Where Does It End?

00:00:00 helix center dot org or the helix center dot org where you can view the round table in its entirety and we encourage you to let us know what you think uh helix center facebook page or write us at the helix center at gmail.com so we're following up on uh our inquiry into beginnings by posing complementary questions about endings why are we curious about endings whether it's that of the cosmos our own can we discover something about each other's curiosity about endings uh how might conceptualizations of the

00:00:32 end of consciousness life civilization and the universe at large inform one another so i'd like to introduce our guests today starting here james berger is senior lecturer in american studies and english at yale university he received his ba from columbia university his m.a from teachers college columbia university and his phd from the university of virginia his interests include 20th and 21st century american literature literary theory disability studies neuroscience and literature and apocalyptic literature and film the latter including

00:01:02 apocalypticism and the notion of the post-apocalyptic and exploring the limits of language the relations between language and non-language the status of discursive objects imagined as somehow whether through global catastrophe personal impairment or religious or ethical imperative outside the bounds of discourse dr berger is the author of multiple scholarly articles and his books include after the end representations of post-apocalypse next to him is paul j steinhardt the albert einstein professor in science and director of the princeton center for

00:01:32 theoretical science at princeton university where he is also on the faculty of both the department of physics and the department of astrophysical sciences he received his ba in physics from caltech and his m.a and phd both in physics from harvard university the author of over 200 refereed articles five patents three technical books numerous popular articles and the co-author of the 2007 endless universe the big bang and beyond a popular book on contemporary theories of cosmology professor steinhardt's research spans problems in particle physics astrophysics cosmology and

00:02:03 condensed matter physics with neil turek at cambridge university he proposed the cyclic model a radical alternative to big bang inflationary cosmology in which the evolution of the universe is periodic and the key events shaping the large scale structure of the universe occur before the big bang next is william colbrander associate professor of english at bart elon university he received his ba from columbia college his m.a from university college oxford and his phd from columbia university he has written in major scholarly journals in literature history theology psychoanalysis and cultural

00:02:35 criticism on jewish topics in commentary azure jqr and ajs review tradition and many other jewish publications and the washington post column letter from israel professor cole brenner is also the author of the 2008 book milton's warring angels a study of critical engagements and the 2011 open-minded torah of irony fundamentalism and love michael rapino is professor biology with the earth and environmental sciences program at new york university and as a research consultant at nasa garden

00:03:05 institute for space studies he received his ba from hunter college of the sydney university of new york and his phd in geological sciences from columbia university a highly regarded teacher at nyu professor rampino's research led to his proposal of the shiva hypothesis a general theory integrating astrophysics planetary geology and the environment and the history of life to account for earth's periodic extinctions his research also investigates the role of volcanic eruptions and extinctions biogeochemical cycles and global climate over a range of time scales

00:03:36 so our round table will go for about an hour and a half followed by time for questions and discussion from the audience so let's begin the end why are we curious about endings well rob you want to say something about the lack of microphone for bill oh yes um that um uh dr cole brenner in observing the sabbath uh you know cannot wear an amplifying microphone today so he will speak louder he'll talk loudly that was good

00:04:09 okay well i'll start i guess my background is in is in the geological sciences and there's been a paradigm shift in the geological sciences over the past couple of decades and then that's away from the old idea of change gradually over time very slowly over very long periods of geological time to a new vision which is much more apocalyptic which suggests that there are

00:04:39 individual catastrophes which are happening periodically to the earth and those catastrophes are causing mass extinctions of life and as far as the history of life is concerned we talk about endings more than 99 of the species that have ever existed on the earth are extinct so in terms of species uh extinction is the name of the game they last for a few million years then either they evolve to something else or else they become extinct with no issue

00:05:13 i mean i'll follow up i mean i'm interested that this is about endings and a couple of weeks ago was beginning as as a literary critic i think of elliot's term or phrase the end is where we start from and the beginnings and ends are always related one to another and i'm i'm just very interested in being in a panel first of all with another literary critic but i'm interested in the way you think about catastrophe and paradigm shift and to think about ways in which the languages of the sciences

00:05:43 also use plotting as a device i saw an advertisement on television for a new movie called something extinction extinction is thematized in our culture and it's used i think in a narrative sense and i'm wondering for both of you kind of from a scientific point of view how much narrative or storytelling or plotting is something that gets i don't know it's obviously not foreground to the same extent that it would be from your gym but i'm wondering how much that is a live issue for you

00:06:14 that's my curiosity well the old idea of a gradualistic change in the earth sciences comes out of uh lyell charles his book principles of geology back in 1831 and lyell saw geological happenings as being gradual and and being connected and so there was a story there the gradual history of the earth and he didn't believe in evolution at the time so life was somehow put into

00:06:45 this this picture and it was for me for many years in geology when you were a student taking geology 101 you were taught this the saying the present is the key to the past in other words things that are happening at the present time geological processes if you extrapolate those over long time periods even very gradual slow changes like erosion by rivers add up into a big result like the grand canyon and that was part of lyell's view of the naturalness the the gradual uh

00:07:18 gradualism nature that this was the way god set things up and uh there was an order to this the order that was in god's mind when he created the universe yeah i was going to uh say something akin to what you marked which is that one of the reasons why we're interested in the end of uh of the universe or says i'm a cosmologist we're talking about the universe uh is because it gives us a lot of information about how

00:07:49 it began and the stages of evolution in between they're all tied together and so the debates that we're having about what's going to happen next in the universe are all tightly related to what set up the conditions that led to the conditions we observed today and those were in turn tied very closely to how um the evolution of the universe is tied to the fundamental laws of physics and what those laws tell us about conditions

00:08:21 at the very beginning or at the big bang or maybe even before the big bang yeah i suppose right i mean one difference you can point to between the way that the english teachers and scientists i think we in our thinking about narrative place the human subject kind of the center of it and we know that for one thing we ourselves are finite so the question of ending has to do i think with the question of finitude in general um and narrative

00:08:56 contributes to that there's a great line in don delilla one of gondolilla's novel um all plots lead toward death so there's that perspective you know as you're thinking of plots there's going to be an ending to the plot at the same time you have the example of shahirazad and which plot extends life and as long as you can tell the story uh you you can extend you can put off fine and too um there's a couple of moves i always said that i i it's hard for me to think abstractly about this you know i think

00:09:27 in terms of movies there's a 1991 vin vanders movie called until the end of the world uh in in which after a lot of kind of weird misadventures they end up in australia at the end of the world and it just at that moment uh and a nuclear satellite falls down creates this electromagnetic disruption all around the world or at least in australia and so ever and they think they're so isolated they think the world has in fact ended um at which point the plot of the movie completely shifts and there's this

00:09:58 amazing invention which someone has developed in order to get captures a neurochemical event of vision for one of the characters blind mothers his mother is blind so um she is able to see images again but they also has this other purpose which is to they discover they can see their own dreams they can basically videotape their own dreams and so they get this insight into this experience of what you might call psychoanalytic terms primary process complete on mediation the

00:10:29 complete absence of the eradication of mediations this extraordinarily sophisticated medium for eliminating mediation and what happens is they become addicted to their dreams that's all that's all they want to do and so that becomes in a sense the apocalypse that's the revelation is this revelation of complete interiority and complete removal from any symbolic world any social symbolic world and i think some jury that's also what apocalyptic

00:11:01 thinking is a yearning for i mean here we are these symbolic we're we're so we're so you know involved in our symbolic communications our relationships to ourselves he's mediated uh what is there that's direct what is there that's unmediated how do you get to sort of the thing itself and some level what apocalyptic thinking allows you to do is to find some place in fiction in imagination where that takes place so i think a lot of apocalyptic narratives have to do with the

00:11:32 bashing of these symbolic edifice so that you have people who somehow are absolutely there without symbolic overlays but that's yeah i don't know that's that that's infection i'm interested you know when i'm in the presence of a cosmologist you know i i think i think i'm a little antiquated i think of augustine and john milton as cosmologists

