Carlo Rovelli: Nothing Exists Alone

22:10These are coherent, but they're different tools. I don't think that physics is an explanation of everything. If you want to know why rabbits run fast, you don't ask a physicist, you ask a biologist. And even if you break your bicycle, you don't ask a particle physics, you ask your mechanics. So we have a lot of knowledge which is not fundamental physics. And most of our knowledge is not fundamental physics. And fundamental physics is important because it's very general. Nothing escapes fundamental physics. But this does not mean that fundamental physics explains everything. It just underlines everything.

22:45And yet, fundamental physics is interesting because it gives us a general picture of the world. And if fundamental physics changes its view, like it happened with quantum mechanics, we have to realize that some assumptions that we thought we derived from previous science are not good anymore. This strong objectivity, the world is unique, is out there, is totally independent of anything else, doesn't fit with modern science, in my opinion. The world is more a complicated network of relations.

23:18James Altucher:And, you know, you even make the point that time for you might be different than time for me. Now, we're lucky enough that we're on the Earth, so that the speed of light is practically instantaneous between me and you. Like, you're in Europe right now, I'm in the U.S. even though we're very far apart, it's instantaneous in terms of the speed of lights. We could talk to each other, even though I'm talking to you, the version of you that's from one billionth of a second ago, and you're talking to me, the version of me that was one billionth of a second ago. It seems like we're both now. And the question I have is, if you take that all the way back, and again, I'm going to ask about the Big Bang, if time is measured in terms of, let's say the speed of light, but at the Big Bang, there wasn't necessarily light.

24:02James Altucher:Maybe there wasn't before the Big Bang because there was nothing to measure time relative to at that point. First of all, you're right in saying, look how close we are, you and I. If you were in a random part of the universe, we couldn't have this conversation because the back and forth time for light going back and forth could be years if you were just in the closest star, or even hundreds of millions of years if you were in another galaxy. So this means that the Earth is very, very small. Imagine how small. It's incredibly small, the Earth. We are just next to one another in terms of flying time for light.

24:43So that's why we get this strange idea that time is the same for everybody. Time is not the same for everybody. Every star has its own time. Every galaxy has its own time. And they don't match. They communicate. We can send messages to one another, but it makes no sense to ask what time is in a different galaxy right now. While you and I can communicate instantaneously, so we have this idea of a common time of us. And that's an illusion. This is something that physics knows for well. This was theory at the time of Einstein. Now it's things we measure very precisely. Now you're saying, well, what about the Big Bang?

25:18You're completely right. The Big Bang, the notion of what is time there becomes very much foggy. And it's one of the reasons why it's so hard to figure out what happened at the Big Bang. Because you have to always measure time with respect to something else. And what is there with respect to which to measure time, it's an open issue. Yeah.

25:43James Altucher:So again, how do we come up with anything? How do we figure out anything? Oh, because we're smart. I mean, come on, science is how smart. In spite of, I keep saying they don't know this, they don't know that, science doesn't know. But we know plenty of things, right? And we've been able to construct plenty of things. Einstein was super smart and Maxwell was super smart. Unbelievably smart, right? Remember what Maxwell did. He started from little experiments in the laboratory by Faraday with little pieces of copper and he invented radio, okay? He realized that there are electromagnetic waves and you can do a radio, essentially.

26:17So we do understand a lot about nature. That's fantastic. And theoretical physics is fantastic. Einstein, on the basis of just Newton's force and what he understood about Maxwell equations, he figured out that if you move faster, your clock is going to be slower. Okay? And it seemed very strange, even hard to understand. And now we can make an experiment with a clock, and in fact, it does slower. It moves slower. So science is this fabulous mental game that allows us to anticipate nature on the basis of this is coherent with that and to understand things far away. That's what I'm fascinated by, by science.

