The Weaponisation of Science: How to Avoid a Global Catastrophe (Professor Carlo Rovelli)

28:21Are smartphones making us more intelligent? I am on this perhaps a little bit less pessimistic than you. I'm more pessimistic than other things, in other directions, because that's the nature of technology, right? It brings good and bad. And the society has always been able to adapt itself to changes. When writing was invented, people complained that, you know, people were saying, well, nobody's going to know things by heart anymore, so we all become stupid. We'll all have no memory. That's happened. It's true. It was a loss. But, you know, two millennia later or three millennia later, we're not going to think that books were a bad idea.

29:06It was a great idea. Sure. Let me put it this way. I live with young people because at the university, Most of the people I interact with are in their 20s or early 30s. They seem to me much better than my generation. More intelligent, more educated, more knowledgeable, with a wider mind. They knew more stuff. They knew the world. So often we make the mistake, you know, I had a good education in Italy. So my friends were the small minority of the society who had good education. and now I compare it with a much larger segment of society and of course my friends, but we're a minority. So I know very well what you're saying.

29:54I mean, the negative effect of the short-term bits of information that the internet gives you, it's horrendous, right? I think social media is making a lot of people stupid. It is, it is. And if you look at, I hear what you're saying about your students. I present a great quiz which is based on university students in this country, they seem to be the most inspirational, wonderful, super bright young people. But at the social level, if you look at Britain and America, this country and America, reading is in long-term sustained decline. I heard that, yes. And I worry, I do worry, I'm definitely more pessimistic than you, I worry that artificial intelligence is going to replace thinking for a lot of people.

30:33I receive both personally on my email and I ran a journal, Foundation of Physics, an incredible number of submissions of people who say, oh, I developed this wonderful theory talking with chat GDP. Together we did that. And it's absolutely always total nonsense, right? Okay, there's hope. So for the moment, you're completely right. The effect seems to be dramatic. What are you pessimistic about as you look around now? That we're going to a 21st century like the 20th century. Big wars. Everybody's making weapons, everybody's demonizing each other, everybody's feeling threatened by any other. These are all the symptoms of going to major conflicts.

31:18And they're piling up. And worse than that, I do a regular exercise every week or two weeks, which is read the newspaper of all the main capitals of the world. The China Daily, the Terran, Times, the New Daily, whatever, and Brasilia, whatever. And the narrative is diverging. It's diverging in an astonishing way. Each of us, including the West, is in its own little bubble of stories, while the others see the world differently. And it's not because they're autocracy and we're a democracy. No, because we're just moving away. I'm afraid that we're going to a major confrontation I hope it's just a fluctuation and then we calm down, but we don't seem to be calming down.

32:12And with nuclear weapons, that's not a bright future. That's where I'm pessimistic. I would like to start screaming, guys, calm down, talk, calm down, because we are going straight toward the catastrophe. What gives you hope?

32:36there's a lot of young people who see this and they're equally worried. So on the one hand, the pessimism of the young generation is depressive because you would like... On the other hand, there's a clack of the pessimism that may, I hope, has a chance to have a voice. Young generation are deeply aware in their bones, many, that there is a climate crisis the planet is going to confront there is a nuclear danger there is war that may be coming they feel that so if this and that these are common problems so humankind have global problems obviously like those ones nuclear catastrophe is a common problem and the climate crisis which is coming a few years ago we were talking about that nobody is talking about that anymore We need a culture of recognizing we're a single tribe around the planet, so let's come together and solve the problem together.

33:42And there are some governments who, at least in words, say that, not our governments. The issue is not whether the, you know, which political system is better. Who cares about that? Everybody deals with its own, you know, we can talk politics, but that's not the issue. The issue is can we live together? on this planet and solve the problem together. Artificial intelligence is going to be very powerful. Look what happened with weapons. Biological weapons came out in a period in which humankind was reasonable. So institutions, world-like institutions were immediately put. The biologists said okay, let's make regulation.

34:23Nobody's allowed to do things unless we carefully discuss and we look one another. So we check one another. Nuclear weapons came out in the middle of a war. So instead of doing the obvious things, which was the same as done for biological weapons, superpowers wanted just to, you know, America tried to have nuclear weapons just by itself, the Russians got it just by itself, the Chinese want to, as a way of defending for one another. We need the opposite. We need to, for artificial intelligence, we need to go the opposite direction which we're going, not military investment in secret research artificial intelligence so we can overwhelm the other.

