"the following is a conversation with brian greene theoretical physicist at columbia and author of many amazing books on physics including his latest until the end of time mind matter and our search fo..."

"in your most recent book until the end of time you quote bertrand russell from a debate he had about god in 1948 he says quote so far as scientific evidence goes the universe has crawled by slow stage..."

"so it's not that i would disagree with burch and russell in terms of the basic physics and the basic unfolding but i think it's really a matter of the slant that you take on what it means for us so ma..."

"much that may sound like a hallmark card this really is the deep lesson of physics and science more generally over the past few hundred years well there's some level where you can objectively say that..."

"it's a tough question i asked that question even to richard dawkins once and i already have my preconceived notion which he pretty much confirmed which is if one could give an answer to that question ..."

"wondering what's the meaning of life or trying to make sense of it just going about its business of survival which of course is the dominant activity that life on this planet has practice we are a rar..."

"think that there are fish walking around and you know coming up with you know existentialism i don't know that there are you know dogs walking around who've developed an understanding the general theo..."

"deeply coupled like language and poetry yeah that resonates with my view as well i mean there's a scientist maybe you've spoken to michael graziano from princeton yeah he um he's developed ideas of co..."

"somewhere in this gray matter inside of our heads and the way i like to think of it is like look you know if um if if if you're in a dark room right and and i had glow-in-the-dark paint on my fingers ..."

"is uh an important component of enjoying something so once once we know how this thing works maybe we uh will no longer enjoy like this conversation we'll seek other sources of enjoyment but there's u..."

"it so yeah well i sort of take that as a bit of a of a motto in some sense that that there is a wonder that comes from a kind of ignorance and i don't mean that in a derogatory sense but just from not..."

"i don't think you can analogize say to a magician right the magician you know does some trick you learn how it sounds like oh my god that was that's ridiculous when you find but but nature is perhaps ..."

"thing yeah i think it will i think it will i think it has it has so far but the other side of it which you which you emphasize is it's not like science somehow reaches an end right there are certain c..."

"smaller because the things that we know that we don't understand grows larger and larger do you have a hope that we solve that theory of everything puzzle in the next few decades so there's been a bun..."

"biology is just small d yeah right exactly yeah so so it is really trying to put gravity and quantum mechanics together and uh since i was a college kid i was uh deeply fascinated with gravity and as ..."

"a day on this sort of stuff i would have said yeah by by 2021 yeah we're gonna know whether it's right or wrong we'll make contact i would have said look there may be certain mathematical puzzles that..."

"but you know science and the universe it's not about pleasing any individual it is what it is and so we just press onward and we'll see where it goes so in terms of string theory if i just look from a..."

"kept so many people deeply engaged in moving the frontier forward there's a few qualities about string theory which are weird i mean a lot of physics is just weird and beautiful so let me ask the ques..."

"five six dimensions might explain why there are certain forces and particles and how they behave to me this was like amazing utterly amazing and then when i learned that strength theory embraced all t..."

"how are we supposed to think about those extra dimensions i was supposed to imagine actual physical reality or is this more in the space of mathematics that allows you to sort of come up with tricks t..."

"mathematics the size and the shape of those extra dimensions leaves an imprint in the world that we do have access to so one of the ways that we have hoped yet to achieve to make contact with experime..."

"of the experiments that we had high hopes for but by high hopes i'm actually exaggerating one of the experiments that we imagined might in the best of all circumstances yield some insight we weren't w..."

"speculative right now it's far too hypothetical in fact i am sympathetic to the view that it really shouldn't be called string theory it degrades the word theory because theory in science of course me..."

"arguments within a subject in order that you stay fresh and you stay focused on the things that matter but in the end of the day i think it's a more vital contribution to give us something new rather ..."

"strange because we can measure it right i mean there are laboratories in the world that measure this thing called time to spectacular precision but you know if you go up to the folks and say like what..."

"that we're talking about time for you and time for me are different if we're in relative motion he then shows in the general theory of relativity that if we're experiencing different gravity different..."

"details notwithstanding the universe allows this kind of travel to the future and if i could pause real quick you could also at the macro level with biology extend the human lifespan to do a kind of t..."

"now we don't know if there are wormholes possible according to einstein correct they are possible according to einstein but even einstein was very quick to say just because my math allows for somethin..."

"but people have studied this in more detail questioned could you ever keep a wormhole open assuming it does exist could you ever travel through a wormhole or would there be a requirement of some kind ..."

