Amy Frykholm: Welcome back to In Search Of, where we go in search of voices and perspectives that inform and expand a life of faith. I’m Amy Frykholm and I’m your host.
Today’s exploration began with a brief email from a listener more than a year ago, in response to my question, “what are you in search of?” Freda Brown wrote: “I’m in search of a way to talk about the intersection of Christian religion with quantum theory and the possibility of interpreting Christianity within a quantum cosmology. Frieda’s email sent me on a search to find a place where we could begin that conversation. That lead me to our interview today with Zeeya Merali.
Zeeya is a cosmologist who also, Thank God, is a journalist. She’s written extensively for publications like Scientific American, Nature, New Scientist and Discover. She has a PhD in theoretical physics and cosmology from Brown University, and she's given her career to explaining and interrogating theoretical physics, quantum theory and the like for people like you and me. Zeeya works for the Foundational Questions Institute, which is a charitably-funded organization that gives money to scientists for research into the nature of reality. And like me, and like Freda, Zeeya is interested in the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical, and she never hesitates to ask physicists about it.
Her most recent book is called A Big Bang in The Little Room, which takes readers on an incredible journey through the research of scientists who are trying to create, I kid you not, a mini universe in a lab.
Welcome to In Search of, Zeeya. Thank you so much for joining us.
Zeeya Merali: Thank you very much for inviting me. I mean, I always love talking about these issues, so I'm really looking forward to it.
AF: Thank you. So, one of the things I love about your book is this way that you bring personality and physics and big questions together, and somehow that really does help me to learn. I was really kind of surprised by that. The more I learned about these individual scientists and the way that they go about their research and the personalities that they have, the more I found my mind open to learning in ways that I have not experienced with a lot of popular physics writing.
And so I wanted to start by asking you one of the questions that you often ask the scientists that you interview, which is, how did you become interested in physics?
ZM: Yeah, I, you know, okay, so funny story. From childhood, I've always been very interested in physics, but what was it that sort of first kind of sparked that interest? And I've tracked it back to when I was in infant school in the UK, so I suppose elementary school, I was about seven years old. Used to love doing maths and used to sort of work through all the maths class books and workbooks that were given by our teacher, you know, very, very quickly and excitedly.
And at some point I ran through the whole load that they had in stock, and you know, the teacher didn't have anything else. So what she did was she sort of, she said, you know, well, why don't you go off to the library and do some research on Pythagoras's theorem? So I thought, well, fine, sounds good, never heard of it. Went off, opened a book, and dutifully copied out whatever was there without, I have to admit, really understanding what I was writing. So, you know, not much better than Googling and cutting and pasting or I guess today, you know, the problem of asking ChatGPT, what the answer is.
But I just came back and lined up, you know, with the other kids waiting to show teacher what I had done, proud and, you know, explained what Pythagoras’s theorem was. And, you know, I handed it over to her and she looked at it and her face dropped and she had this look of fear or horror. And she sort of stared at me for a bit and then she went and she got another teacher to come in and she showed them what I'd written.
And then they sort of took me to one side. This was, I remember Mrs. Grabowski, she was an absolutely lovely teacher, and she said to me, do you really understand what you've written here? And I said, well, no, I just copied it out of a book. And she went, oh, thank goodness for that. And both of the teachers laughed and, and they sort of went away and she was like, do you know, you've written about this guy Einstein?
And the reason was, as I was to understand many years later, one of the equations related to special relativity is sort of a kind of a four-dimensional version of Pythagoras’s theorem. So Pythagoras’s theorem, X squared plus Y squared equals Z squared, relating the sides of a right angle triangle. This theorem in relativity and of course I didn't understand anything about it cause I was seven years old, never heard of Einstein, it related sort of time, space, and the speed of light in a very similar way, a sort of an X squared plus Y squared minus Z squared kind of thing.
And so, you know, she was just like, oh, I'm so glad. You know, they obviously thought I was some kind of child prodigy, but she was just like, you know, only geniuses understand Einstein, but you know, I'm glad that you don't, you know, go away, sit down, do something else.
And so I guess from that moment I had sort of two ideas were in my head. And the first was that really, really clever people and only really, really, really clever people understand Einstein. And I wanted to know who he was and why whatever he’d come up with was so scary. And then actually, and I think this plays into sort of why I ended up becoming a journalist, or why people were so scared of it as well. You know, I mean, I'd actually seen horror in people's eyes when they read his name.
