Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1233 - Brian Cox
Uploaded: 2019-01-29T00:13:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1233 - Brian Cox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-01-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1233 - Brian Cox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-01-29. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1233 - Brian Cox

that's very cool three two one yeah a guy named uh it was his online twitter or
his
uh instagram handles tgt studios and he makes these i actually had one made for
elon elon musk
loved it too so we made him one with he made one with like this very beautiful
red wood yeah and
those are what are those things made out of jamie the some diodes or something
nixie tubes nixie
tubes yeah yes yeah he has to get them from russia that's uh he has them
delivered over from russia
so they might have like listening devices implanted in them as well yeah so brian
good to see you man
great to be back yeah great to have you back so tell me about this tour that
you're doing
it's a it's a world tour try to keep this sucker like a fist from my face there
you go how's that
that perfect yeah it's a world tour starts next week in um the uk and then we
go everywhere from
the south island of new zealand all the way to the arctic circle to svalbard
which is north
the furthest north that you can go on a commercial aircraft wow in the middle
we're in the states for
a month in uh mainly in may and uh yeah it's it's about cosmology and about the
questions that cosmology
raises so if you're interested in the science of how did the universe begin
even questions of what
may have been there is the universe eternal is there such a thing as before the
big bang what is the future of the universe how does
complexity emerge spontaneously in the universe i mean we sort of take it for
granted that we
there's a big bang and it's all hot and there's just this kind of hot
glow of stuff and out of that spontaneously in 13.8 billion years you get
something like the earth with
the civilization and life on it so how does that do we know anything about that
i mean we do i'm asking
the question rhetorically we know quite a lot about it so it's it's really
about showing the size and scale of
the universe but addressing those questions i think everybody has about what
does it what does it mean
to be human this tiny little finite life that we lead in a possibly infinite
universe how do you make
sense of that well it's incredibly exciting to me that there's a giant audience
for this and that
what neil degrasse tyson had been doing and what a lot of public touring
intellectuals are doing now
they're doing these giant theaters and these people are coming out to see these
shows and we're
realizing that there's i mean i hate to use the term market for this but there's
a demand for this and
there's a lot of people who are incredibly fascinated by this and yeah it's it's
spreading information
it's spreading knowledge yeah i mean it's in the uk particularly i mean wembley
arena for example
you know you're talking about 10 000 people 12 000 people in these shows and
you're right they are
coming although you know they're big shows spectacular screens and all that
they're coming for
to think that they're coming to hear about what we know about the universe and
nature
and i think you know i think i'm not surprised people are interested because
these are questions
that everybody asks you know i mean just why am i here you know everybody's sat
there asking that
question but i my point is that there is a framework there's a framework of
knowledge there are things
we know about the universe so it is true that science scientists are not going
to tell you why you're here
they're not going to tell you what the meaning of life is but there is actually
a a there are things
you need to know if you want to start to explore those questions for yourself i
mean you need to know
that there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe you need to
know that the milky way galaxy
has got 200 billion stars most of those stars now we know have planetary
systems we estimate there are
something like 20 billion earth-like planets or potentially earth-like planets
in the milky way
galaxy alone so if you're asking questions about what is my place in the
universe you need to know
those things first of all it's a framework within which you can think when you
get to those numbers
when you're talking about trillions and billions and all those zeros my brain
just goes numb there's this
lack of comprehension that i'm i'm well aware of like those numbers get thrown
about i go oh 200 billion
i think everybody does i think every scientist that no scientist can picture
that number i mean he even
the small number 200 billion which is the number of stars right in one galaxy
and then when you say two
trillion galaxies you know that that's i challenge anyone to be able to picture
that but it is the
reality that we've observed we've you know we i mean we haven't counted all two
trillion by the way we
have we have a thing called the sloan digital sky survey which maps the
positions of galaxies so you can
you know how much of the sky you've surveyed and you know how many galaxies you've
counted and then you
can spread that across the wider universe and you get this picture of a vast
and possibly infinite
universe i mean we we know that the universe are very strongly suspected the
universe is much bigger
than the piece we can see so we have good reason to think that's the case
whether it's infinite or not
is another question and then that goes to your you know that can you picture
infinity well no one can
picture infinity there's a weird thing as well that you know we we say the
universe began 13.8 billion
years ago so that's a measurement so because we can measure the speed that all
the galaxies are flying
away from us essentially and then you can run time backwards if you like so to
find out when they were
all on top of each other and so it's quite a simple measurement and we've done
that so we say the
universe began 13.8 billion years ago but actually all we know really was the
