Transcript

Brian Keating:
We’re here with one of the most magnificent, munificent and mesmerizing minds of our generation, and he happens to be a friend of mine. And what can I say? I like to have my friends on, especially when they write books like this incredible new book that we’re going to be talking about today. Dr. Hakeem Olusche. How are you doing, my friend?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I am doing excellent. Thank you again for your hospitality, for having me. Brian, you’re always good to me, so, man, I appreciate you.

Brian Keating:
I love this book. This book is unlike any other book I’ve ever read. Why does your book start off with a why question? Why do. Why do we exist, Hakeem?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
You know, we’ve learned so much about the universe and existence as scientists, and I think that we’re ready now. I think that we’ve come to a point where we have so much data that we can actually start to formulate questions or answers, rather, to these biggest why questions, like why do we exist? So, you know, sometimes that goes into shaky territory, right? You may personify the universe and think those sort of things, but I tell you, man, this book, phrasing it that way, is a provocation to the reader. Because I think that we scientists are at the point where we need to access the hive mind of imagination to make forward progress. Because, you know, this century hasn’t given us those. We’re finding that we’re good at everything, right? We have the answers, we go look and we see what we expect to see. And that, for us, is not good news, right? We want to see something that’s unexpected. And so, hey, man, I am inviting the world to join us scientists in approaching these big questions.

Brian Keating:
The thing you start off in the book is that you say that falling is not normal. You say on a cosmic scale, the astronauts, the. The apples, etcetera, they’re not really being questioned by why it falls at all. Talk us through the argument that falling the ground is accelerating up towards the apple, not the apple falling down. How is that not insane, right?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
It is insane because reality is insane, right? And I tell you, man, you know, I thought about it this way. You know, I asked my students, when I’m lecturing, if I hold out this object at arm’s length and release it and it just hovered in the air, how would you respond to that, right? You know, it would be shock. That’s what magicians do. But in most places in the universe, which is just outer space, if you do that, then it remains there, right? If you don’t Give it an impulse of any sort. And so what really should freak you out is the fact that when I release something, it moves all by itself. It does this thing called falling. Another physicist, Will Kinney, you know, I heard him say this first, is that gravity turns motion through time into motion through space, right? And so what he’s getting at there is this idea that we’re all moving through space time at the speed of light, and we’re on these straight line paths that we physicists call geodesics. But in the presence of a gravitating body, that space time diagram gets warped in such a way that, you know, if you think about it in X, Y plane, you.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
If you’re moving directly parallel to the Y axis, you have no motion along the X axis. But if I were to bend the X axis, even though you’re moving in the same direction, you now have motion along that X axis. Well, in space time, one axis of space and the other is time. So if you’re in an intergalactic space, you’re moving through time at the speed of light, right? But when you get near a gravitating body and that space time gets warped, some of your motion through space gets moved through time. And so when we think of falling, right, we think that objects are being pulled to the Earth, which is not the case. They’re just continuing to move the way they move. But then once you’re on the surface of the Earth, you now have an emergent property that we call weight, right? And so that weight is due to the Earth accelerating upwards against that space time. So even though when we think of acceleration, we think we think of motion, but you don’t need to move outward to accelerate upward.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
The Earth’s surface doesn’t have to move outward for it to accelerate upward. Acceleration has to do with changing something

Brian Keating:
with respect to your position, right? Traveling. So you just gave me a great idea to lose, you know, 50 pounds, just go to the moon. That’s all we have to do. We’re going to talk about that.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
That’s all you gotta do.

Brian Keating:
Okay, next, provide. We’re just gonna go provocative, just like mind blowing claims, okay? You made a claim in the book that almost no physicist I’ve ever be willing to make would have the energy and even the confidence to make that heat does in some cases flow from cold to hot spontaneously. And better than that, you say you discovered it washing dishes.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
So I was a kid with a single mom in the 1980s, and she would like, wash these dishes when I get home. I Want this floor waxed? This is true. And she was working at 11 to 7 shifts. I was waxing the floor at midnight. But one thing I would do before I realized that it’s not good for pots and pans. At some point in my 40s, you know, I would dunk a hot pot or skillet into a bath of water, and I would notice that the handle would get hotter. And, you know, I continued washing dishes in this way by hand up until around the age of 30. And I.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And I kept asking myself, once I became a physicist, because, you know, I worked in heat conduction, and I know what the equation looks like. The temperature gradient is there. It only moves from hot to cold. So I’m thinking, am I a Mac imagining this, or is this real? Well, one day I went to the University of California, Merced, and I was talking to a professor who works with quantum dots, and he was showing that, you know, in certain cases, when you have a strong current going in one direction, you can get this reverse current against the voltage gradient, right? The voltage wants to move electrons from here to there. But if you do it fast enough, you can get a reflection back. And in order to derive a classical model, you. A classical analog to this quantum experiment, he used heat, and he showed exactly how this works. And I thought, oh, my God, My.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
My intuitive experiment turns out to be real. And once you understand why this is the case, it makes perfect sense. Because heat transmits as a wave within a material. And when a wave encounters a boundary between, you know, light going from one index of refraction to another, say, you know, there’s always going to be, and it is required by the laws of physics, a transmitted signal and a reflected signal. That’s why you can see out the window in the daytime, but you can’t see out of it at night. But the people outside can see in. It has to do with, you know, which is stronger, the reflected or transmitted signal. So when you have an incredibly strong heat flow over a boundary, some of that heat can be reflected backwards into your hand, right? And so that means that just like life does the opposite with energy, that inanimate matter does, right? It concentrates, creates structure.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Well, the same thing happens with heat flow. And so that heat flow phenomenon, you know, lets us know why. You know, sometimes creationists will argue that because of the second law of thermodynamics, you can’t form a star. You can’t form organization from disorganization. But under certain circumstances, even though under most cases it’s not true, under certain Circumstances, these paradoxes are allowed.