And so, yeah, I mean, after that, you know, I liked physics. I liked science. I went on and I studied it. It took another 10 years or so before I really got into learning about special relativity. But that was always in the back of my mind, kind of driving me to read more about it because that seeded had been planted, you know, that long time ago by Mrs. Grabowski.
AF: That's a great story. And I do think there's a horror or a terror that's involved here. At least it's one I feel that I so often read, you know, even the simplest things and I just feel so baffled. But that is why I wanted to have this conversation today because I don't think I'm alone. I'm really grateful that you have made this decision to become a journalist who specializes in making physics and cosmology comprehensible. But how did that start for you? Like what were you in search of when you started down this path?
ZM: So originally, you know, I hoped to and I intended to become a physicist, and so, you know, I studied natural sciences at Cambridge. I specialized in theoretical physics. I was loving it. I was learning about relativity, I was learning about quantum theory, all of these sort of things that you read about in popular science magazines and a lot of things that you see in science fiction, right? You know, parallel universes, time travel, all of that exciting stuff.
I was learning the maths to do it and I absolutely adored it. And I imagined that I would go on and stay in academia and become a professor of physics. I moved to the United States to do my PhD and to start researching. And what I very quickly realized was that research is hard and it's hard in the sense of what your day-to-day life is. It's about, you know, actually sitting down and choosing one very narrow topic to focus on. And then really diving very, very deep into doing that. And, you know, you have to learn a lot of tools to do it. A lot of computational tools, a lot of analytical tools. It's hard work.
I have full admiration for people that that do it, but for me, I sort of, lost a bit of the passion that I had because what I had enjoyed was learning lots of different things–learning, you know, a different thing in each class, and sort of having the freedom to imagine, oh, what if I decided to think about, I don't know, superconductors one day? And I was a natural scientist, so I might be thinking about aspects of biology on another day, or genetics or this or that or the other. And when you are forced to do, well, when you choose to do research, you are forced to narrow down that focus very, very deeply. So I was looking for an alternative where I could kind of rediscover that passion that I had for physics and all the different areas that you could think about and get excited about.
And I ended up doing an internship during my PhD at Scientific American for one summer. At that point I wasn't even seriously thinking about being a journalist, but you know, as I said, I'd been reading lots of popular physics books throughout my childhood to find out more about Einstein. I'd grown up on a diet of Scientific American and New Scientist magazine. And so I kind of thought actually this would be an interesting way to learn how to become a better writer if I ever wanted to write a book while I was an academic.
I went over to their office in Manhattan for a summer and I would say within three days, I had totally fallen in love with being a journalist. I, you know, just completely adored it. I loved just the ability of being able to pick up the phone or send an email to somebody I had never met before about some wonderful new idea that they were thinking about and just published and saying, you know, would you talk to me for an hour about this and explain it to me? And then sort of having absorbed that, trying to find a way to explain that to people who didn't have the opportunity to sit there for an hour with this person and find out exactly what they had done. But to kind of explain that, actually, this is something you should be thinking about. This is something that's important and could have big repercussions for the way the world works or what kind of medicines we have, or how the universe began, or the next advance in technology.
And so that's sort of how it happened. It was in some ways an accident and in some ways, when you look back at my life, it was always there.
AF: So, maybe we can just start with this sort of mind-blowing idea to an outsider. So there are really scientists who are trying to create a universe in a lab, and so…
ZM: There really are.
AF: How did they even think about this and how did it come about and what did you learn about it?
ZM: They sound like Marvel supervillains, don't they? They're trying to create a universe in the laboratory. So, I mean, first of all, I should say that was not what they were originally sort of setting out to do. But I have the same reaction, right? So, I remember first coming across this when I was working at New Scientists as a reporter, and I was trying to find stories to write about, and I came across this paper called something like “the Universe Out of the Monopole in a Laboratory.”
And I was like, oh, what does that mean? You know, I don't even know what they're going on about, but it sounds intriguing. You know, oftentimes physicists will talk in terms of metaphors and, you know, and they'll say things like, there's this massive particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, sort of the France west border, under the ground, they often call it the Big Bang Machine. And what they're doing there is they're trying to recreate conditions that are similar to those in our early universe. So they'll often say things like, you know, you're trying to make a Big Bang, but they don't literally mean it.
