HIGHLIGHTS: Saul Perlmutter

0:01Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian So-and-Wealth Fund. And today I'm in particularly good company with Saul Perlmutter, who I would argue easily is the cleverest person we ever had on a podcast. Because Saul won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering that the universe expands at an increasingly rapid pace. Now, you've also written a book called Third Millennium Thinking, which teaches us how to use scientific methods in order to navigate this increasingly uncertain world.

0:39So, Sal, big welcome to this podcast. Thank you. It's good to be here. I thought we could start with the book and kind of the scientific thinking. So what is Third Millennium Thinking? Well, it's a bit of an odd name because what we really want to capture is the direction in which we think the best of our scientific style of thinking has been helping our whole society be able to do better in working through problems together. And we want to try to capture what does that really look like so that people can realize that there's so many elements of it that they could all be using in their daily life and also that they could be using when they're talking to other people and working out problems together.

1:15And in some sense, I'd say that we've learned by now how to solve really dramatic problems and difficult problems and interesting problems in the world. The one that I feel is the leftover problem that we can make a huge difference if we can solve is just how to talk to each other, how to work problems out together so that we can actually use all these other techniques that we've learned. Because the first time I met, when we spoke, you said, you know, Nikolai, we can now solve all the problems in the world. You know, climate, how to feed people, but we don't manage to because we don't talk to each other.

1:48I mean, it's remarkable. I think we actually live at an incredible moment in history and prehistory and in fact, you know, maybe even cosmic history, where we are the first generations on this planet who have the ability to solve planetary-sized problems. I think, you know, the idea that there could be a pandemic and we actually know what to do about a pandemic. We have billions of people living on the planet many more than when we were children. And at the time when we were children, most of the world was going to bed hungry. Today, that's a very small percentage. And we now know how it's possible to feed a planet.

2:29We can even handle things like climate changes that have happened throughout history have wiped out civilizations at different points in different ways. Today, for the very first time ever, we know how you could stabilize a climate and that we can actually manage that. We can even manage the thing that killed the dinosaurs, the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth, and that one wiped out most of the families of species on the planet. Even that, we have the possibility of being able to solve that problem. That's a pretty incredible starting point, right? So it seems like the one thing that we should all be enjoying today, if we had had a moment to just breathe and ask each other, of what is the world that we want to live in, this would be the moment where we could all be saying, you know, turn to each other and saying, okay, now, finally, we can build a planet that we just all be proud to live in.

3:24And at that very moment, we're having a hard time interacting with each other and communicating well enough in a productive way so that we can do this work. You talk about something called individual humility and collective arrogance. What do you mean by that? So these parts of the story where you need to be able to understand that most of what we did as scientists that has made it successful is to consider the possibility that we're making a mistake and that we're getting something wrong. And that is probably 95 % of an experimental scientist's life is looking for where are the mistakes this time in the experiment they're running, in the theory that they're working with.

4:03If they're day to day, you know, most measurements have some error to them. you have to figure out what the amount of error is that is permissible for the particular measurement you're making. And that's part of the mistakes that are there in front of you. What you're really looking for is you're really hoping you find mistakes in the fundamental theories that you're working with. So when you found out there's something wrong with our understanding of gravity, that was really exciting. And that was what made Einstein, one of the things that made him famous. And most scientists, they're constantly trying to figure out and pushed the edges of what is it that we are fairly sure about, but what things would be amazing if it turned out that the world was a little different than we thought?

4:42And that is actually where our strength comes from, that ability to be constantly questioning. And it sounds like a weakness to always be doubting, but it turns out that I think that's really where our superpower lies. Increasingly, Nobel Prizes are won by teams. So in general, science has become less and less of a single-person activity, the image of a lone scientist putting on their lab coat and going down to the lab and disappearing. That's not been my experience at all. And even rather small groups are still often groups of people doing projects. And a lot of science just requires enough different expertise and different parts and the scales have gotten big enough that they often are fairly big teams.

5:27The projects I was doing were smallish in the sense of maybe 30 people all working together on something. But the very next stage of those same projects in more recent years are now hundreds of people on those projects. What are the challenges in terms of splitting the work and managing that whole process? It's very tricky because you have all sorts of balancing acts to do. So there's the fact that You want groups of people to share a lot of their approaches and other resources. They might share their software with each other to work on it. But there's a danger then that if they've shared too much, then you don't get the independent comparisons that you can often find the errors with.

6:15So you in some sense need to encourage sort of splinter groups to be working on things while the whole group is coming to a consensus at the same time. We talked earlier about the importance of believing in yourself. Now you spent three years without any breakthroughs researching these kind of things before you published in 98. How do you keep a team motivated to just kind of go on and on and on? Yeah, no, it was worse than that. In fact, we started the project. So the 98 result started in 87. That was when we first proposed the measurement. And we thought it was going to be a hard project. We thought that was going to take three years because we were going to need 30 of these exploding star supernova to make the measurement with.

6:57At the end of three years, we had zero supernova, not 30. And it was only after five years that we had a really excellent first one that was well measured. And then, but by then we'd learned how to make the, how to make batches of these measurements. And so for the next three years, we collected a dozen or more a year until we finally had the numbers that we needed to get the answer. And when you have one of these, how long time do you have to measure it? Oh, well, these exploding stars, they're amazing tools because you can see them across the universe. And the kind that we're using is all the same brightness and they make a great measuring tool.

7:34But they're a terrible thing to work with because they don't let you know warning about when they're going to explode in any galaxy around. They only explode every few hundred years in any given galaxy that you're looking at. and they rise in just a couple of weeks and they fade away within a month or so and you have to catch them during that rise so you can measure them at their peak brightness and so they're the most annoying research tool that you can imagine and that's why it took so long for us to get to the point of knowing how to work with them as a very standard tool where we could churn out many of them all the time and study them.

8:15But of course a naive kind of question is How can something which is already influenced expand further? I mean, that's one of the biggest standard mind-boggling questions that everybody comes to and I certainly have come to it over and over again. When you hear the words the universe expands, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Wait, the universe is everything. How could it expand? And the only answer that seems to make any sense is you have to picture even an infinite universe and you ask yourself, okay, today, as I said, there's a galaxy and then there's a lot of space and there's another galaxy and there's a lot of space and another galaxy.

8:54And in an infinite universe that's expanding, all those distances just get a little bit further apart. So it's not expanding into anything else. It's that we're adding extra space between all points. So it's almost like inflating it from the inside, that we're just putting more and more space between any two, between me and you, and between this galaxy and the next galaxy, and the further galaxies, everywhere we're just adding a little bit extra space, and slightly bigger because of that. And it's still infinite, it's just now there's more space between all the points. If Elon Musk asked you to go to Mars, would you go?

9:30I'm somebody who loves the fact that there are people who would like to go to Mars, but I would never go. Why not? Because there's so many things I enjoy doing and I enjoy coming across and getting to explore with people that I would hate to give all that up just for this one thing, the one exploration of just going to Mars.