Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1631 - Brian Greene
Uploaded: 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1631 - Brian Greene' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1631 - Brian Greene' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1631 - Brian Greene

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Mr. Green, how are you, sir?
Good, how about you?
Good to see you, man.
Good seeing you.
What's the latest?
You got a book out?
I do, yeah, the paperback of Until the End of Time.
It's out today.
Until the end of time.
Yeah.
That's heavy.
It is heavy, but it's a big story, but it's one that we have a nice part within.
A small cameo.
The human species has a cameo, so it's a human story, too.
Yeah, the human species.
What have we been around for, what, 300,000 years, 400,000 years?
It depends how you define the species, but yeah, that's not a bad number.
Some people will go back to a million or so if you go back to early human
species, but yeah.
And compared to the length of time scales that compose reality from the
beginning to the end,
that's zero.
That's nothing.
When you, being a physicist, being a person that really does have a much
greater grasp
of the concept of infinity and of time and of the, just the length that the
universe has
existed in its current form, how do you just get through your day and not freak
out?
Well, it's because my wife says, you know, you gotta cook dinner.
So I mean, there are things that you have to actually get done, but it does
change your
perspective in a significant way because you recognize that the things that we
consider
to be, oh, so vital and important are just this blink of an eye on the cosmological
landscape,
on the cosmological timeline.
And it does change the way you approach the world when you pay attention to it.
It's hard to always pay attention to it though.
Look, I mean, if I'm walking down the street and I'm thinking about quantum
mechanics, I'm
thinking about, you know, quantum tunneling.
I'm thinking about relativity, time slowing down when I'm moving, right?
So if you're in the physics mode, you are living life differently, but who can
live that
way for more than a moment?
Right.
Because life is too powerful and it's intrusion on the way you actually behave
in the world.
But because of your perspective and because of your education on this, do you
feel like
almost an obligation to try to expand people's perspective?
I'd say that's part of what my goals of life is, to do just that.
You know, I don't want people to not live their lives the way they have, but I
want them
to be able to broaden the experience by recognizing that everyday phenomenon is
a small slice of
the way the world is actually put together.
And when you can see your life and your experience is just a tiny sliver of a
reality that's like
bizarrely strange and utterly wondrous when you understand everything from
black holes to
time dilation to quantum tunneling to all that stuff that we have discovered
over the last
couple of hundred years.
Yeah.
It changes things.
Is it a, is it a difficult thing to get across to people?
Like, do you try to think like, what is the best way that people are going to
absorb these
ideas?
Because they are so, they're not abstract, but they're, they're so outside of
the norm in
terms of the way people view the world.
Yeah.
You kind of like, they go, Hey, I know you're concentrated on this, but look at
that.
Yeah.
I mean, the real difficulty is not so much getting people interested.
You might think that that's the big hurdle.
People are like, ah, don't talk to me about that stuff.
It doesn't matter to my life.
But that's, no, people are, are very curious and interested in what physics has
found.
What's hard is getting them to not just take it in, but to take it in correctly
so that
they don't take the ideas and twist it into something else that suits whatever
weirdness
they may have encountered in the world.
The number of times that I see people take the concepts of quantum mechanics
and turn it
into utter nonsense because they're like, Hey, oh yeah, probabilities.
Okay.
You know, that describes this quality of my world or, you know, the weirdness
of time.
Yeah.
That's why I had this like mind mill with my best friend on the other side of
the, you know,
that sort of thing.
And, and, and, and I, I don't, I don't fault people for that.
These ideas are difficult.
But if you ask me what the challenge is, the challenge is breaking through that
and getting
people to really understand what it is that we found.
And it's weirder than many of the things that the human imagination would go to,
but it's
harder because it's very specific and rigorous and mathematical ultimately.
And that's unfamiliar.
Do you think it's the complications of quantum mechanics?
Like the con it's that it's so, it's such a bizarre field of study that it sort
of lends
itself being sort of occupied by people like the, what the bleep do we know
type folks that
kind of co-opt it and then spread nonsense.
It's exactly right.
I mean, that, that, that film is a, is an unfortunate, but very good example of
people who took the
ideas and, and usurped them for their own purpose.
Right.
Um, I had friends that are in that film who were deeply disheartened by the way
their words
were twisted.
Well, they were tricked.
They were tricked.
They thought they were doing a documentary on quantum mechanics and it turned
out to be
essentially a cult documentary.
Exactly.
And, and, and so there is a sensibility of that sort, which is volitional.
That's like a choice.
I think that was made.
In fact, I think I mentioned to you once with the director of that film had
called me to
be in it.
And I was like, well, what are you doing?
Cause I couldn't tell what the, and then he called me like a year after the
film came
out and kind of apologized and said, you were right.
Oh, so he didn't know.
Yeah.
He didn't know.
So, so, so, so, but, but yeah,
we should stop just so people that don't know what we're talking about,
understand what's happening.
