Are We Alone? Fine-Tuning the Universe, with Barnes, Keating, and Richards

Peter Robinson: Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I didn't feel like a giant, I felt very, very small. In the vast immensities of space, we humans are mere specks, or are we?

Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. A senior lecturer at Western Sydney University in Australia, the astrophysicist Luke Barnes received his doctorate from Cambridge. Dr. Barnes is co-author of A Fortunate Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. The cosmologist Brian Keating completed his doctoral work at Brown.

He now serves as professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego and as director of the Simmons Observatory in Chile.

Brian Keating: Simons Observatory.

Peter Robinson: Simons Observatory, did I mispronounce both? It's the Simons Observatory in Chile.

Brian Keating: I'm the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory in Chile.

Peter Robinson: I will never forget.

Peter Robinson: And nor will anybody else.

Peter Robinson: Dr. Keating is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition and the perils of science's highest honor. Jay Richards holds a doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary. He serves as senior research fellow at the Heritage foundation and as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

Dr. Richards is the coauthor of The Privileged Planet, How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, a book that will celebrate its 20th anniversary-

Jay Richards: In August of 2024.

Peter Robinson: August of 2024, excellent, all right. Cosmic fine tuning, Luke Barnes in A Fortunate Universe. The fundamental particles from which everything is constructed and the fundamental forces that dictate interactions appear to be fine-tuned for life.

You have before you a total layman. What do you mean?

Luke Barnes: Well, the first thing to realize is that you're made out of fundamental things, physical things. And one of the things we'd like to know as general curiosity about the universe is why are they this way? Why aren't they some other way?

And a way that we could start to get a handle on that question is, well, let's take our best physics and let's see what would have happened? Let's, in theory, just change some of-

Peter Robinson: Change the dials?

Luke Barnes: The fundamental numbers. Yeah, let's turn some of these dials, according to our best theories these dials can be changed.

As far as we know, everything's still mathematically fine. And what we find is that some of the dials, not much of a change, but there's a couple of very important ones that involve the particles, the forces and the universe as a whole. Where seemingly rather small changes would make a dramatic effect to the way our universe would have played out.

So for example, you're made out of a variety of very interesting chemical elements, but change those numbers, and suddenly particles don't stick to each other. You can't make complexity anymore. These are the sorts of things that happen. So suddenly you change this dial, and some particles that would have held together, that do held together, and all of us suddenly don't do that anymore, things decay, things fall apart.

So our universe, the ability of us here to do this, the ability of stars, planets, galaxies to form, it's a rare talent. It's not one that every universe that we can calculate, that we can imagine, has.

Peter Robinson: Okay, so am I allowed to leap ahead to the idea that it is all as if it were designed for us, or is that twist?

That's an unscientific proposition, I suppose, but so what do you want to say? You want to say we should not just take it all for granted. It could have been wildly different if even a few of how many variables, by the way, give me some idea.

Luke Barnes: Within the standard models, there are 31 numbers you need to describe the way matter works and the way the universe as a whole works.

Within those 31 a lot of them are just sort of weird properties of neutrinos, particles you've never heard of and not made out of, so who cares? There's a core of, I would say, maybe 10, where interesting, dramatic, and often catastrophic stuff starts to happen if you mess with those dials.

Peter Robinson: All right, from the fortunate universe, again, we go from the universe to this planet, or the difference between this planet and the universe. We usually take air for granted, but the density of the air you are breathing is 10 to the 27th times the average density of material in the universe.

Luke Barnes: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: So we just got very, very lucky.

Luke Barnes: Well, did we? There's one point of saying, are we in a lucky place in the universe? And I don't think there's a reason to treat the surface of the Earth as a random spot. Of course, where the matter is, where we're made out of it.

Peter Robinson: Right.

Luke Barnes: Of course, we can only be in an environment where there is enough stuff for me to be made out of, and I'm 10 to the 30 times more dense than the universe, and that's getting worse with time. The point is not so much that we're in a lucky place relative to space in the middle of nowhere, although there's some interesting things about that.

The point is that will the universe where we change these dials, will it make a place where there can be structure at all? Because you can make a universe, I can make it very easily, just turn a dial a little bit. And everywhere in the universe has the same sort of density of stuff we see in almost every-

Peter Robinson: No galaxy, no stars, no planet.

Luke Barnes: Yeah, just a boring hydrogen soup where one particle hits another particle every second Thursday. And that's all that happens in the history of the universe.

Peter Robinson: Okay, so there's this obvious problem. I say obvious because it even occurred to me, but it turns out-

Peter Robinson: It's in the literature everywhere. But this obvious problem we have the fish in the sea, and the fish says to his fellow fish, isn't this just fascinating? That the weight of the density, the density of the water, the temperature, the amount of oxygen in the water, it's all just perfect for us fishes?

Isn't that a remarkable discovery? And the answer is yes, no. In other words, of course, the universe is designed such that we can live in it, we live in it, right?

Luke Barnes: So to some extent, I think that explains part of all the environments in the universe, why am I on the surface of earth?

Well, I can't be in the middle of the sun. I can't be an empty space. But the deeper question is, why is there a life permitting place at all anywhere?

Peter Robinson: Right.

Luke Barnes: And so I can easily make a universe where no one has that conversation, right? There's no fish going, isn't the water lovely?

Because there's no liquid water anywhere, there's no planet. I can make really boring universes, if you want one, change these dials a little bit and nothing interesting happens.

Peter Robinson: So a funny way, the fish is onto something.

Luke Barnes: Yeah, there's room for that explanation, but it assumes that there's already water, right?

There's already an environment in which they can live. But that's exactly what we're trying to get back and step back a second and say, what do I have to do to fundamental physics, fundamental cosmology. The deepest level of reality we know about today, in order to make a universe where a life permitting bit of it is possible at all.

Peter Robinson: One more quotation from you, but I want help on this one. This is a quotation from your book, A Fortunate Universe quote. We have found fine tuning as deep as we can go. Further, we have We found that fine-tuning follows us down. It shows no sign of disappearing at deeper levels.

What's he talking about?

Brian Keating: Well, to quote the former president Bill Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word is is.

Brian Keating: You didn't write his speech, but it would have been much better had you. But the question of what constitutes fine-tuning is subjective. And as the Italians say taste is subjective.

You can't argue in issues of taste. So what is finely tuned to Luke or to Jay might not be finely tuned to me. For example, there may be parameters that characterize some of the 31 that Luke properly accounted for. That have ability to be tuned that is stupefyingly coarse and trivial for a ham handed experimentalist like me even to imagine.

And I'll give you an example. If we change one of these constants, which is the dominant form of energy in our universe, it's called a cosmological constant or dark energy. It is the force that's-

Peter Robinson: That's in Newton and Einstein, correct?

Brian Keating: That's in Einstein's theory of general relativity in the modern age, only discovered despite Einstein's protestations to the opposite, that he made a blunder.

Actually, we should aspire to this. When Einstein said that adding in this cosmological constant to stabilize the universe was as big as blunder. That turned out to be a blunder. So try that on your spouse. So my biggest error is that I said I made an error. So if you change that value by a factor of two, ten, hundred, nothing would happen to life as we know it right now.

It's true in the future, as Luke has pointed out many times. Something will happen in the future. But as I say, that's a trillion years from now, keep paying your taxes. So it's not necessarily the case that I would call that or even believe that that number is finely tuned.

In contrast, if you were all old enough to remember AM radios in your car, right? And so you would have to get the dial tuned to a precision of half a percent. And that was hard with chubby fingers as a kid. That is more finely tuned. But even that would not be speak of the need and essential nature of a designer to say, I got the station tuned in properly because I have this ability to finely tune the radio dial.

