. The protagonists are mathematical and physics prodigies, and just as one may requires a dictionary to keep up with the the remarkably diverse prose in Cormac’s writing, some people may need to consult some popular books on science to fully appreciate the scientific asides sprinkled throughout both volumes. I first met Cormac at the Santa Fe Institute back when I was considering a possible position there as its Director, some years ago. I was shocked to walk into the kitchenette there and discover him, as I had no idea that is where he spent his time. But, as we discuss in our dialogue, he moved to Santa Fe at the invitation of Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell Mann to join the new Institute. Cormac and I became fast friends then, and have remained friends ever since. The best hour of radio I ever did was with Cormac and Werner Herzog, on the occasion of Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, where both Cormac and Werner talked with amazing authority about the evolution paleontology of early modern humans. Then later, he honored me by asking if he could copyedit the paperback version of my book Quantum Man, a scientific biography of Richard Feynman. He said he wanted to make the paperback version ‘perfect’, in part by removing all exclamation marks and semicolons.. Of course I said yes, and we added his name as copyeditor on the front page! I have known that Cormac is extremely reluctant to appear in public or do interviews. He agreed to appear in our film The Unbelievers, which was a great gift, but has often demurred when I have asked him to appear in other public panels on subjects we love to talk about in private. So, when I asked him if, on the occasion of the publication of his new books, the first books in 16 years, if we could sit down and record a conversation about science for The Origins Podcast, I was shocked and thrilled when he agreed. He is 89 years old now, and I was so pleased to have the chance to record some of his thoughts on science for posterity.He invited us into his home for an afternoon conversation after a long lunch, and the conversation that ensued was much like the conversations we have had over the years. Cormac loves to discuss science, but prefers to listen to physicists talk about their work rather than initiate conversations. He is, after all, notoriously laconic. But when he does speak about science, his insights are fascinating. Using some of the ideas discussed in his new books a launching points, our discussion ranged over quantum mechanics, the role of mathematics in science, and whether there will ever be a theory of everything. There were a variety of challenges that day, including the difficulty of filming something in a sunlight room without window shades, but the end result was unique and memorable. I hope you agree. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe