Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIs there an explanation for the Universe, or is it random?
Daniel and Katie explore the anthropic principle and whether it can provide some understanding of why the Universe is the way it is.
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Hey, Katie, do you feel lucky to be who you are?
I guess so.
I don't really know how to be anyone else, so I guess being me feels pretty good.
Well, do you ever think about all of the other possible Ktis out there.
Like maybe a Katie who became a snake wrangler instead of a podcaster?
Yeah, you know out there in the Katie Verse.
Wow, the KD verse. I like how that rolls off the tongue.
I think it's better than the multi KD the.
Multi KD cinematic universe.
Good luck at the box office with that one. But something I wonder about if you're thinking about all the possible instentations of you, is whether they all feel lucky to be where they ended up or if you know you're unusual, if you're an outlier.
Well, I feel like Katie to be keeper, and Katie the account's receivable manager probably aren't on a podcast, so you're not getting a representative sample.
Until physics gives us a way to travel through the Katie Verse.
I have to warn you though, before you visit. Ninety percent of the mass of the Ktie verse is obscure trivia about parasites, and also pictures of my dog.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist in this universe and probably also in many other of the Daniel verses.
I'm Katie Golden. I'm the host of Creature Feature in this universe and the CEO of Beekeepers Anonymous in some other universe.
Do you mean that to be a negative somehow? You put beekeepers up there with like accounts receivable, as if being a beekeeper is a horrible fate. It sounds wonderful to me. You have like thousands of pets.
No, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying if I'm busy keeping bees, I'm not gonna bother with them doing a podcast.
It's an all encompassing kind of job.
I think it is. It's hard to keep bees alive.
Well, was there a time in your life when you thought about being a beekeeper? Was that an alternative version of you?
I think so because I like the idea of it. When I was a kid, I never got stung by any bees. Actually, I only got stung by a bee once in adulthood, and it was a complete accident and it didn't really hurt that much. So yeah, no, I think me and bees have some kind of nice vibe.
It sounds like beekeeping might also be in your future. But it makes me wonder about like the path of our lives, you know, how we ended up where we are, how many decisions led to us being just right exactly where we are, and how common that is you know out there. And then Daniel verse, how many of us really did become particle physicists, and how many of us are unemployed writers sleeping under highways.
I do like the idea of having sort of a big conference, either in the Daniel verse or the Kdie verse or listener name verse, where you get to meet all your various other selves and just kind of have like the Daniel Conference or the Katie Conference, and all the various Katies and Daniels, you know, just meeting together, swaping notes, you know, kind of thing like, oh, these life choices ended up here and you somehow became a dictator. That's interesting.
Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, because all of your life choices lead you to be right here, right now, listening to this podcast about everything that's happening in this universe, the way it is, the way it might have been, the way it turned out, and the way it cannot be. On this podcast, we seek to unravel the very nature of space and time, to reveal the true truth about the universe, if it even exists, To drill down into the deepest foundations, the very bedrock of reality, and understand the universe at its core. We talk about the things that we do understand and all the things that we do not understand. We make a bunch of jokes, we make fun of beekeepers, and we explain all of it to you. My friend and co host Toorge can't be here today. He's on a well deserved vacation, and so as usual, we've invited Katie to step in and make a bunch of jokes.
Maybe I'm just an alternate universe version of Jorge.
But you two exist in the same universe, don't you. Have you guys ever spoken.
I've never been in the same room with him, I've never spoken to him directly. How do I know that that's true.
I've never been on the call with the both of you. Maybe that's impossible. Is one of you Clark Kent and the other one Superman.
It's the glasses only one of us closed classes.
That's right? Are you saying if you take off your glasses you look like Jorge?
Hey, yes, that's a secret. The glasses really changed my entire facial sort of structure.
But you know, this kind of thinking, wondering how you got to be where you are and whether you could have ended up in a different place in your life, extends well beyond you and your life choices. It extends also to humanity. You think about the various things that had to happen for humans to even be on this planet. Beyond just that crazy asteroid that wiped out our competitor sixty five million years ago, there were so many branching points where life could have gone this way or that way. The chances of humans evolving on Earth itself seem sort of infinitesimal, and yet here we are. What do you make of that, Katie?
I often wonder about if the chemistry of Earth was just slightly different, where it was more of a water planet, if we would have had a species of super intelligent cephalopods of some kind of under water society, or if that just wouldn't be possible, if their tentacles would get too tangled to ever be able to make tools.
And could you have podcasts, you know, through the muffled sounds of water, or would we be communicating in some other way? What kind of jokes do cephalopods make? Do they have a sense of humor?
Yeah, like like, hey, where'd I put my hat? I guess I left it on the mantle and it's on their head because that's called a mantle. Is that good? Is that? I feel like that's a dad that's a dad joke in cephalopods.
Well, that's like eight times funnier than human jokes exactly. And that's the right way to think about it, to wonder whether we are the only species capable of having these thoughts, and so it's sort of amazing and incredible that we are here wondering it, or if it's inevitable, if whoever had evolved on this planet would have those kinds of thoughts and find themselves special, like each one of us are special and unique and improbable. You know, the combination of a sperm and egg at just the right moment to develop you, And yet here you are asking why am I here? If some other spermit fertilized that egg then that person would be asking why are you here? But we can push this even further, not just the development of you or humanity or life, we can also wonder about the universe itself. What, Yeah, it seems like the universe is hospitable to life. You know, so many things had to go right in the very beginning of the universe, so many constants of nature needed to be set just the right way to make life possible in this universe. Sort of makes you wonder.