So, yeah.

Peter Robinson: Okay, no, I'm coming to you in a moment. But first, I asked him what you meant by fine-tuning as follows us down. And I thought we were going to get some really deep, almost mystical moment. And Keating over here says, mm-hm, so what do you mean?

Peter Robinson: What do you mean by fine- tuning following us down?

Luke Barnes: What I meant by that was our understanding of what's the fundamental stuff we're made out of changes with time, right? We keep doing physics. Now, if you gone back 70, 80 years, we wouldn't be talking about quarks, which what we think we're made out of.

We'd be talking about protons and neutrons. And we'd say, okay, what if I change those numbers? And this discussion would still look like, if you change this number a bit, something would go wrong. And all I'm saying there is, okay, it's possible that tomorrow a new theory comes up.

And when I change those dials, in that theory, in that understanding of the universe, maybe everything's fine. However, that's not been the course.

Peter Robinson: That's not been our experience over.

Luke Barnes: So far.

Peter Robinson: The last seven decades or century.

Luke Barnes: So one of the things to remember is the dial. There's a difference between how much can I change it relative to where it is right now.

Peter Robinson: Right.

Luke Barnes: Say 1% this way or that way, and how much can I change it relative to all the possible dial settings. So is the cosmological constant, is it fine-tuned? Well, in the sense of relative to where we are now, no, cuz you can make it 100 times larger.

But I would argue fine-tuning needs to consider all the possibilities. That's what we're trying to do. And relative to all the possibilities, that change of a factor of 100 relative to the whole thing is actually very, very small.

Peter Robinson: Okay.

Luke Barnes: That's my point of view, Brian has his point of view.

Peter Robinson: Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet, your almost 20 year old book.

Jay Richards: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: Simply stated, the conditions allowing for intelligent life on earth. Barnes world here. Also make our planet strangely well-suited for viewing and analyzing the universe. Habitability seems to correlate with measurability. Explain that one.

Jay Richards: So couple of things that Luke said that are crucial to understand.

So think about all the cosmic fine-tuning conditions, right? So things like called constants. There are within that, a constant is saying some number within something we could call law. And then these initial conditions, sort of the way things would have had to have been at the beginning of the universe, assuming the sort of temporal beginning, all right?

That's fine-tuning that sort of describes the macro structure of the universe. The way I would describe that is that sort of necessary conditions. If you're gonna build a universe for life, there's a bunch of necessary conditions. It's not necessarily sufficient. And we know this by looking around at different locations.

So not every location, of course, within the solar system or the galaxy or the universe is compatible with the existence of complex life, chemical life, all right? And so the question is, okay, is it fine-tuned or not? So in other words, there's something that suggests a kind of specialness, a sort of surprise, right?

We do this all the time when we're trying to decide, is something the result of a random process or an impersonal process, or it's a setup, right? Is it a coincidence or a conspiracy? The intuition, initially, at least, with fine-tuning, is that, well, fine-tuning, does that mean there's a fine-tuner?

You don't have to go that far. But at the very least, the idea that things seem to be suspiciously sort of oriented for the production of conditions where life can exist somewhere in this universe, right? The question to be asked to the answer is, should we be surprised that we're in a place that's compatible with our existence?

That's the trivial kind of fish and water question. No, of course not. We can only observe some place compatible with our existence. The question is, what are the conditions that allow for places like that? And is there something unusual about that? What we found, I would say, over the last.

Peter Robinson: Should we be surprised?

Jay Richards: Yeah, should we be surprised?

Peter Robinson: In the layman's understanding.

Jay Richards: Yeah, and should the surprise suggest that there's some maybe purpose of explanation for this, right? What we've discovered is that as we have learned more about the conditions needed for life at the planetary level, think about H.G Wells War of the Worlds.

Some decades ago, it was plausible that Americans could think that they were hearing a newscast on the radio of an invasion from Mars. Now, why is that? In part because we didn't have a really good sense of how precise things had to be planetarily for chemically-based life within our universe, with its periodic table, the elements make sense.

And then we looked at Mars. Gosh, as close as it is to Earth, it's lifeless. Every place else we found so far, it's lifeless. So that there's this sense that things have to go.

Peter Robinson: Just right.

Jay Richards: Just right, there's a bunch of ingredients beyond the macro to need a planetary level to get a habitable planet.

Peter Robinson: Right.

Jay Richards: Right, then you say, okay, well, is that suspicious? Should we say, okay, this is like.

Peter Robinson: Right.

Jay Richards: William Paley's watch resting on a heath. You see the parts all performing a function. Does that mean there's a watchmaker? Not so fast. The reason is that there's lots of options within the universe, right, for building planets.

So imagine they'll say, ten to the 22 planets in the observable universe, or I'm just making up a big number.

Peter Robinson: Right.

Jay Richards: That means there's lots of opportunities.

Peter Robinson: What about this notion that habitability correlates with measurements?

Jay Richards: That is the second part.

Peter Robinson: All right.

Jay Richards: Because you get to the habitability part, I don't think Guillermo Gonzalez and I don't think there's a very good design argument.

Specifically to be made if you're just focusing on the fact that, gosh, lifelike conditions are rare in the universe cuz you might have a big cosmic lottery running, right? And so as long as it's possible, that could happen once.

Peter Robinson: From the privileged planet. The fact that our atmosphere is clear, that our moon is just the right size and distance from the Earth and that its gravity stabilizes Earth's rotation.

That our position in our galaxy is just so, that our sun is, its precise mass and composition. All of these facts, and many more, are not only necessary for Earth's habitability, but also have been surprisingly crucial to the discovery and measurement of the universe by scientists. And, of course, the operative word there is surprisingly.

Jay Richards: Yes, imagine that you've got this list of conditions needed for a habitable planet, right? So the right kind of star, right kind of structure, right size, right atmosphere for chemically based life, all these things. And we spent 100 years sort of coming up with a list of local ingredients, and this is what chemical life needs.

And then someone else decided, okay, let's compare different kind of conditions with respect to making fundamental scientific discoveries, being able to detect the cosmic background radiation. To figure out that we're in a galaxy, to see beyond our solar system or beyond our atmosphere to the other planets of the solar system, right?

That's like what you would need for doing science. And then you discover, you sort of overlap those places, and you find out they're the same place. So the best places for life overall end up being the best places overall for doing a wide range of scientific discoveries. That's what we argue is a kind of, is a suspicious kind of conspiracy rather than coincidence.

And, of course, there's a bunch of details.

Peter Robinson: Back to Brian, for another. Yeah.

Brian Keating: And I love both of your writings, and I think you guys are geniuses. And so the life big, but.

Peter Robinson: There's a big old but coming.

Brian Keating: But, Peter, here, over here. No, but let me give you an example, so one of the coincidences you point out in your book is that the apparent size of the diameter of the moon is exactly the same as the apparent angular size of the sun.

Peter Robinson: Which we all in the United States, we all saw this in the solar eclipse.

Brian Keating: That's right.

Jay Richards: Okay.

Brian Keating: And the relevance of this is that the element helium was discovered during a total solar eclipse. Not, as I tell my students sometimes that helium was discovered on the sun.

They ask, how was that done? And I say they went at night because that was the time for which they could go. But no, indeed, it was only possible due to that beautiful apparition that we saw in the United States of the corona of the sun, and that was absurd.

So that was a contributing factor due to the remarkable unique in our solar system. I believe that our moon, there's 200 moons in our solar system, or minor bodies. None of them perform an exact total solar eclipse from the surface of the planet, as you point out in your book.

So to quote the late tame Emda, this is spooky. It's spooky, but the point is not just that it's spooky, it's that it allowed us to discover the element helium, which is part of the learnability. But let me ask you a question. Would we not have discovered it but for the fact of this coincidence?