35:05But global institutions that control what is going on and transparency.

35:12I hope you're enjoying this conversation with Carlo Rovelli. What an extraordinary and influential public intellectual he is. If you are enjoying this conversation, please do us a favour. Subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds and that way you won't miss future episodes. And by the way, if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you will never ever miss out. Thank you so much and now back to Carlo Rovelli. If journalism is the first draft of history what happens if that draft is flawed?

35:49In 1999 four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed but even now we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:23So you were born in Verona, 1956. Right. What was life like in that part of post-war Italy? Oh, very quiet, very happy, very rich because Italy was coming out of what was called the big economic boom, as we called that at the time. Italy came out devastated and very poor from the Second World War and with a drama of the fascism to somehow come out of it. But had a very, very strong economic recovery in the 50s and in the 60s and I was part of this thing, being a kid. Italy came also out of that with a sort of, I would say, cultural confusion. I mean, people were trying to negate the fact of having been fascists, but fascism was all over still.

37:11And as a young person, the sense was the world is getting better. Everybody's getting richer. You obviously don't have to worry about the future because, you know, You don't have to work. There is wealth for everybody. In fact, I didn't care about working. My friends, nobody cared about will I find a job. I think about this all the time because I think so much about young people today growing up in an age of anxiety and a zeitgeist which is sort of pessimistic. But you were born in 1956. So, you know, the moon landings were part of your childhood. The moon landings. I was 12. And this tremendous sense of optimism that the 1960s embraced, partly because it had young post-war populations.

37:50Yes. And together with that was also a sense of things are changing fast. The young generation is different than the previous generation. It's going to do things better. We are going to change the world for better. There was a large amount of youth which was very radical. That word is of particular interest to me. When you say there was a large amount of youth that was radical, what do you mean? that the majority of my friends and not just in Verona but all over the world were thinking that okay the world is like that but we're going to change it and make it better how are they going to do that?

38:29what was the means of revolution that they were going to do? oh that was what was discussed every day at the bar right in the coffee shops and in the place where you drink wine somebody wanted you know an armed revolution somebody wanted to change their consciousness. Somebody wanted to go out to the country and start a hippie commune. Somebody wanted to, you know, convert everything to some religion. Everybody had its own way about that. The idea of transforming the world for the better. The idea of transforming the world was widespread. From, you know, Catholicism to Che Guevara, to Maoism. What kind of radical were you?

39:09I was definitely radical, considering myself radical. I was in clash with the school, which my high school was the teachers were definitely with a huge sympathy for fascism, not hiding it. I felt out of place there. I opened this book, The Seven Brief Lessons, with Einstein dropping out from high school in Germany. Yes, exactly. He was dyslexic, of course. Yeah. So that's another way of becoming a scientist, right? You just want to go your own way, different than everybody else. So he dropped out of school. He was going to listen to university lectures on physics just for pleasure. He was reading Kant and just wasting time.

39:54And as I say, that's how you become a good scientist, by wasting time. I wasted a huge amount of time. I'm very proud of having done it. I didn't enroll in university, but I didn't follow the classes. I travelled. I was reading enormously. I was going my own way. I spent some time in a hippie commune. I spent some time just wandering around the world, reading everything I could. I was going my own way. Sounds great, I've got to say. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think you would have been a lot of fun to hang out with back then, yeah. Yeah, but there was many people like me. And, you know, we believed in no family, free love, no society, no borders, no army.

40:33This is kind of thing. So, you know, it's John Lennon imagined somehow. John Lennon, yeah. He made a sort of nice, nice poetic synthesis. Maybe you're more Leninist than Leninist. Yeah. So where did the love of physics come from? Did you have sort of heroes that you look to? No, not at all. It came from really university courses. And somehow I had some classes, some courses in physics, or at least I was not following. I was not going to courses very much. I was studying alone. I always loved to study alone and not. So I would go to the teachers and ask what to study. But then at some point I arrived at modern physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, which are the main topics of the lessons.

