The Trouble with Everything

Summary

Radiolab: "The Trouble with Everything"
Date: June 13, 2013
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Notable Guests: Jenny Hollowell, Brian Greene, Alan Lightman

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Episode Overview

In "The Trouble with Everything," Radiolab delves into the cosmic and the personal, exploring the idea of whether it's possible to truly understand "everything." The episode is structured around two contrasting approaches: the narrative, emotional take provided by author Jenny Hollowell, and the scientific, theoretical perspective from physicist Brian Greene. The show probes foundational questions about the origins of the universe, the boundaries of human understanding, and the emotional ramifications of having — or losing — grand explanatory narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Narrative of Everything: Jenny Hollowell's Story

• The episode opens with Radiolab hosts discussing the challenge of defining "everything," leading into Jenny Hollowell's short story, "A History of Everything, including you."
• Hollowell's reading rapidly telescopes from the beginning of time to the intimate details of a single relationship, blending cosmic creation with the emotional landscape of human life. (04:22–11:33)
  • Notable quote (Jenny Hollowell, reading):
    “We called it… Blinking. Above us shone a star that we called the sun. And we called the ground the Earth. So we named everything, including ourselves.” (around 05:40)
  • The story encompasses love, loss, routine, and mortality, suggesting that personal histories are as vast and complex as the universe itself.
• Behind the Writing:
  • Hollowell describes how the story poured out of her in a single day, an experience she admits is highly unusual for her (03:47).
  • She connects the impetus for the story to therapy and the frustration of tracing one’s origins to endlessly receding causes.
    Notable quote (Jenny Hollowell):
    “At some point, you're talking about some caveman's emotionally unavailable parents.” (12:30)
  • The loss of her religious faith and the struggle to create a narrative played a role:

    “I think that definitely is a part of, you know, the searching that I was going through at the time. Just that desire to grasp what might be the grand, you know, heart of it all.” (13:07)

  • Hollowell frames her story as an act of reconstructing a creation narrative after losing earlier certainties.

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2. The Physicist's Quest: Brian Greene on Knowing Everything

• The second segment pivots to scientific inquiry with theoretical physicist Brian Greene (16:22).

• Greene explains the physicist's dream: to find a set of fundamental equations that can, in principle, explain everything about the universe.
  Notable quote (Brian Greene):
  “The hope and the goal is that the theories that we work out will apply everywhere and tell us about everything.” (17:03)

• The Multiverse Complication:

  • Robert Krulwich introduces an article by Alan Lightman questioning whether the idea of multiple universes undermines the whole project of “knowing everything” (18:46).
  • Greene explains that if multiple universes exist, each with different laws and properties, much that we thought was fundamental may simply be local to our universe:

    “When we study the equations... the other universes could have different features, different particle compositions, different masses of the particles, different forces.” (20:03)

  • Rather than a loss, Greene argues this is progress:
    “We’ve seen this before in the history of science.” (21:42)
    He cites Kepler’s shift from asking why the Earth is a certain distance from the Sun to understanding the general laws of gravity that organize all planetary orbits.

• Can We Ever Know Everything? Skeptics and Limits

  • Greene suggests new questions arise, such as, “What do all of these universes still have in common?” (24:02)
  • But he acknowledges observational limits:
    “We don't know very much observationally. Sure, we can't see them.” (24:42)
  • Greene holds a “deep faith” in coherence of reality, relying on mathematical logic, not dogma:

    “I do have a deep faith that the universe is coherent… The only tool that I know how to encapsulate that coherence are mathematical equations.” (30:08)

  • Krulwich pushes on the distinction between scientific logic and faith—a key philosophical tension.

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3. Philosophical Challenge: Alan Lightman's Perspective

• Krulwich brings in Alan Lightman, whose article sparked the discussion (31:40).
  • Lightman is more epistemologically pessimistic:

    “We don’t even know whether the outer universes exist in the same space and time that we do… We will never be able to have any physical evidence of their existence. And that possibility is what I find disturbing.” (32:25)

  • He suggests:
    “We may have pushed the human mind as far as it can possibly go.” (33:12)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [03:12] Jad Abumrad (on choosing Hollowell’s story):

  “It got kind of ugly internally… But the one story that we all agreed on instantly and we never really looked back… was a story from Jenny Hollowell called A History of Everything, including you.”