Presumably we would have discovered it, eventually, we would have launched spacecraft and they would have done other things. Or we would have had spectroscopes that have very narrow band filters that could filter out everything but the helium signature. So how do you react to that? Yes, it's true that we have this, but that is not the only means by which we come to learn about the physical universe around us.

So does that diminish the plausibility from design, that we are living in a design planet where part of the design is for us to appreciate the designer, I would assume. And that appreciation leads to gratitude, which then leads to worship, perhaps. But if we can get about it through perhaps a different pathway, a counterfactual history, does that not undermine slightly.

Peter Robinson: So would you go for this, that the notion of fine tuning? Fine tuning for life, fine tuning for measurability, this strange overlap between the two, would you go for this? That that set of facts is suggestive but not probative?

Brian Keating: I would say it's a component, I wouldn't even say it necessarily rises to the level of suggestivity, but I would say-

Peter Robinson: You are hard.

Brian Keating: Well, you wanted somebody to-

Jay Richards: That's why we're doing this together-

Brian Keating: You want controversy, right?

Peter Robinson: You get a D in your class, you probably are a hard grader, too.

Brian Keating: No, that's not true, I'm a soft touch. But let me put this, fine tuning is in the eye of the beholder, it's a subjective thing, right?

There is a notion, we can agree, that there are certain aspects of the 31 parameters that Luke very-

Peter Robinson: That's a subjective science.

Brian Keating: There's 31 parameters, but how tunable are they? Some are not tunable at all, I mean, almost not tunable at all, and some have factors of seven to 100 variability, in which case we can still have this conversation.

So what you choose to constitute a fine tuning argument is a type of filtration process. You are compressing, you are condensing, you are editorializing and redacting. And what goes into that process sometimes is done for teleological reasons, to aim at a specific goal, which is perhaps to motivate a designer, which I'm sympathetic to.

But I don't necessarily agree that it's an objective criterion by which we can say-

Peter Robinson: Okay.

Brian Keating: Falsity of-

Peter Robinson: We will return to that, but I wanna get to the Big Bang. Fine tuning, fine tuning, kaboom.

Brian Keating: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: I listened to a podcast between the two of you, and you asked Luke when the fine tuning took place, as the stars were forming, as life was first emerging.

And Luke replied, if you had to nail me down on something, Luke replied in a slightly evasive way, actually, if you had to nail me down on something, I'd say it was the initial conditions. So you are asserting that at the very moment of Big Bang, it was all there.

I was about to say the universe had us in mind. I wanna step back from this, but it was all there. You buy that? That's sensible, that's scientifically coherent?

Brian Keating: With deference to my dear friend Luke, no, I don't. In that it's-

Peter Robinson: It's get a little closer and take a swing.

Brian Keating: You're in the middle of two, cosmology. The reason is the following, I think, again, you have a stop condition. You have a start condition, which Luke is instantiating at the big bang.

Peter Robinson: Right, and that condition is actually terribly complicated.

Brian Keating: But he gave a brilliant lecture recently that I had the privilege of listening to, which he stops.

I want to get out of the Big Bang DNA flagella or something like that. But can you not say more? If indeed you postulate the existence of a designer with that teleological purpose of creating DNA, why stop there? Why not stop at slavery or childhood leukemia? At what point do those have to be encrypted and encoded into the initial conditions?

I don't know that that's part of science.

Peter Robinson: Wow, here we go. So, free will, it was also fine.

Brian Keating: As well.

Peter Robinson: And permissive, okay, all right. So, by the way, while I've got you here, and you're going nowhere until we're done.

Brian Keating: That's right.

Peter Robinson: Is the big bang a theory under pressure?

Brian Keating: So, the word theory is a semantically overloaded term, right? So we talk about that.

Peter Robinson: You won't let me say a single sentence. All right go ahead.

Brian Keating: So theory is used in a lot of different ways. You say that I'm a remarkably handsome man. Someone would say that's just your theory, right?

We use it in different ways, we also talk about theorems. We talk about the special theory of relativity. We talk about germ theory of disease. We talk about evolutionary theory. What do those all mean? Do they have certain things in common yet? The Big Bang theory, shall I say there is indisputable evidence that our universe in earlier times had radically different properties.

And the universe leaves fossils behind. And I brought a prop with me here today, and that's the water in this glass. If we analyze the water in this glass, it contains fossils of the Big Bang. And it contains them in a very precise ratio that's predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis processes that Luke has studied and written about, but you'll find a ratio of what's called ordinary.

Peter Robinson: By fossils, you mean the heavy-

Brian Keating: Heavy hydrogen yes, so there's ordinary hydrogen H2O, and then there's a small, tiny fraction of what's called DTO2, Deuterium oxide, or just heavy water. There's also another one that's called tritium, that's even more dangerous because it's radioactive, but deuterium is fine, you can drink it.

The exact ratio is predicted only as a result of the fact that the universe was an alchemistic fusion reactor at the very first moments of this period of time. Which some people conflate with the beginning of time, but it's not necessarily so. And furthermore, the properties of everything that comes after all the fossils, including us, including galaxies.

Including the cosmic microwave background that I study, are other instantiations of fusion processes and fossil relics that we can study that all point to the same conclusion. Universe was much hotter and denser than in the past, but it says nothing about a singularity, a multiverse and things like that that we can discuss further.

Peter Robinson: I need to give him multiple choice questions instead of essay questions.

Brian Keating: You need to swear me in, yeah.

Peter Robinson: Okay, this is sort of mandatory because this is. I'm a layman, I wanna know what you guys think about things that you probably, I'm asking you to condescend to me.

Jay Richards: Well, I wanna respond to Brian, you know? Yeah, let me respond,

Peter Robinson: Please.

Jay Richards: He's right. So he.

Peter Robinson: And I'm wrong.

Jay Richards: And I'm waiting for my Australian friend here. Yeah, and he's-

Peter Robinson: Keating keep saying-

Brian Keating: That's what happens when you have a New Yorker with two gentlemen.

Peter Robinson: And so Brian keeps saying. I respect both of you, your geniuses.

Jay Richards: You know, it's coming, right?

Peter Robinson: I've never heard worse insults.

Jay Richards: And so he's, of course, right. So he gave one example we use in the book is this production of perfect solar eclipses, this weird magic, totally different bodies, right in our skyd, that are intrinsically interesting by themselves.

But it also, as Brian notes, has allowed us to make certain scientific discoveries. We never say in the argument or in the book that would have been impossible otherwise, but rather that it makes it much easier than less habitable places if you sort of compare all these things.

One thing was, of course, the discovery of helium, but of course it was a confirmation of Einstein's general theory. There were other kind of scientific values. But the argument is what philosophers call a cumulative case argument. So it's not a deductive logical argument that sort of proves its conclusion.

Peter Robinson: We will bury Keating-

Jay Richards: So the idea is, just as we evaluate things like more or less habitable locations, right. Where life can exist, it could be kind of hard to quantify, and some of it's subjective. We still have a pretty good sense that the surface of a star is not going to be compatible with life in the same way the surface of the Earth is, right?

Peter Robinson: One barns dial, another barns dial another, barns dial the sun lined up. And we just-

Jay Richards: And a lot of these. So that if you were to find sort of throughout all the kind of well known conditions needed certainly at the local level and compare it with the other types of places, we can either observe or we can sort of theoretically predict.

As it turned out, gosh, there's a lot of the things we need for a wide range of different kinds of science. We find them in the best places for observing overall, but it requires lots of detail because there's no way any one example by itself I would agree.

Yeah, maybe it's kind of interesting, but otherwise, yeah.