00:12:03 and and for them i mean i'm just a little bit working on when you're suggesting jim about that apocalypse and the kind of pre-modern manifestations of apocalyptic thinking which is just the way everyone thought that is thinking that that history has a telos there's an esche time towards which history is tended and the way in which that sense of an ending infuses the present meaning there's not only a beginning and an end

00:12:34 but that sense of an ending takes chronometric time literary frank remote uses this distinction between kronos kind of waiting time where i think in shakespearean terms tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow that lack of mediation things happen but an end and kermode uses the great term kairos i guess it means the fullness of time that end towards which one is tending

00:13:05 not only informs the end of history but also infuses the present and you spoke before about the present being the key to the past and i think in some sense models of time i mean maybe adam phillips might put it like this tell me what you think about time and i'll tell you what you believe because conceptions of time is there an end towards which we're attending or is there not really taught as the basis of a certain kind of theological or religious belief

00:13:37 and i'm wondering in a kind of scientific or post-modern or post-apocalyptic world how does the eschaton does this or in aristotelian terms is the notion of life as a plot as is either cosmological time as a plot of the beginning middle and end and the way that might interact with the subjects thinking of his own life or her own life as a plot with beginning middle and end

00:14:08 is that still something that's viable or in a post-apocalyptic age born in age given over to scientific stories and narratives are those really antiquated that sense of yeah an ending yeah i think that's a i mean i'm going to get the science but just to add one one thing to that i think in the sense of endings that you're talking about in the commode and many other people talking about the end the way one conceives the end is what gives meaning to the present but i think in the scientific way of

00:14:40 thinking in the cosmological way of thinking i can't imagine how that would be actually take place whether sort of the meaning of social and personal life would have anything to do with the way one conceives of the act be the ending of the universe as hypothesized scientifically yeah i think i think we're talking about humanity end of humanity for example which is one thing kind of apocalypse we think about the earth another kind of apocalypse and

00:15:11 then the universe uh which is a which is in a different a different kind of end we could talk about for the universe i think one thing that's happened in cosmology in the in just the last few decades has been a tremendous opening up of the possibilities of even what we mean by universe which colors the question of what do you mean by the end the end of what what are you interested in um so of course we're interested in humans and the earth but in terms of the universe are we interested in the part of the

00:15:42 universe we observe because up until recently we had the notion that we observe all that there is but the current view is that what we observe is a tiny infinitesimal patch of what is out there and that what we observe may or may not be typical of what is out there now we may be interested in this patch because it is all we see and can ever hope to see i mean the laws of physics prohibit us from seeing regions that are beyond a certain uh that are stretching for not fast enough from us and for that for that region we can talk

00:16:12 about an end we can imagine two kinds of ends at least two kinds of ends one in which it crunches into something like a black hole in which time and space lose their meaning and another one which is where time and sense some sense lasts forever but not in a meaningful sense the universe expands into more and more vacuum and becomes more and more vacuous and empty and continues that way forever this this patch of space we observe

00:16:42 in either of those circumstances there may be interesting events creation events in fact occurring in other parts of the universe where new regions are being created new patches are being created and for all and and many plausible circumstances this would this process would continue eternally forever and there would be no end to the entire process although there may be ends to the regions which are of greatest interest to us so i've just given you a few examples of some of the wider variety of possibilities that have

00:17:13 been opened up and motivated by recent ideas in cosmology just to give you a taste i know a few years ago it was a lot simpler story the universe began in the big bang and through cause and effect the scientists could trace the history of the universe from the time of the big bang to the president and the idea then was that either the universe was going to expand forever or if the galaxies were massive enough that gravity would pull it all back in again but things have changed since then

00:17:44 things have become much more complex so for so first of all in terms of the future going to the future we've discovered there's an entity in the universe which we knew in principle could be there but we which we didn't realize was actually there which is what we call dark energy so most forms of matter that were all the forms of matter that we're familiar with gravitationally attract each other in fact most of us learned in school that gravity always attracts it's not actually true gravity attracts for certain forms of matter and energy but not for others there's a form there

00:18:15 are forms of matter and energy in which it actually causes repulsion we've known about it since 1917 but you probably didn't hear about in school because no one believed it it actually was an important component of the real universe well we've known from we now know from recent measurements in the last decade that 73 of the universe is the stuff and once it takes so it's already taken over the universe in terms of being the dominant form of energy in the universe and it's causing therefore the expansion of the universe to accelerate at the present time speed up rather than slow

00:18:47 down so it's actually promoting the expansion rather than resisting it and if this continues then what will happen over time is more and more of the matter that we see in the universe today the galaxies and stars will begin to disappear from view because of this expansion every region of the universe will be begin to approach empty space and this will be a kind of end which is like a you know ts eliot's whimper which you simply you know slowly decay into an emptier and more deadly universe for this patch

00:19:19 of the universe and that's a possibility that's a possible end to the universe an alternative point of view is that this dark energy is unstable and will eventually decay and then it will lead to a new crunch bang and and and the process will begin again even in this patch of the universe all these and it could even repeat periodically so this is the idea behind a possible return of the idea of a kind of cyclical universe so you're saying there are other patches that we're just living in a patch well what's what is almost certain uh is

00:19:52 that what we observe is a tiny patch of a much larger space that we're not that when we look at the farthest distances we can see um those are not the edge of space they're simply the edge of what we can see because um the oldest light we can observe is 13.7 billion years old it's only had a chance to travel 13.7 billion light years that's as far as we can see but that doesn't say that there isn't plenty of space out there so that boundary is not a boundary it's not a boundary at all it's our person it's our

00:20:23 it's in fact we call it our horizon because it's essentially a limit to our vision of what we can see something beyond them um well we can already see hints of it uh when we look at radiation from the that comes from the oldest radiation we observe in the universe gives us a uh is radiation that comes from a time when the universe cooled to the point that the first atoms were forming in the universe so let's go back a bit uh if extrapolate back in the time the universe was more

00:20:54 and more contracted and more and more heated up as you contract a gas it heats up if you go back far enough in time was hot enough to boil atoms into their fundamental constituents so now around that time which was when about 13.4 billion years ago 13.7 billion years ago um the atoms first atoms formed the universe became transparent radiation began to stream freely through the universe and we collected today to get a picture of what the distribution of

00:21:26 matter and radiation looks like at that time and what it shows us is an extremely uniform distribution of matter and radiation that even gives us some vision of how smooth if you hadn't um even is able to show us that there isn't an edge that this isn't the edge that there has to be something beyond the light to give us a kind of smooth boundary to what we're seeing so that already extends us a short distance and most of our theories to explain that degree of homogeneity tell us that

00:21:58 actually what we observe is a much tinier tinier patch of a much smoother region of space it must be much larger than what we observe and in many versions of these many of these theories that this is one of many infinitely many patches that would have formed over time and would continue to form over time so very pushing us way beyond what we can actually observe it's a doctor how much time do

00:22:28 we have this is when we need alvi singer's pediatrician's reassurance that brooklyn's not expanding right yeah i think brooklyn's okay how much to time we have or earth is a habitable uh place i guess well the universe is a habitable place uh may say that is could be quite long you know i mean i mean as long as our sun exists you know so another 5 billion years or so

00:23:01 and our galaxy in this scenario would be habitable until such point that there might have been a crunch or something like that if that were to occur then so estimates would range from anywhere from tens of billions of years to indefinite i just wonder what what are the effects

00:23:33 of these kinds of cosmological perspectives speculations horizons what is that what is the effect of that on subjects i mean we have different we have models of time with beginnings and middles and ends and jim and i were talking before in the green room as it were about the modernist the persistence of the modernist emphasis on endings i'm really interested with jim we didn't pursue it because there is a certain kind of post-modern claim