Now, what was weird about this paper, I very quickly realized they did mean it. They literally meant they wanted to take a particle. It's a hypothetical particle. It's called a monopole. Let's not worry about it too much for now. But it's some kind of hypothesized particle that could exist. You take it, you stick it into a particle accelerator, you fire other particles at it with a whole load of energy. It's gonna be more energy than we can currently do. So I'll tell you that now. But you, you know, in theory, you fire particles at it with a whole load of energy. And what that would do was set this particle, sort of trigger it, kickstart it into inflating into a whole new universe, which sounds terrifying, you know, like this sort of airbag in your car when you crash that suddenly inflates and smothers you, and you know, just keeps expanding and expanding outside of the laboratory, outside of Switzerland, you know, outside of Europe, and eventually overtakes the whole world.
It wouldn't be like that. It would create its own space and time, separate from ours, but connected to ours. So, sort of talk us through that bit. Looking at it from the outside, we would just see this tiny particle, which actually would show up like a tiny little black hole spraying off other little particles, and that's all we would know about it. But within it, it would be expanding to, you know, astronomical scales big enough to house galaxies and stars and planets and life forms.
And it would actually sort of be connected to our universe only very briefly by a little wormhole. Before that wormhole breaks and we lose contact with this little baby universe entirely. And this is an idea of something that could happen in a particle accelerator like the large Hadron Collider, you know, maybe one day in the future. And this paper that I had seen was sort of blueprints for how to do that, and it blew my mind. It completely just…
I mean, first of all, I thought these people must be crazy. Very often papers are, you know, they're not all equally credible. Let's put it that way. Some scientists write more serious papers than others, and some are more speculative and some are just bad. So I sort of sat there thinking, is this actually a good paper? Are these sensible people? Have they just written a load of nonsense?
And then I looked through the paper and I looked through the references and I suddenly understood, actually this is a program that started in the 1980s. It's got a huge long history behind it. It's very well established. And that was when I decided I wanted to just start writing about it and looking into it further.
AF: And what did you find as you looked into it further in terms of its value both for physics, like this project's value for our understanding of what the universe is, and then also, why it was such a good subject for introducing people to some of the intersections of quantum theory and cosmology.
ZM: Yeah, no, good question. So, yeah, they're not Marvel supervillains. They hadn't set out to go, oh, you know, I wonder what I'll do today. Let's work out how to make a universe in the laboratory.
This actually, as I say, goes back to the 1980s when cosmologists were just beginning to think about processes that happened in our universe when it was born. And there were a few puzzles about sort of reconciling what they thought had happened, which was there was a Big Bang at which point, time and space were created and exploded outwards into the expanding universe that we live in today versus the sort of the details of the observations that they were seeing.
So the way that physicists sort of corroborate this idea that a Big Bang had happened is by looking at the radiation bath created in the afterglow of this Big Bang explosion. That's this explosion of light that was released about 300,000 years after that Big Bang occurred. It's called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation now, and you can detect it now. There are, you know, massive big experiments that measure this radiation. It's all around us everywhere, and as the name suggests, it's light that is in the microwave wavelength. So it's why we don't see it all the time, but it's there. If you've got the right equipment, you can look all around the sky and you can detect it, and you can say, actually this fits pretty well with the predictions of light that would be emitted after a Big Bang explosion.
But there were some things that didn't quite make sense about it. One of them was that light on different sides of the sky looked so similar in temperature. It was kind of surprising. You wouldn't expect such far flung regions to have the same temperature, roughly speaking, because if you think about, you know, just temperature in the room around you, you know, you've got a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, it's hot. You leave it out for a while, it cools down. It's because it's in contact with cool surroundings that the temperature kind of reaches an equilibrium and everything ends up roughly the same.
So you'd expect something similar to be happening in the universe, but physicists couldn't work out how on earth that could have happened because if you're looking at one far end of the sky versus the other far end of the sky, they're so far away from each other that they wouldn't ever have time to have been in contact to have reached the same temperature. And there were, there were all sorts of these other puzzles that they were sort of wondering about.
And there was a physicist called Alan Guth who managed to solve it. Him amongst, you know, a number of other people that were working on these ideas. And one solution that they came up with was that just after it was born, in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe inflated at an alarming rate, an astronomical rate for a very brief period and that would explain some of the strange observations.