• [13:32] Robert Krulwich (on personal narratives):

  “The logic of that is, having lost a given-to-you narrative of how things began, you were thinking, okay, so let me see if I can work my own narrative from the ground up.”

• [17:03] Brian Greene:

  “The hope and the goal is that the theories that we work out will apply everywhere and tell us about everything.”

• [21:36] Robert Krulwich (summarizing Greene’s view):

  “If you’re focused on one thing, you’re going to think that one thing is the key to everything. When your one turns to many, then you think, ah, well, the one thing really wasn’t so special. But the way Brian sees it, that is progress.”

• [32:25] Alan Lightman (skeptical about multiverses):

  “We don't even know whether the outer universes exist in the same space and time that we do… that possibility is what I find disturbing.”

• [33:12] Alan Lightman:

  “We may have pushed the human mind as far as it can possibly go.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro & setup: 01:16–02:34
• Jenny Hollowell's reading: 04:22–11:33
• Discussion with Hollowell: 11:39–14:44
• Brian Greene on knowing everything: 16:22–29:00
• Debate on logic, faith, and mathematical laws: 27:20–31:25
• Alan Lightman’s philosophical response: 31:40–33:36
• Conclusion: 33:41–34:09

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Tone & Style Notes

• Warm, engaging, and occasionally self-deprecating, with friendly bickering between Krulwich and Greene.
• The episode’s mood shifts from narrative and introspective with Hollowell to cerebral and speculative with Greene and Lightman, but always foregrounds curiosity and wonder.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

"The Trouble with Everything" glides between the cosmic and the personal, asking whether the human search for "everything," in science or in story, always ends in mystery. The episode balances the comfort and necessity of narrative (Hollowell) with the restless ambition and limitations of scientific reasoning (Greene and Lightman). While science revises what "everything" means, personal histories and cosmology both evoke awe—and humility—before the unknown.

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Want more?

• Read Jenny Hollowell’s story: Linked on radiolab.org
• Read Alan Lightman’s essay: Coming in his book "The Accidental Universe."

Transcript

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[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, you're listening.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. All right.

[Radiolab Announcer]

You're listening to Radio Lab.

[Robert Krulwich]

Radio Lab shorts from WNYC.

[Radiolab Announcer]

And npr.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, the podcast. And before we get rolling on this podcast, just two items of business we wanna put in front of you.

[Robert Krulwich]

First, we're gonna be very. I don't know when you're listening to this, but if you're listening to this before June 19, 2013, that would be a Wednesday. Next Wednesday, then you will find us. If you're a Reddit person, we' and ask me anything for the Reddit folks on that date, 3pm Eastern. So if you want to join us there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. And as the name suggests, you can ask us whatever you want and we'll do our best to answer. Details are on our website, Radiolab.org okay, bit of business number two, which we're really excited about, is we're very close to announcing our next live tour, which is going to happen later in the fall. We're going to go to 20 cities. It's going to be awesome to checkradiolab.org for that too.

[Robert Krulwich]

And now to the podcast at hand. We are going to be considering Two very different takes on everything.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Later, we'll get to physicist Brian Greene.

[Jad Abumrad]

But we're gonna start with a woman whose name is not Brian.

[Brian Greene]

Hello. Hello.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello.

[Jenny Hollowell]

Hi.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hi.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this Jenny, by any chance?

[Jenny Hollowell]

It sure is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Her name's Jenny Hollowell. She's a writer, an author. And here's the setup. So we were recently asked by the show, Selected Shorts to curate an evening of stories, just to select a couple for people to read. Well, that turned out to be really hard for us. Like, we. We could not agree. We argued. It got kind of ugly internally. I'm not gonna go there. But the one story that we all.

[Robert Krulwich]

Agreed on instantly and we never really looked back.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Was a story from Jenny Hollowell called A History of Everything, including you. So we called her up and we asked her to.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, I kind of gushed a little first.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, yeah. There was the fawning.

[Robert Krulwich]

There was the fawning. I know that people are going to hear this, so they're not going to read it. So they won't be able to dwell on just the incredible tensions in these very short and specific sentences that you've written. But I'm just wondering, how long did this. It's about five pages. To hold in your hand. How many decades did it take for you to write this?

[Jenny Hollowell]

Well, it's one of those stories that defies most of my experiences with writing stories, which is that it came out very quickly, and I always hate hearing other writers say how quickly something came about because it's a rare occurrence. And you're always kind of full of envy for those moments. This is the one story I think I've ever written in a day.