41:19And reading what had been discovered by scientists in the 20th century about the nature of reality, it was like a shock. I was rebellious and all that, but I was a very serious guy, so to say. So whatever I did, I did with enormous... I believed it. So I didn't study just because you have to take an exam. I studied because I wanted to understand what I was studying. And when I studied general relativity, you can't avoid, if you try a full immersion in what is, to say, wow, this is astonishing. I mean, this is unbelievable. The world is a totally different space and time, totally different from what we usually see.

42:06It's a much bigger discovery than the fact that it spins. So I said, well, this is more radical than Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. So the book and your work, I've seen a lot of public lectures you've given, I've seen on YouTube and elsewhere. It portrays 20th century physics as I think, although this is my phrase, not yours, as this kind of unstable relationship between two extraordinary theories, both of which are themselves revolutionary in how they update our understanding of the world, but which are very hard to reconcile with each other. Yeah. And what is I mean, I'm going to let you do the heavy lifting in a moment.

42:47But what is so extraordinary about quantum mechanics, which explains subatomic particles, very, very small particles, is that it seems to be our best way of understanding what happens at a very, very, very minuscule level of matter. But it seems to be in some sort of fundamental argument with general relativity, which was Einstein's great, extraordinary new frontier at the beginning of the 20th century, which talks about gravity and space in much, much bigger terms. and these two things together, this unstable marriage form, what we call the standard model. And we're now sort of updating that and we've got new theories like your interest in quantum loop theory.

43:19I wonder if we could just go through these things and break it down for a few people. So let's just start with general relativity. What was in core terms Einstein's theory and why was it such a remarkable update on how in the late 19th century people thought of the universe? This is what the story I tell in the first chapter of my book. Up to the beginning of the 20th century, the idea was that there's a big open space, a huge box in which everything happens. And then there's time passing. And everything that happens, happens in this space as this time passes. So space and time are sort of given out there.

44:00But this space has a sort of structure. In fact, we studied at school, this is geometry, right? Geometry is a structural space, three-dimensional geometry. and time is like a line as measured by clock. And what Einstein realized through a reasoning and on the basis of what was understood about other physics up to that point is that things are more complicated than that. And the space and time are not rigid structures which are out there but are themselves like a huge molluscus, like a jellyfish, a colossal jellyfish in which you are, which can bend and stretch and change shape, so to say. And the thing we call gravity, namely things falling down.

44:43Mass being attracted to mass. Mass being attracted to mass. It's actually better understood as a movement of this colossal jellyfish in which we have, as a deformation of space and time. It's a spectacular idea. It's an incredibly strange idea. I mean, how do you come out with an idea like that? A stroke of pure genius, you write. The gravitational field is not diffused through space. The gravitational field is that space itself. This is the idea of the theory of general relativity. Newton's space, through which things move, and the gravitational field are one and the same thing. Exactly. And here are the equations for the movement of space.

45:23Okay, that's magic. Because that was 1915. And out of this equation, you can predict that the universe expands and it turned out to be true. That there are gravitational waves that can ripple of space and turn out to be true. That there are black holes and it turned out to be true. That clocks move at different speed depending on where they are and it turned out to be true. So it's magic. It's like he read the mind of God. Here are all these equations out of that. There are these unbelievable predictions. Nobody really took them seriously in 1916 when they were out. Some people say, okay, that's a good theory, but come on.

46:04Black holes expanding universe, gravitational waves, time going different speed in the mountain than in there. That's nonsense. And absolutely everything has predicted by the theory of Einstein so far has been exactly realized. Today we can take two clocks, two watches, mine and yours, move one up and one down. Well, we can take two better clocks. and then when you bring them down you see that the one up has moved more time than the one down so there's more your your head has lived longer than your feet how can that be the case that's the wrong question the right question is uh uh why why shouldn't be the case what why the time why should time apply differently on the surface of the earth to five feet seven inches above it.

46:56Exactly. So the right question is why time should be the same up here, down there, right? We got used to it because we have been, because the discrepancy is very small, of course. So we don't notice it. So we got used to the idea that time is the same for everybody. If you and I separate, you know, you walk around for half an hour and I stay here for half an hour. When we meet, it's half an hour for you and half an hour me. But that's a fact of experience. It's not needed to be true. In fact, it's not true. If you walk around, your time's a bit less than me stays here. It's a teeny, teeny fraction of a second.