Yeah, you know, there's this quote, I believe it was Douglas Adams, where a little puddle of water will always think smugly to itself, Wow, this hole was made perfectly for me. And that's how sometimes I feel about the universe, like, Wow, the universe was made perfectly to sustain life. Are we sort of a puddle fitting into this perfectly shaped hole for us? Or was the hole made.
For us exactly? And it's a deep question in physics because when we look at the universe, we don't just want to understand how it works, like what are the mechanisms of it? We want to understand why the universe is the way that it is. Could it have been different? And we are just lucky to be in a universe that supports life, or are there reasons that it has to be this way that no other universe is sort of logically consistent.
And what does it mean for there to be a universe without someone to view it, like it doesn't have to be a human, but something that can observe the universe, Like, without that thing that is observing, it feels like the universe's existence almost doesn't even matter in a way.
If a universe exists in the forest by itself doesn't even exist. Well, that's a great question. But we think that the universe existed before there was any humans in it, probably before there was any alien life in it. You know, there's probably nothing alive and observing the Big Bang. But we do think that it happened right.
Right, but it happened in that past. Of it happening is based on our observations now. So it's just it's a hard thing. And maybe this is extremely egocentric of me, but it's hard for me to imagine there being a universe just humming along with no consciousness within it to perceive it.
Yeah, on one hand, that sounds kind of sad. On the other hand, it's probably less sad because they're no like MOPI depressed people in it wondering about what their point of the universe is. Right, it just sort of is. Yeah, it's like the most zen universe possible without any Zen philosophers in it. But this is a deep question in physics and in philosophy, and people have wondered about whether we can conclude anything about our universe, whether being alive and intelligent and observers in our universe means something, or whether we're just lucky, or whether there's a deeper explanation to all of it. And today on the podcast, we're going to dive deep into one particular idea that tries to explain all of it. It's called the anthropic principle. So on the podcast today we'll be answering the question what is the anthropic principle? So are you familiar with this explanation for the meaning of life, the universe and everything, Katie.
I am not, but it sounds like something I could guess if I might dare, and I know our listeners are going to guess as well. But it sounds like it has something to do with human beings sort of being very full of ourselves.
It sounds like the hubristic principle.
Huh yeah, yeah, the me, me principle.
Well, it's funny you say that it is sort of about placing humans at the center everything. On the other hand, we do sort of feel like the center of our own universes. Right, as you say, we are observing the universe from our perspective. We're not observing it from like weird, squishy octopi intelligent beings in Alpha Centauri, right, we can't observe it from any other position other than inside our own skull, So we are limited to that perspective.
Yeah, the only perceivable universe that exists is the interaction of our neurons inside our brains. Like, that's what it is. It's like whenever you try to take a look at anything in the universe that is a result of chemical reactions inside a pile of meat, inside a dome of bone.
And there is a limit to what we can observe in the universe, and therefore the questions we can ask. Sometimes in the podcast we talk about things that you cannot observe, you know, like predictions of the multiverse, other universes you could never interact with and whether that's really a scientific question, because if if you cannot observe it, if you cannot prove it exists, how do you know that it's real? And so in that sense, we are definitely limited to what filters through our few senses into our little meat computer and gives us the experience of it. So, as you said, I did go out and ask some of our listeners to volunteer to answer a question without any preparation at all, and I'm, as usual, eternally grateful to those of you who volunteer to play this fun game. If you would like to give answers to random physics questions without the chance to prepare and hear your speculation on the podcast, please don't be shy. Send me an email to questions at Danielanandjorge dot com. It's fun, it's easy, it's low stress. So thinks to yourself. Do you know what the anthropic principle is? Here's what our listeners had to say.
Anthropic principle seems like something to do with the human beings and actually the anthropology as we know it like having the consciousness of what we feel.
I believe that is that we see everything as a reflection of ourselves, so that when we think of aliens, they have two arms, two legs, two eyes. They're symmetric, and that's because that's the way we are. So when we look at different things in the galaxy, we are looking for things that look like what we think life should be, in other words, another earthlike planet, and are kind of dismissive of alternatives because if that's the way we are, that's the way it must be.
Anthropic principle.
Is it related to anthropomorphism somehow?
I don't know.
I feel like the anthropic principle kind of relates to all the numbers that seem to crop up time and time again when we're studying the universe, like the value of pie or the speed of light or the plank length, like they seem arbitrary but also so deeply ingrained in the universe. It's kind of like, is it a totally random like kind of roll of the dice that we happen to have these values, or are they saying something intrinsic about the nature of the universe and that we couldn't have a universe without these numbers exactly as they are.
The anthropic principle, it's Basically, the universe was made for intelligent being like us to be seen by soul. The universe made us to look at it.
If I remember right, which I probably don't. The anthropic principle has to do with how we describe the universe in terms that makes sense to us, and we tend to assume that everything works the way that our intuition says it would.
O tricky, tricky, trick.