[Brian Greene]

Really. Wow.

[Jenny Hollowell]

But then the vision.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just not fair. That will.

[Jad Abumrad]

Would you mind reading it for us? And we can talk more on the back end.

[Radiolab Announcer]

Okay, sure. A History of Everything, including you. First, there was God or gods or nothing. Then synthesis. Space. The expanse. Explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion and fusion. Out of the chaos came order. Stars were born and shone and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses. And the elements combined and became life, evolved or was created. Cells trembled and divided and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs and fins and hands and antennae and mouths and ears and wings and eyes. Eyes that opened wide to take all of it in the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe. Eyes opened and closed and opened again. We called it. Blinking above us shone a star that we called the sun. And we called the ground the Earth. So we named everything, including ourselves. We were man and Woman. And when we got lonely, we figured out a way to make more of us. We called it sex, and most people enjoyed it. We fell in love. We talked about God and banged stones together, made sparks and called them fire. We got warmer and the food got better. We got married, we had some children. They cried and crawled and grew. One dissected flowers, sometimes eating the petals. Another liked to chase squirrels. We fought wars over money and honor and women. We starved ourselves. We hired prostitutes. We purified our water. We compromised, decorated and became esoteric. One of us stopped breathing and turned blue. Then others. First we covered them with leaves and then we buried them in the ground. We remembered them, we forgot them. We aged. Our buildings kept getting taller. We hired lawyers and formed councils and left paper trails. We negotiated, we admitted. We got sick and searched for cures. We invented lipstick, vaccines, Pilates, solar panels, interventions, table manners, firearms, window treatments, therapy, birth control, tailgating, status symbols, palimony, sportsmanship, focus groups, Zoloft, sunscreen, landscaping, Cessnas, fortune cookies, chemotherapy, convenience foods and computers. We angered militants and our mothers. You were born. You learned to walk and went to school and played sports and lost your virginity and got into a decent college and majored in psychology and went to rock shows and became political and got drunk and changed your major to marketing and wore turtleneck sweaters and read novels and volunteered and went to movies and developed a taste for blue cheese dressing. I met you through friends and didn't like you at first. The feeling was mutual, but we got used to each other. We had sex for the first time behind an art gallery, standing up and slightly drunk. You held my face in your hands and said that I was beautiful and you were too tall with a streetlight behind you. We went back to your place and listened to the White Album. We ordered in. We fought and made up and got good jobs and got married and bought an apartment and worked out and ate more and talked less. I got depressed. You ignored me. I was sick of you. You drank too much and got careless with money. I slept with my boss. We went into counseling and got a dog. I bought a book of sex positions and we tried the least degrading one, the wheelbarrow. You took flight lessons and subscribed to Rolling Stone. I learned Spanish and started gardening. We had some children who more or less disappointed us, but it might have been our fault. You were too indulgent and I was too critical. We loved them anyway. One of them died before we did, stabbed on the subway. We grieved, we moved, we adopted a cat. The world Seemed uncertain. We lived beyond our means. I got judgmental and belligerent. You got confused and easily tired. You ignored me. I was sick of you. We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails. We got tender. There was that time on the porch when you said, can you believe it? This was near the end. And your hands were trembling. I think you were talking about everything, including us. Did you want me to say it so it would not be lost? It was too much for me to think about. I could not go back to the beginning. I said, not really. And we watched the sun go down. A dog kept barking in the distance. And you were tired, but you smiled and you said, hear that? It's rough. Rough. And we laughed. You were like that. Now your question is my project. And our house is full of clues. I'm reading old letters and turning over rocks. I bury my face in your sweaters. I study a photograph taken at the beach. The sun in our eyes and the water behind us. It's a victory to remember the forgotten picnic basket and your striped beach blanket. It's a victory to remember how the jellyfish stung you and you ran screaming from the water. It's a victory to remember dressing the wound with meat tenderizer and you saying, I made it better. I will tell you this. Standing on our hill this morning, I looked at the land we chose for ourselves. I saw a few green patches and our sweet little shed. That same dog was barking. A storm was moving in. I did not think of heaven, but I saw that the clouds were beautiful. And I watched them cover the sun.

[Robert Krulwich]

A history of everything, including you, by Jenny Hallowell.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jenny, can you talk a little bit about, like, what you were thinking when.

[Brian Greene]

You were writing this?