Peter Robinson: Are we alone? Two quotations. Brian Keating, there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone. And there are 100 billion galaxies like the Milky Way. So what are the odds? Jay Richards, the more we learn about how much must go right to get a single habitable planet, the more it reduces the hope of finding intelligent beings elsewhere.

I note that that is premised on the notion that we are intelligent beings, which I take the flattery. Thank you. So we have 100 billion stars per galaxy and 100 billion galaxy, let's put it this way. The SETI project, search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets founded just after the second world war and there are different names and it's taken place privately and it's publicly funded for a while, NASA funds it for a while, Congress gets sick of it and cuts it.

But it's been going on, listening for signals has been going on for going on seven decades now, and there hasn't been a peep. Are you surprised?

Luke Barnes: What I love about this question is, I get it more than any other question.

Peter Robinson: Everybody's going to want me to ask, so I'm asking.

Luke Barnes: I go and talk to school students, amateur astronomers, even in churches and I talk about what I wanna talk about. And then they ask me questions about, is there life elsewhere? And there's two questions there. One, is there life out there somewhere? But the SETI thing is, is their life close enough that we can hear their radio signals?

And those are two very different questions. What I'm thinking of, the SETI one's an interesting one, but on the other one. So, you know-

Peter Robinson: I love this. Ordinarily, I ask you a question, I get an answer. Here, I ask a question, I lose ground.

Jay Richards: Well, these are hard questions.

Luke Barnes: I don't have an alien in my pocket man I'm so sorry. How many planets are there out of the universe that life could have a go at hanging out? Maybe they won't have the right moon, but they could try that numbers probably multiply those. It's ten to the 22, maybe.

Peter Robinson: It's a very big.

Luke Barnes: It's got, okay, but here's the thing. I'm an astronomer. I have big numbers, plenty of those. What I wanna do with that number is. And I don't go, that's big. So there must be life out there. I go, no, no, ten to the 22.

There's another number I need, which is, what are the chances? What's the probability that a life permitting universe, the life permitting planet, will develop, actually develop life? And that question is a biology question, right? I've made a lovely planet out there. It puts all sorts of chemicals on it.

I'll just heat it up for a bit. With a star, will anything start jumping around at any point? Right, will a cell form, will anything that we could call life be there? And that's the really hard question. I feel the astronomers did their job and the biologists.

Peter Robinson: You are telling me that answering that question is not your job?

Luke Barnes: It's a very hard question, and it's definitely not my job.

Peter Robinson: Brian Keating, I'm quoting you. Consider a planet right next to a planet that's teeming with life. This second planet shares the same solar system. It has an atmosphere, it has a magnetic field. It has all sorts of the conditions for life.

Now, let me tell you that that second planet already exists. Brian, explain.

Brian Keating: That's right. I use this analogy quite frequently when I ask the question of what is the probability once life gets going, once we have n equals two? Two examples of life in the universe. Should it be not possible to predict the spread, the rapid spread?

As Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic park, life finds a way.

Jeff Goldblum: Life finds a way.

Brian Keating: And in that case, the question has to be asked. The non observation of life should count to reduce our probability space that life, once it gets kicked off, is inevitable. But the lack of life on Mars, as far as we can tell or anywhere else in our solar system, is not this positive.

I mean, evidence of absence is not absence of evidence or whatever Carl Sagan would say. He says everything and nothing at the same time sometimes, but to the point that Luke was addressing another thing I brought up. I've had the privilege to go to the South Pole, Antarctica, twice, and at least the two of you paid in part for it, cuz it's only possible to go through the US government National Science foundation.

And you get a ride down through Australia or through New Zealand, you end up at the South Pole after about a week, and it's the most desolate, boring, lifeless place in the universe outside Palo Alto, where I've spent some of my time as well. And once you're there, there's nothing there, and yet you're on a continent.

So what if I told there's seven continents on a planet, and you knew nothing else. And you say, what are the odd there's 7 billion people on this planet, too. We haven't been to every continent, we've been to six of them. What should be the odds, just based on probability, that life exists in Antarctica and what should be the population of hominids and Antarctica, birds and monkeys and whatever else you like?

And you'd say one in seven should be a billion people. There's literally 200 people there. It's possible for you to go there, Peter, and be the tallest person on the continent at one point.

Peter Robinson: Could I be the smartest?

Brian Keating: You could be.

Peter Robinson: Just for one day.

Brian Keating: You could be, yes as long as.

Peter Robinson: Table like Jr is there.

Brian Keating: So the point is, possibility is not probability. Just saying this number, and by the way, the number is worse than what Luke suggested even I'm taking your side in this. That number, 100 billion squared, roughly ten to the 24th, that's in the history of the observable universe, which has a radius of some 43 billion light years, and existed for 13.8 billion years.

I'm also not an astronomer, but I would like to know the answer in our lifetime, right? In a lifetime, my grandkids or your great grand graduates. And that number is exquisitely small, and I think Luke hinted at that.

Peter Robinson: So, but can't you guys deal with numbers? I'm coming to you, you guys deal with numbers all the time.

This is the number of planets in the universe we think, and to an order of magnitude, we can get it. To find intelligent life, we believe you need this condition times the number, this condition times the first condition times the number. And we end up getting, okay, so here I come to the privileged planet.

In other words, I am accusing the two of you of being very slippery on this question that's in everybody's mind. Just because it's in everybody's mind doesn't make it beneath you, or okay, so Jay's book, again, the privileged planet, compared to, I don't even know what this means, but you'll explain it.

Compared to the giant planets being found around other stars, the planets in our solar system have more circular orbits. If we assume that all planet eccentricities are uniformly distributed between 0 and 0.8, then the probability that our solar system was selected at random for life, is about one in a billion.

So that's quite a reasonable calculation, isn't it?

Jay Richards: Well, that's one thing.

Peter Robinson: Yeah, but one thing times one thing times one thing.

Jay Richards: Some of the numbers we can get kind of rough handle on others we don't. But you did describe it correctly, I mean, it's a famous Drake Equation.

It was kind of initial stab at this in which you just say, okay, how many-

Peter Robinson: The Drake Equation, that's right.

Jay Richards: Drake-

Peter Robinson: How can explain that? What's the Drake Equation?

Jay Richards: Frank Drake astronomer that there's kind of an initial discussion of this some decades.

Peter Robinson: Just after the war, 50s maybe early 60s.

Jay Richards: Yeah, but basically it was, okay, how many stars do we have? How many planets do we think there are around each star, right? And so that's sort of the set.

Peter Robinson: It was the kind of first cut of the number of variables.

Jay Richards: Absolutely. It's been said that, yeah, it's a really efficient way of compressing a lot of ignorance into a small space because we didn't know the value of almost any of these variables.

And so your initial intuition, ten to the 22 stars with planets around them, and that's got huge number of opportunities. You get lots of people that say, yeah, it's just sort of inevitable. It just completely depends upon what the other numbers are. And as Luke said, the question about the origin of life, that is just such a difficult question.

That's where we stop in the privileged planet, in fact. So we thought, okay, well, let's just focus on given what we know so far, how prevalent do we think Earth-like planets are in the observable universe? Setting aside the origin of life question, because it turns out simple life also makes a planet more habitable.

There's a chicken and egg question there.

Peter Robinson: Sorry, what life makes it more habitable.

Jay Richards: So simple life living on a planet for long periods of time can make the planet more conducive to life or complex, right? So a little bit of chicken and egg, let's forget that.

And just like, what do you need to get something like a planet that has liquid water on a lot of its surface? So a nice circular orbit, it's not freezing up and boiling off during its orbit around the star. That's one of the important factors. Our argument is essentially this, that the more we have learned so far, the more precise the conditions seem to be for having a habitable planet.