So the idea would be that a very tiny patch of the universe that had all reached the same temperature, suddenly got stretched out, you know, it just grew massively in size and our universe is within that patch, and that's why it all looks pretty similar all around us now.
Whoa, that sounds great. If you're happy with that. I don't know, but physicists were sort of happy with that. The only trouble was they didn't know why it would inflate or why it would stop inflating. And this was the puzzle that Alan Guth was trying to solve in the early 1980s when he sort of sat around with his graduate students. And in trying to find out what would make something start inflating, why would one patch of a non inflating universe suddenly inflate, that they started to realize actually it's not that difficult to make something inflate and maybe you could do it in the lab.
AF: And so then, so what are the implications of this for us, I guess? Suppose that they do succeed in making a universe. Would they know that they had made one?
ZM: Yeah, it's a funny question. I mean, I think, you know, not necessarily not unless you are actually looking for it.
It's the type of thing you might do accidentally. I sort of gave some caveats earlier that you would need much more energy than we currently have in our particle accelerators. But, you know, it's not beyond reasonable sort of consideration that we may reach that point one day. But unless you are looking for it, you wouldn't necessarily know you had done it. Because like I say, from the outside, they look like mini black holes and for a whole host of other reasons, you know, physicists are already looking for mini black holes in these particle collisions, you know, at the Large Hadron Collider. They're very hard to find.
I mean, I’m throwing a lot of physics out there, but at these, at these particle accelerators, they have so many of these collisions happening per second that a lot of what they're doing is just trying to sample bits of that, bits of the collision debris and find out what's going on.
But, you know, they have no idea what's going on most of the time. So, you know, it's exactly the sort of thing that could just happen if you're not looking for it. It's not happening now, I would say, at the LHC, but it could happen in the future without anybody realizing.
AF: But they also haven't found this particle right. The one that would need to inflate. It's a hypothetical particle.
ZM: It is indeed. It's a hypothetical particle called a monopole. But they've been looking for it, and I would say they have good reason to think it does exist.
So what is a monopole? A monopole is a weird thing. It's a magnetic monopole. So if you think about, like just a normal bar magnet or a magnet that's on your fridge, it's got two poles, a north and a south pole. A magnetic monopole would have only one of these poles. Which sounds easy enough, it sounds like, well, why don't you just snap your bar magnet in two and then you'd have a north pole in one hand and a south pole in the other. Actually, if you try it, what you'll end up with is two bar magnets. Now, two smaller ones each with a north and a south pole. So it sounds tantalizingly close to something you would expect to just easily find, but you don't.
There are also theories of sort of fundamental reality that predict that this particle does exist, but nobody has ever found one. In fact, it was trying to find one, trying to understand why nobody had found one, that Alan Guth ended up thinking about inflation in the first place. ‘Cause he had sat down to look at some of these theories and he found that really these monopoles should be absolutely everywhere, you know, all around us, and they should be massively heavy. So much so that they actually should have, you know, interfered with the ability of galaxies to form. And probably if they did exist everywhere, we wouldn't. So there was some big confusion here now, as to, you know, where are all these monopoles and, you know, they should exist, but they don't.
Why not? His theory of inflation actually helps deal with that problem because in his theory you could, you know, before inflation occurred, you could take a tiny little patch of space that only had one monopole in it, and then that could inflate. Turning into our universe. And so our universe could end up with only one monopole in it. And so that's why we don't ever run into it. But also then it's gonna be very difficult to find it. You know, a needle in a haystack, a monopole in a universe is gonna be very, very tough.
AF: So one of the things that comes up in your book is that as people are looking for the monopole or they're looking for the origin of the origin of the origin, there's a lot of conversation that comes up about “nothing,” about how the universe might emerge from “nothing.” And you talk about this. What is “nothing”?
ZM: What is nothing? That is an interesting question. And depending on who you ask, you know, it's a bit of a loaded term.
I had heard this said a lot: physicists have shown that the universe can be created from nothing. Huh? What does that mean? So I went and I met up with Alex Vilenkin, who is one of the people that actually came up with this, who did the calculations. And what his calculation was based on were the laws of quantum theory. The laws of quantum theory tell you that empty space is never really, truly empty. So even if you create a vacuum in the lab, and you know people have done this, people have shown this, it's never completely empty in the sense that because of quantum physics, there's always some uncertainty about what's happening.