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, where did this come from?

[Jenny Hollowell]

Oh, I. Well, the story kind of came from that impulse to kind of trace back, I think maybe. I was in therapy at the time, and, you know, they always ask you about your parents or the. And I found myself a little frustrated by the idea that it's traceable, like, whatever sort of position you find yourself in life that you can trace back to the origin. If you follow that logic, then you're eventually going to end up in a protoplasmic sort of situation. And I think that's because on the.

[Robert Krulwich]

Couch, the guy said, so tell me about your parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents. It's one of those kind of things, kind of.

[Jenny Hollowell]

I mean, where does it end? At some point, you're talking about some caveman's emotionally Unavailable parents.

[Jad Abumrad]

And to imagine one of the conversations you might have had with your therapist. I know you were once very religious and then you kind of lost your faith. I mean, was that part of this, did that happen near or in the neighborhood of writing the story?

[Jenny Hollowell]

It was probably about two years before the writing of the story, but it was a very. It was still a very fresh experience. I was sort of in the thick of it at that time.

[Jad Abumrad]

And was there something of that struggle or fall from faith that kind of got infused into the storytelling?

[Jenny Hollowell]

I think so, too. I mean, I think that definitely is a part of, you know, the searching that I was going through at the time. Just that desire to grasp what might be the grand, you know, heart of it all. So the story was a little about that wrestling experience, trying to explain how I'm here, how we got here, how we ended up in this moment, and.

[Robert Krulwich]

The logic of that is having lost a given to you narrative of how things began. You were thinking, okay, so let me see if I can work my own narrative from the ground up.

[Jenny Hollowell]

That's definitely where I was just sort of maybe mourning the loss of that narrative a little bit and making one of my own to just give me something to think about. I definitely don't feel like I stumbled across any solutions, but I felt like the comfort of narrative is definitely something I believe in and the story sort of is a extension of my process about thinking about the beginning of everything.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, as creation stories go, it's really, really nice, I have to say. You're going to, you know, you're going to be hearing from Talmudic rabbis and Quranic scholars and Christian saints.

[Jad Abumrad]

Have you ever thought about getting a church and starting one?

[Robert Krulwich]

Another church? Start one of your own.

[Jenny Hollowell]

Wow, that feels like a can of worms, baby. But thank you.

[Jad Abumrad]

That concludes the fawning portion of the podcast. We're going to come up and we now have the bickering portion coming up.

[Robert Krulwich]

In just a moment with Brian Green, professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University. Bicker picker.

[Jad Abumrad]

Picker.

[Brian Greene]

Yeah, we.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll continue in a second.

[Radiolab Listener/Supporter]

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[Brian Greene]

Hi, this is Josh Goldstein, Calling from Bend, Oregon. Radiolab is supported by Undercurrent, a consulting firm in lower Manhattan. Thinking about Bitcoins, Holacracy and burger making robots. More thoughts on how complex organizations thrive.

[Jad Abumrad]

In the digital [e-mail]. We're back. We just heard a story by Jenny Hollowell called A Brief History of Everything, including you. Five pages, kind of encompassing the entire universe. Everything.

[Robert Krulwich]

Can we do this in a completely different way?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Brian Greene]

Part two.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, so this is about what you do for a living. You know that I have this neighbor and friend, Brian Greene.

[Brian Greene]

Brian Greene, professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, I do know that.

[Robert Krulwich]

And the thing about Brian is he is a theoretical physicist. Now, theoretical physicists say that it's theoretically possible to know everything there is to know in the universe. So one day they'll be able to explain not only how you could send a rocket to the moon, but the laws that govern space and energy and time and gravity, everything, the whole universe, one day, they think might be totally understandable using logic and mathematical equations.

[Brian Greene]

Now, you can't take that too far. None of us really imagined that. If you ask the equations, what are we going to have for dinner tomorrow night? The equations will spit out fried tofu and, you know, spring rolls or something like that. But at the level of the fundamental ingredients, the particles that make up the universe, their properties. The hope and the goal is that the theories that we work out will apply everywhere and tell us about everything.

[Robert Krulwich]

You just said everything.

[Brian Greene]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

As in everything.

[Brian Greene]

Yes. That's the big, big goal.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is like playing poker. You're helping me. I don't know what you're going to do. All right, we'll take it the next step. Okay, Wait, so what do you.