And as Brian said, we're comparing Mars, right? If you wanna know what's the most Earth planet other than Earth that we know about still 5000 extrasolar planet discovery then, it's Mars. It's around an otherwise habitable system. Its orbit is very similar to ours. It's sort of comparable in size.

I can tell when our book first came out in 2004, every new extrasolar planet discovery a science writer would call and say, what about this? You'd said we had a privileged planet, and we'd say, our argument is not that there's only one Earth-like planet. That's not it. This kept happening.

If I like to remember, I told a reporter, call me when we find a planet outside our solar system that's at least as Earth like as Mars is, we still haven't done it. And so that's, in some ways, it tells you the conditions for habitability seem to be fairly narrow.

It doesn't follow that Earth is unique in our argument, at least. We argue that if there are other planets where there is life like us in the universe or even in our galaxy, it will be very much like the planet and the system that we're on. That's our.

Peter Robinson: Now you're looking skeptical.

Jay Richards: Mm-hm.

Peter Robinson: You wrote a book on fine tuning, and now you're, what's up.

Jay Richards: Yeah, the general level, so.

Peter Robinson: Okay.

Luke Barnes: There's a factor that needs to go into this. It's easy to find a planet when it's bigger for fairly obvious.

Peter Robinson: Exactly.

Luke Barnes: So the way you actually find them, how do you find a planet around a star that's an awfully long way away? Well, there's two ways. One is the planet goes between you and the star, and you get a sort of an eclipse, but just the light goes down and then up again.

Or as the planet goes around, actually, the star of the planet wobble each other, so you can observe that little wobble. The bigger and the closer the planet is, the easier it is to see those two things. There's a couple of other methods. What that means is there's a bias just from our methods that will find planets bigger than Earth and closer to their stars than Earth.

So it's actually very hard to find. Mars is just really hard to see around any other planet. But we're in an era where we've got whopping great big space telescopes going up. We've got wonderful new observatories coming on board. We're still going on this one, so stay tuned.

Jay Richards: That's exactly right. And this is crucial, though, Peter, because these are testable claims, right? But we're just now getting to the point where we could really discover Earth like planets around planets other than.

Peter Robinson: These are testable claims.

Jay Richards: Yeah, they're testable claims, but we're just now, I mean, just the technology just coming online to really nail down just that one number, right?

Like Earth-sized planets and then now we'll look for Earth-sized planets around similar stars.

Peter Robinson: So could I ask, this one really does not fall within your purview, except as people who have to get this question asked all the time. Why are people fascinated by the question of whether we're alone?

Brian Keating: I think it's an ultimate question. People, I'll ask you this. I love to ask this question. People, what's the-

Peter Robinson: I ask the questions around here.

Brian Keating: I'm taking podcasters prerogative here. What is your favorite day on the calendar, Peter?

Peter Robinson: Christmas.

Brian Keating: Christmas, okay? What is Christmas?

It's an origin. It's the origin of Jesus Christ who's your savior, right? So what does that mean? That means people are fascinated by origin stories. What's the ultimate origin story? The universe, perhaps. How did it get here? What's the next most interesting origin story? How did life come to exist?

What is the origin of life? We have whole research programs dedicated to both of those great and grand topics. People love origin stories, why? Because it marks a demarcation between things that you could have, in principle, experienced and obtained empirical evidence. It's about namely your life, and things you have to trust other people about, other theories, other hypotheses, which are provisional and could be wrong.

In other words, you only know who your father is, as they say, cuz your mother told you right? But after that, you can say a lot of things about things you experienced. So, it's a fascinating thing to ask, where did the universe come from? Because we don't know if there was a day for which there were no yesterdays, and that's the branch of science that I study.

Peter Robinson: I grant every bit of that, but this is just occurring to me as we speak. So, yeah, I mean, it's an unusually unformed thought, most of my thoughts are unformed. This one is unusually unformed, but that Neil Armstrong quotation at the beginning, isn't it a question of meaning?

Are we just specs? Are we just motes of dust floating around in a big empty room like this one? Or is there some meaning to I don't know. So, why are people fascinated by it?

Luke Barnes: Well, I'm no psychologist-

Peter Robinson: A question you get all the time.

Luke Barnes: I know, I'm no psychologist, but it's so common, I think there must be multiple answers.

I don't think there's one general, but I think Brian's answer is right. I think there's sort of a feeling of I think Earth is kind of amazing, are there more of that out there? Or is this place special in some senses, are we typical? Or maybe the whole universe is teeming with life, and it's gonna be all right if this planet, we have to move somewhere.

I think all of this gets mixed in cuz it's such a common question. Everyone comes at it differently, and I think movies are part of it as well, obviously.

Brian Keating: But actually, I'm not front-

Peter Robinson: Whatever number of body problem.

Luke Barnes: The name of the show is 3 Body Problems, it is, in fact, a full body problem.

Peter Robinson: Is it?

Brian Keating: You permit me one indulgence that is, we already know how the movie plays out because this actually happened in 1996 again, President Clinton during his administration. There's a scene in the movie contact, written by Carl Sagan and Andrine as his widow that depicts an actual speech by President Clinton, and it's not CGI.

President Clinton: I'm glad to be joined by my science and technology advisor. This is the product of years of exploration by some of the world's most distinguished scientists. Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined and scrutinized, it must be confirmed by other scientists.

Brian Keating: This discovery, if confirmed, will go down in the history of annals of greatest discoveries ever, okay? That was a discovery of putative life found on a martian meteorite.

Peter Robinson: That's right I remember that.

Brian Keating: Landed on the ice caps of Antarctica, where I've had the privilege of going twice.

And it is a claim that was made that was not refuted for decades. And in fact, it's sort of ambiguous whether or not they made a mistake, if it was actually some systematic error, or some effect that was, but my point is this, did life change for the average layperson, did you stop getting these questions?

We found life, right?

Peter Robinson: You got to take just one moment to describe what form of life, if it was a form of life, I think that this was nothing that would grow up to play the piano.

Brian Keating: Correct but that would be a huge advance, if true.

Peter Robinson: Some microscopic something.

Brian Keating: It was a respiratory process or some microtubule structure of a bacterium.

Peter Robinson: And now it's in doubt or disproven?

Brian Keating: It's essentially been disproven.

Jay Richards: Yeah, though it's still, I would say ambiguous, but certainly it's not unambiguous proof of life, but it hasn't been ambiguous.

Brian Keating: So, that means for 30 years we've lived with the specter of having made this discovery, and yet, I stipulate, did anyone's life change? Did we start treating each other better? So, this is a glimpse into the future of if we make contact tomorrow, I predict almost nothing would change.

And the setting maximalist, the people-

Peter Robinson: Jay would see, if they're interested in his book.

Peter Robinson: Jay would immediately start thinking.

Jay Richards: I would wanna know if they saw a perfect solar eclipses from their home world, that would be the question.

Peter Robinson: All right, so science, science, science, worldview, geochemist Ross Taylor, quote, Copernicus was right after all.

Copernicus, of course, is the fellow who persuasively said, actually, the sun doesn't orbit around the Earth. We're not at the center of everything, it's the other way around. Copernicus was right after all, the idea that the sun, rather than the Earth was at the center of the universe caused a profound change in the view of our place in the world.

That seems to be historically accurate.

Luke Barnes: No.

Luke Barnes: No, it isn't.

Jay Richards: It's backwards, it's textbook orthodoxy.

Luke Barnes: It's a myth from the 1800s.

Jay Richards: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: It's a myth from?

Luke Barnes: The 1800s.

Jay Richards: Yeah, it came from the 19th century, so think about this.

Peter Robinson: I just go throw out the rest-

Jay Richards: No, because this is actually.