I have no idea, so I'm just gonna say I'm just gonna leave this one as a shrug. I liked the guess about it maybe being related to anthropomorphism because this touches my little biology heart where this is a big problem in biology, where we when we see animal behaviors, we try to reframe it, even subconsciously, even without intending to. We reframe it in terms of human emotions and human behavior. So it's a constant thing we have to struggle against. And with physics, I imagine it's also a huge problem because you don't even have a competing consciousness. Well, I guess I can't say that for sure, but we're very limited in our observation of the universe in terms of it has to be something we can fit inside our little human brains.
That's right. And I hear people anthropomorphizing physics sometimes they talk about particles and they're like, the electron it doesn't want to go hang out with other electrons because it's a fermion, you know, where protons don't like to be together. And I'm like, they don't like or dislike anything. They don't feel anything unless you subscribe to Max tegmarks idea of computronium. How the whole universe is somehow self aware. None of these electrons are making decisions. They have no free will. But it's just sort of the way that we think, right, We take our choices and our frame of reference and our ideas and we project them to the whole universe. And I don't mean that critically. That's basically what physics is, right. We are trying to build a model of the universe inside our head to understand our experiences. So yeah, we got to put ourselves in it also, and we've got to use the language that exists in our head to explain it to ourselves. That's why we talk about particles, sometimes as tiny little balls of matter and sometimes as waves of stuff, because that's the language that we have, and what else can you do? Man?
Yeah, I mean, how can you think as not a human? It's impossible not to think like a human because every human that is thinking is a human. So it's literally impossible until we've figured out some way to avatar our brains inside of a galactic squid, like we have to think as humans, and so everything we think about we're going to think about in terms of, you know, of our kind of human experience, which is why when there are minds that work on these big problems, sometimes you have someone who contributes greatly to science by thinking about things in a different way than people have thought about things before. But even then, even you know, the outliers who think about things a different way, they're still thinking with their human meat brains. So, you know, we can't think like a solar system because that doesn't make sense. Our brains are not solar systems. Our brains are brains.
Until we meet those galactic squids and we get to talk science with them, and then we learn how differently they view the universe. Although you know, I worry that when we do meet the aliens either, they'll be so alien that we can't talk to them, which means that that fascinatingly useful, incredibly different perspective will be lost on us, or they'll be so similar to us, so we can talk to them and they'll have nothing really to add to the conversation because they'll basically just be other squishy humans.
I think they're probably gonna shove one of their space tentacles up our noses and plug it directly into our brains and just kind of create a new sort of like duo brain for us. That's my theory.
Well, it'll be interesting when we meet those galactis quids if they are also asking the questions that we are asking, if they are looking around at the universe and wondering why is it the way that it is? You know, you hear people in theology sometimes making the argument like if you find a watch in a desert, then that's evidence of, you know, some sort of design. You would never conclude that the watch assembled itself randomly. I think, you know, that's cute and it's clever. But a better question is sort of like, if you find a watch in a pile of watch parts that's like almost infinitely big and jiggling around for a long time, would you be surprised to have found sort of a watch eventually self assembled in a big soup of way watch parts, and then to bring it home for today's episode. You know what, if you are that watch, you know you have discovered yourself made out of these watch parts and a big soup made out of these watch parts and a big soup of similar bits. Should you be surprised to find yourself existing and self aware, surrounded by all the things necessary to make you well?
You know, I don't have the answer to that question, Daniel, But you know what you season watch soup with right? No, I don't tell me you season it with time.
I can't believe I just watched right into that one.
So, Daniel, this anthropic principle, right, Like, I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of the direction we're going. But what is it really like? What is this principle as it's defined in physics?
So this is an attempt to try to answer the question of why we seem to be lucky to be here, why the universe seems to be sort of like fine tuned for life and maybe even for intelligent life. And the answer that it offers is a little bit controversial and somehow unsatisfying. It's an argument that sometimes coincidences don't need explanations, that you are biased in the way that you look at the universe because you exist, and so it might just be that the reason you were here asking questions about why you got so lucky is because you are the one who is here asking those questions. You know, like the watch example, if a pile of watch parts self assembles itself into an intelligent, self aware of robot, and that robot asks, hmm, why am I here? Who made me? It might just be that it's only asked that question because it's here, and if it hadn't self assembled, it wouldn't be asking that question. And so there is no sort of like deeper explanations, no designer of that robot. There's no reason why the robot had to exist. If it didn't exist, if it hadn't assembled itself out of watch parts, there would be nobody to ask that question.
And I think, speaking of anthropomorphism in our conversation earlier, I think this is a hard, difficult concept for us to wrap our brains around, because human beings are very like Our way of thinking is usually cause, an effect or motivation, and effect. So we think about things in terms of I want to do this, so I do it, or I need something, so I make this thing to accomplish this thing. It's this kind of directional thinking of I put on this sweater because I was cold, or I put some time on my soup because it didn't taste like anything. So we have this like type of thinking that when we look at bigger concepts or patterns. Even in evolutionary biology, we'll think about things like, well, how could an eye have possibly evolved? It's too complicated. The eyeball is kind of like that watch in the desert, right, it seems like it just kind of self assembled. But the answer that kind of is unsatisfying is like it evolved because it evolved. Like it evolved because the things that evolved, the earlier versions of it, survived, and they survived because they had these benefits. And so things evolve just because they survive, and that's it, like they survive past on their genes. There's no creature that has a thinks about wanting something and then evolves into it. And so with the universe, it seems like we have a similar problem right where it's like, okay, so how are we lucky or are we here just because we're here? And then that's why we feel lucky exactly.