Brian Keating:
Speaking of, like, forming structure in the atomic realm. So we should say there are nine realms go through it. The last one culminates with one of these things, the brain, the realm of imagination. But you say that electrons are the heroes of the universe, of the atomic realm, not the other way around. Why do we talk like that again? Because I was always taught protons 18, 36 times heavier than electron, same charge magnitude. How could you possibly think that these little wimps, that they have more sway over the atomic realm? Why doesn’t anyone teach it like that?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I was at the University of Southern Mississippi earlier this week giving a. Giving a lecture, and I was hanging out with some chemists, and one of the chemists said exactly that, right? He had read my book. So maybe the chemists think that way, but we physicists certainly don’t think that way. But if you imagine the universe without electrons, you know, you would have all this positively electrically charged nuclei that would be trying to get as far away from each other as possible, and you would never form larger structures than, say, a lithium nucleus. But along comes the electron. And the electron, for me, has what I find to be a massive coincidence, right? You have one, a proton, a composite particle that, you know, what is it? Well, it depends on how much energy you probe it with, right? It can look like a sphere at low energies, it could look like three quarks at higher energy, or it could look like three quarks with a gazillion virtual particles at even higher energies at the lhc. And then on the other hand, you have this little, what we call a point particle, electron. And their electric fields just happen to be exactly equal and opposite, so that when they combine into a hydrogen atom, they are now electrically neutral.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And. And they could be packed together into giant molecular clouds which just happen to birth stars, right? So without electrons, man, not only do we not have chemistry, we don’t even

Brian Keating:
have stars and planets with the electrons in place. You know, I think it’s kind of highlights to me, sort of like a dangerous deception that even educated people like me and others might have. You don’t get deceived as easily as I do. But I talked to a moon landing denier last week on Piers Morgan. I’d love to have you on there. We could tag up on this guy, but this guy, Bart Sibrel, and he’s making the claim. And I was astonished and a little bit depressed that thousands of people in the comments agree with this guy that we never went there. I even had demos I had, you know, moon rocks.

Brian Keating:
I have the plasma globe because he’s claiming that astronauts will die. And I was like, you think you’re smarter than Elon Musk and all the NASA astronauts he thinks he is. So what do you think is a normal deception that educated people have right now? What’s the most dangerous deception in society?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I would say the deception of thinking that you know something when you don’t really know it, you believe it. Right? And the difference for me between believing and knowing. Believing means that you accept something as true without confirming it to be true. And knowing means that you have confirmed it to be true, but not only that, you associate an uncertainty with that knowledge, Right? So, for example, I believe that my mother is in Houston, Texas, right now. I haven’t confirmed that to be true. In all likelihood, she is right. There’s a big high probability with a small error bar. But I know that that error bar exists, and I know that that probability is not 100%.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And so I’ve said that to people because for me, in graduate school, that was a big revelation when I learned. Because let me tell you, it came to me by my PhD advisor who I talk about in my memoir. He would tell me to do something, right? And I might delegate it to someone else, and he’ll say, hey, Hakeem, did such and such happened? And I’m like, oh, yeah, I told this guy. And, you know, and he’s like, do you know that happened? And I go, yeah, I told him. And I saw him walk out of the room and had to do it. He goes, but, yeah, but do you know that happened? And I’m like, oh, I’ll be right back, right? I hadn’t confirmed it. So a lot of people, you know, even though that sounds very obvious and intuitive, I find that for the vast majority of humans, we don’t know the difference between what it means to know and not know. And like, you and I went to school for many years to become an expert on a topic.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And as they say, you know, becoming an expert means knowing more and more about less and less until you learn, until you know everything about nothing. But the point is, is that when you realize how much effort it took to become an expert on a topic, and you realize that you haven’t put in that effort in other places in life, you’re left thinking, man, I know nothing. Becoming an expert just makes you realize, I am so ignorant, right? But most people haven’t gone through that process of becoming an expert. And so most people, you know, and it’s not a part of our education system.