27:01So Einstein predicted black holes. It predicted black holes. And here they are in the star. It predicted the gravitational waves. And here they are. Okay. So the game works fabulously well to some extent. and the things we understand, we understand well, we predict well, they're confirmed and we do great technology. Even the GPS works thanks to Einstein. Einstein, you know, the thing that you locate yourself in your car and tells you where you are, it works thanks to Einstein's work. So we get great technology, we get great understanding at the price of never being sure, never having the final theory, never saying, oh, I've understood everything, that's it.

27:43Always keeping open the possibility of learning more.

27:47James Altucher:Let's say there was an alien civilization that was a billion years ahead of us in science. And, you know, they're able to do things that we wouldn't even dream possible, we wouldn't think possible. Do you think even for that civilization that there's things that they wouldn't understand in science? Because is this a fundamental nature of science, that there's always going to be things that you can't understand no matter how great you are? Well, what do I know? but I would tend to say to answer yes. Namely, I don't expect science to get to any final story. There's so many things we don't know. The amount of things we don't know about the universe is spectacular.

28:30We even just discovered because of this thing called dark matter, right? Astronomers have realized that there is some stuff out there around the galaxy, which is not ordinary matter. It's not clear what it is. There are various hypotheses that we don't know. So we don't even know what's the stuff around us. Far from understanding clearly quantum gravity, I have a theory, but I'm not sure it's right. Is it possible that an advanced civilization in the future will figure out all the questions in science? I'm quite skeptical, but I don't know. What I do know is that if we want a chance to get there, we'd better stop fighting with one another on Earth and take away the nuclear weapons if we want a chance of survival.

29:15James Altucher:I agree with that. But on the kind of, it's almost fundamental that there's always things we don't know. And I'm wondering if this is connected to like Gödel's theory, that given any sophisticated mathematical system, there's always going to be things you can't prove. And he proved this mathematically that there's things you can't prove in any sophisticated system. And so I wonder if physics, of course, is sophisticated enough that there's always going to be things you can't prove. Yes. One is tempted to use the theorem, the Goethe theorem that you mentioned, to say, look, it's impossible to close knowledge to arrive at the end.

29:52I would take it as an analogy more than a proof. as far as our knowledge I think that it suffice just a list of things that we do not know to make it obvious that in any case we are very very far away from complete understanding so I don't believe there is a theory of everything around the corner you know James it's even the opposite if we want to learn we want to be open to discover something new. So, so often in the history, humans have been tempted to say, oh, we're almost there, we have to figure out everything. And those who have not fallen into this trap are the ones who have discovered more.

30:41That's really interesting. Yeah, so not believing in certainty and definite knowledge is the best way to learn more. So this kind of veers into

30:52James Altucher:the more philosophical aspects of your book. So you kind of mention these deeper philosophies, whether it's from Hinduism or Taoism, where they also, just like modern day physicists, they also agree that everything exists in terms of how it is relative to each other. So Cheng Su saying, am I a human dreaming of a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming I'm a human, there's no way for him to really know. And he kind of expresses the same idea poetically, what you're saying. And it gives, when I read this Shang-Soo story, as it's always intended, I feel very relaxed. Like, oh, all these day-to-day concerns I have, maybe I'm just a butterfly having a nightmare.

31:37James Altucher:And I'm going to wake up from it and just be a butterfly. Like, so there's something, like you just said, the not having certainty actually leads to this greater creativity and innovation, perhaps in general, like what is the philosophical core of, if I take what you're saying philosophically, how could I improve my life? I, look, for me, I can only talk about myself. For me, giving up the idea of certainty as a necessity, but also giving up the idea of looking for the final explanation of things, for the foundation of everything. Giving up these ideas was very, very giving me serenity, right?

32:21And accepting that I don't know. Look, imagine how bad is the idea if we could know the answer of everything, but we don't. I mean, why should I be the one who doesn't know? I think, first of all, there are questions which are ill-founded, ill-posed. I mean, the foundation of everything is not a good question. What does it mean? I know this, I know that. A lot of ultimate questions are bad questions. And this is an idea which I found in some philosophers, some Eastern philosophers, but also some Western philosophers at Wittgenstein. But in some parts of Buddhism, and you mentioned Taoism, that's one.