And physics is a drive, as you say, to understand that cost and effect chain, to go back to the very very beginning and find the simplest explanation and derive everything from that. And it's worked so far.
You know.
Sometimes we've looked at the universe, we've said, we don't understand it, why is it this way? And we've struggled to find explanations, But then we have found them. We have figured out, like, oh, why are there one hundred elements? Is it just that the way it is? No, it turns out it comes from a deeper organizing print bullet comes from the way quarks fit together and electrons link around them and build those elements. There is an answer, but that doesn't mean that there always will be an answer, because we are observing the universe from a sort of biased perspective, you know. The anthropic principle says that some things that seem like coincidences that are needed to make observers, to make people around to ask those questions, might not need further explanation. That the answer might just be, hey, it's random. But when the coincidences don't happen, they just don't make observers, So there's nobody there to notice, nobody to ask the question. You know, It's like if you said, why have we survived all of these calamities? Is there somebody protecting us? If we hadn't, we wouldn't be here asking why we survived that meteor, why we survived all those ice ages and all those pandemics and everything in the past. And if we get wiped out by one in the future, nobody will be around to sort of count that against our luckiness. So we feel lucky because we are alive, but we only notice that we're lucky because we are alive.
It's like you never question why wasn't I born? It's always the question why was I born?
Exactly? So you have to balance a couple of things. On one hand, you want to keep a skeptical mind, You want to look for explanations, You want to dig deeper and understand the true meaning of the universe, if there is one. On the other hand, you also have to recognize that you are biased in how you observe the universe, that your perspective indicates that you are not in a random sampling of the universe.
So this is why we have science, right. We understand that human beings are biased, so we have scientific experiments to try to remove that bias. So why can't we just remove that bias through some really good scientific experiments that we run, like with the Hadron collider.
Oh yeah, it's no big deal. We can totally run those experiments. They consist of starting the universe over again a million times and observing what happens and seeing if there are intelligent observers in those universes.
Also, I feel like I detect some sarcasm here, But.
The answer is that we just have this one universe. We have this one example, and from this example we have to draw all of our conclusions. That's it. We're limited to that. You know, it's sort of like, you know, say that you're put on a firing squad and there's like a thousand people shooting at you and they all miss. What can you conclude from that one experiment? Can you conclude, well, they're all terrible shots, or can you conclude that they intended to miss? Or can you just not at all estimate your chances of survival? Because you're only there to answer the question if you do survive. And so that's essentially the argument of the anthropic principle that you can't accurately estimate the chances of the kind of thing happening if you need that to happen in order to be around to ask those questions.
Right, So when we're studying the universe, you know, we can think of this universe like an individual. So when you do a study on say, mice or something. If you did some kind of medical research on a single mouse and they're like, hey, this mouse is weird. Look at how its heart works, and everyone would laugh you out of you know, the journal, because you only did that study on one mouse. You're like, hey, this mouse has a tiny planet inside its stomach. It must be that all mice have these planets inside their stomachs. But in this case, the mouse is our universe. It's like, well, this universe is the only one we can look at, and we can look at it because the universe is such that we can be. And so now my mind's oppressle again.
Inside the uni mouse with King Golden exactly, and you know, I want to dig into how this might explain things and the questions that it helps answer. But I also want you to keep in mind before we get there, that there's also another side to the anthropic principle. There's a danger. The danger is that the anthropic principle tells us that there are no answers to our questions, that there is no deeper explanation, and it sort of discourages us from digging. And digging is what physics say is all about, is pushing hard to try to find that answer. So it would be a tragedy if there was a deep explanation for why the universe is the way that it is and we didn't find it because we gave up because we thought, hmm, I guess it's just chance and we got lucky. But before we get into lots of examples of how the anthropic principle can be used, let's take a quick break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan. They really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi s, fees and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
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So we were talking about how the anthropic principle can be potentially dangerous, right and discouraging more exploration. But for me, it's kind of it makes me want to know even more because it seems really mysterious how you could have a universe relying on totally random chance leading to us being around. And it makes me wonder what's behind these rules of the universe that allowed such incredible, seemingly random chance and such a large scale.
We just don't know, right, And it's the kind of thing that we wonder about. We wonder at the very core of the universe, if some of the numbers that control the universe were set randomly, and what mechanism sets those random numbers. I think that's what you're getting at, And if it's even possible to imagine other universes with different values of like the speed of light or the charge of the electron or the mass of the muon, you know, whether it even makes sense whether it's possible to have those different laws of physics, or whether there's some deeper explanation that sort of links them together and says there can only be one value.
Right. That's the thing that really makes me go cross sight is why are physics rules the way that they are and not another way? Is that a problem that we run into with this anthropic principle where we obviously can't observe another universe that maybe has different rules, So could we never really answer something like, hey, could a universe have different rules? Like are these rules arbitrary?