47:39But if you take a starship and you fly very, very, very far away, you come back. I'm much older than you when you come back. And that difference in the rate at which time passes at different heights, is that related to gravity, i.e. how close the way in which gravity is, because gravity is a force which acts on mass. The reason we're on the surface of the earth is because the surface of the earth is a very, very big mass and we're drawn towards it almost magnetically. And that slight difference in height implies a slight difference in gravitational pull. And there's a relationship between gravity and time.

48:12Is that right? No. Excellent physics questions to which the answer It's right, but what Einstein teaches us, and again, it has worked so well because it's better to think the other way around. It's not that there is a force and therefore there is this effect. It's the other way around. Where there is masses, time slows down. That's the thing that happened. And because it slows down, the way this is manifested is through a force. And so just to be clear, what made, obviously Einstein pushed forward through general relativity our understanding of science and made these predictions on these huge questions which turned out to be true.

48:53But why was Einstein's idea in 1915, apart from being true, why was it so radical? How did it update what we previously thought? Well, it changes completely what we think about space. It changes completely what we think about time. Time and space are not a fixed thing out there. is just a manifestation of a field. Things don't happen in space and time. Things happen by themselves, and space and time are just ways we describe the happening of things. It's a profound change in the... It flips it, yeah. It flips it. It flips completely. So it is a radical way of thinking. Like every radical idea, it has ancestors, right?

49:37In a sense, if you go back to pre-Newton, you also find this idea that time is not a thing by itself. It's just a happening of events. Let me put it completely. Suppose nothing happened. Would time pass nevertheless? Well Newton would say yes, of course. I mean nothing happens but time just passes. It's nothing to do with the happening of things. Well after Einstein, no. Time is just a happening of things. There's no time by itself. When was, that was 1915 Einstein. That was 1915, yes. Quantum theory, which became the second member of this marriage. Maybe there are three people in the marriage and you're the third component.

50:19But quantum theory, when did that really develop, particularly over the 20th century? When did our understanding of subatomic parties? It's a very different story because Einstein struggled 10 years with general relativity. It was a very beautiful intellectual adventure of a single man in which he published wrong stuff, changed his mind. He published an equation and then six months later said, no, that's wrong. I mean, it's a beautiful story. But it was just him. I mean, he had some friends and collaborators. Einstein was not very good in math, so I had friends teaching him the math he needed.

50:51Quantum mechanics is a completely different story. Quantum mechanics was completed 10 years later in 1925, but it was a collective, a truly collective enterprise with a lot of people getting involved. And the first hints started at the beginning of the century, 1900, 1902. Einstein himself gave a big push to it in 1905. And then in 1925, bingo. It sort of solidified in a mathematical structure, which is the one we still use. And what was the insight which solidified in 1925? What was that insight and how did it update our previous understanding? Do you want a sincere answer? Yes. Nobody knows yet.

51:37What happened in 1925 is that a number of people came out with equations that we still use, that they use to do technology today, the basic equation of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg wrote a key paper where he introduced a piece of mathematics that was needed, and then Bohr, Jordan, Dirac. Paul Dirac, the great mathematician. It sort of independently came out with this thing. And shortly after, Schrodinger came out another version of this thing. And then people started discussing immediately, all right, so what the hell does this mean? And we haven't stopped discussing what the hell does it mean.

52:20So if you ask these different people, you get different answers. A naive answer, which I think is wrong, is that, oh, we discover that particles, you know, the bits that make matter are really waves. This is, for those of the 17-year-old, 18-year-olds doing A-level physics, this is wave-particle duality. Exactly, exactly. I think it's bullshit. Oh, sorry, I shouldn't say that. I wish you'd tell my physics teacher 25 years ago, why have, these are questions I've always wanted to ask Because it doesn't make any sense. Why is wave-particle duality bullshit? What does it mean? Is it a wave or a particle?

52:56What do you mean is it? Or could it mean that it's different things at different times? Behaves like a wave in some circumstances? I mean, I don't know, to be honest. You see, you never see the wave. You see the effect of the wave. You always see the particle. You see the wave is a way of doing calculations on what a particle does. No, it's much deeper than that. The understanding of quantum mechanics, which I think is most interesting, is that it tells us that we shouldn't think at objects in isolation. There's no meaning in saying that glass by itself is there, has this color, has this position, has this velocity.