33:05See, it's very strong there. We are not gods, right? We are not outside the universe looking and understanding everything. We're little creatures in nature, part of nature itself, looking around, getting some information. I'm very happy of being alive and learning something about the world and enjoying life. But this accepting this partiality of our knowledge, this perspectival aspect of our knowledge, and the limitation of our knowledge, I find it makes my life much more serene.

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35:18James Altucher:yeah and and you know i've seen a lot lately particularly since the the last nobel prize with roger penrose there's a lot of connection between quantum mechanics and consciousness and i'm not sure i understand it and i'm trying to figure out if your if your book touches upon it because you mentioned consciousness a little bit but what's your stance on what's what's going on with this connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics? Look, it's subtle. I don't think that quantum mechanics is directly involved in our consciousness. I know Roger Penrose has explored a little bit this idea. I have an immense respect for Roger Penrose and admiration of his work.

35:58He's also a good friend, but I think it's wrong there. Our brain is not quantum. I mean, not anymore than anything is quantum. It's not specifically quantum. So I don't think that quantum mechanics is going to be used specifically for understanding consciousness. But more in general, once we realize that the correct way about thinking about the world is not like we're outside of the world and looking at it from the outside. As you said at the very beginning, I have a view of the world. It's my own view of the world. It's a perspectival view of the world. And that's how the world in general works.

36:35There's a lot of perspective looking at one another. Then the mystery of consciousness disappears a lot because it's not a specifically human thing, the fact that every piece of nature interacts with the rest, so in some sense has information about the rest. So I am a piece of the world that has information about the rest, and that's my worldview in a sense. So there are many aspects of ourselves that become less mysterious if we give up this idea of perfect objectivity of things that have their own property independently of whoever is looking at them. So if we think of the world in a more relational way, it's much easier to understand ourselves as part of this relation of perspectives.

37:22James Altucher:That's really interesting. So the idea that you existing contains information essentially about the rest of the universe. Yes, exactly. So somehow, just the way our DNA, just a simple strand of DNA kind of encodes information about all of our cells, the trillions of cells in our body, your existence itself contains traces of everything. It does, right? happen. It does, because if you think of the universe, if you think about everything you know about the universe, about the Earth, about your friends, about New York, about China, about everything, it's all in your mind. Everything you know is in your mind, right?

38:01So you have information about all that. It's a fact. So it's also a physical fact, because you have a lot of neurons out there, and you have hundreds of millions of neurons, and they store information about all the rest. So the rest is reflected inside you. I'm not saying it's something New Age or magical. I'm saying something very strictly scientific here. That's fine. So in principle, I could learn a lot about the universe just by asking you or looking at your brain if I could decode your brain if I had a machine. Impossible. For really leaving your... We're not dead there. Maybe we'll go there.

38:38We'll get there. Who knows? So the universe is reflected inside you. And everything I know about the universe is reflected than me, of course. But I can talk to you and you can talk to me. We are not isolated in a sort of solipsistic universe. No, you're part of my reality and I interact with you and I'm part of your reality and we can interact. So somebody else can look at the two of us and our interaction and say, oh, look, how much information there is in Carlos' brain or in James' brain. That's the complexity of nature and it's astonishingly beautiful, this network of relations. And in this network, it makes sense that I have a mind and a consciousness, but also I'm just a piece of nature like any Elvis.

39:22James Altucher:And so, you know, I'm always trying to wonder, like, there's all these beautiful analogies between quantum physics and physics and everything else. And that's why it does become new age. Like, oh, you know, nothing really exists until I put my attention on it. It's the law of attraction. I can make it manifest. Like, so people kind of extrapolate and get anything out of this. And I'm just wondering if, what is the practical use? I mean, you mentioned earlier, like, there's a certain serenity that comes with knowing I don't know everything. And I think we can all acknowledge that none of us know everything.