And for a very brief, fleeting second, you can have pairs of particles popping up in the vacuum. They're usually sort of a particle and an antiparticle, so that could be like an electron and its antiparticle partner, a positively charged positron. They exist for, you know, a brief nanosecond or much, much less than a nanosecond, have a little look around and then smash back into each other and disappear.
And so in some sense, a vacuum itself is full of sort of just kind of these little undulations, these tiny little frothing particles that disappear and reappear and disappear and reappear. So that's sort of, that's established. Physicists are very, very comfortable with that. And what Alex Vilenkin was thinking about was, how far can you take that?
He was thinking about, let's say you start with a tiny little nugget of a universe that, you know, just a tiny, tiny, small thing. And he was sort of trying to work out how it might inflate into a bigger universe. And then he said, well, let me think about this backwards and make that tiny little nugget that it begins from smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
And he ended up making it so small, it disappeared, but because it was, you know, quantum rules and a quantum universe that he was thinking about, even when it disappeared completely. So there was no nugget of a universe anymore, there was no space, there was no time, there was no matter, there was a probability that the universe could just pop out out of nothing. And I'm, you can't see me, but I'm doing sort of air quotes here. “Nothing.” A tiny seed of a universe could pop out of nothing and then start to grow.
And so he published a paper about the creation of the universe from nothing. There were other physicists who were thinking about similar ideas at the time. And that's what people usually refer to when they say that physics has shown that you can have a universe that's created from nothing.
Now I, like you, sort of was a little bit curious as to what “nothing” really means here. So, you know, I sort of said to him, what, you know, what do you mean? Because, okay, I understand you've got no space, you've got no time, you've got no matter. I don't know if I personally can even conceive of what that means, but, okay, you are saying it's nothing, no matter, no space, no time. But you are saying that the quantum laws of physics apply.
So there are these abstract rules, this handbook of how matter and time and space should behave, should they ever pop into existence. And you know, Alex Vilenkin says, yes, absolutely, they are still there. So even he said that he put “nothing” in air quotes when he wrote his paper, because it's not really nothing.
Now I don’t know about you, I don’t know if that's convincing to you or not. I mean, to me it's sort of, it's very weird to think about why there would be one certain rule book or one set of physical laws that exists. Where does it exist? Why does it exist? It exists for the potential of maybe applying to something that may pop into existence one day or it might not one day. I mean, there's no time. It just doesn't, you know, you can't even think of the language to describe it. I don't, I don't really know what that means.
He had an answer, which I'm not sure was truly satisfying or maybe just equally perplexing , but, but he said, well, when you think about it, you know, it's weird that these physical laws would apply to nothing. But at the same time, it's kind of weird that these physical laws apply to anything, even when there's something in the universe, you know. Why do they do that? Nobody knows. So, you know, I don’t know how satisfying you find that, but, but I guess in answer to your question, it's a lot more subtle than it's perhaps presented sometimes.
And, there is this question of, where do these physical laws come from? Why are the laws, the laws that they are?
AF: Right.
ZM: And it's one that physicists do think about and don't have an answer to.
AF: That kind of leads us to questions about determinism. It seems like in your book, there are these three different assertions that come up in physics research, and I realize that's a very broad term, but basically the nature of reality is deterministic, the nature of reality is undetermined and the nature of reality is inter-deterministic. Can you kind of walk us through each of those?
ZM: Yeah. It, and you know, it's interesting because I think, you know, where you're probably going with this is that, it comes into questions of whether we have free will or not. So, the most intuitive one is that our choices are undetermined and the laws of physics or reality itself is undetermined.
And it's as simple as, you know, what did I have for breakfast this morning? Oh I had some toast. I could have had some cereal. But that choice wasn't there. There was nothing controlling that choice particularly, external to myself or external to my will. You know, on a whim I chose to have toast. That's fine. Nothing is really controlled in a very tight manner. That's what we might naively assume as we go about our everyday lives.
I think when we go back through the history of physics, there was then a picture that came up of a kind of a clockwork universe that was described in terms of physical laws that explain the behavior of particles, you know, what they do when they do it, how they do it.