It's a tough question because if it's true that the universe could have had lots of other value ues for important consonants that control the way the universe is, you know, the strength of gravity, the expansion rate of the universe, the speed of light. If it's true that those universes could have had other values, and we are just one among a huge landscape of multiverses that have this value, then there is nothing we could do to discover why our universe has these values and not other values. And it could be that many of those other universes just don't have intelligent creatures in them because they're not hospitable to life. On the other hand, if there is a reason, if only certain values of those parameters are allowed because of some deeper laws of physics, that we have not yet discovered, some rules about how the universe has to work. And you know, we are certainly not finished understanding the deep nature of space and time and quantum mechanics. We have a huge journey ahead of us. We've only just begun.
So you've got some job security. That's good.
In the case that there is a deeper explanation, then we could potentially discover it. We keep doing experiments, and that's sort of the history of physics, is that we have peeled back layer after layer of reality and understood the way it is and why it has to be that way, you know, like we understand how chemistry emerges from particle physics. Now you can't just say, well, chemistry of life is the chemistry of life, and we wouldn't be here to ask about it. If it wasn't this way, so it just is. No, there are deeper explanations for biochemistry. You can explain it in terms of the atoms and the quarks and the electrons and the other smaller particles. You don't need to stop there and throw up your hands and say, well, anthropic principle says that we wouldn't be asking this question if it didn't exist, and therefore we shouldn't be asking any more questions. And that's the danger about the anthropic principle is you never know when to apply it. You never know when to say there is no further explanation, it's just random. We're just lucky because it describes what you don't know. And so to me, it's fundamentally disappointing and scary because it encourages you to stop asking questions.
Are there cases in which it would actually encourage you to ask questions though, where it's like where we realize that something must be happening in the universe for us to be able to observe the universe.
Yeah, there are some really great examples of how the anthropic principle does help steer us towards better understandings of the nature of space and time, and one of them has to do with something we talk about on the podcast a lot, which is the rate of the expansion of the universe. So we know, and we've known for about one hundred years now, that the universe is not static, it's not just a bunch of stars and galaxies hanging in space, but that it's expanding, and in the last twenty years we discovered that that expansion is actually accelerating, that galaxies are moving away from us faster and faster every year. This is something we call dark energy. So something out there is sort of tearing the universe apart, is pulling things apart, is creating new space between us and other galaxies. We think that this is controlled by some parameter. It's called the cosmological constant. It's just a number. You put it in Einstein's field equations for general relativity, and if you crank it up, then it expands the universe really really really fast, and if you crank it down, it expands the universe more slowly. So it's just sort of like a number that controls how quickly the universe expands. But that number has to be within a certain range for the universe as we know it to have formed. If that number was way too high, it would have torn the universe apart before, for example, even atoms could have formed in the very beginning of time before electrons and protons found each other to make hydrogen, right, And so that sort of sets a limit, an upper limit on the expansion ready of the universe. If it expands too quickly and too rapidly, then you just don't get interesting structure. And so that's fascinating, it's super interesting, and it's helpful actually because when we go to calculate the cosmological constant, when we try to figure out, like what is that number? How do we get what that number is? We can try to calculate it because we think it's related to the energy of empty space. We added the energy of all the quantum fields and empty space, and we get a number, and that number turns out to be really big, like way too big. Like if that number was the cosmological constant, if we started from first principles and quantum fields and tried to calculate the energy of empty space and how much it was expanding the universe, it would be too big by like a factor of ten to the one hundred. The anthropic principle there tells us that our calculation is wrong, that if the universe was expanding it that we predicted that we calculated that it would have torn itself apart much much earlier, and we would not be here to ask about it. So in that sense it is useful.
So the fact that we are even here, we know that our calculations have to end up creating a universe that allows us to be here. Is that kind of what you're saying.
Exactly, Because you can't observe a universe that doesn't lead to observers, and we are here observing it, it has to be hospitable, right. You can't argue that the laws of the universe are such that they don't create the universe that we see, right. It's just really as simple as that. And so the calculations that we do now that try to predict the expansion rate of the universe their way off, and just knowing that the universe exists and is hospitable to life tells us that those can't be right. And so that's sort of like, you know, it's a weak application of the anthropic principle, because you could imagine deducing that otherwise just saying like, well, that number is different from what we observe and so it can't be right.
Couldn't we sort of use the anthropic principle to help guide our questions without it stopping our questions because it's kind of like, I mean, it reminds me of like the famous the kard thing of I think therefore I am where. You know, being conscious is sort of your only proof of existing. But that doesn't mean you can't keep asking questions about your consciousness of like well, why do we think? How do we think?
You know?
Those kinds of questions. Could we do the same thing with anthropic principle where you know, okay, so we're here because we're here, but how did we get here? And are there any deeper mechanisms behind you know, the laws of physics of our universe that allows us to be here.
I agree with you, and those questions are really important. The issue is that the anthropic principle sort of suggests that there is no deeper explanation, that the reason we're here asking these questions is that we got lucky, and the folks that didn't get lucky aren't here to ask those questions, So it's sort of a way of saying, look, we don't need to explain this weirdness. We see something strange that seems really unlikely, but maybe there is no deeper explanation. So it sort of like stops that chain of inquiry by telling you that there is no further explanation to find. There is no deeper level of reality that explains the way things are that is just random, and we are here asking that question because we're the ones who got here.