40:03James Altucher:But I'm wondering what else, what do we learn from quantum mechanics, particularly from this past century, that things are this collection of probabilities rather than being this objective state? Like, what could we do? Yeah, first of all, I mean, one has to be careful of not falling into excessive new age. We're all waves, so we're all waves. So, yeah, that's fine. If somebody wants to do that, that's fine. But you don't gain anything there. Quantum mechanics is incredibly solid things, right? All our technology today is based on quantum mechanics, the transistor. So it's a very precise mathematical theory that allows us to compute what happened in circuits, in transistors, to tell us why the sun is burning, why the sky is blue.

40:45In fact, it's a quantum mechanical calculation, and so on. So it's a very solid science. And one can also take it just as solid science without any philosophical reflection about it. One can say, okay, I can now do the calculation. I have many colleagues who say, well, I don't care about what quantum mechanics tell me about the world. I know how to compute the temperature of the sun from using quantum calculations. Fine. But nevertheless, quantum mechanics, I think the moment in which you start thinking, you realize that it's challenging one key idea. And the key idea is that there is an objective, solid piece of the world.

41:28All the pieces of the world are objectively there with their own status, state, position, velocity, all the properties fixed. That seems a natural way of thinking about the world. The world is made by objects. Each object has a property. That's it, right? The world is a lot of atoms. The atoms are moving around and that's it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not the world. The atom is a very funny thing because it's a quantum thing. It's something that manifests itself in some way and then it's some other way. So the atom is a center of interaction with other things. It's not an object by itself.

42:08So it pushes us towards this universality of thinking in terms of relations rather than in terms of objects. I think that's the main message.

42:18James Altucher:And, you know, when you were, you kind of spent some time trashing metaphysicists at Princeton and they would say, oh, there's an absolute moral truth and you would say, know based on these ideas of how things are relative to each other? What was ever their response? Did anyone ever agree with you? Well, first of all, it was a great conversation. I loved it. I spent a couple of months there debating with them. And that's actually the source of the book. The book, The Quality of All Things, it comes from there. Because I lectured there. I had my lecture notes. And then I slowly evolved and became a book when I transformed them in something readable to a larger public.

42:57And the relation was very, very good, a lot of fun, because we had different ideas. I mean, in fact, it was this perspectivalism that I was defending was against, this is not all philosophers are like that, but in principle, it's a group of philosophers with a very strong realist intuition. Okay, no, no, no. Morality is absolute and dependent of us. Physical things are absolute and independent of us. Okay, reality is one. And I was telling them, as a scientist, I think things are more complicated than that. And as a human being, I think that morality, it's a strong thing, but it's not independent of us.

43:34It's a property we have. We as human beings collectively have. But the fun part of the conversation, especially at the beginning, I was saying, what makes you believe that there is this very objective reality? And they were saying physics. and I would say, well, come on, I'm the physicist. You're the philosopher. They were not wrong because the physics of last century or two centuries ago, in fact, did push us toward this very strong realism. But physics changes, we learn. And that was a good philosophy at some phase of understanding. But now we understand better. I think it's not a good philosophy anymore, that strong realism.

44:20It would push us toward not scientifically useful way of thinking. So the conversation was nice because they were curious. They were very gentle, very kind and listening. Oh, strange scientists will come here and tell us that science is giving a picture of the world which is completely different than the one I thought. Science have done that repeatedly. from Copernicus telling everybody that the Earth is spinning and the Earth is going around the sun. Darwin, Darwin telling everybody, you know, we're common cousins, we're common ancestors with butterflies. Your grand-grand-grand-grandmother and the grand-grand-grandmother of butterflies are the same creature.

45:03That is astonishing. And then we have to readapt the way of thinking the world once these discoveries are made. because after Darwin, you'd think about being a human in a different way than you were thinking before. So I think the beauty of science is this forces to change our view of the world in some deep way. The way we talked about being human before realizing that we had common ancestors with the animals, of course, is different than after, right? Because we can still think we have a special soul, whatever, but come on, we are just little creatures. We're little animals. like rabbits in the forest.