00:24:05 that we're posting we're post-apocalyptic and scientists seems especially when paul's manipulated the cosmological visions of the universe reinforce those models but is there a persistence of a sense of an ending that that renders the present meaningful i mean the postmodern abandoned that kind of ending leaves a kind of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

00:24:37 and i'm just wondering is there in the world that we live have we given up those endings psychically as subjects do we structure our lives as clocks the psychologists ask their their their designs their patients to think of their their lives and narrative terms i think in some places here i'm speaking out of my discipline that freud speaks of a past present and

00:25:08 future in terms of ego and superego and the sense in which not a non-repressive version of the superego that vision of this of the future the idealized vision of the future will help me reconstitute my desires my drives allow them to speak in a certain way my past so i can live any more meaningful presence and again i'm wondering about the seeming facticity of a universe that is one

00:25:41 among many in a billion years scheme and our own thrust or drive for me and i think meaning comes that's why i asked you at the beginning about plots and stories meaning comes from stories and thoughts and the story that you gave us is first of all multi-faceted in the 17th century there was i should know this there was speculation that many many were the first kind of science fiction

00:26:12 and it was very unsettling for those who lived in the kind of platonic universe where there was the divine plot the divine sentence but beginning middle and end this kind of cosmology where does the subject how does the subject meet how does the subject plot we exist on one planet out of probably many many habitable planets in the in the in the galaxy

00:26:45 and we're the product of four billion years of of evolution and so if you look at it from the cosmic context at least here on this habitable planet evolution the origin of life started here evolution produced more and more complex kinds of life and we are the most intelligent at least for the time being form of life on the planet and so we have that narrative this is the course that i teach at nyu you have the narrative of looking back from this special place which is human consciousness and looking back at the

00:27:16 history of the universe it all seems like it's leaving someplace but then that's just a way of looking at it really doesn't mean anything because evolution is very very uh contingent in cosmology i'd even make that point more strongly the discovery of dark energy i think shatters this kind of vision that many people had of just what you described the universe itself as evolving from simple to more and more complex uh if there were not this dark energy if we only had ordinary matter and radiation the idea that we had be up

00:27:48 until a decade or so then we then the prediction would have been that the universe does become more and more complex more and more structure forms more and more galaxies form more and more planets form but that story is now shattered something recently recently on cosmic scale has happened dark energy has taken over the universe now the expansion of the universe is accelerating that prevents the formation of any further structure in the universe the largest structures we see in the universe today are there let will be the last to form and now

00:28:19 what the universe will be doing is reverting to well we'll be turning into an emptier and emptier universe and this has happened so so this is this is shattering from several points of view it means there's something special at this particular juncture in time in cosmology we live at a juncture in time in cosmology on the on the one hand there's enough matter in the universe that we can see galaxies and stars and planets out there so we can see that where the past came from we can also see that there's dark energy in the universe so we can see where we're headed

00:28:50 uh if you if we'd lived um let's say six billion years ago we could see the matter where we couldn't see the dark energy if we in the future will be able to see the dark energy it'll be hard to see the matter so we live at a very special point in time this shatters the notion of evolution is some sort of steady process in which every moment is in some sense as good as any other moment there's really something special about this juncture in cosmology and we don't understand why it's just a fact of nature we have to live with what nature hands us whether we like the answer or not is it special because we're here is

00:29:22 the anthropic principle kind of working here we're in we're there because we're there if we were early we wouldn't be here if we were late we wouldn't be here no so we so so we we could have so there could well be species that evolved earlier uh we we've evolved you know really relatively it could have evolution could have occurred faster suppose it uh four billion years ago uh sentient beings evolved in the universe they would have a lot of trouble seeing that the fact that there was this dark energy uh because um

00:29:53 the ratio of dark energy to matter changes over time so back then the dark energy would have been a relatively small percentage now it's kind of intermediate we see there's a significant fraction of matter and a significant fraction of dark energy in the future it becomes more and more dark energy but uh you know it could have been well it could be that life evolves in our galaxy um let's say 100 billion years from now they will have a lot of trouble seeing if there was a lot of matter once in the universe they'll think they just they just lived in one little island galaxy

00:30:23 they won't see the billions of galaxies we see and they'll see almost everything being dark energy and they'll have a lot of trouble reconstructing how they got to where they were right it'll be very confusing cosmologists would be in trouble cosmologists evolve at that time for the first time at that time would be a lot of trouble they will have a lot of trouble reconstructing their history just like cosmologists that you know were born four billion years ago would have a lot of trouble figuring out that the future was going to be one dominated by dark energy so this is shattering to our traditional ideas and i i don't think i mean to me it's something that's

00:30:56 it's a profound importance scientifically what it means but in terms of what it means in terms of our human reaction to it i don't think we've even begun to absorb it yet i don't think the message has gotten out that our view of the world of the universe has changed in such a profound way and it's okay what do we make of it yeah i can't think of of of human cultural imaginative examples that in any way take take in these these these scientific findings the closest i can come is blake uh

00:31:26 you know seeing states william blake that you know sensing that that what we see as the surface of reality is somehow just not really the case and you have to burst these doors of perception and and and and that our whole very terminologies are skewed we need a new set of names to talk about what human existence physical and spiritual are the other person i think who has some sense of trying to negotiate speak a little louder writing in the book

00:31:57 okay the other person is blocking her name the south african woman writer um no no the other one um doris lesson yeah exactly uh has you know this whole series of kind of science fiction kind of gnostic science fiction texts in in which um all kinds of interesting things happen with with time philip dick i guess would be another example of someone who's making that attempt but generally our you know most of us are thinking in terms of of

00:32:28 human the time frames of human history uh and the various historical political social economic problems which which faces at the moment so in the sense each i think each generation and each writer within each generation um and not just writers but with just people sort of choose the ending that fits their immediate concerns so that say in the late 19th century when h.g wells was writing you know you can see in a book like the the

00:32:58 the time machine you know you know exactly what the kind of prevalent social anxieties there are which are anxieties about evolution and which way evolution is going and anxieties about class so you have sort of darwin and and marks there you know at the center of those things of those apocalyptic anxieties so that the anxiety the vision of the end of the world are extrapolations of ideas of remarks and ideas of darwin plus of course then you know there's the bifurcation of the

00:33:28 social club the species according to social class um but at the end of that book if you remember then actually he even brings in the cosmological view you have the sense that everything is gone except these completely non-human creatures and the sun is exp is this giant thing that's expanding and about to you know encompass the earth or something um and then in a relatively trivial or at least weird contemporary example i've been actually been watching this tv show the doomsday preppers

00:34:02 what is the doomsday preppers about it's basically a home improvement show how do you build the perfect bunker you know you know ted and edie you know believe that the world's magnetic poles are going to shift in the next five years and therefore they need an underground bunker they need to stop you know how are they best going to do it and they consult experts and they you know build whatever the hell heck they build um but what are they really worried about i mean we're worried about the social chaos that will ensue a lot of i mean that's a lot of people they're worried about the social chaos that will ensue

00:34:34 from some catastrophic breakdown of of whatever it may be and these people are always not in cities there is never a doomsday prepper in new york city because if you are one you're not going to be here you're going to move somewhere else but don't you think some of this and you were bringing in psychoanalysis some of this has just to do with reactions to mortality and various ways of trying to deny mortality the preppers maybe the crappers are basically worried about black people pouring out of cities and

00:35:04 invading the suburbs i mean the the racial subtext of this show is unbelievable i mean you know it's so i might so yes i mean i would say uh your anxiety in different ways you can express it through different things but if they end with you ending then it has to have something to do with mortality you you mentioned psychoanalysis and meaning there are different ways psychoanalysis looks at meaning one way you look at meaning is