Brian Keating:
I like to say I know more about the Dunning Kruger effect than anyone who’s ever lived.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I know what you’re talking about. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
You’re one of the most simultaneously infectiously enthusiastic optimistic people I know. But you also have this sober pessimism. And I think nowhere is that better really defined than when you do a calculation about the life realm, the realm of the living in this book where you calculate and you do this walk us through this Fermi calculation, which will lead to the Fermi paradox. We’ll get to that. That there’s roughly 100,000 star systems in the Milky Way alone that could host multicellular life. And then we’re like, oh yeah. And then you say, but we’ll also probably never find each other. Why not?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Absolutely. Yeah. Because, well, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. So if there are 100,000 stellar systems with planets that can host multicellular life, that means it’s one in a million. So when a person who doesn’t do astronomy looks up at the night sky, they may think they see a million stars. But you know, on the planet total, you can only see 6,000, right? So stars are huge, massive, burning brightly. But our galaxy is so big that you can only see the 6,000 nearest ones. So if there’s one out of a million, they’re going to be buried so deeply somewhere, unless there’s a massive coincidence.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Even the sci fi of Star Trek reflects this because, you know, they never leave their own quadrant of the galaxy. For the most part they realize it’s that darn big. But let’s get to the calculation. My calculation is similar to Frank Drake’s equation, but instead of looking for detectable civilizations, I think the better question is how many worlds can have multicellular life. So you start with the number of stars and then you multiply that by the fraction of stars that are just right. Stars, they have the right chemical composition, they’re in the right part of the galaxy, the galactic habitable zone. They’re long lived enough for multicellular life to evolve, which on Earth took around almost 4 billion years. And they’re not too long lived because that means they’re small.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
The planet has to be near them. It will be tidally locked. And those stars have these massive ejections and flares that would destroy life on. So it needs to be in a sweet spot. And so when scientists who aren’t me calculated the number of stars that would be, that would be suitable, it turned out to be 1.2% of the stars in our galaxy, then you need just. Right, Planets, right? So those are planets. If you want multicellular life, it needs to be in a habitable zone. You don’t need to be in a habitable zone for life.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
You need to be in a habitable zone for multicellular life. Right? And so what do you need? You need to be protected from the bad stuff, which is typically radiation, but yet you need to have the geological conditions that allow you to form life. You need liquids. So if you satisfy the liquid criteria, you know, typically other things are in your favor, right, Abundant liquids. So then you need to have incredible luck. And what do I mean by that? The Earth is very unique when it comes to planets in the sense that we have this three layer filter that does exactly what I just said, it blocks the bad stuff. What does that filter? For early life, it was four layers, right? It was the ocean, the atmosphere. No, they only had three as well.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
The ocean. Until late times, the ocean, the atmosphere, the ozone layer, and our magnetosphere. So when we look at planets around our solar system, and among the thousands of exoplanets we find, we see that atmospheres typically come in one of two configurations. Super thick, like Venus, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, or completely absent, or almost completely absent, right. Moon, Mercury, Mars. And so here we have this almost absent atmosphere that if we did not have our strong magnetosphere, it would have been eroded away by the sun’s radiation. Right? Just like what happened with Mars. But because we have this strong magnetosphere, accidentally we have a special condition.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And so most people have been led to believe that that special condition is having abundant surface liquids. That’s not what’s so special. There are 10 ocean worlds in our solar system, but most of those oceans are under miles of atmosphere rock or ice. Our water is bathed in sunlight. And so that early life eventually learned how to. Do you know, that early life did photosynthesis, but it eventually learned how to do photosynthesis that produced oxygen. And once that oxygen was able to build up in the atmosphere, and finally in a deep ocean, you get this burst of life, of multicellular life, the Ediacaran, followed by the Cambrian explosion. So that idea of being bathed in light with liquids on the surface is what sets Earth apart.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And why do we have that condition with that strong magnetosphere? Because of a big collision that happened early in Earth’s evolution, right? That’s churned our Earth’s interior. And now a significant part of Earth’s interior is molten metal. Okay, we see that with Venus and Mars or Mercury, we’re unique in that way. So, man, you know, it’s almost like the universe makes life inevitable, but it doesn’t make multicellular life inevitable. Right. You need some luck. And even if you get multicellular life, yeah, it’s going to have a sensory system. It’s going to respond.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
But does that mean you necessarily get a technologically advanced civilization? Highly unlikely. Right. Of all the billions of species, there’s only one that has done that.

Brian Keating:
That’s right. Reach the pinnacle of evolution, which is what you call two guys and a microphone.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
A podcast.

Brian Keating:
Now, speaking of microphones, what do lumberjack rappers do in their performances?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Oh, my God, chop it up.

Brian Keating:
No, they sing logarithms. Logarithms. Now, speaking of logarithms, I didn’t say it was a good dad joke. I mean. Okay, so let’s start with the scale question, because you really define something that most people are completely oblivious about, and it borders into the G question, the God question. I will get to that in a minute. But you say that humans are slap dab. I quote in the logarithmic middle of the observable universe.