Peter Robinson: So, let me finish this, and then you guys correct it.

Luke Barnes: Yeah, I know we pounced before you finished.

Peter Robinson: Yeah, Republicans' pounces so, Copernicus was right, the idea of the sun, rather than, I did ask, was that the center of the universe caused a profound change in the view of our place in the world.

It created the philosophical climate in which we live okay, it is not clear that everyone has come to grips with the idea, for we still cherish the idea that we are special, and that the entire universe was designed for us right, go.

Jay Richards: Okay, so notice what he's doing, is he's arguing that there were, before Copernicus, the pre-Copernican cosmology put humans in a position of privilege by putting it in the center of the universe.

And the general argument is that science, everything we discovered, just shows how insignificant we are.

Peter Robinson: Correct.

Jay Richards: And so, the idea is that physical location and metaphysical significance somehow correlate. Hey, here's the first point, no historian that you ask about this will tell you that in the pre-Copernican cosmology, the best place to be was in the center.

This was Aristotle's physics, remember? And so, the center, that's where the heavy stuff falls, remember, it was the moon and everything above it that's made of this fifth element, this kind of unchangeable, ethereal substance, right? That was actually that was the heaven.

Peter Robinson: The music of the spheres.

Jay Richards: The music of the spheres, right? It's the surface of the Earth, at best, would have been a sort of intermediate place, right, in which things die and fall and decay. So, the center of the universe in the pre-Copernican cosmology, if you wanted to kind of give a location metaphor, you'd say it's the bottom, it's the sump in which Detritus.

Peter Robinson: Even on Aristotle's view, we lived in a fallen world.

Jay Richards: Well, a world in which things change and decay.

Luke Barnes: Imperfect would be.

Jay Richards: Imperfect would be, yeah, exactly.

Luke Barnes: In a typical sense.

Jay Richards: And so, if you look at what Galio actually argues, right? He actually argues if the Earth is another planet, then it can reflect the light of the sun.

So, there's a complete sort of, if you understood what the early scientists after Copernicus were doing, they didn't see themselves as demoting humanity or the Earth or anything like this. It was only in the 19th century that there's a kind of reinterpretation of what actually happened in order to make this kind of dysteleological argument.

Now I'm making that point, nevertheless, it's important to understand that physical location and metaphysical significance, they're not directly correlated in any obvious way. But we got to get the history right because it's sort of this textbook mythology.

Peter Robinson: So, this is part of Darwin and the whole Victorian rebellion against some religion.

Is that what we have going on here?

Luke Barnes: So, it probably is sort of bound up in this, there's a lot of stuff going on in terms of Darwinism, in terms of TH actually trying to carve out a place for professional science. In terms of, especially in the UK, most scientists are kind of parsons who just during the week do some observations of plants out in their garden, and Huxley wants to professionalize science.

There's a lot going on here, the point is that there's just nothing before the 1800s on this.

Peter Robinson: So, if Copernicus didn't invent the Copernican principle, it just emerges from, but it did get invented. The worldview does exist, I encounter it every day.

Jay Richards: There are discoveries but there's also this narrative interpretation, right?

Peter Robinson: So that's wrong.

Jay Richards: So that's what the Copernican principle is, a kind of narrative interpretation that weirdly reverses things with respect to Copernicus.

Peter Robinson: Yeah, but the worldview exists.

Brian Keating: Yes, but it's almost self refuting. I mean, we call it the worldview now, the Copernican principle and so forth.

But it was almost immediately self refuted because although the Earth wasn't the center of the solar system, immediately it was discovered that the sun was the center of the galaxy. And this was due to misperceptions, due to the fact that we live in the dusty galaxy. And it wasn't immediately found that we are actually in the outskirts of an ordinary spiral galaxy that we call the Milky Way.

But that wasn't enough because our egos had to be solved somehow. And that way to solve it was that we are the center of the universe. And that was the most simple interpretation of the observation that every galaxy that we see, with the seven exceptions out of 100 billion, are all moving away from us.

Now, either we didn't put on our cosmic deodorant, or we are in a special place. That is the most efficient, economical, parsimonious interpretation of the observations.

Peter Robinson: That we are in a special place.

Brian Keating: That is the naïve interpretation. Obviously, we don't believe there is a sense.

Peter Robinson: I thought I had you at last.

Brian Keating: Tenure revoked. Yes, try harder, Peter. So the point being that scientists didn't even adopt this, and it's sort of in revisionist history that we all then became the Copernican victims. I call it the ultimate big brother principle. All those of us with a big brother know, if you have one, you're not that special.

You're not unique. But as these two gentlemen said, it really had no effect on the practicing cosmologists. And the ultimate refutation of it was that eventually, when the Big Bang model came to be much more seriously taken, cosmologists reverted to what was called the perfect cosmological principle. Where cosmological principle is that it's a generalization of Copernican principle to galaxies and to our position in the universe.

But then the perfection was achieved by saying, we're not only not special in space, we're also not special in time. And the only way to get rid of a special point in time called the Big Bang is to have an eternal universe. So you could argue that the Copernican principle almost stifled scientific progress, at least if it was taken seriously, thank God, or whoever you like.

It wasn't taken seriously, as these two guys just said.

Peter Robinson: Okay, so you just raise one more point.

Brian Keating: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: We'll come back to the Copernican principle, on which I think all three of you are proving remarkably slippery or evasive. But of course, surely I'm mistaken, because you all know more than I do.

We'll get back to my final agony in a moment. The Big Bang, when I mentioned a moment ago, is the Big Bang a theory under pressure? I put it crudely, but what about this notion of the multiverse? This notion, it seems, to layman Robinson, excuse me. Let me stipulate that everything I say is the naïve view.

I don't know enough to give you any other view, but the Big Bang implies that the universe had a beginning. Implies that.

Peter Robinson: I mean, if you just intuition, something must have begun it. Now, we immediately spin off into notions of an intelligent design or stop that. Well, I can stop myself.

But still, it's one moment in time, and the universe as it exists is the only one we have. Up comes the multiverse, as far as I can understand it. A, the math does hold together. It's extremely sophisticated math to say that, no, the Big Bang didn't just produce this universe.

It bubbled through to a gigantic number of universes, so the math holds. B, there is not one shred of physical evidence for it. C, however, it's a way out. It's a way of there's no God. There's an infinite regression of you get to lead your life an infinite number of times in different.

What do you make of the multiverse?

Brian Keating: So, first of all-

Peter Robinson: Is that taken seriously, and what do you make of it?

Brian Keating: It's absolutely, it's deadly serious.

Peter Robinson: It is.

Brian Keating: It is, it's taken extremely seriously.

Peter Robinson: Because the math does work.

Brian Keating: So seriously that there's not one multiverse.

There are multiple multiverses. There are multiple.

Luke Barnes: Different series-

Brian Keating: Different types of-

Peter Robinson: You guys get paid for this stuff?

Brian Keating: That's right, we get a $0.01 tax. You ever remember when you were a kid, you could buy a star, and they named a star after you?

I've said, well, why stop at stars? Sell universes and Keating Brand Industries, folks. Go to brandkeating.com.

Luke Barnes: I need to return one of those.

Brian Keating: So multiple, multiple. What does that mean? Well, there are certainly regions of space time which we have not had time to interact with yet.

And tomorrow there may be a universe literally right next door to ours. That's one light day away from us. I'm speaking crudely, but my professional colleagues will forgive me. But effectively, it's a matter of time. Tomorrow we could discover actually the physical imprint of the consequences of there being a neighboring universe that we come into contact with tomorrow, literally tomorrow.

Then there are other conceptions of the multiverse. There's the many worlds hypothesis postulating. There are postulates that there are other universes parallel to us in space. There are other universes. So these are all different types of multiverses.