45:43Evolved ones, smart ones, but we're also that. So similarly, I think quantum mechanics and also general relativity, Einstein, but especially quantum mechanics, have come like a scientific thunderstorm. And scientists are very confused by quantum mechanics. But now the fog is sort of going out and we have to recognize, like in the Renaissance, you know, Europeans said, well, come on, we have to recognize that the universe is spinning. We cannot hold on to the idea that we're fixed at the center of the universe and the rest is turning around us. We have to give up and to accept the idea that the stars are not moving, we are spinning.

46:25And similarly now, I think we have to recognize that the solidity of things is less solid than we expect.

46:33James Altucher:And if you were to project out like 100, 200 years, is what do you think, even though it's impossible to know what we don't yet know, what do you think, what types of things are we going to understand 100 years from now, 200 years from now that would blow our minds today? Not what will we know, but what types of things might we know? You know, somebody said it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. It's hard to say what would surprise us because if we knew what would surprise us, it wouldn't surprise us. But look, my own job is about quantum gravity. So that was definitely something we don't know.

47:07We clearly know that we don't know. Namely, what happened at the Big Bang. I mean, that's open. And there's all this work. And even more, what happened inside black holes. You know, black holes is incredible. Now, when I was a student, nobody knew about black holes. I mean, 20 years ago, nobody expected there's so many black holes in the sky. But there are. It's a fact. The universe is full of black holes. Maybe one quarter of the matter of the universe is just black holes. So there's all these black holes there. We didn't even suspect they existed 20 years ago or 30 years ago. A few people were working on them.

47:39But even those didn't believe they were real. They thought we were doing some mathematical game. They're real. And we see things falling into black holes. We actually see the close of black holes. We see stars being eaten by a black hole in the center of the galaxy. So a matter falls in, goes very rapidly to the center. It takes a few minutes. And then what happens? We don't know. Isn't it astonishing? With all these things falling into these holes, we have no idea where it goes. So clearly, we have to figure these things out. And I think once we figure this thing out, the universe will look differently.

48:18I don't know how, but space, we're going to think about space differently, time, we're going to think about, I don't know how. But certainly, you know, the universe looks, big universe, completely different and it looked to our grand-grandfathers, they thought we were just a few stars. There had nothing happening. Now we know that everything is happening up there. So cosmology has changed. Our astrophysics has changed. Our worldview. I think quantum gravity is going to change our worldview. Plus, I think we are going to understand much more what is our mind. How do we think? Now we have artificial intelligence.

48:53So this will raise all sorts of discussion. People are debating, shouting to one another. Okay, it's conscious. No, it's not conscious. I mean, this is bullshit, of course. Slowly, there will be some clarification on what computers could do, how they're similar to us, how they're different from us. So we will think about ourselves differently. And I don't know how, but I'm pretty confident that unless we go to a nuclear war and healate one another, which is possible, if we survive, we will have a different view of ourselves.

49:24James Altucher:Well, and you talk about the difference between computers and humans in the book when you compare like chess computers, which could seem random to the human eye, but are actually fully deterministic and predictable. You compare that to humans, which also could appear random. Like we feel like we have choice, but, but ultimately we're like gigantic, sophisticated computer programs that work all the time. And so to some extent, not in the same way computers are, but much more complicated. In some ways, we're deterministic as well. And my question there is, do you play a lot of chess? Yeah, I did play chess until I got depressed because my stupid MacBook beats me so easily.

50:08This is very depressing. So computers are so better than us in chess now that I lost the sense of pride of being a chess player. I agree with what you say about determinism, but I would phrase it differently. I don't think that our freedom in choosing is an illusion because there is an underlying determinism. I would phrase the thing differently. I think what we call our freedom in choosing is what we do when we choose between alternatives. It's not that we're not free. We are free because what we do depends on us, on the process in our brain. It doesn't depend on something else. Okay? The mistake is that we think we are not our brain.