[Jad Abumrad]

What are you up to here, Krolewich?

[Brian Greene]

All right, so.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you know, we argue. That's the fun thing we do. But unlike him, my position has always been that it's gonna be very hard to answer all the puzzles in the universe. And frankly, it's not a bad thing if some mysteries remain mysterious. Yeah, that's my view. But because Brian's so smart, when I tell him, how do you know this? Whatever. He always wins the arguments. But a few months ago, this is the thing that got this whole thing started. I was reading Harper's Magazine and I found an article written by another physicist and a novelist, Alan Lightman. And I thought, oh, boy, this is gonna drive Brian bats. Because Alan says there is a group of physicists, and Brian happens to be one of them, who've embraced a very exciting idea with an unfortunate effect. If this idea turns out to be true, Alan writes, it will then be impossible for physicists to know everything. Which I thought, ah, excellent.

[Jad Abumrad]

What is the idea?

[Robert Krulwich]

It has to do with more than one universe. You know, there is a very, you know, this we talking about it before that. There is a vogue now for the idea that instead of one universe encompassing everything, there might be more than one.

[Brian Greene]

Right. So there actually are a number of ways that physics comes upon this idea of other universes. Maybe the most intuitive is to think about the Big Bang that sent space rushing outward and matter could cool and yield the stars and galaxies. That wonderful picture that we've had with us since the 1920s. We have in the interim decades come to the possibility that the Big Bang may not be a one time event. That is, there may have been many big bangs. There may continue to be big Bang like events, each spawning its own universe. If that were the case, then our universe would then be viewed as one of many in this grand collection emerging from all of these Big Bang like events.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, in this view of things, there could be not just one universe or three or 19. There could be 10,000, there could be trillions, there could be an infinite number. And here's the crucial thing. Each and every one of these universes can be different from its neighbor. Vastly different.

[Brian Greene]

That's right. So when we study the equations for the production of these universes, we see in the mathematics that the other universes could have different features, different particle compositions, different masses of the particles, different forces.

[Robert Krulwich]

Some of them might have atoms, some of them might not have atoms. You could have universes with lots of stars, some with no stars, some could be made of Muenster cheese. I don't know. The fundamental properties of each universe could be very different.

[Brian Greene]

That's exactly right.

[Robert Krulwich]

And that's the key to Ellen Lightman's argument. Well then, going back to the beginning of our conversation, if a physicist's job is to explore everything that is the universe now the universe has just been demoted to a sub universe. Then when you get your diploma from a great university, the president of the universe says, my friends, we are gathered here to meet the people who have earned the credentials to describe the sub universe, a little bit of what we could know. It's like you've been demoted. You thought that you were going to get to learn about everything, your words, and now it turns out that everything is very is sub.

[Brian Greene]

Oh, I wouldn't describe it like that at all. As you might imagine, Rather than view this as an incredible loss of understanding, the right way of viewing it, I think, is to recognize that certain questions that we were asking when we thought there was just one universe were the wrong questions.

[Jad Abumrad]

Meaning? Meaning what?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, he says, here's the way to think about it. This is how it always goes.

[Brian Greene]

We've seen this before in the history of science. Take Kepler.

[Robert Krulwich]

Johannes Kepler was an astronomer and a kind of mapper of the solar system. He was trying to figure out where the planets were and the nature of their orbits and stuff.

[Brian Greene]

And Kepler spent a long time trying to find an explanation for why the earth is 93 million miles away from the sun.

[Robert Krulwich]

93 million. Kepler thought that has to be a really important number, a key to a deeper mystery.

[Brian Greene]

But we now know that he was barking up the wrong tree. Why? There isn't just one planet. There are many planets, in fact, many planets around many stars. And the distances of those planets from their host star varies over a wide range of possibilities.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mars, for example, is 141 million miles from the Sun. Jupiter 483 million. And when you start comparing the different distances of planets from the sun, you realize that the fact that the earth is 93 million miles away, it doesn't seem like a deep law of the universe anymore. It just feels kind of arbitrary. And then that forces you to change the question, not why 93 million? Now, why are all these different planets at different distances from the sun, and yet they all stick around the sun? They're all trapped in the neighborhood. That question puts you on the road to a deeper thought, the theory of gravity. The point is, says Brian, if you're focused on one thing, you're going to think that one thing is the key to everything. When your one turns to many, then you think, ah, well, the one thing really wasn't so special. But the way Brian sees it, that is progress.