00:35:36 when you uh have a person in analysis you try to understand what is the meaning of their behavior what is the meaning of their interaction with others what is their meaning and their the meaning of their fantasies about themselves and others but then when you're talking about meaning of life that's something that develops over time i don't think an 18 year old really cares much about the meaning of life he cares about getting a nice card and a nice girlfriend and so on the older you get the more the issue of

00:36:07 meaning of life and achievements and what you've done and what your kids are doing becomes more central so and that again has to do with mortality is the idea that things are not going to last forever so you may as well feel like you had some kind of good or impact or something that you did in this world and this came up last time and it's come keeps coming up to my mind and i've asked the number of

00:36:39 cosmologists and physicists and i i don't really get an answer and the question i have which i think rob put under the rubric or mark norrell put under the rubric of curiosity is why are we interested in the stuff you're talking about i mean that you know you're talking about billions of years i maybe have 10 more years of life why do i care what's going to happen what happened billions of years before i was even around

00:37:09 and why do i care about what's going to happen 15 years 20 years 30 years from now maybe for my kids but after that there is no but yet we have this tremendous i personally have curiosity and interest in the kind of work that you do and there has to be something in humans that makes us want to keep understanding this even to a degree that which seems almost not understandable that this black

00:37:40 energy expands or doesn't expand or whatever else it does well because well first of all hopefully it does become understandable when you first discover things they at first they're confusing but you can't they begin to become familiar as you deal with them more and more um why are we interested well i think we're all curious to know where we came from where we're going and why things are the way they are and so the question of the future is not just a question about the future

00:38:10 it's a question about what forms of energy can exist in the universe how what kinds of effects what are the interactions between matter energy and gravity because not only does that affect the future but it affects every stage of the universe including the present and what's even happening in this room so if i want to know for example you know why the atoms in our bodies are stable i ultimately have to understand something about the most microscopic components

00:38:41 of matter which are the key components of matter that existed at the very beginning of the universe uh if there was a beginning uh at the very beginning of the universe when the universe was quite young they were the universe was boiled into those constituents and how they interacted is what eventually determined how you ended up with atoms and molecules planets and earths and humans and that's also related to what's going to happen in the future and you want to study every stage of this i mean the goal is to is to figure out

00:39:11 this puzzle of why things are the way they are and you use every hint available to you which includes thinking about the past future present recent past and and there's another way to look at it which is that if there was no end there wouldn't be really an interest in end so it must be that to some degree our own mortality is what's

00:39:43 encouraging us or what's pushing us so when you say well everybody's interested in where it began where it is and where it's going yes that is true but why is it so why be interested so psychoanalysts have theories about why it's that we've become interested in our beginnings and in our endings but the fact that we all are aware that there is a final danger which is

00:40:13 mortality and that we are biologically designed to always avoid danger we are constantly avoiding anxiety we are constantly avoiding danger and we have the signal of anxiety which tells us there's danger don't go there don't go there don't go there so that anxiety must have something to do with the kind of things we need to find out because we feel as if in our fantasies that the more we know

00:40:44 the safer we are who was teaching cosmology at princeton four billion years ago don't remember yeah i i just put her when i was speaking about meaning before i really meant on a psychic level the way in which conceptions of my ideal self will allow me to give meaning to my past and that and therefore my presence and i think i think the question that you're implicitly asking or raising is

00:41:14 really the theological question and and we know that freud's sense of religion was one of a kind of false consolation and adam phillips writes about the kind of magical narratives charming oneself with visions of the future and through those charming narratives those fantasies of a benevolent future a future that gives meaning of rendering the present

00:41:46 meaningful philip says it's really avoiding our helplessness our fundamental humanity is defined by their helplessness and we use these narratives of the future of a comforting future a significant and to avoid that and i'm wondering and we haven't we've spoken about apocalypse and we've spoken about endings there's also messianism which functions in the same kind of way i'm wondering to the extent i find

00:42:17 philip so interesting because he's skeptical about everything and he'll write one book where he undermines one set of terms and the next book he will write will undermine the terms that he used to undermine the previous terms the one thing that he shows no skepticism about is a critique of just this kind of theological thinking meaning theology coming from this freudian matrix and i know not everybody this world and we are exceptions to a and embraces certain extent but theology becomes the one thing about

00:42:49 which one and the endings that it causes becomes the one thing about which there is endless and only skepticism and even your comments said i think indicate that you know we get old when we get worried and we sense danger and we get sentimental and we create narratives about the future wonder if that's an exhaustive account obviously this kind of transcends the disciplinary

00:43:20 conversation where does theology fit in or does it does it not is there a generous view of theology from a psychoanalytic point of view from a scientific point of view is it something we just tolerate or presume might exist in one of those patches someplace else is that an embarrassing question i think it's implied

00:43:50 in any idea of meaning um i mean theo if implying an actual god um as being part of the picture i mean it's it's a world you know there are world views for some reason your your voice is not going to be just is it i don't know okay all right and i don't want to sort of talk about it

00:44:24 um yeah this yeah yeah it is hard to talk about i mean there's plenty of people who who have it in a you know an apocalyptic messianic uh view of the world uh the left behind series has sold enormous number of books the christian apocalyptic perspective but um yeah yeah but but i assume when you're talking about theology you're not you're

00:44:55 not you know that that doesn't exhaust the question uh i mean i don't know next year in jerusalem i don't think i'm to be there who knows sure i mean i'm not i also i don't think we should be rebuilding the temple or anything along those lines uh so so i i yeah i'm yeah it is it's not an embarrassing question but it's certainly a difficult question because i think some sort of ultimate sense of where we are and where we're going is is implied in all the literary cases that

00:45:27 i'm looking at um it may or may not be involved in the minds of scientists who are thinking anything i mean for myself just in my lazy way i think that if the universe is going to drift off forever as you describe in one scenario that is a bad thing if the universe is going to recoil back on itself and begin again that to me would be a hopeful possibility and and so that i suppose is the theological force very science point of view uh the galaxy is full of planets and some of those must be earth-like

00:45:58 planets just by the statistics and on some of those earth-like planets there could be uh evolution of life would go on and it would produce intelligent beings and so to to a lot of astronomers and planetary scientists the galaxy is probably full of civilizations intelligent civilizations possibly trying to contact each other over the vast distances of space so we're just one world in many many world situations chris is the case

00:46:29 that the distances are so vast that communication is is is a pretty hopeless possibility no chris limpy said last week two weeks ago your colleague chris limpy said two weeks ago and i don't know if you agree with it or not he said within the next 100 years we will have people going to some other habitable planet and when they go there they will continue to live there they will change because they'll be on another planet but he saw that within completely within realm of possibility humans would go

00:47:00 elsewhere humans will go out there but i think he means planets within our solar system like mars no i don't think he meant now that's a little bit different than contacting the planets that mike's talking about which would be probably the habitable plants where they already exist intelligent life would be probably much farther out we could receive if they were sending it right but having a conversation i think that's what he was he wasn't lying about mars we can't travel very far into the space because his distances are so vast

00:47:32 and our rockets only go so fast well he was saying in the next 100 years that's a pretty yeah i still think it's pretty optimistic no i think that's that strikes me as absolutely implausible yeah who's going to pay for it so i think it underestimates the dangers of space i mean we i mean just thinking about going to mars if you uh as you one of the already there was a dangers of going that distance but what you're talking about which is sort of

00:48:02 the star wars uh stars track kind you have to develop a tremendous technology i don't think it's 100 years but i wanted to ask a question because i don't know the answer to this is so so in in a lot of discussion we're having about theology and cosmology acts like one presumes that the interest in theology is cosmological and my impression is that's a more modern

00:48:33 addition to theology theology was really designed about everyday life and decisions we make about our relationship between ourselves and in god and and how we should behave and was never you know it was never intended as a serious competition with what we would call science nowadays as as creating a cosmological model that's something we impose we've imposed on it maybe in the last thousand years or so or something like that fairly recently

