- [Anne] Hi friends, it's Anne. Today in our ongoing series on Deep Time, infinity, the longest, deepest time there is, almost impossible to imagine, and yet real enough that you can do math with it. For example, take something as small as the space between zero and one. You can actually divide up that space an infinite number of times, and each of those divisions can also be divided up an infinite number of times, which means infinity is infinitely expanding, or it comes in an infinite number of sizes. This is head spinning stuff, right? So this hour, a deeper look into the deepest time there is, infinity.
- [Announcer] From WPR.
- [Announcer 2] Hey listeners, You know on "To The Best of our Knowledge", we explore big ideas with top tier guests to try to feel smarter and better connected with each other. Get the same sensibility on the "Superhero Leadership" podcast, hosted by Marvel's former CEO and legendary turnaround expert, Peter Cuneo. Each week, Peter is joined by top performers from business, media, and beyond, leaders who have mastered the art of impact, resilience and vision. Together, they explore Peter's leadership essentials, revealing what it really takes to rise, inspire, and lead with purpose. If you wanna level up your leadership, this is your blueprint. Search, "Superhero Leadership", available wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance, fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [Anne] It's "To The Best of our Knowledge". I'm Anne Strainchamps. With a new episode in our series on Deep Time. This is part six, if you're counting. And in this one we're tackling the biggest kind of time there is, infinity. Infinity, time that goes on forever. Immeasurable, uncountable, fathomless. And also, strangely comforting. Contemplating the infinite is a time tested way to shrink the present down to size, to get a little relief from the pressure of current events. We could probably all use that today. But if you think about it for very long, infinity will really mess with your mind because there is something fundamentally paradoxical about it.
- [Jordan] Lemme put it this way, infinity sounds very philosophical and out there and opaque and weird, but if somebody just asks you how many different numbers are there, you're like, well, wait? How could there be a limit?
- [Anne] Why would they ever stop?
- [Jordan] Right? So on some level, infinity is both bizarre, and abstract, and extremely familiar.
- [Anne] This is my neighbor Jordan Ellenberg. He's one of America's best known mathematicians. And Jordan and his fellow mathematicians have been fascinated by infinity ever since the 19th century. That's when George Cantor discovered that, get this, infinity comes in different sizes. I mean, the idea of a world with more than one kind of infinity is glorious, but totally incomprehensible. Does that mean you can add, subtract, divide with infinity? Jordan says, yeah, but not the way you'd imagine
- [Jordan] Infinity plus one. Well, if you have infinitely many things and then you have one more, you still have infinitely many things.
- [Anne] Or you try to divide infinity. I mean, how could you divide infinity?
- [Jordan] Oh, let's do it. I'm gonna do it right here. I was just wondering where we were gonna go, but we're just going there. If I were gonna divide infinity well, there's infinitely many numbers. Let me divide them into odd numbers and even numbers. Well, there's infinitely many odd numbers, and there's also infinitely many even numbers. So somehow I divided infinity into infinity and infinity. That could be a little weird.
- [Anne] But that doesn't work because when you divide something, always the answer is the quotient is always supposed to be smaller than the thing you divide with.
- [Jordan] What do you mean it doesn't work, I just did it. So it does work, but the problem is it doesn't have the properties you expect. You also, if you were to conceive that infinity equals infinity plus infinity, you have the little problem that you might wanna subtract infinity from both sides and conclude that infinity equals zero. And that's unpleasant. That's not really what we wanna say. So when people say infinity is not a number, this is kind of a hobby horse of mine, because I think we're actually making a rather practical distinction that if you carry out the arithmetic operations that you're used to with infinity, treating it like a number and expecting it to have the behavior that ordinary numbers have, you're gonna be in for a world of hurt.
- [Anne] So what is infinity?
- [Jordan] You've gotta all imagine me on the radio with like my eyes raised to the heavens with a long pause as I try to address the question I was most hoping not to hear, but that I knew that I eventually would. I would say, okay, I have a good answer. I was gonna say, it's like a kind of number that doesn't behave the way we expect numbers to behave. Let me say a different thing. I would say that infinity is a size. How about that? So one kind of size is five. Like if you have a collection of thing, you could say its size is measured by how many things there are. Once have infinite collections, like the set of all numbers or the set of all English sentences of any imaginable length, no matter how long, those are all infinite sets. And so infinity is saying something about their size, how big those sets are. And now to come back to Cantor, his great insight is that there was a meaningful sense in which one infinite set could said to be bigger than another. You don't have to just say they're infinite, shrug your shoulders and stop there. And that was his incredible insight.