[Brian Greene]

That is understanding. And then it frees you up to ask other kinds of questions, such as, what's the law of gravity? What is the equation that allows us to understand how the sun forms? So those are real questions. And when you can toss out the ones that are red herrings that you thought were deep, but they're actually just asking the wrong question, that frees you up to make progress.

[Robert Krulwich]

And Brian says, you can make the exact same kind of progress if you compare universes. So instead of asking, why is our one universe the way it is now? You can ask, well, what do all of these universes, so different one from the other, still have in common?

[Brian Greene]

That would Be pretty heavy and exciting to describe the underlying laws that govern all universes, regardless of their detailed features, and what it would be like in that universe or that universe or that universe way over there.

[Robert Krulwich]

But there are an infinite number of them. So if I told you that you could write anything down and it might be a universe, black universes, white universes, green universes, soft universes, hard universes, muscular universes, teeny universes, huge universes, then the only one you know intimately is your own. It seems to me that what do you know about those other universes, other than that they might be very different?

[Brian Greene]

In other words, we don't know very much observationally. Sure, we can't see them. We don't know very much experimentally. So they're definitely on a very different footing from that perspective.

[Robert Krulwich]

But Brian believes that one day we might be able to experimentally detect these other universes and somehow kind of pick up their distant vibrations, kind of like the way you'd hear your neighbor's music just emanating through the walls. We might be able to listen in, he says, and take a couple of.

[Brian Greene]

Measurements, which would be quite wonderful. And in that case, at least there's a chance that we can observational evidence of the existence of these other realms. And at that point, I would begin to say, hmm, maybe there's something really to this.

[Robert Krulwich]

So the physics you're doing says, I can't go there. I can't observe it, at least for the moment. All I have is my brain and my math. And I say from my brain, I'm going to just assume certain things are always true. There's always going to be gravity to say there's always going to be some particle or wave that creates matter. There's always going to be. I don't know what else are there things that they're always going to be. What are they? They're always going to be.

[Brian Greene]

The things that you were describing need not always be the case. Yes. What would be the case is that the fundamental governing equations, the mathematical laws, would be the underlying architecture that governs what happens in those places. But environmental details can change things.

[Robert Krulwich]

Gravity, environmental details.

[Brian Greene]

Yes. Well, that's actually something, you know, at some level right now, right on the moon, you could jump a lot higher than you can here. So if you didn't.

[Robert Krulwich]

But I don't think that two. Two bodies do attract each other.

[Brian Greene]

That's right. So there is a fundamental law of gravity that manifests itself in different ways based on the environment.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right, so let me say that again. Or ask it again. Are there fundamental laws that you think operate in all universes?

[Brian Greene]

Yes. Yes, absolutely.

[Robert Krulwich]

And why do you think that that.

[Brian Greene]

Is the starting point when we come upon this possibility of other universes? It's not a crazy idea that we dream up late at night when there's nothing else to think about. These are ideas that emerge from the fundamental equations that we use to describe the things that we do see in the world around us. Then we follow the equations and the equations suggest to us there might be these universes. So we have equations, we analyze them, and we interpret what they're telling us about reality. But those are the very equations that come to this possibility of other universes. Then those are the equations that govern those other universes. The starting point is, let's assume that these are the fundamentals.

[Robert Krulwich]

This sounds an awful lot like, why is God three in one? Or why does was the world made in seven days? It. Aren't we getting close to some sort of. You're believing in certain things to be always true the way religious people believe. Certain things are always true, not because you've seen it, or it's just because you can't. You have a faith in it.

[Brian Greene]

I couldn't disagree with you more.

[Robert Krulwich]

I thought not.

[Brian Greene]

It has absolutely nothing to do with faith. The reason why we trust the equations is because we've got centuries worth of observational and experimental evidence that the equations take us in the right direction here, here. And it's those very same equations that work here that we are following to their logical conclusion to see where the mathematics takes us. Right. So if you remember the. The train of reasoning here, you might.

[Robert Krulwich]

Have just projected here into there. That's faith talking. No, because you can't go there. All you can do is say, well, what works. But my deep understanding of here has to be there. I don't know why it has to be, but that's what you just said.

[Brian Greene]

No, it's actually the reasoning goes in somewhat reverse order from that. We build mathematical equations to describe here. We then follow those equations and say, oh my goodness. Those equations that we developed to describe here are telling us that there is something over there. And then we're like, wow, the equations do a great job of describing things here. And the equations have this feature that they tell us there's another place over there. Maybe that's possible.