00:49:05 um uh fairly recently well i mean compared to when the religions were compared to when the religions were created and there was the creators of those religions uh cosmology was not foremost on their mind uh behavior was an ethics was on their mind survival yeah i mean i think of cosmology narrative terms and i might have a frame of reference now i was thinking milton which to me is old

00:49:37 and they said before that you know tell me what you believe and tell me what you think about time and i'll tell you what you believe paradise lost in a certain sense as an education in temporality the first five lines of the poem end with until one greater man restore us it begins with mortality death all our role the human condition helplessness this idea of being lost and then this ending until one greater man restores

00:50:07 that is jesus christ figure who's going to come and redeem history and even many interesting things about what you've said i think this in a relationship and this is why i keep on coming back to it there's a relationship between cosmology and ethics there's a relationship between cosmology and how we know the world there's a relationship between the day-to-day and it's so so crucial to milton and other figures in the christian world dante or even in

00:50:39 the classical world the importance of endings in your style everything tends in escuelas's trilogy everything tends towards an ending and in the very beginning of the plot one can already feel the end of the plot and i think there is again that strong relationship between ending and ethics i mean we just tend i think naturally to to look at these messianic frames is overly simplistic milton

00:51:09 gives the lie to that because in a way he shows the skeptical or not religious moment in the heart in the heart of the religious experience the reason people keep on reading nothing is because he's a theological skeptic which is a paradox because i think he accommodates ed's sense of we want to know what the ending is but he doesn't give in to simplistic renderings of what that okay so let me be more specific about my question because okay now i was being

00:51:41 vague i was gonna somebody say specifically christianity i think imposes constraints on cosmology because you can't have the idea of original sin and a messiah unless that sets up that sets up a time frame of a rigid time frame of beginning there's something before and there's got to be something at the end if you think push that away for a bit then um uh then the idea that might be and you can see that such a concept really runs into trouble when you think about a universe which has different

00:52:12 patches which are being created at different times and what is original what does it mean to say something what does this whole story even mean in that context it sort of loses its meaning in that context entirely whereas it doesn't lose its meaning in other theological contexts so i think i i i think to some degree the problem that may be specific with with a christian theology as opposed to other theologies i mean in the 17th century one sees this tension the card and hops begin to spinoza begin to undermine

00:52:43 theology and create a whole different set of disciplinary hierarchies and their sciences at the top then of course there's just a disjunction and then and theology becomes artifice that's why i keep on coming back to i mean i'm i'm very interested in the way in which both of you even as you're presenting us and i'm sorry i'm going to be a humanist here presenting us a picture of the facts are reliant upon metaphors shifts catastrophe dark

00:53:14 energy which i think comes from paradise laws the dark knights of the transformation of dart milton's dark matter maybe i don't know so it seems to me that there's always a narrative rendering of the objective scientific world in which you do it obviously the realm of theology and literature the articles is foregrounded but i understand discomfort you would have with those older versions of cosmology how they

00:53:46 don't they don't gel with the scientific facts and i wonder whether one modern transformation of theological thinking is utopian thinking which also fell into disrepute and disuse and the sense i think came more that this way of life that we're in which is capitalism which is global capital is simply going to continue and continue the history and you know the end of history scenario

00:54:17 that there's this is what's before us more and more consumer goods perhaps increased prosperity around the globe perhaps not but at the end at any rate no alternative and i think it's that sensibility that has spawned the just absolute plethora of violently ending narratives which characterized the last 50 years um you know just so many apocalyptic you know the apocalyptic imagination i think is is very much in response to this

00:54:47 sense of the end of historical progression and this sense of sort of what seems to be a lot of stuff happening all the time everywhere is really just a kind of a complex form of stasis um and so even so theological thinking yes it's who needs it but even utopian thinking is gone it's it's a lot of i'm not sure where the origin of this statement is but um it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

00:55:19 i think it's it seems to be the case there are so many ways to imagine the end of the world and all of them seem dedicated to just wiping out this crap that seems to be the contemporary world out of which there and to which there seems to be no alternative so the challenge to sort of locate an alternative is is you know and i think that's one of the reasons that say the occupy movement became such a powerful you know popular and powerful phenomena at least in that moment that it was whether it will be

00:55:50 again i don't know but it certainly was for a while and because it seemed to be well right right there is some other way of thinking about addressing the social problems that face us in this country and globally ways which are not apocalyptic or which are well or which are but at any rate some some other some other way of thinking um which is what the utopian imagination is trying to do and which was as i say kind of discredited for some time

00:56:23 but it you know is it a form of theology you know yeah yeah i think you can make an argument in the in the evolutionary picture in history life and of the earth science i i said that the old idea from loyell was the president is the key to the past studying what's going on now you can figure out what went on in the past the new motto this has been replaced is the the past is the key to the future so study the way what has happened in the past if it if it did happen it can

00:56:54 happen right and and then those things will repeat themselves into the future and also with with darwinism darwin had this very capitalistic mode right of competition between species and extinctions were caused by one species winning the competition that's all changed now the picture now is that species go along for a long period of time pretty much stable and then something bad happens and lots of species become extinct some catastrophe and then in the aftermath of that extinction life radiates into lots

00:57:24 of new forms the mammals didn't out compete the dinosaurs they just managed to survive the catastrophe 65 million years ago and they radiated into all the forms of mammals that we see today populating the earth so there's been a change that i've seen at the hopefully what would the social i think something that's been implicit in much of what's said is kind of the

00:57:55 reverse engineering of um what you paul were communicating about how the dominance of dark energy would kind of shatter our self-conceptions the reverse engineering of that being and you know you've all been kind of touching upon this how our self-conceptions uh shape and influence how you as scientists theorize and how you recognize

00:58:27 things for what they are what about the self-conceptions right that influence that that's that kind of gets at the bridging of the two cultures that you were kind of uh negotiating uh down in the in the green room i wonder what thoughts you have about that i think about that as a theorist as to whether or not we've thought about all the possible kinds of theories one can have of the universe historically most theories of the universe fall into one of three categories the created universe which is created

00:58:59 and then evolves and just goes forward in time about becoming more and more complex with time the static universe universe is always the same and the cyclical type universe and we think we understand where those come from in terms of our human experience uh they you know uh cyclicity occurs and in certain things in the daily cycle in the seasonal cycle we understand that and a stasis we understand we look at the stars and they

00:59:30 seem to be static so they have an apparent stasis although we now know that there's not a real stasis there but that's where that would have come from and uh the idea of the created universe that's birth that's that that's that's part of our human experience as well and when we talk about the end that's kind of you know that's like our death so the question is is that okay so most models of cosmology you could put into one of those categories and you can ask the question well is that all the possible theories there are or is that just us humans trying to impose our you know

01:00:00 are we just so influenced by our humanity that that's the only kinds of theories we can come up with and one of the interesting things about recent theories is that many of them don't quite so simply categorize and so that's interesting i don't know we don't know whether or not they're true or not but i think that's an interesting development that we're breaking out of those traditional molds i don't know you know in some sense you know uh you know evolution is also undergoing a change in terms of um being more complex

01:00:31 not not being a simple story simple story but being i mean you were even simplifying it the way you were describing it but some sort of combination of you know uh slow evolution and catastrophic evolution and just things are more complex than any simple narrative it's coming to tell us too lots of times it's slow evolution taking place and then you have these uh apocalyptic you know catastrophes right so one of the things that science has forces us to do is to come to grips with whether our narratives make sense

01:01:01 so you keep pushing your narrative and saying okay if this narrative is true then i would guess the following would be true and then you look to see if that's true and when it's not you're forced to correct your narrative and that's i mean that's the discovery of the scientific method that was the grand discovery that you take the scientific method and you add the human brain to it and really something miraculous happens suddenly new information is created out of at a much greater rate than we were able to create any other time any other period up till the present

