Brian Cox
speaker
1,719 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
You linked hope to anxiety. Is that right?
I hope.
I have hope. I think I was using it in a different way, though. I was imagining hope as like, I don't know, excitement for what's beyond the horizon. Sure. So not driven by... This actually gets to the heart of what I think a scientist is, by the way, the difference between not only a scientist, but let's say, what is a scientist? Or somebody just researching anything, really.
Somebody who creates things. They're people who like to stand on the edge of the known. So they find it exhilarating but interesting. Almost in the context we're talking, it's almost one of the things that drives our existence. Yes. Is to stand on the edge of the known and peer into the unknown with excitement and curiosity because you can go over the horizon.
And so that's the sense in which I'm using these terms. I'm saying that's one of the fundamentally most valuable things of being human. Yes. That there is an edge of the known. Yes. And so I would find it, I think, more terrifying to imagine that there was no edge of the known. that everything was known, then I would think existence is pointless. I personally would not find that.
I wouldn't think I'd achieved nirvana. I would think there's no point.
I think we're trying to imagine what it's like to be God, aren't we?
I mean, it is in some technical sense. It has to be.
The universe is everything, including God, if God is a real thing. If you define God as the creator, then you're right. From some point that we don't understand, by the way, the Big Bang, we don't even understand whether that was the origin of the universe, by the way. We understand that something interesting happened. What is Sir Roger Penrose's... He has an infinite cyclical universe. Yes.
And he's trying to answer... Questions about the very special state of the early universe and why it was the way that it was.
It doesn't recontract. It's called, what's it called, conformal cosmology or cyclical conformal cosmology or something. So it's essentially that... And I don't fully understand it. And I have asked him about it with some colleagues, actually. If you can't understand it, we're fucked. No, I don't think many of us understand what he... I mean, Roger Penner is one of the greats, right?
So you listen to him and take him very seriously. But I haven't met anyone who quite understands what he's talking about in that. But... But it doesn't recontract. It's not one of those models where the universe expands and then recontracts and bounces like that. It's not one of those.
It's somehow, he argues, that when you get to what we usually call the heat death of the universe, where even the black holes have evaporated away. you have conditions that begin to look perhaps like an origin of the universe again. And I can't really fully explain it because I don't really understand what he's trying to say, right?
Yeah, it kind of looks like conformal means there are no...
sort of distances or time measurements or anything in the universe it kind of loses all sense of scale and then you could you could reimagine that as looking somewhat like the beginning it's something like that that he has in mind but i really couldn't explain to you i don't understand what what he's what he's proposing wow so it but what it does tell you is that we don't know
why or how the universe got into the state that we call the big bang so we don't we don't know whether the universe existed before that we have theories that it did theories called inflation which are very popular theories you'll find up in all the textbooks which say that before the universe was hot and dense which we used to call the big bang space and time is still there
And the universe is expanding extremely fast. It's called inflation. And then that period draws to a close. And that expansion slows down and almost collapses and changes. And the energy that was driving the expansion gets dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we are made. So that's actually the standard model of cosmology now.
So we do have an idea that we redefine the Big Bang as the hot Big Bang. And it's not the origin of the universe in time. It's the end of inflation. And then you get the question, what is inflation? Did that have a beginning? And the answer is that in Einstein's theory alone, then yes.
And Roger Penrose actually and Stephen Hawking proved this a long time ago, that just given Einstein's theory, you have this singularity, just like kind of like the black hole singularity, but at the beginning of time. But we do know that when you put quantum mechanics in and add that in, then it gets messy and we don't really know what that means.
And so Stephen Hawking had a thing called the no boundary proposal. Basically the point is we don't know. So we don't know whether the universe had a beginning in time, I would say is the correct statement as we are at the moment. Part of the reason why, by the way, getting back to the black holes, they're important and interesting.
Showing 1461–1480 of 1,719 · page 74 of 86
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