#1631 - Brian Greene

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Jamie (0:06)

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Good to see you, man.

Jamie (0:17)

Good seeing you.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

What's the latest, you got a book out?

Brian Greene (0:20)

I do, yeah, the paperback of Until the End of Time is out today.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Until the End of Time.

Brian Greene (0:25)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

That's heavy.

Brian Greene (0:27)

It is heavy, but it's a big story, but it's one that we have a nice part within. A small cameo, the human species has a cameo, so it's a human story, too.

Joe Rogan (0:38)

Yeah, the human species, what have we been around for, what, 300,000 years, 400,000 years?

Brian Greene (0:42)

It depends how you define the species, but yeah, that's not a bad number. Some people go back to a million or so if you go back to early human species, but yeah, and compared to the length of time scales that compose reality from the beginning to the end, that's zero, that's nothing.

Joe Rogan (0:58)

When you, being a physicist, being a person that really does have a much greater grasp of the concept of infinity and of time and of the, just the length of time scales that exist in the universe, and you think that the universe has existed in its current form, how do you just get through your day and not freak out?

Brian Greene (1:17)

Well, it's because my wife says, you know, you gotta cook dinner. So I mean, there are things that you have to actually get done, but it does change your perspective in a significant way because you recognize that the things that we consider to be, oh, so vital and important are just this blink of an eye on the cosmological landscape, on the cosmological timeline, and it does change the way you approach the world when you pay attention to it.

It's hard to always pay attention to it, though. Look, I mean, if I'm walking down the street and I'm thinking about quantum mechanics, I'm thinking about, you know, quantum tunneling, I'm thinking about relativity, time slowing down when I'm moving, right? So if you're in the physics mode, you are living life differently, but who can live that way for more than a moment? Right. Because life is too powerful in its intrusion on the way you actually behave in the world.

Joe Rogan (2:11)

But because of your perspective and because of your education on this, do you feel like almost an obligation to try to expand people's perspective?

Brian Greene (2:20)

I'd say that's part of what my goals of life is, to do just that. You know, I don't want people to not live their lives the way they have, but I want them to be able to broaden the experience by recognizing that everyday phenomenon is a small slice of the way the world is actually put together.

And when you can see your life and your experience is just a tiny sliver of a reality, it's like bizarrely strange and utterly wondrous when you understand everything from black holes to time dilation, to quantum tunneling, to all that stuff that we have discovered over the last couple hundred years. Yeah, it changes things.

Joe Rogan (3:04)

Is it a difficult thing to get across to people? Do you try to think, what is the best way that people are gonna absorb these ideas? Because they are so, they're not abstract, but they're so outside of the norm in terms of the way people view the world. You kind of go, hey, I know you're concentrated on this, but look at that.

Brian Greene (3:24)

Yeah, I mean the real difficulty is not so much getting people interested. You might think that that's the big hurdle. People are like, ah, don't talk to me about that stuff. It doesn't matter to my life. But that's no, people are very curious and interested in what physics has found.

What's hard is getting them to not just take it in, but to take it in correctly so that they don't take the ideas and twist it into something else that suits whatever weirdness they may have encountered in the world. The number of times that I see people take the concepts of quantum mechanics and turn it into utter nonsense because they're like, hey, oh yeah, probabilities. Okay, that describes this quality of my world or the weirdnesses of time. Yeah, that's why I had this mind mill with my best friend on the other side of the, that sort of thing.

And I don't fault people for that. These ideas are difficult. But if you ask me what the challenge is, the challenge is breaking through that and getting people to really understand what it is that we found. And it's weirder than many of the things that the human imagination would go to, but it's harder because it's very specific and rigorous and mathematical ultimately, and that's unfamiliar.