Brian Keating:
See how I segued from the log? Okay, explain what that means and why does it matter? What does it mean to be in the logarithmic mean, and what is the potential impact on humans, and why does that matter to us?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
The biggest known physical distance in the universe is the size of the observable universe. And we Express that as 10 to the power 26 right meters across or in radius. Same thing. It’s a factor of two. But then when we think about the physically smallest entities in the universe, we think of the neutrino that has a size limit of around 10 to the minus 26 meters. And here we are at 10 to the 0 meters, slap dab in the middle. And this is the place where at this scale, life can exist and intelligence can exist. It doesn’t exist on the scale of galaxies and stars.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
There are no sentient stars that we know of. But, you know, unless you read comics, right? Marvel Comics has a sentient planet and all that jazz, you know, the fact that in the logarithmic middle, center of the universe is where we exist, and that’s where our intuition is valid. That’s the world that we know. That’s the world that Aristotle and these guys were thinking about and saying, hey, I think I understand it. Then we get our microscopes and telescopes and realize, like, oh, there’s a lot more going on, and our experience cannot Be extrapolated. You got to understand it on its own merits. And what’s remarkable to me, you know, we’re dudes in suits with microphones, but man, I still think of us as an animal. I still think of us as australopithecines, right? You know, Stone Age creatures that have been able to come this far and knowledge and ability is incredible, but it’s because we get in where we fit in.

Brian Keating:
Now, you have a modest goal with this book, which is to organize all of reality into nine realms. Okay, I’m joking, but this isn’t something like textbook taxonomy. You call it a sw. Swag. A scientific wild beep guess. Okay, so now why frame it that way? And why did you organize the the title and subtitle of the book? You could take us through the book title, subtitle, judge the book by its cover. As we say, hey, book lovers, we’re

Hakeem Oluseyi:
judging books by the covers.

Brian Keating:
We know we’re not supposed to do

Hakeem Oluseyi:
it better into the impossible. There’s nothing to it. Let’s take a look and judge some books.

Brian Keating:
Why did you organize it in terms of these realms? And what is the importance of the scientific in front of the wag?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
So, you know, there is a difference between a wild ass guess and a scientific hypothesis. All right? And you know, what I’m saying is not at the level of a scientific hypothesis. I’m not putting forth anything that’s untrue, right. Or inconsistent with what we’re doing as scientists. But I am informing a wild ass guess here using my science. So it’s somewhere between hypothesis and guess. And what I’m trying to, trying to do is create a cognitive map of reality to help the reader understand. If they’re going to help us with understanding the true nature of reality, then they need to have a map in their mind.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And you know, I feel like, you know, when I became a PhD student, I felt like my job was to, you know, you have to become current, right? So what does that mean? That means you have to read and understand all of the knowledge in your field up to what happened yesterday and even understand what people are working on that’s going to come out tomorrow. Right? But then once you have that understanding now you need to make a new contribution to knowledge and that’s when you get your PhD. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken the world as we have framed it, the universe and existence as we have framed it as physicists. And I said, hey, I understand how we see things, but you know what? Now let Me make my new contribution. Here’s how I see things. And I think that having this map of reality broken into these realms allows a person to understand the universe in its wholeness. And again, I’m talking about the physical universe because with a title like why Do We Exist? It can get religious and faith, you know, it interfaces. And I’m not, you know, I have all respect for that, right, that type of thinking.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
But this is based on, you know, the scientific process. And these nine realms to me are sort of like the minimalist set of realms that I can break the universe into. And some of them are obvious, right? So the quantum realm, the cosmological realm, the dark realm. Those ones are obvious. But, you know, there are some that are more speculative, like the multiverse realm, Right. Another one that you know is not speculative is known, but it’s never put this way is the realms beyond horizons, right? That is a, you know, within black holes, beyond our cosmic event horizon. These are the realms that we can never probe directly and existed and report out. You know, you can.

Brian Keating:
That doesn’t stop our colleagues, you know, like Michio Kaku and our friends like Brian Greene from speculating. You know, I come from an experimentalist perspective in the cosmological realm, right? And for me, I get a little frustrated, to be honest with you, with the rampant speculation. Okay, string theory is one thing, but when you start talking about things like Stephen Hawking did, where at the end of A Brief History of Time, he says, once we get the, you know, theory of Everything, then we’ll know the quote, mind of God. And he postulated that it was due to this, you know, Hardle Hawking instability that creates, carves off time and creates it from the no boundary, you know, from a timeless universe that existed before. But those things capture the imagination. If I start describing superconducting tunnel junction detectors, calibration, polarimetry, and you start talking about the sun and all the different realms that you and I are experiencing, people don’t seem to be as excited. In fact, one of my agents, you know, kind of friends that are eight bookings, like, well, it’s great to talk about experiments, but they want to hear about theories. I’m like, these theories will never be discovered.

Brian Keating:
They’re totally, you know, they’re total vaporware. And he said, they don’t care. The public doesn’t care. And that depressed me. So where do you draw the boundary? You have the imagination realm at the end. That seems to be the one that sells the most, at least for our theoretical colleagues. What do you make of that? That hunger for. Even if it’s nonsense to talk about the multiverse, the wormholes, these horizons, we can’t understand.

Brian Keating:
Why is the public care so much about them?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I think, you know, people do have curiosity, you know, and people do have. In a sort of. You know, I had friends that talked about the Illuminati and these sorts of things.