I guess thinking from since I'm still stuck in my sort of anthropercentric or, I guess even just like animal centric point of view, when I think about randomness, I think, well, things can just be random, But then when you have huge systems, there's usually some kind of pattern that emerges from randomness. So I feel like, even if we determine something is maybe in our universe that things just randomly happen to allow life to occur, to be able to observe the universe, could there be something even bigger behind that randomness? Does that make any sense?
It does, but I think that what you're actually talking about is not randomness but chaos. You know, sometimes we see things emerging from swarms of tiny, little buzzing particles, you know, for example, chemistry, right, chemistry is like a coordinated dance of lots of quantum particles following the life of physics. And you don't need to use the weak force and the strong force and particle physics to talk about life and biochemistry because these other rules do emerge the rules of organic chemistry. So sort of like sense and mathematical reasoning does emerge out of the crazy swarm of what does seem like an insane amount of particles all moving together, the way, for example, like weather patterns emerge from water droplets, and I think that's our minds making sense of the universe. It's not necessarily randomness. It's more like turning chaos into mathematical stories to say, look, I can tame this. I can find some sort of simple explanation for that describes the higher level effects, you know, the way, like human psychology is right. Human psychology is not fundamental to the universe. It's not written in the standard model. But people are predictable. You can describe how people will buy things and sell things and talk to each other and break up and feel in response to certain situations, and that's not a fundamental law of the universe. It just sort of emerges, and so we can describe that. So I think that's trying to grapple with something else, not randomness but chaos. But I think it is important, and it goes to our desire to tell stories about the universe to find these explanations. And for me, again, while the anthropic principle is hard to refute, it's hard to say, no, that can't be because it might be just that we are lucky in random. It's frustrating because I always want to find that story. To me, the story the universe is random and you just sort of like got lucky to be here. It's not really an interesting story because it doesn't tell you anything deep about the universe.
And we're not talking about sort of a higher power here. We're not saying, well, then there is a galactic squid pulling all the strings, but more that maybe there's something like as we chop the universe down to its smallest parts, like maybe there are sets of rules that are behind the rules that we can use to understand our situation better.
Right exactly, And let me give you an example. We look at the particles that we see in the universe. For example, the electron, and we notice that it has charge minus one and the proton has charge plus one. The proton is built out of quarks, which when you combine them together, they give you charge plus one. The amazing thing, though, is that in our theory those two numbers are independent. Like, if you're at the control panel of the universe, then you could set the charge of the electron to be you know, minus one, and the charge of the proton to be plus one. You can also set the charge the electron to be like minus one point zero zero zeror zero zero zero one. There's no like rule in physics that says you can't. Those are two independent numbers. They're like different knobs on the control panel of the universe. Now, if you don't set them to be exactly opposite each other, then you don't get neutral atoms, you don't get chemistry, you don't get life, you don't get ice cream, you don't get podcasts.
No, no, no.
And so you can ask, like, well, is that a coincidence?
Is it?
Right? Are there an infinite landscape of universes out there where those things don't balance and you don't get neutral atoms and you don't get chemistry, and we're just lucky. And we're here asking those questions about it because we're in the one where they balance. Or is there a deeper explanation. Is there a reason why these things are exactly opposite. For example, maybe they're built out of even smaller things that we haven't yet discovered, And the reason the electron has the opposite charge as the proton is because they come from the same fundamental units, just arranged in a different way. They're a fundamental string vibrating a slightly different frequency or something. Right, maybe they are linked in a way that we just have not yet discovered. So the anthropic principle says, Eh, don't worry about it. It's probably just random. But my visics brain says, no, it's a screaming clue that there's something going on, something deeper we haven't yet discovered.
All right, Because you can have chaos on one level that leads to something more organized on another level. It's usually it goes up, right, like, the smaller the particle, the more chaotic it is. And then when you have a bunch of those small units in a large amount, they lead to something more organized, more of a pattern. Could you ever have something going in the opposite direction where you break apart of the smallest particle you have and you discover something behind it that actually becomes more organized or is somehow explaining some of the chaos of that larger particle that it creates.
Why that's a deep, deep question, super awesome, you know, it is fascinating that we notice that organization sort of emerges at larger scales, Right Like, as you say, a baseball has you know, ten to the thirty buzzing quantum particles in it that are possible to predict, and yet I can throw a baseball across the room and predict its trajectory pretty accurately without knowing anything about those little particles. Right, That's the sort of organization principle that you mean. And the truth is, we don't really know why that is in our universe. Why it's possible to tell these cute, simple mathematical stories about big things that involve intractable mathematical stories about the thousands and billions and zillions of tiny things inside them, We don't really know. It's called emergent phenomena, and it seems to be sort of a miracle in our universe that it's possible, you know that you can describe the path with baseball without understanding quantum gravity. We're actually having a whole other podcast episode planned just on that topic to try to understand why stories teem to emerge in layers from the chaos of the universe, not something we currently really understand.
I don't want to spoil the episode, but I will make a prediction. I think it is little tiny gnomes, little teeny tiny gnomes.
Well, let's investigate Katie's theory of the gnomic universe, but first let's take another break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are us. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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All Right, we're back and we're talking about why the universe is the way that it is and could have been other ways and in those other universes? Are there better flavors of ice cream available? Are we missing out?