Peter Robinson: These are unfalsifiable.

Brian Keating: Not necessarily. It may be that you could not necessarily falsify, but you could motivate to a level of credulity that would rise to a level of circumstantial evidence perhaps.

Peter Robinson: He speaks the truth.

Luke Barnes: Yeah, I think so. So the important thing, things about multiverses, things about, say, the beginning of the universe, they're not things we can get straight from observations. I can't go and look through one of Brian's wonderful telescopes and see that. So I've got to ask a theory.

And now the question is, who do I ask? Who do I trust? With the beginning of the universe, if I ask Einstein's theory of gravity, I get some rather general conditions where actually look, given this place, there probably is a beginning if we just stick with that theory, right?

Under fairly general conditions. But now the question is, all right, but we went right back to a beginning where there's extreme conditions there. Do I really trust Einstein all the way? And the answer is now, actually, we've got this other theory about how things work around here called quantum mechanics.

And we didn't ask like, that didn't come into it. And maybe we should ask that one as well. But we need to combine the two. And so we have these clues because there are different theories we could go and ask. And the question of, who do you trust?

Is should, hopefully. We'd love it if data came along and went, that guy, ask that theory with the multiverse. The problem is we've got a whole room full of people we could ask, including the person who says, nope, no multiverse, right? They're in there as well, that's possible.

Peter Robinson: That's just in this universe.

Luke Barnes: Yeah, yeah and there's these ideas about how it could happen. And the data's not telling us who to ask. And so we can try to get clues, circumstantial evidence. We can try to ask, hey, if I lived in your multiverse, would I expect to observe a universe like this one?

Or are most of the life forms in a different sort of universe? That's circumstantial, but that could actually sort of kick a few people out of the room. But we're always gonna be, in this case, of here's the data out of that, I hope there's just one theory to ask, but there's probably more.

And then I ask them, and they can't quite agree with themselves. So we just have to live with this tension of we'll have clues, we'll have circumstantial evidence, but-

Jay Richards: But Peter, what's interesting is almost every discovery leads to more questions. But we're in a different position than everyone, and certainly every scientist was, say, in the mid 19th century.

In fact, you can find scientists telling you in even the early 20th century that the question of where the universe came from or if it has a beginning is not a scientific question. In fact, the proper scientific attitude was to treat the universe as a whole as just eternal and static given, right?

The fact that we now talk about the universe as having an age, that's a significant sort of update from a century and a half ago. It leads to new questions, right, is it unique? Was there one beginning, can we talk about the beginning, but that's a different sort of situation.

And so, I think if you're thinking in terms of worldviews, I would much rather be a materialist where everyone assumed the universe was eternal than be at a moment in which virtually everyone, whether skeptic or believer, says well, the universe has an age, so it's got a finite past.

Peter Robinson: You'd rather be a materialist in the 1890s-

Jay Richards: Exactly.

Peter Robinson: Than today?

Jay Richards: Yes, and I think it's much easier to be atheist in which standard cosmology says well, the universe hasn't always been here. It's no longer a kinda good candidate for ultimate explanation if it had a beginning-

Peter Robinson: I like that answer so much, I'm not even gonna let you address it.

Peter Robinson: But actually, could I ask you, sort of to me, this is just kind of a technical question about the discipline of physics. So, Newton is what, 17th century? Quantum mechanics is late 90s, when is maximum?

Luke Barnes: 1920s.

Peter Robinson: Okay, so we get quantum mechanics and relativity are emerging at the same time, and these are two systems of thought that do not, Einstein supersedes Newton. Everybody seems to get that, but quantum mechanics and relativity simply exist in different boxes, is that right? They don't refute each other, but it's been a problem for you guys that they are separate.

The search for some way, the unified field search, has been a problem for you for a century now. Is that right? I mean, for your discipline.

Brian Keating: You're absolutely wrong, no.

Peter Robinson: Thank you very much Dr. Keating-

Brian Keating: I'll answer you in a second.

Peter Robinson: What do you have to say about Dr. Lawrence?

Brian Keating: Absolutely right, I think your only mistake is that you're conflating general relativity in quantum mechanics. In reality, special relativity, the theory of objects, mechanics, propagation of objects with mass near the speed of light, mass energy, interrelationship equals mc squared, etc. That's one of the most, if not the most quantitatively tested of all theories.

So, the only incorrect thing-

Peter Robinson: That one just holds up and is confirmed again-

Brian Keating: It's Dirac, it's Feynman, it's Schwinger, and so on, and every time there's a collision at the large Hadron collider, it's being tested. What's not been tested or reconciled, or even mandatory that exists is a theory of quantum gravity of general relativity, which is the way that this fabric of spacetime warps under the curvature of massive objects.

And the interplay between matter and spacetime, was first pointed out in general relativity. But at the microscopic level, at the subatomic level, how does gravity behave? And where is that relevant? To my knowledge, Luke can refute this, but it's only relevant in two situations. One is at the core of a black hole, the singularity of a black hole, which is perhaps excluded from our vantage point by what is called an event horizon, a firewall, and ultimately impenetrable firewall.

And the other regime at which-

Peter Robinson: We can't see it.

Brian Keating: We can't see through the-

Peter Robinson: We just can't observe, we cant.

Brian Keating: And the other regime at which it may have been required is at the origin of spacetime itself and the singularity that existed then. Which is also quoted from our view, by another type of event horizon that precludes us from seeing the actual origin of time.

So, I stipulate we put a lot of effort into this, and the question is, is that a good investment for physics? Cuz to investigate two regimes that have one or two ultimate applications, black hole cores and the beginning of the universe. And who is to say that gravity and quantum mechanics have to be related in what you already alluded to as a unification or theory of everything, as it's on his cult?

Peter Robinson: He said Luke may refute me, I'm begging refute him.

Peter Robinson: That stands, go ahead.

Luke Barnes: I agree, when do you get something really heavy and really small, well, center of black hole, beginning of the universe. What I disagree with is the thought that if we had a theory of quantum gravity, all it would do is tell us how the universe started, and that's a waste of time.

No, no, no, that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm gonna stick with that. That's worth-

Peter Robinson: Feel free to caricature-

Luke Barnes: That's worth going after, because we want that, who do we ask? I can't observe the beginning of the universe, and I wanna ask a theory, general relativity, does an amazing job of predicting what goes on around us.

And so, if we had that quantum theory, I could say, all right, you've predicted things, you've explained things, you're all self-consistent-

Peter Robinson: Is that somehow undevelopable in principle?

Luke Barnes: No.

Peter Robinson: Why don't we have it?

Luke Barnes: It's not my field.

Peter Robinson: Not my job.

Brian Keating: Some people say it's not possible, or it doesn't exist.

There's no mandate from God or nature or whoever you like that says that the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity must take place. It's a desire based on our intuition that the laws of nature should be simple, and elegant, and beautiful. But that is also projection of taste, and sort of, there's God or mother nature, it's not under an obligation to unify things so that my theoretical physicist friends have full employment.

Peter Robinson: Okay boys, last questions, it turns out what this conversation has taught me is I understood even less than I thought that I understood. But what I'd like to get to, I'm sure this is a vain attempt but I kind of like to wrap up the notion of the implications of your fields as they now stand.

So, this Copernican principle I'm gonna read you what my search engine produced on the Internet. So, this is the thing that's in the air because it's on the Internet. The Copernican principle, which we now know was mistaken, but it still got invented, is a fundamental concept in astronomy and cosmology, pretty strong words.