- [Anne] Wait, two different sets, they're both infinite, but one's bigger than the other? But doesn't infinite mean the biggest possible? So how could one be bigger?
- [Jordan] So one might have thought, but no, here's what Cantor meant, and this is actually something I think I can explain just sonically like without my blackboard that I would usually have. Let's show our listeners that there's the same number of odd numbers and even numbers. That's kind of believable, right? Even numbers and odd numbers. But we're gonna do it. We're gonna play the matching game. You say an even number.
- [Anne] 10 gazillion.
- [Jordan] 10 gazillion and one, that's odd because 10 gazillion ends in zero. Okay, now you say another even number.
- [Anne] 10 gazillion two.
- [Jordan] 10 gazillion three.
- [Anne] Negative four.
- [Jordan] Negative three. Every odd number has its companion that I say.
- [Anne] We could keep going forever.
- [Jordan] And then we could keep going forever, and so the odd numbers and even numbers just match up one by one like left shoes and right shoes. But Cantor would say, that's how you know that they're the same size.
- [Anne] But I thought you said that Cantor's insight was that you can have two infinite sets and one's smaller than the other.
- [Jordan] We're gonna get there. You're like raising your hand in back. We're gonna get there, we're gonna get there. Wait, I wanna do one more weird thing that is a little strange. So to show you, this is kind of a weird world because Cantor would also say, actually there's the same number of even numbers as there are numbers. Now that's very weird because some of the numbers are not even. But we're gonna do the exact same thing. Ready? Your job is gonna be to say an even number, and then I'm gonna say a number.
- [Anne] Okay, eight.
- [Jordan] Four.
- [Anne] 10.
- [Jordan] Five.
- [Anne] 2 million.
- [Jordan] 1 million.
- [Anne] Okay.
- [Jordan] Okay. Do we know what I'm doing?
- [Anne] No.
- [Jordan] Every even number you say I'm dividing it by two. And in this game, we play every number on my side, which is all numbers will be matched by a number on your side, which are even numbers. And so, one of the weird things about infinity is that a subset can have the same size as a set, just the even numbers is the same size as just the odd numbers. And they're both just the same size as all the numbers. And that is somewhat counterintuitive, but it's kind of the only definition that makes sense.
- [Anne] Would you call this a paradox?
- [Jordan] Only until you get used to it. It feels like a paradox, but what it really is is it's a violation of your intuition. And then you must choose.
- [Anne] Lost yet? That's what thinking about infinity will do. Drop you down a deep dark hole where even mathematician Jordan Ellenberg cannot rescue you.
- [Person 1] Well, the first time that I thought about infinity, I was looking up at the sky one night when I was about 10 years old.
- [Person 2] I was really little. It was before I had started school. And I was sitting under the dining room table and counting. And at a certain point I realized this goes on forever.
- [Person 3] Lying on a beach late at night and just wondering the vastness of outer space. Does it go on forever?
- [Anne] That's a clip from the Netflix documentary called "A Trip to Infinity". A wild ride of a film filled with animated shorts by artists from 11 different countries. It won two Emmys and caused a TikTok sensation. Charles Monroe Kind sat down with director John Halperin.
- [John] We asked the question, does infinity exist or is it something we made up? And that's it. That's the film.
- [Charles] You sent me a email this morning and in the email you said, "Hey, just heads up, I'm not a math expert. In fact, I'm building an A-frame right now. And I don't even know the math to build that." Like, why, why?
- [John] Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I wasn't being sort of hyperbolic there. I'm really bad at math and I am, I'm building this A-frame, right? So an A-Frame is a series of triangles, and it's pretty simple. Like if you know the length of two sides and an angle, you can figure out the rest of it. And yet I'm constantly cutting the boards at the wrong angle. Like I'm just constantly getting the math wrong. Like I'm really bad at it. I walked out of college calculus on the first day. I can't do this.
- [Charles] But you made a documentary about math.
- [John] Yeah but so, but I love math. I'm fascinated by math. I was intrigued with this notion of infinity, and I just started reading about it and I realized actually one of the paradoxes of infinity, it's kind of simple.