There was a person in that documentary that calls themselves Ramtha that there's
a, they
don't explain it in the documentary, but they claim to be like a, what is it?
A thousand year old?
35,000 year old sage from the lost land of Lemuria, I believe it is, which is
like another
lost land with Atlantis.
They were like at war with Atlantis or something like that.
So yeah, it's, it's a pretty deep cult.
Yeah.
And yeah, I think I mentioned to you once, I actually accidentally found myself
at one of
their headquarters in, in, I think it was in Washington state gave a talk at a
gathering
and it was, it was so sad at some level because I saw people searching for
truth, but being
misled by a charismatic speaker who was basically coming up with this nonsense,
you know?
Um, and, and, and so that's one way in which these ideas are usurped, but
others, it's
less, it's less by design.
It's just more, you hear quantum mechanics is weird and then you hear something
else is
weird and you say, oh, that must be quantum mechanics because there's this
general sensibility
that the world is weird.
But quantum mechanics is weird in a very specific way, right?
I mean, Schrodinger, Erwin Schrodinger wrote down an equation, a mathematical
equation that
actually quantifies the weirdness in a very specific way that makes
mathematical predictions
that we can test in the laboratory.
So that's not just like, you know, people in their minds coming up with crazy
stuff and
saying, wouldn't that be curious if that was part of reality?
This is stuff that has emerged from careful study.
So, you know, when you learn that the world evolves according to a game of
chance, it's
as if, you know, there's a throw of the dice that determines how things evolve
from one moment
to the next.
That's deeply unfamiliar.
We don't go around the world thinking that there's a chance that something
bizarre will
happen, but there is such a chance in every moment, in every experience of your
life.
The chance is so small in the big everyday world that we don't experience these
things.
But if you were an electron, yeah, you'd be having the weirdness of being two
places at
once in some sense.
You'd have the weirdness of passing through solid barriers.
You know, these kinds of curiosities would be an everyday phenomenon if you
were as small
as a particle like an electron.
That's sort of what lends itself to the woo-woo people, right?
Yeah, totally.
Because when you talk about things being in superposition, or you talk about
spooky action
at a distance, you talk about these bizarre things that they sound like magic
when you're
talking about something that's both moving and not moving.
It's in two places at the same time, or there's a probability of it being in
these...
Describing stuff like that, especially to the average person that doesn't have
a background
in this, they go, what is the world then?
Yeah.
What are you saying?
And I have to say, though, we physicists come to the very same place.
We say, what is the world then?
Yeah.
What are we talking about?
And the difference is we can then look back at the equations and say, if we're
talking about
quantum entanglement, we can see how two particles far apart in space will have
behaviors that
are correlated.
You do something on this particle and it will have some instantaneous
correlation with what
happens at that particle, regardless of how far apart they are in space.
Einstein himself called this spooky.
Yeah.
Spooky action at a distance.
You do something in New York and it affects in some quantum mechanical way a
particle in California.
How could that be?
How can that be?
Good.
So I don't know at some level, if I'm trying to answer you human to human, but
if I'm answering
as a mathematician, as a physicist, I can see it in the equations.
I see it in the mathematics.
I see how this particle has a quantum wave, which has a piece that stretches
all the way
out to California and way beyond.
And when I interact with this particle, I affect that probability wave instantaneously.
Therefore, I change the wave in California, even if my action is in New York.
So I see that in the mathematics.
I understand these words you're saying, but I don't understand it.
Neither do I.
That's the point.
You know, so what level of understanding are we talking about, right?
If you're talking about intuition, like a deep intuition, the way we understand
two plus
two is four, right?
I don't have to explain that to anybody.
They get it.
They see two apples and two apples for up.
They got it.
But when it comes to quantum entanglement, I don't feel it that way.
I don't have that intrinsic understanding of what it is.
And so if you push me to say, well, what is it?
I ultimately fall back on the math.
Right.
And ultimately, I say the reason I believe in math is the math makes
predictions that we
can test in the laboratory.
And then you say, well, then what kind of understanding is that?
And some people would say that's the deepest understanding.
All we really want of a physical theory is for it to give a rigorous
mathematical articulation
of what happens out there in the world.
And it's the human brain struggling for some kind of intuition.
That's our problem.
That's a human problem.
That's not a problem of physics.
That's a problem of us being satisfied.
A problem of perception.
Perception and understanding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this spooky action at a distance.
Why was it first, was it a hypothesis?
Or was this something that was proven by math first?
Yeah.
So Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, a
curious fellow, very
interesting life.
But he realized, looking at the equations, that there was this quality of the
math that if
two particles come together and they interact for a little while and then they
separate, they
can no longer be thought of as independent or autonomous.
I mean, the very basic quality of autonomy, you and I are autonomous because we
can separate.
We can go our separate ways and do whatever we want at our respective locations.
So you would think that if two particles separate, they will also be autonomous.
But he saw in the mathematics th