Fundamental concept that asserts that Earth and its inhabitants do not occupy a privileged or position in the universe. The principle has profound philosophical implications, maybe it shouldn't, maybe philosophical implications are only imagined in the wider world. But that's what it says, profound philosophical implications challenging the notion of human exceptionalism, and suggesting that humans are not unique or central in the cosmic order.

And what I would like to know is the current, not even the present, not even sort of snapshot of physics at the moment. But the general movements of your careers, indicate that it's time to wrap up this worldview that this planet is more remarkable. And we as humans do indeed seem unusual in the universe, and maybe that has implications for the way we feel.

Maybe Neil Armstrong shouldn't have felt like such a little speck. Maybe he should have thought, gee, we humans are pretty spectacular, you get what I'm going for here, okay, Brian?

Brian Keating: Okay, so when I hear this, it goes by the name of cosmic insignificance theory, and this is-

Peter Robinson: Okay, I got it, that's better than the Copernican principle, okay.

Brian Keating: Oliver Burkeman, a wonderful book, Four Thousand Weeks. It's mostly about you have 4,000 weeks allotted to you, how are you gonna spend that before you meet your termination? And I think it's ridiculous, right, is Jupiter more significant than a nine-month-old baby?

Is it possible to say that the large magellanic cloud, because it's so much bigger. Nowhere else do we find that size matters in terms of significance, and I would say the ultimate difference, between these come from, or the ultimate expression of our significance, which is a humanistic, I think, very beautiful thing that scientists tend to ignore in favor of materialism.

Come from two things for me that make me think maybe there's something to what my colleagues here are onto and maybe I should be more open to it. And that's these two things. We share 99.8% of our chromosomes with apes, right? With bonobos or orangutans or whatever, sometimes wish it was 100% right.

But the fact is it's extremely close. What is that difference? Or another one that's my favorite. If you look at the mass energy budget of the whole universe, you'll find that what we're made up of, elements on the periodic table, up to iodine or something that's useful for life, makes up something like 0.001% of all the energy in the universe.

And yet that's the only form of matter or energy that can contemplate that. We make up only 0.001. So there's something in that now, is it evidence of God? No, I don't think it's proof of God. I personally don't believe you can prove the existence of God, and I don't operate under those circumstances.

But to say that we're insignificant because we don't, aren't as big as a gas giant planet, or we share the same number of chromosomes as a fruit fly, those are empty, soulless arguments. And to counteract the late great Stephen Weinberg, who said, the more we comprehend about the universe, the more pointless it appears.

I think the actual opposite, the more we see how similar we are to everything and yet how distinct we are, the more irrational the universe appears to be and the more resplendent it appears to be, which may lead some to seek ultimate gratitude as well.

Peter Robinson: Jay.

Jay Richards: Exactly what Brian said.

Notice there should be a disconnect between the idea of size, scale and significance there's no one is a sort of measure, physical measure. It's completely ridiculous once you frame it that way. And notice, no one ever says, wow, humans and the Earth are huge compared to quarks. Wow, we must be very important, right?

The comparison almost goes one way, it's really silly. Significance is gonna hinge on things that are, I think, more subtle than that. It's the same thing with respect to whether is earthly life unique in the universe, or is there life, including intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe? I honestly think the answer to either of those questions is interesting.

As atheist, I think both of those are possibilities that we should be open to either of those options. But I don't think the problem with the Copernican theory is not just it contradicts the history of science, but it forces natural science to sort of bear the water for a particular ideological campaign for which it's not well suited.

And the people, including ordinary people that aren't scientists, end up missing the grandeur and the heroism of science pursued properly to help understand as well as the universe that we can see.

Peter Robinson: Luke?

Luke Barnes: Yeah, my favorite quote about fine tuning came from someone, I believe it was said to Alistair McGrath, but who said this was lost to the sands of time, but it was simply, I'm not religious, but something weird is going on here.

There's this impression, I think it was Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist, who said, it's having reviewed just the basics of physics, went, looks like the universe knew we were coming. And that impression, I think, against the, we're just nowhere particularly special. There's nothing unique, this is all accidental.

I can make you an accidental universe in my computer if you want one, and there'll be nothing interesting going on in there, nothing as interesting as this. The idea, if you wanna say the universe is accidental, go make yourself some accidental universes until it happens, it's not like this.

So there's something fighting back against that idea. I don't think it proves anything. I think mathematicians prove things, but certainly, I think if you think the universe is accidental, you should be wildly uncomfortable.

Peter Robinson: Let me close final question. Just go through with each of you. I'm gonna give you a fragment of text that comes to us from the late Bronze Age and ask each of you how you live with it.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth. Now, what do you do with that? Does that convey valuable information? Is it inspirational? Must Brian Keating, the scientist, remain blind to it while Brian Keating the man is permitted? How do you deal with this?

Brian Keating: Well, first let me say I would kill for 1% of God's book sales.

I mean,

Brian Keating: There's nothing quite like that. But in seriousness, you mentioned the Bronze Age, and yet we read it to this day. The idea that we'll still be reading Stephen Hawking's brief history of time a hundred years from now, let alone 30 centuries from now, is laughable.

And it should be something that he, the late, great Stephen Hawking, should wish to not be true, because it would mean that almost no progress in science has been made. When I read that passage in Genesis 1:1, it has a lot of overtones to me as a Jew, thinking about the notion, it's a famous question, why did God begin the Bible with that?

After all, it was written for these Bronze Age itinerant peasants. Why didn't it begin with, don't eat that delicious thing with the curly tail that I wish I could eat, but I can't? It should have begun with the laws for the Jewish people, why did it? Because it says that or the famous commentator Rashi says, because God staked his claim to the creation of the whole universe, and therefore everything else can follow.

If he had only created stuff, you could say, well, it's just for the Jews, I still don't have to love my neighbor as myself. I can kill my parents, I don't have to honor them, etc. So when I look at that, I see wisdom. And always remember, the word science in Latin means knowledge.

It means nothing about wisdom.

Peter Robinson: When you hear that, you see something that, do you see truth?

Brian Keating: For me, I see no scientific content in that, if that's what you're asking. After all, the sun and the Earth are created on the fourth day, and the concept of what that means.

And I struggle and I rebel against attempts to squeeze the 13.8 billion years of the Bing Bang model into that. I rail against that with my rabbinical friends. So, no, I view them as completely, wholly separate. And just as I would not use the Bible to teach science to my students, I also would not use Stephen Hawking's brief history of time, teach morality, ethics, and how you treat your fellow man to my students as well.

Peter Robinson: Jay, in the beginning-

Jay Richards: I certainly agree with Brian that this is not a science textbook, it's saying something else. I differ from Brian. And I think, first of all, I think the claim is true. I think God did create the heavens and Earth is just a summary term for everything other than God.

I also think that by studying carefully the natural world around us, the heavens and the Earth, first, that everything we know about it is consistent with that claim. And then also we can discover things that confirm or at least suggest something like this. But I've never imagined that it's something that all the details of Genesis 1:1 could be proved from doing astronomy or cosmology or biology.

Peter Robinson: Luke, out of sheer affection for down under, we give you the last word.

Luke Barnes: Thank you very much. We think it's on top, of course.

Luke Barnes: What I love about Genesis 1 is that there's no antagonist, there's no bad guy. If you read all the other sort of myths and stories.

Read the Enuma Elish, wonderful story cuz there's dragons fighting, there's no bad guy, no one God just orders, and it happens. And for me, that's not a history, that's not a science, that's not a theory. But what tells me is what came first was rationality. What came first was a mind.

What came first was that. And so when I take my mind and try to understand the universe I can take comfort in the fact that the mind got there first.

Peter Robinson: Luke Barnes, Brian Keating, Jay Richards, thank you.

Luke Barnes: Thank you.

Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation shooting today in Fiesole, Italy, I'm Peter Robinson.