And there was a sense, I think it was the 19th century philosopher, Pierre-Simon Laplace who had this idea that you could have, all-knowing demon or being who, if they kind of knew where every single particle in the universe was and they understood all the laws of physics, they can basically tell you what every single particle would do next, including, the particles inside your brain that decide, you know, that controlled whether you decided to have coffee or tea in the morning.
That would be, you know, sort of the deterministic universe, where now you're sort of sitting there and you're thinking, you know, if my brain is just neurons firing, you know, my choices are based on what sort of molecules, sort of the soup of molecules inside my head, whichever way they're kind of roaming around. That's determined by what they did five minutes ago. It's determined by what, you know, these molecules and other molecules in the world around me were doing 10 minutes ago, a year ago, a hundred years ago, you can track that right back to the Big Bang. And you can say, well, you know, depending on how that exploded in space and time was created, you know, you could have that quantum rule book or any kind of physics rule book or biology rule book, which is gonna tell you how they clump together. And it's gonna be an endless chain that leads up to you choosing what to have for breakfast.
And that completely takes away your free will. You may be okay about that. A lot of people, a lot of scientists think about this and they sort of say, I'm free to do what I want, but I'm not necessarily free to want what I want. Right? That could be determined by my biology, and it could, you know, be determined by molecules and movement and science and whatever. You know, we don't have any power over that. So that's the other extreme. That's the deterministic universe.
Now, the indeterministic universe comes in because of quantum theory. And quantum theory is strange. Quantum theory is very, very, very strange. And you know, you'll often hear this idea that according to quantum physics, things aren't set until you look at them. So you can have a particle and it can be in two places at the same time, and those two places could be, you know, just to the left and just to the right, or it could be on the table in front of you or on the moon, right? And until you look at this particle, it can be in any and all of these places at the same time. It's this weird super position of multiple properties that exist. It doesn't have one set nature.
We have an equation that helps us understand how this weird super position evolves. And it can tell you the probability that when you actually look at it, what's the probability that you're gonna find this particle inside your cup of tea on the table and not on the moon. And you know, if it started out in your cup of tea, it's probably a very high chance that it's still going to be in your cup of tea and not on the moon.
But there is some probability that it could be there.
And what's so weird about this is that this uncertainty is inherent in reality. So, you know, I could ask you, you know, what, what are the odds of, I don’t know, whoever's going to win the next presidential election in the United States, right? And, you know, we could take bets on that. Or I could ask you, you know, what are the odds that it's gonna rain tomorrow? And we can say, oh, it's a 10% chance, or whatever. But that's, you know, there's uncertainty there, but it's not inherent in reality. It's just that we don't know enough about, you know, we're not good enough at weather forecasting to say with certainty that it's definitely gonna rain tomorrow. But if we were, you know, brilliant weather forecasters that had all the information in the universe, we could, we could say with certainty, this is what's gonna happen.
With quantum physics, it wouldn't help. Or at least with the standard interpretation of quantum physics, there just is no certainty even. Before you look, it's not that you don't really know where things are, it's that they are nowhere. And even if you had every single piece of information about them, you still wouldn't be able to tell with certainty when you looked where they would end up. So there is a certain freedom now, written in, stitched into reality that, you know, that has nothing to do with our knowledge but has everything to do with the way the world works. And that's where this indeterminism comes in. There's this role of the dice about every quantum process that happens.
AF: One of the things that fascinates me is the way that you sometimes move back and forth in your book between the inner life and the outer life, so you probe scientists about kind of their inner lives and about what that looks like for them. And I've found one in particular I'd love to hear you talk about, which is one scientist that you interviewed, and he identifies a field of consciousness in the inner life that he says is something like photons and electromagnetic field. And he doesn't mean this only metaphorically. He says that the field is a physical entity that is all pervading.
And that seems to paint this picture of the inner life that has some correlation, some interrelation with the physical world. And I just, I'm curious, I'd love to hear you talk about that. What do you make of that? What is this kind of assertion coming from an eminent cosmologist do in the field? What is he talking about?
ZM: I think it's utterly fascinating. I absolutely loved talking to him. So this is Abhay Ashtekar and he is very famous for having come up, with Carlo Rovelli, in fact, having worked on an idea for how space-time itself is generated. So, you know, we sort of talked about how the universe can come from nothing.
But you know, he really wanted to get an answer of, you know, how to actually go from nothing and then stitch together the space and time that we have around us. What are sort of the building blocks of that? And, you know, he's very famous for having come up with a theory that sort of explains how to do that.