Yeah? I went on Amazon and ordered a really powerful magnifying glass to see if I could try to find the tiny gnomes inside the electrons. But so we cannot observe other universes, right, because we're sort of like fish in a bawl. We're stuck in ours. But can we think about other universes? Like can we sort of project sort of what we see in this universe and think about other possibilities?
We absolutely can, and that's something that we do all the time as we sort of unroll the story of our universe as we ask could it have been different at various points? Could other things have happened? And that's really the deep question we're trying to ask. And you know, we have made a lot of progress in understanding the universe. We have these basic fundamental particles and we've even gone deeper there. People, for example, who have developed string theory, which is this idea of where all these particles come from. They say, maybe all the particles we see are actually these tiny vibrating one dimensional strings. And when they vibrate in one way, they look like an electron, When they vibrate another way, they look like a muon. And this comes out of a beautiful mathematical structure. And everybody I know who does string theory is constantly calling it beautiful, like there's some elegance to it, Like there's some like when you see it, it's like wow, you're like looking at a work of art. It just sort of like clicks together for them to have a deep appreciation for it. Problem with string theory is that when they put it together, they realize there are some choices to make, Like when you put string theory together, you can put it together this way, and you can put it together that way, and there's a bunch of different choices to make. And they sat down to calculate, like how many different string theories are there? You know, it's not like it's just there's only one way to put it together. And so they came up with a number of different string theories that you could assemble, and the number is ten to the five hundred. So each of these represents like a different possible theory of a universe.
I tried counting that on my fingers, but I think it ran out of fingers.
It's a mind bogglingly big number. Like the number of years the universe has existed is only like ten to the twelve, the number of atoms in a mole is like ten to the twenty six. The number of particles in the uni verses ten to the eighty. We're talking about a number much, much, much bigger than any of.
Those numbers, definitely more than the number of jelly beans that I got in this jar. So don't gets ten to the five hundred, And.
You might ask yourself, well, why is that important? Why is that relevant? Well, it's sort of like different configurations of the string landscape, and it sort of seems like when the universe started string theory is correct, we rolled a big die, and that die has ten to the five hundred sides to it, and we just happen to end up on this one. And so it makes people wonder like, well, geez, that seems pretty unlikely. Is there a reason why the universe ended up on this one spot out of ten to the five hundred you know, is there a deeper explanation like that's the only one that could work somehow? Is there some other rule we haven't yet figured out? Or are there ten to the five hundred universes out there and we are just in this one. So to answer your question, like, this is the kind of thing that helps us think about maybe are there other unit universes out there that have different values? We can't figure out a reason why the universe chooses one value and not another, makes us wonder if there are other universes out there where those other values have been chosen.
So when we talk about other universes being out there, I think that can be hard to visualize because one way for me to think about it is so this universe plays out over billions of years and then at some point spreads apart completely and then somehow dies and then restarts into a new universe, or the other way I think about it is like we're sort of in a bubble amongst a bunch of bubbles of other universes. But I realize this is probably not accurate ways of thinking about it. How does someone like me try to conceive of there being multiple universes?
It's difficult to sort of hold this in your mind. The easiest way is the second description that you gave, which is to imagine that there are other universes sort of really far out there, so far away we could probably never travel to them, but sort of in the same space where we live. There's one view of how the universe started that it began as infinite, and it started with a sort of like primeval universe material, which is even before like the kind of stuff that makes up our universes, and then little bubble universes sort of popped out of that, and in one spot you got our universe, another spot you got another universe, and another spot you got another universe. And that maybe, if the laws of physics do have some randomness to them, that maybe those different bubbles like got different roles of the die and ended up with different you know, effective laws of physics that an electron is more massive over here and less massive over there. And you know, Stratchietela has more chocolate in it in that universe and less chocolate in it in this universe. Coorse apps exactly, And so that's one way to imagine it that you can sort of fit them in the same space as our universe. That's a bit tricky because it requires you to have some moment in the universe when like these decisions happen, when those big bangs begin, that those numbers are somehow set into stone.
That's so strange to me. I mean, first of all, it seems like the beginning of life or the beginning of the universe. The beginnings of things are always sort of a soup for some reason. And the second thing, I mean, so you how much could we because you're saying there's ten to the five hundred potential possible multi versus right, how much could we tweak the rules of our universe and like create a universe that could potentially support some form of life or consciousness or is like it's something like in computer programming, where you just move one decimal point, you ruin the whole thing.
It's a super awesome question, and people have looked at these numbers and try to think about that exact thing. And you know, it's hard when you start from the ten to the five hundreds. String theory landscapes because we don't really know how to do string theory yet. We just sort of like have discovered the framework and we see its beauty and we seems cool, but we don't really know how to go from string theory to like predicting a universe. So we start from another level. We say, well, let's look at the standard model. Let's look at the particles we know and the numbers that seem to control the universe as we see it, as we talked about earlier, like the cosmological constant that controls the expansion of the universe, or also like the strength of gravity, or the strength of the various forces, or the mass of the electron. These are things we don't have explanations for, and we can wonder about, as you say, if the universe would be really different inhospitable to life if they were changed.
And how do we discover these constants in the first place, right, Because we don't look up at the sky and there's not a constellation that tells us, you know, what the gravitational constant is, so we discover these through some other means.