01:01:31 exactly why that come works that way i don't know i think it really requires both the humanity and the scientific method to work the humanity to be imaginative to come up with stories to come up with guesses huge jumps huge leaps and then the scientific method to check that to put that in check and say okay that's a good guess and that's a bad guess and somehow that works together in some magical way that has led to a tremendous amount of a tremendous run of progress over the last several hundred years

01:02:01 um the scientific method i'm not sure i understand what you're saying the scientific method is something that exists outside of us that we kind of yes i mean like we just got like the monolith oh it was discovered yeah the idea that you empirically test your ideas that that you don't just tell your story and because it's a good story i mean that that's what this we were talking about theology theologies are really good stories uh which have a lot of appeal to them and and and there's some good lessons to be learned from them but then you want to you know

01:02:32 but you know is that story true or is that story true you know well well theology would maybe not answer the question but for you know why stars form there are different stories you could think of right but you need back and so the human imagination allows you to leap and think of many possible stories and then you impose on that the scientific method with many different you know i i have to find objective ways of demonstrating to you that that idea is right and that idea is wrong objective in the sense that you know people in different parts of the world

01:03:02 with different backgrounds can all agree on you know i'll make those observations and come to the same conclusions that that was an invented idea and you know invented in the renaissance it was not an idea that was there historically beforehand and it led to a tremendous run of several hundred years up to the present time of you know the rate of which new information has come to us has just you know just exponentially increased since that time maybe there's a better invention a better something better than the scientific method for increasing the

01:03:33 rate at which we gain information we haven't discovered it yet i don't know but at the moment this is our best invention that does just sound to me as a literary critic as a kind of utopian narrative before this is the death of utopian narratives the scientific method is the miraculous yeah i don't know a history of science to to talk about it but but obviously any all pre-modern societies i mean they had some form of trial and error you know you you you made stone uh you know implements you figured out ways to do it it wasn't a formalized

01:04:05 scientific method but it was an empirical it was a form of empiricism i think so so but but as you but yeah i mean but something happened in the whatever 16th 17th century some convergence i would think of political economic social um thinking such that this idea of standardization of repeatability verifiability there were different goals i mean i i guess i would question the sense that oh you know just

01:04:37 for no particular reason somebody thought of this great way of doing inquiry i mean the results of it i think are as you said but but the origins of it maybe that was discussed two weeks ago but the origins of it i i would think there would be more uh other social ideological economic questions that were at play you know one wanted to be able to do things one wanted to be able to explore the world and want to be able to create

01:05:08 products that were markets developing so i just at least that's that's just the mindset that i can disagree with don't disagree if those were that was part of the spirit of the time i mean and um yeah so being being successful and meant you know being able to succeed in the marketplace uh was different than being successful because let's say i was the king or something like that so uh so it led to more competition of of products and a competition of ideas

01:05:38 and um knowledge is power and so suddenly it was possible to be powerful without being in this aristocratic by by having knowledge and i think that that's i'm not a historian so but my guess would be that would be part of the forces that are at work that led to what is i think is clearly an invention because certainly the way knowledge was gathered you know say before galileo newton is quite different than the way it was gathered since galileo newton and the amount of progress that's been made there in every area of science is just

01:06:09 there's no comparison to what was there before i'm just fascinated by the connection between senses of endings and ways of knowing we know we know how to know now differently we know factually no in an empirical way things are objectifiable well so for example uh you know uh there are different ideas

01:06:40 we have this is a question um so the so maybe the way they respond to that is to say to make it a scientifically meaningful issue it had better have some empirical consequences so in some sense being a scientist you restrict yourself to a domain of questions or domain of issues which have empirical consequences if they not you're welcome to think about them but they're outside the domain of science what i'm wondering about cosmologies that allow for different ways of knowing

01:07:11 i'm also wondering and the culture that he represents in competition with this draconian hobbsian universe which is i mean hobbs really comes armed with bacon and anticipating society and he comes to destroy don shakespeare milton these are not legitimate ways of knowing they argue through paradise they argue through what hobbes will call and reject as metaphorical

01:07:43 contradiction it's also an extremely resonant question here how does how does this kind of empirical knowledge jim talk before about primary process about dreams what happens to those primary process insights those insights that are not reducible to secondary process i mean how does the psychoanalyst intertwine with this miraculous narrative and i'm not i'm not i'm not doubting miraculousness i'm not undermining that miraculous

01:08:14 narrative but i'm also trying to understand the the consequences of that cosmology grounded as it is an objectifiable reality with other cosmologies which allow for other kinds of knowing and that's just that that's a a literary historical interest of mine because i'm always interested in the relationship between hobbs and the beginning of a kind of modernity but he's also the end

01:08:45 and hobbes of course has just announced it as i said before just the death of this other kind of culture and the depth of a kind of knowing which is based upon metaphor which is based upon paradigms it seems so much of what would go on in this building would have to do with that other kind of knowing so maybe it's worth saying that uh in cosmology as although cosmology is in some sense one of the oldest sciences in terms of people thinking about it in terms of being an empirical science it's one of the newest

01:09:15 so up until 1920 we weren't even able to see and recognize there were galaxies beyond our own and we've gathered more data in the last 10 years about the nearby intermediate and most distant observable parts of the universe which correspond to the present intermediate and past distant past of the universe that we just didn't have before so from a scientific point of view you can just take the data from the last 10 years and throw against that all the

01:09:46 concepts of cosmology that have been developed by humans throughout human history and almost all of them are inconsistent with those observations with the exception of two i can name uh two ideas uh which is a pretty amazing statement just based on a decade's worth of data so that's so so where does science come into it well if you insist on the scientific methodology that your cosmology should make sense with you know with an objective observation which is what scientists do then then you can sort

01:10:17 through these different ideas and say okay that was a great idea very imaginative idea but that idea is not our universe and okay and this one is even though it may not have been the one you would have chosen so that's all i can offer it's a lot i think so but but you may not always be happy with the outcome so so maybe uh if there aren't further comments from the roundtable we could

01:10:49 open it up to uh questions from the audience please you know state your name the sessions were weekly there on monday and she said that the world was going to end on friday and then the next session when she came out on monday i asked her how she felt about the

01:11:19 situation she said no it's going to it's going to end on friday this went on for months the reason i mentioned is is that i think the akapel the apocalyptic and sort of dramatic sense of ending may have a basis in a stereotypical unconscious part of our minds where it's a it's it's sort of boilerplate it's stereotypical it doesn't come

01:11:50 it doesn't seem to be based on anything it's delusional and that it just is sort of there uh had my therapy focused on relieving her of the problem that the world was going to end up it would have gotten nowhere and probably actually would have gotten worse uh and antipsychotic medication actually did reduce that over a period of time and she got to the point where she said i just don't think about it anymore the other issue was that the problem with anxiety with this

01:12:22 lady was was her marital realm and i thought oh it's symbolic see if the world's going to what that means to her is my marriage is going to break up and that will be the end of the world for me there really wasn't any connection at all in fact the marriage wasn't breaking up in fact we did make some progress with the marital therapy and she did fairly well so it's just a sort of a word of caution i guess is to

01:12:54 is that in in the unconscious the stereotypical unconscious we have i asked i worked in a prison for a while i asked inmates to write down to draw me the devil it was an amazing similarity i had 12 drawings of people that didn't know each other and were not comparing notes a rodent-like figure big teeth big eyes big ears tail pitch pork so on i mean this is a stereotypical

01:13:25 unconscious and i'm afraid it fuels things like apocalypse and so on and that it just it keeps keeps that going that we just keep in mind that it may be part of our whole structure of our mind that is is more stereotypical than actually symbolic or actually meaningful and the other thing i want to ask is for you in particular is would you consider that there might be an eternal universe but there also might be a local big bang

01:13:57 universe that we live in that's not eternal that is is and is there do we perhaps perceive that intuitively and is there something having to do with envy are we because we're so finite envious of the eternal that may be out there and so we try to go through elaborate situations uh and anarchists and stories and so on to make believe that that our life is eternal you know it's