What he's not very well known for, which I didn't even know until, I think a little bit before I interviewed him, when somebody said to me, you know, you should ask him, you're going to talk to him, you should ask him about his experience meditating, because he is, you know, he has, you know, a very, very serious dedication to, I wouldn't say any one particular kind of Eastern philosophy, but he practices meditation. He's very, very thoughtful about that inner life, as you say. And that's not perhaps hugely common amongst physicists, or perhaps it would be better to phrase it as saying, it's not hugely common for physicists to feel comfortable talking about that.
So, you know, I went out there originally, I had arranged to go out and speak to him about his ideas for the origins of space and time, but sort of in the back of my mind was, oh no, I must ask him about, you know, his practices meditating. Just as an aside maybe, I wasn't expecting anything more to really come out of that.
So, lemme tell you a little bit about the physics first of all, because you'd asked about how the physics connects to his inner life. So there's something that's very well understood, which is sort of, mainstream physics, we understand it now. And that is, we talk about quantum fields. And we talk about, for instance, light being made up of photons or little particles and we talk about a sort of an electromagnetic field that these photons come out of. And you can kind of think of this electromagnetic field everywhere, and these photons as little bubbling excitations, like, you've got some soup on the stove or whatever, and you turn up the heat and suddenly it gets so vigorous and you can almost see a kind of a roiling surface. And those excitations would end up acting like little particles of light.
So you've got this kind of field and then you've got these bubbling things coming out of it. Again, it's very similar to what we were talking about with the vacuum and things bubbling out of the vacuum. So it's just kind of a way that physicists have. It’s very natural for them to think about fields or nothing that pervades everything and things popping out of it.
And then you have his more speculative ideas in physics, which are about, okay, now, let's say you have nothing, and again, this is another one of these kind of sneaky things where physicists will say nothing, but then they'll say, oh, but in that another, there are certain rules that apply. And for Ashtekar, there's this sort of sense of geometry that applies. And because you have a sense of geometry, you can sort of have loops of geometry that can suddenly pop out of this empty field of nothing. And these loops can somehow link together to create space time.
So it's almost like they're kind of these building blocks of space and time. but these blocks are loops and they're loops that kind of jump out of nothing. They're excited out of a field of nothing like photons of light are excited out of an electromagnetic field.
So we've already gone from something that's very well established in physics to something that's very speculative in physics, which is how space and time could be created. And it's an interesting idea. It's been around for many decades now and quite a few physicists like it and are investigating it.
And then we get into something which is way more speculative even than that. And that's when I started to ask him about his meditative experiences. And like I say, just because somebody had said, you know, you should ask him about it, he spends a lot of time studying this, takes it very seriously. He goes to retreats, those silent retreats where you give time to really quieting your mind and trying to understand more about your inner being.
And what was interesting to me was that, you know, being a physicist, he thought about what was happening, but in very physical terms. And so he was taking ideas from Eastern philosophy in which there is a sort of a universal entity that we are all part of, where the individual is part of a greater whole.
And he was picturing it as, okay, let's say, in very physical terms, you have a field like the electromagnetic field that pervades the whole universe. But now this is a field of consciousness of one, one shared consciousness, and that each of our consciousnesses is an excitation out of that field. It's, you know, like photons bouncing out of electromagnetism.
It's sort of funny because, you know, for physicists it's easier to think in terms of the physics and talk about consciousness by analogy to that. Whereas I think for everybody else it's probably, why are you telling me about the electromagnetic field? I don't care.
But, you know, it was interesting to me that this was the way that he was thinking. And, he was talking again, very much in terms of physics, but I think it's something that anybody who has tried meditating even, or, you know, even mindfulness or something like that, which is a sort of a lighter version of that has probably experienced, which is, if you can quieten your mind, you can sink back into that consciousness field is the way that he described it. You feel yourself reaching a level of peace and for some Eastern philosophies, it's this sense of actually kind of sinking back into the shared consciousness that we all are sort of part of, but we experience perhaps distress and suffering the more we are pulled out of that shared consciousness.