- [Charles] I want to tell people something about your movie, because I think it's important to understand, and we're gonna come up with this a lot in the interview. It's animated, mostly. And not just animated. You got like people from 11 different countries with completely different styles, which really helped me because I was kind of overwhelmed by this concept of infinity. I wanna get into some of the animation 'cause each piece of animation kind of gets at a concept. And the one that blew me away, and the one I've shared with people, because I was like, oh, maybe I understand this. The Infinity Hotel. Can you explain the hotel to us?
- [John] So this is a parable so you understand the paradoxes of infinity. So the idea is like you have a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and every room is full of one guest. And someone arrives at the hotel, wants to check in, the clerk says, I'm sorry, we're completely full. Every room is full. But that's the bad news. The good news is there's room for you. And you're like, wait, but you said it was full, but it doesn't matter. Infinity goes on forever.
- [Charles] Well, so I think the moral of this crazy parable is that infinity doesn't behave like anything we're used to. I mean, we're used to thinking about collections of finite numbers of things. Fish, fish, fish. That's through fish. So we're used to small numbers or even big numbers you hear nowadays about trillions of dollars needing to be spent on the budget in the United States. But those are nothing like infinity. Any finite number, no matter how big is nothing compared to infinity. And we just don't have good intuition about how infinite things work.
- [John] First thing we do is we come up with the plot trigger, like, what's the question? How can we make that question as simple as possible? We then structured the film. The first act is what is infinity? The second act is, can we find it in reality? Like does it exist? And the third act, well, if it exists, what's it mean?
- [Charles] Hmm.
- [John] Right? If infinity is a real thing, if the universe is infinite, what does that mean for us? How do we fit into the story?
- [Charles] You know, one thing that I know that worked, and you must have figured this out pretty early, is that the, when you go back to the people doing the interviews, I've seen a lot of documentaries. I've watched a lot of documentaries. Your interviewees were super excited. I mean, they were really into it. They were laughing. That kind of really impressed me how excited everybody was.
- [John] People who study infinity are obsessed by infinity. They're obsessed, and they really want to talk about it, and they want to talk about it 'cause it's illuminating and confusing and scary and joyful. It, I mean, without sounding hyperbolic, it kind of encompasses like everything we are.
- [Person 4] My wife gets nauseous when I bring up infinity, and my kids don't want to hear about it either. Infinity is some kind of monster that has to be tamed.
- [Charles] There's a moment in your film about an apple. I love the apple. So, tell me about the apple.
- [John] So this is a story that the cosmologist and mathematician Anthony tells. And the idea is you take an apple and you put it in a box and the box is sealed. But he says, okay, well what happens if you leave the apple there forever, for an infinite amount of time? It breaks down and it breaks down to atoms, and those atoms break down, and those atoms become particles. And then over enough time, because there's a non-zero chance that those atoms will and particles will reconfigure, it will become anything that that number of particles can become, and it will do that over and over again infinitely. So it will become everything that's possible an infinite number of times. And this is one of those rare times in my career where you're like, you do something. And to be honest, it's a scene in the middle of the film. I mean, it's beautifully animated. And some kid with 100 followers on TikTok filmed that scene, which is four and a half minutes long and put it up on TikTok, and it ended up having something like 80 million views.
- [Charles] In a week.
- [John] Yeah. That to me is like, and people, they had, there's a punchline in this story, and they had to have watched the whole thing because they're commenting on the punchline.
- [Charles] And the punchline is, it becomes an apple again.
- [John] It becomes an apple again.
- [Person 4] Why do we care? Well, we might be in the box.
- [Charles] For me, I was recently in Greenland, spent three weeks in Greenland, kind of doing this art project up there. And at one point we're at the foot of this Greenlandic ice sheet, and there's all these icebergs stuck in the sea ice. And I took an opportunity while I was there to climb one. So I go up and climb one by myself. It's blue ice. It's beautiful. It's a little dangerous. It's exciting. It's dead silent. And I'll be honest, I've been having a really difficult time personally in my life, and so I take off some, it's cold. So I take off some of my gear, the bear hat I was wearing, and I take it off and I just scream. I just scream. And at that moment, I felt two things. One, I felt my pain was extremely insignificant in the universe. I'm, like I said, I'm looking at this imposing piece of ice in the middle of Greenland. I'm like, I don't matter at all. But then I remember as I was screaming, I started to cry and I breathe in this air, and air was cold and it really felt cold in my lungs. And I'm like, oh my god, not only am I insignificant, but I'm significant. And I was like, I wanna understand that moment, that moment where I felt absolutely totally I could die and it doesn't matter. And at the same time, I'm the most important thing that's ever happened.