Brian Keating:
We’re not supposed to talk about the Illuminati, remember?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
That’s right. That’s right. I was at a guy’s house who has done very successful for himself talking about paranormal phenomena. And he went on his Amazon creator background and showed me his sales numbers from his many books the dude was making over. I’m not even going to say it, but it was a lot more money than I ever made from a book. You know, he gave me my very first ride in and my only ride in a. What is that car? Is that. Is it a Rolls Royce? Maybe it was a Rolls Royce.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I think it was a Rolls Royce. Yeah, it was a Rolls Royce. My only ride I’ve ever taken in a Rolls Royce. Right before he went to his mansion, that’s where I started. And that’s the thing about me is that, you know, I’m really thinking about the people and reaching them. And I realize that those kind of thoughts can be a bridge into real science. And I’ve tried to avoid that, you know, in this book, I’ve tried to be like, where I’m speculating in everything, right? Where I’m speculating, I’m going to let you know, this is speculation. And what I didn’t like about when the string theory books were popular is that they were written in such a way that when they were speculating, if you were a scientist, you could recognize it as that, but if you were a lay reader, there was no way you could recognize it.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
So you thought the universe really does have 11 dimensions and thoughts like that. Right? So I’m with you, man. It really. I don’t like it. I don’t like people that lead people astray in that way. I can’t speak to their motivation, but I can say that it tends to be profitable. And I’m not willing to go there. You know, there’s a lot of places that people try to pull me into that I’m just not willing to go.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Like, people try to pull me into dissing religious folks, right? Because, you know, and I’m like, no, I’m not doing that. And people try to get me to say, hey, look at that light in the sky, it’s an alien. And I’m like, bruh, there is nothing that a light in the sky can do to make me conclude that is an alien or it is anything other than a light doing something weird in the sky. That’s what the data is telling me.

Brian Keating:
So our second conversation two years ago, three years ago, got into the politics of science. The naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. You’re one of the most courageous thinkers that I know. You’re unafraid to go up against powerful forces that tried to squelch you and really besmirch the name of James Webb himself. And we’re not going to recomm capitulate that, because in this book you talk about the findings that this James Webb Space telescope has made, including these early mature spiral galaxies that you know, according to some people, shouldn’t exist if the big bang occurred 14 billion years ago. They shouldn’t be appearing, you know, 100 million, 500 million or even a billion years after. So you suggest a provocative alternative, that gravity models need to be modified and that they may have a better capability than dark matter alone. It doesn’t mean that dark matter doesn’t exist.

Brian Keating:
Talk about that. What’s your justification? I mean, it is kind of a minority view, but I’m accustomed to that with you. You go out on limbs, you are

Hakeem Oluseyi:
courageous, no pun intended. The minority view.

Brian Keating:
You never hear these words like hilarious dad joke and courageous academic, but today you break them up.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Thank you. Thank you for recognizing that, Brian. Courageous academic. That is a rare one. So it’s not my thought, right? This is, this is me being the messenger because this is not the mainstream of thinking. But what the people with these modified gravity models have shown is that, yeah, their models do reproduce early, you know, mature galaxies much better than our standard approaches. It’s one of these cases where we treat it as either or. But it may be that, oh, in some circumstances, maybe something’s going on here, and in other circumstances, this is what the dominant process is.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
So all I can do in this case is say, hey, you know, this is a very model dependent field. We’re not actually creating galaxies. We’re not actually creating universes in the lab and allowing them to evolve. We’re creating them in computers using models. And those models are constrained by the measurements of cosmological parameters, which are themselves kind of weird sometimes when you have things like the Hubble tension. So we know that there are elements that we don’t know and we don’t understand. And what’s clear to me, and I say this in the book, is that like, you know, we really think that the best fit to the data is dark matter or dark matter and dark energy. But it is not at the level of where we have conclusive knowledge of exactly the nature of these phenomena.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And so it’s kind of like, you know, when somebody in my family loses something, you know, my wife or the kids, you know, I’ll say, did you look in the refrigerator? You know, they’re like, it can’t be in the refrigerator. I’m like, listen, if you can’t find it, it can literally be anywhere, right? We can constrain it to the house, in the car maybe, but you don’t know where it is, so look everywhere. And that’s how I approach things. You know, I approach things with. Until it has been conclusively demonstrated, we must remain open minded and we have to give credit where credit is due. So if these models are able to reproduce what we see to some degree, you know, let’s, you know, because that’s the thing about these modified gravity models. Every time you think they’re dead, they get, they get modified and do a little better to reproduce nature. I’ve given the reader all the information, not just the preferred information.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I actually have, you know, every now and then we have these horrific inquisition like teaching evaluations where some senior faculty comes in, you know, I’m getting the gray hair and stuff, so I’m pretty senior now, but, but they’ll come in, I remember. And I was teaching about dark matter and I also mentioned mond, modified Newtonian dynamics which you talk about in the book. And I had interviewed, you know, Mordecai Milgram, who was the conceptual, you know, architect of it originally. And the senior professor was saying, well, like why do you teach that? We know it’s wrong. I’m like, do you know what’s wrong? I mean, first of all, you’re a theoretical particle physicist. Second of all, you have no, you know, really, it’s just kind of an arrogant thing to say. We know the answer. I mean, we’ve never detected dark matter and we may never detect dark matter, except for the neutrino, which you talk about in the book.