So I thought that was an absolutely beautiful analogy. And so I said to him, you know, this is a lovely way of thinking about it, but you know, you don't literally mean that there is a field of consciousness. And he was like, no, I absolutely do. You know, he's a physicist. He's a serious physicist. And he was saying, well I think that we could one day discover this consciousness field. And you know, in a way, I mean, I think so many people who meditate have described this same phenomenon. And it is a physical phenomenon, right? It's a real thing. Like, if somebody punches you in the face, you feel it. And if you meditate, you feel it. It's a physical thing.
And you know, he's saying, well I don't know how to do it. I haven't worked out the mathematics of it properly. But, you know, Einstein posited space-time pervading the universe more than a hundred years ago, and it took pretty much exactly a hundred years for experiments to detect ripples in that fabric of space-time. So just because it takes a very long time for people to work out how to actually find the physical proof of this, it doesn't mean that there's nothing physical there.
So yeah, he meant that very literally. And I found it absolutely fascinating. Like I say, I think it’s certainly a real effect, so it's not so outlandish that he should think about it in very serious scientific terms and in terms of something that he's used to handling mathematically. But I've never heard anybody else try to do that. It was very interesting to me.
AF: Yeah. The mathematics of consciousness is not something that I could get my mind around, but at the same time, I can see why he would.
ZM: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, not just the mathematics of your consciousness or my consciousness, but
AF: Right, but of The Consciousness.
ZM: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And again, because people who are looking into these questions, cosmologists and physicists, are so used to thinking on these scales that it doesn't seem weird to them to say, well, you know, if I can think of an electromagnetic field that is pervading all of space, why can't I think of a consciousness field doing the same thing?
AF: I wonder if you could point listeners to other things that they should read, or if they find this interesting that they could continue to explore, beyond your own book, which I think is really, I really do highly recommend it because it just does the work that allows me to enter into these conversations in a way that I really hadn't imagined that I could. But what are your favorite books that try to make physics and cosmology and quantum physics more comprehensible and relevant to ordinary people?
ZM: So you brought up this question of nothing, which is, you know, it's a book in and of itself, and somebody has written that book, that is a science journalist called Amanda Gefter, who writes a very much on her own personal journey to find out the meaning of nothing precisely because it's so ill-defined. And I really enjoyed her writing. She writes from a very personal perspective of her quest to get to the bottom of this. And her book is called Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn. So I would highly recommend that one.
I think if you are interested in existential questions, there is a physicist called Sabine Hossenfelder, who's written a book called Existential Physics. Have to admit to being a little bit biased because she interviewed me in that book about making a baby universe. But then she goes on to deal with other questions, some of which we've touched on, things like free will and just other big questions that are lurking around in the background of these physics projects, but are never really brought to the surface and explicitly dealt with. So she's another excellent writer and a professional physicist.
And if you are just interested in a very nice introduction to the physics, perhaps without necessarily getting into the metaphysics, but just getting to grips with, you know, big questions of how the universe began and how it could end, Katie Mack has written a very good book on The End of Everything, which looks at the fate of our universe.
And I'll also give a shout out to a physicist called Nicole Younger Halpin, who has written a very good book on quantum information. And I particularly love that one because she has written in little strands of fiction in there that, in terms of firing up your imagination, I think that's an absolutely lovely way to get some of these ideas across. So I would highly recommend that one as well.
AF: Thank you so much, and we'll get all of those into the show notes for this episode so that people can go directly to the show notes and find them there. But that's great.
Thank you so much, Zeeya. Thank you for your time and for your passion and for your ability to explain some of these incredibly difficult concepts in ways that at least allow me to get a little toe hold in these incredibly big questions. I am really grateful for that.
ZM: Once again, thank you very much for your interest.
AF: Thank you so much for joining us today, Zeeya. And I just wanna say to listeners, I do highly recommend Zeeya Merali's book A Big Bang in a Little Room. And if you read nothing else of Popular Physics this year, why don't you read that? Because I think it will expand your imagination and open your mind to some of the strangest questions in the universe.
And thank you, listeners, for joining us for this episode of In Search Of. If you, like Freda, have ideas of scholars, projects, and perspectives that you’d like to hear on this podcast that you are in search of, please let me know. You can email me at insearchof@christiancentury.org. Also, go to our website, christiancentury.org/insearchof, to sign up for our newsletter and connect with us. Please follow this podcast and rate it on your favorite podcast app. This helps other listeners find this podcast. This has been a production of The Christian Century, a thoughtful, progressive, independent magazine for today. We’ll see you next week. Until then, happy searching.