universe was very hot and
very dense at that time and we have some theories that the universe was in
existence before that
and perhaps some sort of circumstantial evidence and that means that actually
the universe could could
have always been there eternal and um when i talk to people sometimes they get
a bit some people get
upset about that some people would rather it had a beginning and the idea that
it might have been
around forever is more frightening somehow than the fact that it began you know
it's it's interesting the
way that people's minds work what what terrifies you the most an eternal
universe or a finite universe
yeah they're both incomprehensible the the eternal universe
if there was an eternal universe is that negate the theory of the big bang or
does it mean that there's a
constant cycle of big bangs and then expansion and then recompression or yeah
it could do so those
theories are back in vogue some of those theories are back in vogue again so
yes some of them say that
there's a a cycling universe um so the big bang is an event when space gets
very hot and very dense and
filled with particles and that may happen again or some of the other theories
uh there's a theory called
eternal inflation which is a theory that and it's actually the most popular
theory i think at the
moment but what happened but why the big bang is the way that it is because it's
got some very special
features the big bang which we could talk about but inflation is the idea that
space space time was
around before the big bang and it was expanding extremely fast and there was
doubling in size in the
the most popular of these theories every 10 to the minus 37 seconds which is 0.00000
with 37 knots
one of a second so it's an unimaginably fast expansion and then the idea is
that draws to a
close so it quite naturally sort of dies away and the expansion slows down and
all the energy that was
taken that was causing that expansion sort of gets dumped into space and heats
it up and makes particles
and that's what we call the big bang and those theories that slight extension
to those um say
that that slowing down just happens in little patches so most of the universe
the overwhelming
majority of the universe is still inflating at that insane sort of speed and
the just little patches
stop and they're big bangs so you get multiple universes a multiverse it's
called the inflationary
multiverse and we are in one of those bubbles and that's one of the more
popular theories that's
another one i mean that right now i'm aware of what you're saying i i can i can
sort of visualize
it in some sort of a graphic form but it's incomprehensible like my mind doesn't
it doesn't
have the capacity to expand the this sense of distance and size to that that
grasp is this because
of just the way we evolved we evolved here on earth to deal with the space that's
in front of us and now
over the course of you know industrial civilization and education we're now
grasping these concepts that are so
alien to the reality the the tangible reality that we exist in every day i'm
sure that's right um
that the you know even very simple things like you go back to the greeks so
aristotle and there's great
you know very clever people but they thought the earth was at the center of the
universe why because
it feels like it's at the center of the universe it feels like we're not moving
um and that's quite
a deep point actually in physics it's like why is it that we're flying around
relative to the sun very
fast at whatever speed it is 18 miles a second or something like that and the
whole solar system is
going around the milky way galaxy and so on but why is it that we don't feel it
and then the greeks
quite naturally said well because we're at the center of the universe they also
said everything falls
towards the earth so therefore the earth must be at the center it's it's
natural right and and
actually it's quite a deep uh thought to understand why it doesn't feel that we're
moving you have to
go all the way to einstein really for someone to take that very seriously and
he what he said actually
he said well this um there's a great little explanation in stephen hawking's
brief history
of time about this that the idea that you can't tell whether you're moving or
not demolishes the
notion of absolute space so if we think about space if i said space to you or
most people i suppose
you'd think the way that newton did of a big box within which things happen and
that's got to be
that's a natural picture of space and the universe isn't it it's a thing in
which all the planets and
galaxies are placed but um in in the brief history of time hawking says well
imagine bouncing a ball so
we bounce a ball on the table now a tennis ball so i drop it and i catch it
again um so let's say i drop
it and it takes a second to bounce up so in that second the earth has moved
about 18 miles or so in space
around the sun so you could ask the question did that ball return to the same
place in space or not
and the answer is you can't answer it you it does from our perspective but from
the perspective of
someone watching the earth go all the way around the sun it went up i caught it
again it had moved
18 miles and then from some other perspective it would have done something else
so the point is
you can't say this is a point in space it came back to the same place because
that just depends on your
perspective depends on whether you're watching the sun the earth go around the
sun or whatever it is
so so einstein said that means there's no such thing as absolute space which
kind of follows if
you think about it but that's a difficult it's it's a cool but difficult
thought process right i mean
that's that's essentially what's happening when you're on a plane i mean if you're
throwing a ball
up in the air and catching it on the plane it's happening in a much smaller
scale right yeah i mean
you're flying at whatever 600 miles an hour relative to the ground but it doesn't
seem like it when
you're sitting there yeah and einstein elevated that to a principle and said if
you're moving at
if you're not accelerating you're just moving at a constant speed in a plane or
now i mean that's
esse