Brian Keating:
So you’d say that the nine realms interlock like gears. Okay, so here’s my gears. You got some nice toys, kind of mesmerizing out. It’s good to have kids, you know, that know how to do 3D printing. You know, you get brains, you get, you get alien artifacts. But you say two of these Realms. Two of these gears, if you will refuse to play nice. They grind catastrophically.

Brian Keating:
They won’t pass through each other. Quantum field theory predicts a vacuum energy density. It’s 120 orders of magnitude larger than what we observe. So how do the nine realms, how do they handle the clashing between the quantum realm and the cosmological realm?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
We’re in the. In the neighborhood of the dark realm now. And dark, you know, it started off with not emitting light, but now I take it as a statement about our knowledge, right? We’re in the dark. We definitely see real physical phenomena, but the explanations for those physical phenomena are, you know, we come up with our best models, we go looking and we’re like, ah, that’s not it. You know, and so how do we really converge on what the truth of the dark realm is and how you know, it? You know, I feel like right now there needs to be some revolution in thought that I don’t know what that is. My very first physics experiment was working with Bernard Satellite in the basement of Laconte hall in Berkeley on what would become the cdms, you know, code Dark Matter Search Experiment. You know, I thought, oh, yeah, we’re gonna know what dark matter is soon. We’re direct detecting it.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And then, you know, after I left Silicon Valley, I joined a supernova cosmology project, right, which had just, you know, participated in discovering dark energy five years earlier. And I’m like, oh, yeah, we’re gonna, you know, build a satellite and, you know, put these new detectors on these telescopes, and we’re gonna know what dark energy is in five years or so, and we don’t, right? We have a lot of confidence in our quantum mechanics because of its experimental successes and everything else. You know, like, GR is okay, maybe there’s something there. But GR has been so successful in so many different scenarios. You know, I’m not one to say that it’s incomplete, but there is this battle going on, this pushing, this pull that we have yet to resolve. So I’m fine with open questions. I’m fine with we don’t know, let’s keep searching. But the thing I’m not fine with is you can’t think that thought.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
You can’t think that thought. You can’t allow that person to participate. You know how it is when you’re a physicist, all kind of people write you with their crazy ideas. And sometimes I look at them and I’m like, you know, most of the time, right, I’m like, ah, this is nothing. But sometimes I’M like, oh, wow, that’s interesting. You know, so I think the answers could come from anywhere. Even, maybe even a seven year old, like, look who’s breaking all the records in Rubik’s Cube solving. Right? They’re babies.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, that’s right. I can solve a Rubik’s Cube if you solve the first five signs. I got it. I got it, man.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Okay. Okay.

Brian Keating:
Now, you and I, you know, operate as physicists, as scientists, and we know that there are tensions, we know that there are battles. Not unlike, remember, the 1980s, the 90s, the rap battles, you know, east coast, west coast. I was not on the west coast at that time, so I was still in the, firmly in the Biggie Smalls camp. But no hate towards the other side. But you and I have this, you know, kind of, I’m working the CMB instrumentation field. You were involved in the supernova, you know, cosmology project. And you know, we studied different realms of the cosmos, later realm, early realm, that most people would say, oh, it’s, you study something that’s up 2 billion years old. I say something that’s 13 billion years old.

Brian Keating:
Oh, that’s really close. No, they’re totally different. So how does a, how does a layperson interpret when scientists each seem like they’re brilliant when they disagree so violently as we do in the scientific realm, of course. So in the dark energy, you know, kind of are in the Hubble constant wars that we’re experiencing now, The Hubble tension you and Adam Reese talked about, Nobel Prize winner, friend of the podcast. How do you interpret that? Use two brilliant people, two brilliant types of technologies. How does a layperson make a decision that, like, hey, the universe might be a billion years younger than we thought?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I would say to the layperson as we watch these, number one, it doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything because that’s where a lot of people think they don’t know details. That means they know nothing. That is not the case. The other thing is, is that the, the culture of science is weird to regular people. And sometimes regular people get caught up in our little battles, like, oh, do black holes have hair? You know, is quantum information lost? And I’m like, you know, sometimes we make too big of a deal of these little nerdy things. But Adam Reese was like, no, this Hubble tension is a big deal. I always go back to observation and data, and I think experiments like the Nancy Grace Roman telescope and the Vera Rubin telescope are going to fill in those gaps between the nearby universe and the Far universe. Right.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Because the supernovae don’t go that far. The CMB is very, very, very far. Right. There’s a big space in between. And the other thing we haven’t done, you know, you model the universe as a uniform gas, right? And so we assume that the expansion rate is the same in all directions. One experiment that I wanted to do when I was a young scientist just becoming a professor is measure redshift drift. I wanted to actually see the redshift of galaxies changing with time. And I was trying to think of clever ways like, oh, what if I use time dilation? Like, move a spacecraft incredibly fast? Could I get something from doing that? The measurements seem to have been really solid.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
All you smart people have looked at them and looked at the possible systematic uncertainties that may be plaguing these real results. And it’s all in that uncertainty measurement. It’s all in that error bar. And those error bars are not overlapping. And knowing the culture of science, people hate each other. Right? People. There’s no conspiracy to come to the same answer. If there’s any conspiracy, it’s the conspiracy to get the other guy.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I’m accepting where we are right now and waiting for the new data.