53:36When we're describing an object, we're always describing the way to interact with something else. So objects derive their existence through a kind of relational power. Exactly. That's how I understand quantum mechanics. And I think that's a core discovery. It's more radical, general relativity. General relativity just tells us space and time is not what you thought they were. It's more complicated. it. Quantum mechanics tell us everything, every bits of matter, every component of the universe, every object. You should not think of it by itself. You cannot describe a thing by itself. How things affect one another, how they look to one another, is what quantum mechanics describes.

54:19Why is the model of the universe given to us by quantum mechanics, especially in 1925 and henceforth, thereafter, why is it hard to reconcile that with Einstein's theory of general relativity? Why is the standard model of 20th century physics an unstable one? I mean, so far we've been talking about what we know reliably of the universe, right? Quantum mechanics, general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, all that's the stuff that you can count upon. You can, it's credible. It's very credible. It doesn't mean that it's a final story about the world, that it has been confirmed by all sorts of experiments.

54:58Everything has been predicted, come out right. Now we're jumping to what we don't know. And we know we don't know something because space itself is this gravitational field. So this gravitational field must have quantum properties itself. So space is quantum. We need an understanding of what are the quantum aspects of space. So this relational aspect of space itself. And quantum mechanics has some simple consequences. The most clear one is discreteness, granularity. So space must be granular at short scale. So we need a theory for that because there are phenomena in the world, like the Big Bang.

55:45I mean, you ask why we don't yet understand what happened 14 billion years ago. Because there are quantum aspects of gravity involved in that. The gravity of space, that becomes crucial. Or we expect black hole to, on the long term in the future, to evaporate, to become smaller and smaller and smaller. We don't know what happened at the end of the evaporation because they become very small and the quantum property of space comes in. So what we don't have, and that has been my life, is a theory of quantum gravity. And the main core of my scientific life has been working with friends and colleagues and build a tentative theory of quantum gravity, which is loop quantum gravity.

56:28Quantum loop theory. Quantum loop theory, right. You've had this remarkable, if I may say, life and also career with this unexpected surge or boost out of this particular book, which you're celebrating 10 years of publication of, what role do you still want to play in forging this better, more cooperative future? One which is not the age of stupidity, but the age of a better natural intelligence. Look, I'm 70. You look very good for 70, if I may say. I hope I'm as influential and as fit as you at the age of 70. But you've still got a lot of healthy years ahead of you. What role do you want to play?

57:05if I have some yes we should be ready to die tomorrow I think all of us is the best way of living I hope I can still do physics I enjoy enormously my time when I just lie on my sofa do calculations and think and write papers about black holes and how to check this theory that's my when I'm tired I stop doing silly things and I do calculations but I am I'm always struggling with myself because there's a voice in me that says I mean come on Carlo, you're a scientist don't talk about the problems of the world just talk about science and shut up and there's another world there's another voice in me you said a public intellectual by chance, by whatever I found myself a voice which many people listen it is my responsibility to say what I think should, the mistakes we're doing collectively.

58:07My hero is Albert Einstein for a number of reasons. Of course, he was a jerk in something, but everybody's perfect. But he has been my hero in a number of things. When there was a First World War, before the First World War, 1915, 1415, it was approaching, Europe was sleepwalking into this catastrophe, completely stupid, idiotic catastrophe. Europe self-destroyed itself and then the Second World War was just a second chapter somehow, the First World War and the German number of German intellectual society manifesto saying we should defend the civilization, the great civilization the German civilization for this decadent French, we should be ready to fight, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff.

58:57The clash of civilization was used at that time. And Einstein and a few friends, three or four, wrote a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful text which nobody followed unfortunately, saying what are we doing? This is completely crazy. We are all civilized people. The worst thing we're going to do is start killing one another. He was obviously right. I would like that a lot of intellectuals today that see this could have the courage of raising the voice, even against mainstream narrative, and saying, no, we shouldn't be taken by fear of the other, we shouldn't be taken by desire of being the most powerful, we should go to our collaboration.