[Robert Krulwich]

The key thing also logic in your mind, not belief.

[Brian Greene]

This is just logic.

[Robert Krulwich]

Aren't you worried though, that there's another Brian Greene in universe number 3790,208, 600,045 who is sitting there talking to another radio reporter in another university. And he's saying, well, we know all about the other universes because we're assuming that the math here is the same as the math there in that other place. But as it turns out, their math and our math aren't the same. So there will not. You may just be wrong.

[Brian Greene]

Oh, that's always the possibility. In fact, it's likely the possibility. In fact, 99.99% of everything we do is wrong. Not from the point of view we make a mistake, but the wrongness is.

[Robert Krulwich]

A deep wrongness that you somehow are somehow feeling that the math is a clue, that everything follows your math. If at some point the maths collide and then the universes collide, then that would be very unsettling to both of you, I would assume, in terms of.

[Brian Greene]

Whether the math is somehow contradictory or incoherent.

[Robert Krulwich]

Your tools of learning are not working.

[Brian Greene]

Yes, that would suggest that we were both wrong and that there's a deeper, overarching framework. I mean, I hate to use the word faith, but the one point where I'll give you faith is this. I do have a deep faith that the universe is coherent. And by universe, call it multiverse, whatever word you want to use the whole thing, I do believe that it's coherent. Now, whether that means it follows mathematical laws, I don't know. It could be the case that, you know, when we talk to those aliens that we encounter one day and they say, okay, show us what you got. We bring out our equations and they kind of laugh at us and say, oh, you guys are still stuck on math, you know. And they said, yeah, you know, a thousand, ten thousand years ago we were doing math too. But here's the real way of describing it. Now what they'd be showing us with the real way of describing it, I have no idea. I can't even imagine what it would be that would be non mathematical. So I do have a deep faith that it's coherent. And the only tool that I know how to encapsulate that coherence are mathematical equations. So if Xantar, Brian and Brian here come up with equations that collide with one another and don't work, to me it just means that both were wrong and there's some bigger overarching coherence that we've yet to find.

[Robert Krulwich]

That'S it.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't even. I can't even begin to figure out if you. Did you just win? Did you just lose? I Can't tell. Wait, so this all came from Alan Lightman's article.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

So do you think he beat the objections in the article?

[Robert Krulwich]

Did he beat the article? Well, I thought it would be fair to ask the author of the article. So I called Alan, who happened, as it turns out to be, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

[Alan Lightman]

I make all of my international calls.

[Robert Krulwich]

On, and I sent him the interview with Brian. He listened to, and I asked him, well, what do you think about Brian's argument?

[Alan Lightman]

Well, I don't think that he's wrong, but I think that the problem is philosophically more disturbing than what he is confessing.

[Robert Krulwich]

He said, well, I think it's going to be much harder than Brian thinks to actually sense or encounter or measure these other universes, if they exist at all.

[Alan Lightman]

We don't even know whether the outer universe is exist in the same space and time that we do. And there are other physicists who feel that these universes are even in principle, never, never observable by us, that we will never be able to have any physical evidence of their existence. And that possibility is what I find disturbing. It may be that this is the way nature is.

[Robert Krulwich]

What does that mean?

[Alan Lightman]

Well, I mean, it may be that we've done as much explaining as is possible.

[Robert Krulwich]

And that we'll never, ever really understand everything.

[Alan Lightman]

Yes. In other words, we may have pushed the human mind as far as it can possibly go.

[Jad Abumrad]

So is that everything? I think we can say about everything?

[Robert Krulwich]

I think that's everything.

[Brian Greene]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

We should, however, thank Brian Green, professor of physics and Math at Columbia University, Alan Lightman up at mit, whose essay the Accidental Universe will appear in a book of the same name coming out this fall. So if you want to read the essay, you'll buy it in book form soon.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks also to Jenny Hollowell, of course. We'll link you to her short story from our website, Radiolab.org in the meantime.

[Robert Krulwich]

We'Ll just say goodbye.

[Jad Abumrad]

Bye.

[Robert Krulwich]

Bye.

[Radiolab Listener/Supporter]

I'm Lindsay Freitas from Santa Clara, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail]. i just recited that from memory because I'm a Radiolab junkie.