Brian Keating:
You say in the book, towards the End, that the universe will succeed in its ultimate mission. Oh, that’s really great. And that mission, Hakeem, you say, is to destroy all matter. So what I want to ask you is how much longer do we have? I mean, it’s tax season. Should I pay my taxes?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
I am not a tax advice person, so anything I say, don’t sue me. We got a long time, right? But one thing I see from this, from this tale of the universe is that it appears to me that the universe is very young. And why do I say that? Because only a young universe is observable, right? That cosmic event horizon is out there, and the expansion rate of the universe goes faster and faster. So it’s kind of like when you have children, you’re going to interact with them longer as them being adults than you are going to interact with them as them being children, right? So your mind frame, as a parent needs to be able to make that transition. Well, the universe is going to exist much longer as a lonely place than it is as a place packed tight with galaxies where galaxies are only, like, 10 times their own size apart from each other. Right? Where stars are tens of millions of times their own size apart from each other. You know, soon we’re just going to be the local group only. So we’re Right at the beginnings of the universe.

Brian Keating:
What does that mean? How long is that going to last for?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Yeah, so I look at the universe as a series of events where the universe is attempting to go neutral under these field forces, the strong force, the electromagnetic force. And the Stalliferous era is a universe going neutral under gravity. Right. So what is happening is matter is collecting in these vast filamentary structures that we call the cosmic web and is expanding in the areas between them. And as it does so, as the matter collects, higher levels of complexity are evolving. So gas becomes stars, the residue becomes planets. Those stars ultimately die. And every galaxy is destined to be, you know, a black hole, giant supermassive black hole surrounded by a halo of smaller black holes.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Right. That may eventually coalesce inside the universe is going to wipe out the ability for life to exist at all, because it’s going to get rid of all the stars and planets and, you know, and there’s going to be black holes and not much else. Right. As far as matter concentrations go. But the things that we have to deal here with on Earth are our immediate concerns. Right. Eating today is a bigger concern than the universe ending. And what I find fascinating about humans is that we’re always talking about the end of the world.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Right. And what does that mean? That means all humans die at the same time. And why are you so concerned with that when we know it’s inevitable that each of us dies individually? So finding value and fulfillment in your own life and meaning is where we should put our efforts. And so for me, you know, I’m a family man, and, you know, it was drilled into me as a child, be useful, you know, in my rural upbringing. And, you know, I like to help other people. And, you know, I have my own selfish things. I used to love to play basketball until the cost benefit analysis, you know, as I age, became not very great. But, you know, just finding fulfillment in life and hoping to contribute, man.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
So you don’t have to worry about these big things. But there are more nearby cataclysms, like, you know, impacts that we can do something about potentially, right. Like large cometary or asteroid impacts.

Brian Keating:
We’re recording this on April 10, which is the afternoon that the astronauts on Artemis II are scheduled to splash down right off the coast of UC San Diego in Amir Scripps. And I want to talk to you about a couple things. One is, you know, I’ve seen you all over ABC News, and I was just like, you did such a good job. You’re just so, like, calm and, you know, When I go on a podcast sometimes I like nervous. And you’re talking to millions of people live on the biggest event in the space faring histories that most of us have been around for. You talked a little bit about Victor Glover, who was the first black man to go ever into deep space around the moon. You’re a black astrophysicist. You grew up in the streets.