59:46But does it feel to you like being a public intellectual today, you're kind of under attack or an endangered species because a lot of people looking at the problems of the world today if you look at you know what's happening in the white house or even in this country here say that actually this kind of meritocratic ideal which is we allow the clever people the brahmins to run societies they've not done a very good job and therefore we shouldn't uphold cognitive ability intellectuals as the gold standard um well have the other done a better job I should ask them when I get the chance Carla that's a wonderful rejoinder to the critics of meritocracy and it's always a pleasure to see you thank you so much for coming in and talking about all your incredible ideas thank you very much it was very very good thank you

1:00:40you know it's just a really special privilege to spend time with people who've spent a lot of time themselves thinking about the big questions on Earth and in that infinite expanse beyond Earth as well. And Carlo Rovelli is straightforwardly an extraordinary bloke. If there was one theme, one thread that united his remarkable childhood and student days in Italy as a sort of anti-fascist with his discovery of theoretical physics, with his concerns about AI and his broader concerns, clearly deeply felt about where the world is going, It's this feeling that basically we need to rediscover the joy of collaboration and cooperation.

1:01:20So on AI, those of you who've heard our previous episodes on this podcast, looking at that, whether it's Laura Bates in our first episode or she's the everyday sexism and feminist campaigner talking about how AI is really damaging the feminist cause. Or if you listen to Dario Amadei, the boss of Anthropic, there can be this kind of talking up of AI. and I can understand where that comes from and indeed I've got some sympathy with it because I think AI is potentially transformative. It was so interesting listening to Carlo Rovelli, just not pour cold water on it, he says it's going to be huge, but just saying let's pause for a moment about kind of the potential consequences of this technology but above all, let's work together.

1:02:01And he kept coming back to this example of what happened with nuclear technology and bioweapons and the fact that when we unleashed them in the world, we cooperated globally, there was an institutional framework for dealing with those potential threats, which there just isn't right now. There's a race dynamic, a competitive dynamic, and it's kind of big, strong companies against rival, often autocratic governments. So he's very concerned about that. Obviously, he's completely mesmerizing talking about science. I hope you take away a few interesting nuggets, like the idea that the Big Bang might have been a big bounce, like the idea that your head and feet age at ever so slightly different rates.

1:02:39But above all, I feel like he was sat there as someone really celebrating the life of the mind. And I'm not going to lie. I have a certain romantic attachment to that ideal. I hope I was never, you know, fawning or too sycophantic towards him. I tried to push back on a number of the things that he said, and I hope you hear that and what comes across. But I respect public intellectuals and people who try to use the life of the mind to influence public life. and in an era where we might, in my view, be stumbling towards stupidity, celebrating the life of the mind with someone who spent 50 years thinking about the big questions is a really cool thing to do.

1:03:18Thank you so much for all of the messages that you've been sending in. It shows you are properly engaged with what we're trying to do and that is very, very exciting. And we love hearing from you, people like you, Liz, who has emailed to say this, Hello, Radical. I'm listening to your episode with Edward Enninful. I've never been a consumer of fashion magazines, and I'd never come across this beautiful soul before your podcast. I wanted to say that his choice to use his first issue to celebrate women of a certain age, yuck, quote unquote, is a wonderful and insightful thing. Seeing mature women as a group which need to benefit from inclusion is moving.

1:03:52Aging is harder for women. Men in their 40s, 50s and 60s benefit from an aura of authority. they are often seen as powerful and attractive. For women, the narrative is that you have moved past your prime. Your body starts to betray you. Your hormones start to fail and throw you into physical and emotional turmoil. Weight control is harder. Images show not authority and power, but a loss of youth and fecundity. We carry the weight of complex home and work balances, but are increasingly seen as irrelevant by the world we serve. Thank you for a wonderful episode. Gosh, Liz, I find that incredibly moving.

1:04:26I mean, I can't for a moment begin to dispute that ageing is harder for women. I think that stands to reason. And actually that media and public and cultural script or narrative about how men as they get older acquire more authority and more power, whereas women seem to lose something, is one that I personally have tried very, very hard to challenge, not least by championing women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s in various bits of broadcasting I've done. But I should say, though, Liz, it's interesting. I mean, I'm really grateful for that feedback and that quite emotional message, because there are other people who listen to that podcast and I saw on social media saying it's not very cool that, you know, you've got a man in your 40s, i.e.