50:57We're not our... So we are something else, some abstract soul. And then we are shocked because it's not the soul that decides, but it's the brain. But there's no soul separate from the brain. So when I say I choose to do that, I choose to talk with you, I choose who else, okay? Because there was a process going on in me, and that's my choice. So I don't like this phrasing of illusion. The illusion is thinking that what goes on in my choices is unphysical. That's illusion. It's to making a story about some ghosts that come out of physics and tell physics what to do. That's nonsense. I am this thing here, not something else, not a ghost.

51:45I'm this Carlo here that you hear, you see, you cannot touch because you're far away. So I choose because the horrendously complicated process in my brain is what determines what I'm going to do.

51:57James Altucher:And so it seems like throughout all this, I'm going to argue there is one absolute, which is that everything decays. Like you talked about the apple earlier, eventually it turns into a rotten apple. A stone eventually turns into a dust. In your own work with quantum gravity and black holes, everything turns into, the black hole ultimately, billions or trillions of years turns into just these quantum remnants. Like, is there an absolute that everything kind of decays over time? No, I don't think so. There is certainly a universal drive toward decaying, which we do understand quite well, actually, with thermodynamics, second-low thermodynamics, dissipation.

52:40So there is a quite good statistical understanding understanding of why things decay. But we also observe in the universe, in these 12 billion years, 14 billion years of universe, or 4 billion years of evolution of the surface of our planet, the Earth, that also other things have happened, right? The universe very long ago was more uniform, and galaxies have formed, structure and solar system have formed, Stars have light up. And on Earth, bacteria have formed and living things have come out. And it's not because of some strange, funny fluctuations. It's because there's also an actual drive in phenomena to go toward phenomena to repeat themselves and increasing of complexity.

53:34Let me give you a super simple version of that. If you take a glass of water and you put some vinegar in it, okay, after a while, the vinegar diffuses completely. And, you know, you cannot separate vinegar and water. So it's total randomness and decay. Okay, there's no structure anymore. But if you take a same glass of water and you put some oil in it, you can also mix. It's all mixed and it's foggy things. weight, and very slowly the oil goes to itself and the water goes to itself. They separate. They form structure. So you see, structure formation is not something strange, something that happens by itself in nature.

54:17Nobody doing anything. It's just a glass of water. There's no energy coming in, nothing. It's just by itself. It gets ordered. Now, at a different scale, the surface of the planet got ordered in plants, animals, humans, civilization, books. So there's also natural drive to order, which is reassuring. They're both, okay? They're both, and we are not completely clear yet, but I think it's a good scientific problem, in understanding what exactly separates one case from the other. What is the profound difference between water and vinegar and water and oil? We haven't figured it out. Case by case, we understand.

54:59But we don't understand what is the general principle. When is it that things order themselves? And when is it that things disorder themselves? But I don't believe this idea that everything decays. Certainly, we decay. We die. But even the fact that we die is a bit funny, right? Because in the biosphere, organisms don't really die because of decay. if you look at the texts that study that organism has automatic system for correction the decay but then in the DNA it's programmed at some point to stop doing that and to die because it's convenient for our children and grandchildren that we die, okay?

55:39So we don't die because of decay we don't die because the system is well organized for the future somehow and why is it so? Well, because of course we are the future of something happened before. So once you find a mechanism like that, it produces itself by itself. That's Darwin. That's Darwin's fabulous intuition, right? Things can happen by themselves to grow. So nature is complicated. We haven't figured it out. It's beautiful.

56:05James Altucher:Well, Carmo Valley, once again, always, I feel like you're tolerating my questions and you do it very well. But I'm always pleased to talk to you and expand my knowledge on all the things that you think about and write about. And on the equality of all things, lessons on physics and philosophy just came out. It's such a great summary of your thoughts and so many questions come to mind. I only really hit like a partial amount of them, but thank you so much for talking to me and talking further about these fascinating topics. Thank you very much. It was great fun. And your questions were good, actually.

56:43I've been going here and there. So thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

56:46James Altucher:Thank you.

57:09James Altucher:The Matrix Trilogy Shut up! Titanic! I'm the king of the world! And so much more. For Showtime's, press nothing. They're free, 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.