Brian Keating:
Your first book’s about being a drug dealer, right? I mean, milestone mean to you. You’ve done so much in your life, and if anyone ever, you know, doubts your credentials, you got a stack of resume that’s, that’s, that’s, you know, can reach the moon. So what does it mean, first of all, to see a black man making history like that?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
It matters. A lot of people are averse to discussions about identity and race, but I tell you, it absolutely does matter, man. When I was a kid, you know, I remember that anytime there was a black person that made one of these revolutionary breakthroughs and it became knowledge to us, you know, we were so proud of them. It was like a member of your own family had done it. And what’s hard to understand about the psychology is when you feel that the world is messaging to you all the time, the opposite of that, that you don’t have value, that you’re not capable of things and that sort of thing. So, for example, how did I get accepted into Stanford University was in part due to William Shockley, the Nobel Prize winner. You could go on YouTube today and find him saying things like, there’s no point in trying to educate black folks. They’re just not capable of it, Right? This is not something that is make believe.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And the thing is, is that if you’re not subject to it and you’re not doing it, it’s invisible to you because, you know, it’s like, you know, if you’re Jewish, if you’re a woman, almost no matter what you are, there is some specific hatred that you receive that other people don’t receive. And if you see someone like yourself do something good, you know, it could be like, oh, my fellow Napoleon, right? You’re going to feel pride in that. And the fact that we’ve come so far, you know, I think one thing about us as Americans, we don’t give ourselves enough credit, man. I think that, you know, if you want to paint America in black and white, black people and white people have come so far, right? And we need to give credit to that, man. Like, literally when I left Mississippi, you know, I thought, oh, every white person is Racist. Not true, not true. Every black president Barack Obama was running, you know, Chris Rock had this joke where he was like, barack, you got the most votes. Too bad you lost, right? Like, he could never happen, right? I thought that, man.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
But I tell you, you know, we are better. We are better than we give ourselves credit for. And I feel that people are good, fundamentally. I’ve been to 44 countries, I know a world of people. And I curate the humans in which I interact with. And I often say I don’t choose people I interact with based on how they look. I choose it based on how they feel. A lot of my mentors in the 21st century have been white women, right? There’s been people that have been.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
So I wouldn’t be here, right? You know the dudes that, that mentored me early in my career, Richard McGinnis, David Thiel, Gerald Bruno. These were three white dudes who came from elite universities, Caltech, Harvard, Cornell, and decided in the 60s that they wanted to help out with the Civil Rights movement, go down to Mississippi, right? They had strong Christian faith. That’s what led them there. And they end up spending their entire careers at Tougaloo College, right? And they created me and my Tougaloo College colleagues, right? And, man, that is what we’re made of as human beings. If a cat walks into my lab, I don’t care who and what they are. And so what does that mean? My lab group used to be like the group of outcasts, right? The gay students, the women black students, the people who felt like, you know, hakeem is non judgmental. I feel comfortable with him, right? Those are the people. But I see the value in all people.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And, you know, I see the beauty and the ugly, as I like to say.

Brian Keating:
That’s what it means to be a mature, you know, thinking individual. And I think it’s a perfect place to end up with a final question that you end the book with the realm of the imagination. I love that because I was the former and one of the founders of the Arthur C. Clark center for Human Imagination here at ucsd. And we met at a Clark Awards for the first time. All of a sudden I said, is that Hakeem Olusea? I never met you. So we’re giving an award to Michio Kaku about five years ago. So you write that imagination is, quote, an evolutionary imperative.

Brian Keating:
So, so my question is, if that’s true, you know, why are there so many Kardashians? No, no, if that’s true, you know, what, what happens to a species that stops imagining. And how can we avoid that with our kids, with our society, with humanity as a whole?

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Man. I think that because we do start off as children, you know, children, they’re not gonna listen to you. They’re gonna do their program. Right? It’s kind of like the mother doesn’t make the baby. The baby is a parasite that makes itself right? And our children, you know, the evolutionary pressures that brought us here gave us this imagination, that gave us this brain, this mammalian brain that was able to self organize in different ways to become smarter and smarter and imagine more and more. And now it’s given birth to AI, right, which basically develop its own imagination. Currently. Its imagination sucks, but, you know, there’s no actual limit to what it can do theoretically, right? So I don’t think that that is a question we ever have to wonder, but I do think that how you nurture those imaginations matters, right? How? You know, there’s something that has to do with the, with the American system that we keep dominating in these imaginative technologies.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
And I don’t know what that is, right? What was it about the Germans in the early 20th century that led them to dominate physics? What was it about the British in the 19th century that had them dominant? I don’t know. But I do know that there are cultural elements and there are structural elements involved. And so structurally, we have the people, the government, they take their taxes and they invest in imagination at the universities. And then we have systems to commercialize what we come up with. And in some ways, we’ve pulled back. Recently, a lot of the government investment is pulled back. We have this massive, almost 40 trillion dollar deficit or having a situation like that, where do you want to sink your money in, into investments that are going to grow? Right? That’s where you want. And the greatest investment, the greatest sustainable resource we have is the human imagination.

Brian Keating:
That’s beautiful, Akeem. This is always fun. I always love talking to you and I love it even more. We get together for a pint or whatever when we get together next time. This book is a great contribution because it really explores and explains what it means to be a brilliant but also humble scientist, which I think a scientist needs to be cocky, needs to have some swagger, some swag, right? But you also need to be humble that the universe can not humiliate you, but humble you at any time. And I think this book in the nine realms of the. Of the universe that make us possible is really just an incredible contribution. Congratulations.

Brian Keating:
And I do hope that people will start to really see themselves in these positions that you have really paved the way for, for both scientific literacy, but also, I always say communicating to the public is probably the top job of a scientist that we never do because, oh, it’s like, that’s for, like, slick, you know, people to do. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene, all these, they can do that. But a real scientist doesn’t it? No, that’s not true. Yeah, it’s something that’s hard. You have to work on it. And it’s a moral obligation to give back to the taxpayers who fund us. And since you told us that the universe is not going to end before April 15, I really do appreciate that little bit of non tax advice. Hakeem, thank you so much, my friend.

Brian Keating:
And congratulations on this awesome book.

Hakeem Oluseyi:
Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you, sir.