01:14:28 not the universe had those are we envious of the cosmos thank you i can't addre it's an interesting question the last one i can't answer it but to answer your your your scientific question which is can you is it possible to have the universe which is eternal on on average there are parts that are always existing and being in new creations taking place and parts which are ending in one way or another ending by catastrophically or ending by this sort of petering out yes that is the picture

01:14:59 that is if you were going to guess that if you're going to describe the prevalent picture among cosmologists that would be the prevalent picture among cosmologists at present the physics the science seems to allow for that possibility uh and it seems allows for it i mean it makes predictions about the part of the universe that we observe that so far have been verified so it doesn't allow us to see out there to check it but there are other inferences of such theories that we can that do make implications for what we should observe about the radiation from the early universe and the distribution

01:15:31 of galaxies that so far work and so right now that idea seems to be working well i i would just add maybe that ancient ancient cosmologists from the talmudic rabbis to augustine assume that time is a creative thing and that there is something beyond time and eternity and i also would just add speculations about eternity

01:16:02 dovetail with what i keep on coming back to the speculation about the divine i mean the non-empirically objectifiable i think that was the question themselves is there something beyond the empirically objectifiable and that's that becomes not a question i think only for scientists although i hear the scientific answer that becomes that becomes a conversation where philosophers and their theologians also

01:16:38 ernestine bradley the new school i have the impression that we were really talking about two different times one the cultural time in which theology is subsumed all theology not just jude or christian or whatnot in which literature is subsumed from doris lessing to milton and whatnot psychiatry and what i was lacking in this conversation was the fact of self-awareness that we are all talking

01:17:10 in a box that we are western oriented we have not included other boxes which would still be boxes uh so that's really i don't want us to believe that we are you know the horse's mouth and that's why it was very important for me to mention this but if i use the term myth that we all every culture needs a myth to deal with death not just with ending

01:17:40 but with death and sometimes that death can lead into rebirth so there is no ending and i thought you know maybe we should also keep that in mind and then the last one the one question i really have is a question addressed to the cosmologists and the astrophysicists whether astrophysics isn't again a myth a contemporary myth that is totally dependent on the

01:18:12 instruments that are available the instruments you know chasing the big bang or whatever and of course you can say that the instruments themselves are already the outcome of the direction in which you want to go with your research but i wonder again whether this is not inside a box which is our box today

01:18:45 um well see so um number of interesting comments and i'm trying to decide which one to begin with i do think that i try to make the point that i think science is a it's a human invented method which combines our ability to imagine and make myths and make stories and make net make make narratives with

01:19:18 objectivity in the sense of the instruments and ways in which we can make prescriptions that you know i i can write something down and say you do this observation and you will observe i predict you will observe the say the following and you will go do it and you will actually observe it which is an interesting you know an interesting kind of interesting truth which turns out to have a lot of practical value that we can do that uh as opposed to other stories which may be less practical uh maybe very appealing but maybe less practical uh but i mean you can call i'm not sure i mean the words have

01:19:50 connotation so when you say is science a kind of mythology which involves instruments and mathematics and object and you can use the word myth but i i think it somehow deserves a different word and i think and so i'll use the word science well i think i think you're saying that that there's a difference between calling science and mythology and science arising from the same human capacities that that myth making um

01:20:20 entail doesn't mean that science yeah i think we've extended our imagination i think that's the point i was trying to make i think a scientific methodology extends us beyond our imagination to be able to distinguish different stories which are practical interests like i want to know if there's going to be a solar eclipse in japan uh today okay which there is okay the fact that i can predict that is based on observations and then you can go off and check with the japanese call your friends in japan say yeah sure enough

01:20:51 there was a solar eclipse there it's different than other myths i could make up of why there are solar eclipse which would not give me that power to predict so i think of science it's just a it's it's a way we've learned to make our imaginations more powerful to be able to predict and explain things in ways with that now allow us to say what's going to happen next give us better control over our lives our health our all the things that technology brings us those are real things that science has brought us which make it different than

01:21:22 myth making the yeah yeah absolutely i think the the mythological or ideological um consequences are that the idea of predictability becomes a kind of fetish so that if one if if a discipline that does not lead toward predictive consequences then it's devalued and i think that is maybe what earnest was talking about and that's certainly something that occurs to me for example the

01:21:52 very prominent pseudoscience of economics you're about to laugh seems to me you know it's it's predictive assertions seem to be completely inadequate inadequate at least and yet there's an ideological fixation on this discipline such that the smartest guys in the room are the economists because they can do these amazing things with numbers and they have this whole apparatus and so the scientific instrument has now been appropriated by

01:22:25 a field which really has nothing to do i'd say with science as you described so there is a mythology of science uh actual scientists i don't think are part of it in the whole but but there is a myth that comes from it well it's an attempt to i mean okay we've discovered this method that works for certain kinds of questions it works really well for explaining why this table is as solid as it is and doesn't the same methodology doesn't work so well for economics and so science is limited it's it's as i said it's an invention and and like any

01:22:57 invention i like the blackberry it works well for some things but not for some for other things and and how do we work but you try and when it works it works really powerfully right and we know we we've seen that and so we we okay so it's it's natural to say well could we apply it to answer this question or or that other question and sometimes you can and sometimes you can't and so you try it's part of human efforts to try to gain knowledge uh i have a more more narrow technical

01:23:27 question for uh michael sanders a more narrow technical question for dr steinhardt is it thought that the amount of dark energy is increasing and if so by how does it come about okay so it's a simple question you guys a simple question so um yes it is increasing in terms of a total

01:23:58 amount of dark energy but there's two things going on at the same time the universe is expanding and as it expands energy spreads out becomes more dilute but different forms of energy become diluted different rates matter you know just spreads out the more you make if you double the volume it then its density decreases by a factor of two radiation decreases at a faster rate because as it spreads out it also the photons redshift so they actually lose energy faster

01:24:29 dark energy is the energy that loses its energy either not at all its density not at all or at the slowest so over time it eventually takes over because everything else dilutes and it doesn't another thing that's happening is when you're stretching the universe you're creating more space and that space has energy in it so there's therefore more energy total of energy is growing and where is that coming from well it's coming from gravity so one thing that's not we should have all learned in elementary school but i even find my advanced graduate

01:25:00 students don't quite appreciate it is that gravity is the one form of one force in which you can draw an infinite amount of energy and this is an example of it an expanding universe filled with dark energy creates keeps stretching creating new space filled with dark energies the total dark energy grows the gravitational energy decreases but gravitational energy is a kind of bottomless pit so you can just keep doing that forever and that's what the laws of physics tell us can happen and could be happening that could be happening for that could that's one

01:25:32 possibility for the long-term future of the universe that's all that happens there's more and more dark energy less and less of everything else go ahead this gentleman than you my name is irving heller and i'm just passing through like the rest of us in life this has been a great i really mean a great post-doctoral discussion but i would like you to focus for a couple of minutes on the starkest notion

01:26:05 of one's end that's one's personal death was demise i would venture to say that to discuss the topic today if this were your final hour would you see things differently would be clarifying terrifying or indifferent the silence is

01:26:48 i want preservation of poetry and i'm wondering if that gets preserved with these cosmologists you said you know i might not like it but one of the things i don't like is or is there you know ginger the the post-apocalyptic is there post-apocalyptic poetry i mean you mentioned lesson literary theory is post-apocalyptic poetry we know that blake worried about newton because newton made poetry impossible or if he thought so to get away from the intellectual level what about the emotional level about

01:27:20 life that was alluded to where is that in our efforts to try to get to the point of it all i don't know is is one is one's sense of the meaning of life dependent on the actual act of dying the moment of one's death i i i don't know i mean i think there's meaning in every moment of your life uh i don't i think it's melodramatic to