Yeah, well, actually we do discover them by looking at motions of things in the sky, or by look looking at chemistry and understanding the strength of the electromagnetic force. This is the product of you know, thousands of years of investigation is assembling these explanations of the universe, boiling down our ideas into the simplest equations possible, and then noticing in those equations that there are these numbers and we don't have an explanation for why these numbers are what they are. Why is the speed of light what it is and not twice what it is or a quarter of what it is. Now we have noticed that if you change some of these numbers, the universe seems suddenly very inhospitable to life. You know, if you make, for example, the electron much heavier, then you don't get atoms in the same way, right, you don't get chemistry the same way because chemistry is dependent a lot on the ratio of the masses of the electrons to the nuclei. For the electrons to do all the things they do that let chemistry happen, you know, to interact with other nuclei and have their various atomic levels. Things suddenly shift and you can't really get chemistry the way we expect it in life, the way we know it now. Of course, the really hard question is does it lead to other interesting forms of life as we don't know it certainly, it's true that if you tweak these parameters, you don't get our universe and it might not be hospitable to our life. But what it's really hard to do, as you said earlier, is imagine that there might be other interesting, complex phenomena that emerge in that universe that are so different from ours that it's impossible to even imagine. And maybe those folks wonder, you know, like, are we in the best universe with the best ice cream? That's really difficult.
So we've got our universe, and we've put it in the Character Creator, and we've got all of these sliders where we can change these aspects about the universe. How messed up can we make our universe? Like, if we start playing around with these sliders, what is the extent to which we can create something completely different from our universe?
Well, if you have your fingers on those sliders, please lift them up very gently and step away, because our universe is very sensitive to those values. Like if you change the massive electron even a tiny little bit, all of chemistry changes. If you make gravity even a little bit weaker, then you don't get things like stars and planets. Right, If you make gravity a little bit stronger. Then you get a lot more black holes, and you get stars that formed, but they're much smaller and they're colder. They don't haven't had a chance to accumulate as much stuff before they collapse, and so you don't get life as you know it. If you tweak the value of the strong force, then you change how fusion operates at the heart of stars, and you might not get like nucleosynthesis. You might not burn and fuse and create things like carbon and oxygen that are essential for life. And so really it seems quite sensitive. We know that if you change the values these parameters even a tiny little bit, we're talking about fractions of fractions of a percent, the universe is very very different.
We're kind of a soup flea universe, right, We are very very particular, very hard to bay and.
So the anthropical so what looks at this and says, well, maybe there's just lots of universes and this is the one that we are in, and that's why we are asking this question. We have survived this firing squad, but we can't estimate the chances of surviving a firing squad because we're the only ones who have survived it and that's all we can do. And to me, that's frustrating, and I don't like that at all. I like thinking there is an explanation that in one hundred years, physicists will have a better theory of the universe, and instead of having twenty six numbers, we don't have explanations for maybe it'll only have five numbers, and from those five numbers we can predict the twenty six. Right, they're controlled by five deeper numbers. And in five hundred years, maybe we'll have a theory of physics with just one number in it or zero numbers. Right, we'll discover the logical principle that is the only way a universe could be put together, and so it has to be this way. That's sort of my deep fantasy scientifically, So, if you were.
To go up to the Great Council of the anthropic Principle and argue against them, what evidence do we have, if anything, that we may find deeper further explanations other than eh, life happens.
You know, that's a great question. I think the answer is that so far we have that's so far when we have rejected the anthropic explanation and said let's keep looking that we have found deeper explanations, that we've peeled back layer upon layer of reality and found explanations for our current layer lying within the deeper one. That the mechanisms that emerge from the smaller chaos do explain the larger phenomena that we see, and so we should keep digging. It's like you found a huge vein of gold underground. Do you keep digging and keep minding or do you say, well, that was probably lucky, it's probably going to end there. Let's just stop digging. For me, I'd say keep investing, keep digging, and keep pulling that intellectual gold out of the ground.
I mean I would be sipping my lemonade and going like, yes, keep digging, go for it.
You'd be writing a comedy play about particle physicists trying to operate a mind to not to a great effect.
Yeah, it'd be called Wow, that sure looks hard by Katie Gold.
Subtitle I need a refill on my lemonade, please. And So. One of the deepest questions in physics, and in philosophy, and in science and in the human experience is why is the universe this way and not some other way, and until we can operate the universe simulation machine and run a million other universes to see how many of them end up looking like ours. With biologists sipping lemonade while physicists do the real work, we can't really answer that question, but we can look at the patterns of the answers that we have uncovered, and we can ask ourselves, could have been another way? Is this the only way that the universe could be organized? Is there a deeper explanation waiting for us? Or have we run into the bedrock, the place where the universe is just random and there are no more ex planations to be found.
Yeah, but Daniel, if we run that universe simulation machine, maybe that's what creates new universes.
And what's the theory of the universe simulation machine and what explains that? See, there's an endless cycle of questions to be asked. Well, thanks Katie for joining us and asking such great questions about the nature of the universe.
Thank you so much for having me and for answering them and refilling my lemonade.
And thanks to all of our listeners who supported us over these years and whose questions drive this podcast and all of science itself. Keep thinking deeply, keep asking questions, and keep listening. Thanks very much, Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases, Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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