"uh sorry to go crazy for a second but if you have like the pan psychosome idea that consciousness permeates all matter maybe traveling in that whatever laws of physics the consciousness operates under..."

"of our existence is human to human communication contact we live in social groups and that's what it's allowed us to get to the place where we've gotten imagine that we have long missed that there's o..."

"have any kind of physics based free will yeah and and so the idea follows naturally from all that we've been talking about let's make the assumption that all there is in the physical universe is stuff..."

"that is the cause for our decided to go left or right choose vanilla or chocolate live or die that intuitive sensation does not have a basis in our understanding of the physical world so that's the en..."

"is not from the control of physical law the freedom that we have is from the constrained behavior that has long since governed inanimate objects we are liberated from the limited behavioral repertoire..."

"still pretty much a holy mathematical subject today yeah do we long for that image where we can look at it and say string it's real i mean you know i mean how thrilling how thrilling to be part of tha..."

"appreciate it's like terrified aw somehow it's still beautiful that's a good way of saying it i think i kind of share that that reaction because there is a way in which when you work on this subject l..."

"even if we truly knew what the big bang is that's a big question it's own right one would still be left with the question well okay so you've explained the process by which a tiny nugget of a universe..."

"beautiful explanation for what the bang in the big bang was and then people mathematically analyze the consequences of this idea and they make predictions for tiny temperature differences across the n..."

"no hang on you know your theories suffers from different problems and so the arguments goes it's a healthy debate talk about real debates and science so when you ask what's up with the big bang i don'..."

"we're not used to those kinds of numbers in physics we're used to a half one pi e square to two those are the kinds of fundamental numbers that emerge in our explanations of the world and we look at t..."

"don't mean to in any way cast aspersions on the work it's vital and interesting and people are thinking about it i don't consider it as close a competitor to say the inflationary theory as for instanc..."

"most simulation cosmology by the way is just awesome but you know just like simulation of the early formation of our solar system to understand how the like the ore cloud and just i don't know the the..."

"it might be oversimplifying things but just observing the power of the evolutionary process i tend to believe and like you read different theories of how we went uh how homo sapiens evolved it seems l..."

"yeah they're they're watching so where where do you and these possible explanations to the fermi paradox why haven't we contacted aliens do you land on well i think the most straightforward explanatio..."

"of many planets i mean there's now an estimate now that there's on order of one planet per star on average so we've long known that you know the galaxy hundreds of billions of stars numbers of galaxie..."

"advanced than us and i don't think that they would expend the energy to hide themselves so i don't think they care enough and so i see that's actually what i i believe that there's uh a very large num..."

"imagine that the super advanced aliens would be like like whoever you know but but i feel like we're sufficiently advanced that there should be some signal signature of that but maybe it's coming i th..."

"in translation yeah and it could well be it's a look i mean i think part of the reason i go toward the possibility of the soul intelligence is there's a certain kind of romantic appeal to looking out ..."

"in let me ask you as somebody who's a screen theorist a physicist do you think space exploration a colonizing space is a physics or an engineering problem what would you say yeah i think it's fundamen..."

"maybe reducing what it means to be a human being into information and uploading certain parts of it maybe not all the full resolution of a human life but maybe the essential things like the dna and be..."

"do you think there'll be a day in the future where a human being is born on mars and has to learn about his or her human origins on earth like they'll have to read in the book yeah i don't think it'll..."

"i i really like the idea of going to mars of and not just stepping foot on mars and it wasn't until maybe um misinformed but for me personally uh it wasn't until elon musk started talking about the co..."

"going to happen relatively soon so i mean it could well be in your lifetime unlikely mind but possibly in your lifetime that that kid will be born and and and have the experience that that you describ..."

"that to me carries a deep sense of terror hmm you know i i feel that sense of terror every time kerouac jack carrack talked about this and on the road is you know when you leave a place if you're hone..."

"the denial of death by ernest becker and when you are aware of the ways in which our mortality influences our behaviors it really does add a different slant a different kind of color to the interpreta..."

"experiments where they have group of people a group of people b and the only difference between the two groups is that group b they somehow reminded them in some subtle way of their own mortality some..."

"and i think about from an engineering perspective this is where i lose all of my robotics colleagues is i feel like if you want to create intelligence you have to also engineer in some kind of echoes ..."

"fit into human society you better have the same kind of existential dread the same kind of fear of mortality otherwise you're not going to fit in [Laughter] it might be it might be wild but it's at le..."