1:05:07Mia Mole and Edward Endinful in his 50s talk about old women. Why don't we hear from women talking about that? To which I would say, well, you know, we will talk to women who are in their 50s and 60s and 70s about that when appropriate. But I think the fact that Edward Enninful chose to put Julia Roberts on that front cover of his new publication meant it was a good place for us to go to. And listening to you or reading your email, Liz, sounds like you appreciate it as well. So thank you very much indeed. I hope it wasn't offensive to anyone that I in my 40s was talking about that subject. I happen to care about it.

1:05:39And there's a lot of women that I know in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. One of whom is my mum, who I revere and think of as mighty and powerful. Anyway, here's another text from Kate. Thank you, Kate, for this. Hi, Amol and the Radical Team. Kate from Manchester here. I really enjoyed the Edward Edinfeld podcast as an ex-fashion student now working in textiles. It reminded me of the good in the industry. However, I was disappointed in how he seemed to brush off or brush over the sustainability question. Yes, other industries are polluters, but fashion is one of the biggest. It was lovely to hear his love for the craft of fashion that he had taken from his mother, but the craft in local fashion is dying out in places like Ghana, where fast fashion is flooding the beaches and sea.

1:06:18It would be really interesting to have someone like Orsola DiCastro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution, on to counterbalance this. Love the podcast. So refreshing to have a space for different views and long-form discussion. Kate, thank you so much for certainly that last sentence and the fact you absolutely buy into what we're trying to do on Radical. I don't know the work or influence of Ursula de Castro. I'll definitely feed that in and discuss it with the team. I know that a huge amount has been done in recent years on this question of circular fashion, people trying to make fashion, which you recycle, basically, to massively reduce the carbon footprint.

1:06:48In fairness to Edward Enniffel, who I do feel, given he's not in the room as I record this, I should be fair to, I think he acknowledged that fashion has a big problem when it comes to carbon and pollution and the kind of disposability and dispensability of fashion, which doesn't last very long by its nature. But I think, you know, I don't think he sort of tried to ignore that completely. I just think there was another point that he wanted to land. So I don't feel that he's necessarily someone who's dismissing that stuff. One of the other words which you use there, which I note, Kate, is craft.

1:07:18And I've got to say, how can I do this without getting in trouble? It has become, I've become increasingly aware that there are really, there's not one fashion industry but lots there's a fashion industry which is catwalk modeling and high fashion and uh very expensive designers and i frankly look being really honest about it i sometimes look at that stuff and i think uh no one's going to wear that what on earth are you doing this is kind of more art than fashion but there's a different world which you're alluding to kate which you're now working with textiles which would edward enifel was alluding to which is about craft and skill and manufacture and if you're interested in craft if i could just do one quick shameless book plug.

1:07:58We had on the Today programme a few weeks ago, someone who I know very well called James Fox. He's written a book called Craftland and it's all about the disappearing crafts across Britain. And there are some amazing, amazing stories, including in the world of textiles. And I've just become, this is me getting old really, I've just become completely fascinated by, bewitched by the idea of disappearing crafts and of this idea of distilled wisdom in practical skills people using their hands the hand eye coordination to do things that other people can't do and the whole idea of craft which you're alluding to and you're working in kate has really frankly rescued the fashion industry for me for me from being something that posh and expensive people with all sorts of issues do far away to being something that actually people like you do kate when you work with your hands to produce amazing fabrics and materials so thank you for your interest in craft and thank you to james fox who's interest in crafters alerted me to maybe the fact that I've got a slightly too narrow a view of fashion.

1:08:57Right, if you want to get in touch to talk about the things that we talk about on the pod or with your own ideas you can WhatsApp us on 0330 123 9480 or you can email radical at bbc.co.uk which I still think is the coolest email address at the BBC. That is it for this episode. Really, really hope you enjoyed the conversation with Carla Rovelli. I know that you might not spend most of your time thinking about theoretical physics, but having spent a bit of time with him, I hope you can understand why we think it was important to introduce you to his ideas. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds.

1:09:38And you can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on iPlayer. How cool is that? Right, speak to you next week. Goodbye.

1:10:14I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.