01:27:51 put it in those terms of course when one gets to that point then you'll get to that point somebody suggested to me we should have an undertaker for this round table so so i don't know i i can't i can't answer it i'm not sure that to answer the ques especially questions you want to answer but you're asking whether the emotions you have near your moments before death are helpful is that what you're asking are they helpful in addressing these questions my guess is they're not

01:28:21 helpful to answer these questions because you're emotional you're a little preoccupied with something else probably irrationally but i don't know go ahead i'm very interested that you try to connect the arts and literature with the

01:28:51 sciences in terms of what's developing in the science and wanting to feel that the arts have to follow suit because very most often the arts have dealt with certain structural elements and there is an implication that some of these structural elements you felt were obsolete for instance like tension or drama or apocalypse or contradiction or paradox and it's curious that you're thinking as science develops we the artists and the writers

01:29:22 and the philosophers have to change our structure of the very nature of our existence because we experience life in one way and even if our knowledge changes there's still certain elements in the paradox of living because of the inherent tensions in it so i found this why were you so concerned that my goodness actually that seems to be some of the problems that what's happening in the arts today that they're dissolving and evaporating and receding almost in fear that certain structures are

01:29:52 obsolete this is this is just a general comment and i have one other thing that always interested me maybe because in philosophy it was mentioned in schopenhauer and so about repetition and heraclitus speaking about you can never step in the same with a river twice and it seems to me as you're talking that repetition there is not any longer a concept of repetition in science but there is some base by which you work uh that gradually evolves but is there a underlying structure that keeps changing

01:30:24 or is there or do you find there are some some some elements that are building stones that are there if you follow what i'm saying i mean the huracan view uh versus the idea is there such a thing as a repetition do we ever repeat anything i i think the first question i mean the humanities have been anxious poets have been anxious since plato we've become anxious again in the 17th century

01:30:54 with hobbs and we became more anxious with the development of science the disciplinary hierarchies have changed go to my university in israel marilyn and see the size of the new physics buildings and the nanotechnology buildings and the old humanities building it's very clear why that anxiety should exist i'm also just struck by the the the assertion of the separation between the emotional and intellectuals that that's not somehow given and again i think where are we in this building in which i think that that dichotomy would

01:31:26 be very strongly interrogated and to think about the role that the poetic functions not only as hobbs would derogatorily put it for something which is nice looking or pretty but the way primary process functions as a way of knowing and paradox functions as a way not only of some kind of ephemeral poetic expression but in which the emotions and the intellect are somehow

01:31:56 more unified i mean that's i think one of the inheritances of the scientific world is that the emotions have been pushed out poetry has been pushed to the side yeah yeah i i don't think the arts really necessarily sort of following the sciences or trying to sort of keep up with with what scientific developments are doing um except i don't know the the science that seems to be to have captured people's imaginations most recently it seems to be neuroscience

01:32:27 and and uh the resume arts and neuroscience is something that people tend to be thinking about quite a bit the gap in sort of disciplinary emphases between you know cosmology and you know these kind of enormous wastes of time these voids of time are um so i mean the question if the question is sort of where do we come together and i'm thinking i mean

01:32:57 yeah i mean we're thinking about different things i mean the histories of our disciplines are different and maybe i mean maybe there should be an inherent tension what's wrong with things that aren't resolved ever but our tension between what's happening scientifically what's going on in the arts there can remain the tension between the two which creates an apocalyptic vision yeah i don't think there's any problem with with different fields having

01:33:28 different methodologies and different approaches it's it's there's different kinds of people we we all we had different childhoods we had different teachers when we were in high school we went different ways so that's what we did the question is where you know do we come together socially and politically or are there questions which we really do think about in common as a mortal beings and be as citizens and i think i would hope that that would be that's the more important question i think than than whether our particular academic interests coincide

01:34:00 well as as a i mean you know science is not a robotic process it's a creative process like uh in the arts and and and and so where does the inspiration come from well the inspiration comes from a very similar human process sometimes you might go to an art museum and look at a piece of art and that might inspire you to think of an idea that science that turns out to have a scientific meaning you know so that's the purpose of these round tables or this yeah you know something so so so

01:34:30 we and that and that's why i'm here you know part of these twice exactly we're here coming to this is because this kind of thing can't inspire unusual discussions it gets you just thinking a little bit differently and then suddenly on the train home i may think about a problem today and view it in a different way and uh something good happens from it so that's where the human part of the process comes from um i want to answer your question about repeatability so um so in fact there's a sort of double problem about repeatability number one

01:35:02 um if you mean by exactly repeatability classically before we consider quantum physics that is statistically you know so unlikely is not to be worth considering uh but with quantum mechanics it even becomes ill-defined because when you say exactly the exact repeatability it assumes that you have an exact notion of position time energy mass and in quantum physics those are all now fuzzy objects which only

01:35:34 have probabilities not certainties so that's that's the current condition of a current way of understanding the best we can do in the universe so we can say it's approximately repeating something is approximately repeating in certain average quantities but exactly repeating would never almost lose meaning in the quantum sense go ahead my name is ken wade i'm an artist from downtown and i want to talk more about dartmouth dr max sounds like a very sinister thing

01:36:07 i remembering movies when i was a little kid launching in june who used to morph into the wolf man when the moon came out full so i know we're affected by stuff out there so i'm wondering this is a an increasing as you said dark energy yeah yeah so does this explain everything or does it have any influence on matters here like all these terrible

01:36:51 okay so first of all the term dark energy or uh is not meant to be sinister it's meant to tell you that it has energy and that it doesn't emit or absorb light so it's it's a fairly boring term and not not my favorite term for it but that's become the convention so although there's lots of it it's extremely thinly spread so within our solar system most of the most of the matter in our solar system is not dark most energy sorry in our solar system is not dark energy it's the matter you know

01:37:22 and love the energy that makes up you the earth the sun the planets and the light uh however space is normal you know it's hard to conceive until you've thought about the numbers or and even with the numbers a man help you but space is enormous compared to uh the the places where matter is concentrated uh and if you imagine that even in those spaces between galaxies there's still this thin distribution of dark energy it adds up to be a huge total so the total is huge

01:37:53 but it within our galaxy within our solar system it's so thinly spread that it doesn't have any significant effect so in fact it's only effect is when you look at the universe and the large and then when it sums up to be more than all the matter in galaxies and and stars then it becomes a dominant influence in controlling the stretching of the universe and because it's gravitational repulsor that encourages the stretching and causes this acceleration whereas the matter is trying to hold itself together

01:38:25 it wins because there's more of it because it's so thinly spread but spread out but occupy so much space yes one effect that won't affect their elections um and one of the things that i think you mentioned

01:38:55 struck me about this gathering and our what we're doing here it seems to me that it's a lot of what we're doing is intellectualizing speaking in the abstract and being scientific is a defense against the anxieties that that we all could feel if we took the time about perhaps our own impending

01:39:26 death whether it is or isn't my religion if you like and it's not really a religion it's a lifestyle is buddhism and buddhists have a way of making impermanence meaningful to us by using it to motivate us maybe and say life life i am mortal

01:39:56 my life is infinite and i must do something meaningful is one of the common prayers if you like of a buddhist and uh that therefore is motivating um impermanence is seen all around you might walk down the street and see a pigeon that's dropped dead overnight any one of us could drop dead now or on the way home and it's it's having that

01:40:28 awareness in our consciousness that that is that lends to or adds to the quality perhaps of our lives um because we know that that that is there to ignore it is a defense against feeling that thank you yeah so i want to thank the audience comments and interlocutors and and our

01:41:00 panelists today jim berger paul steinhardt bill cobriner and michael rampino for a stimulating discussion um you know perhaps i can invoke winston churchill's words uh from 1942 when he said you no this is not the end it's not even the beginning of the end but perhaps it's the end of the beginning and please follow us on helixcenter.org for further announcements

01:41:31 for our fall programs and thank you all for coming