- [John] No, no, you do, you just explained infinity. You just did it as well as anyone in the film who understands the math. That's a beautiful story.
- [Charles] Thank you.
- [John] And that's the paradox, right? That we are that very thing that I'm completely insignificant, I'm just, I'm a fraction of a fraction of a fraction on a number line. And that number line goes on forever. It's interesting, the film ends with a long, basically time lapse of what happens at the end of the universe if the universe does ever end. And a lot of people have come to me and said that it was really depressing. And it shocked me because I find it beautiful. I find it utterly beautiful knowing that my particles my atoms are gonna become particles, and those particles are going to drift off forever. ♪ Forever and ever and ever and ever ♪ ♪ Forever and ever and ever and ever ♪ ♪ Forever and ever and ever and ever ♪
- [Anne] John Halperin, co-director of the Netflix documentary film, "A Trip to Infinity", that was Charles Monroe King talking with him. Coming up, after the death of her husband, a NASA scientist found solace in the infinity of space time. It's "To The Best of our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
- [Steve] Hey, it's Steve and I wanna tell you about another podcast I do. It's called "Luminous", about the science and philosophy of the psychedelic revival. I talk with a lot of amazing people like the neuroscientist Gul Dolen, who's given MDMA to octopuses. Eric Davis on the history of LSD and the Psychedelic Underground and Spring Washem, a healer who navigates the very tricky line between Buddhism and psychedelics. You'll find all these interviews on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the "Luminous" podcast feed. I have to say, talking to these people has been kind of a revelation to me. So here's an invitation to listen along with us on "Luminous".
- [Anne] Michelle Fowler can't remember a time when she was not obsessed with space. Her mom says that as soon as she could talk, she began pointing at the stars. So no surprise that she became an astrophysicist. Then she met and married another astrophysicist, Andrew Booth, and they became a space research power couple. For 26 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Goddard Space Flight Center. And then in 2019, out of the blue, Andrew was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer, and he died less than a year later. Michelle has given very few interviews since then, but there was one I've never forgotten. Her grief at the time was an enormous black hole. But she talked about finding solace in the structure of the universe, in the very nature of space time itself. Michelle, I have wanted to talk with you for two or three years now, at least since I heard the Science Friday interview you did. And it was so beautiful. And I kind of, at the time, the reason I never called you is I kind of felt like I, it's a really intimate moving story that you had to tell. And I thought she's told it, like, don't try to get her to tell it all over again. It's, she put it out there in public, but then we're doing the show on infinity, and I just thought, oh, maybe she'd be up for talking. So anyway, I hope this is all okay with you.
- [Michelle] Well, I'm so glad you did. No, it's wonderful to be with you too. I think that when you're widowed, people think that they sort of hate to bring up the whole, your spouse died situation because they think it will upset you that it'll bring something back, trigger something. But the thing is that it just becomes part of the air that you breathe. You never forget it. You're never away from it. It just becomes something you just, like I said, you just live in. And so I think that people should be less afraid of talking about this to people who've lost spouses or children or any type of deep grief.
- [Anne] And how strange to live in a culture that is afraid of grief and the one thing that if anybody is experiencing grief, it's the one thing we should be talking about. Anyway, there's, I think this is kind of an archetypal experience that a lot of us have. It's summertime, it's night. You're lying on the grass, you're looking up, hopefully it's someplace really, really dark. And it's like layer upon layer of stars as far as you can see. And you know that feeling, that's almost like a head rush a little bit. It's, you feel dizzy in the face of that immensity. And I was thinking, well, I wonder if that's because that's a little tiny brief perception of infinity, which otherwise I think is almost impossible to wrap our heads around.
- [Michelle] Yeah. And infinity is a slippery thing for me because it seems as you look out into space that that goes on forever. And you said something very important, very cognizant there just a minute ago, you talked about layers upon layers of stars. And in fact, the reason that you don't see a bright night sky is one of the proofs that the universe cannot be infinite in both space or time.
- [Anne] Okay so first of all, I feel so stupid because I've been using the infinite and the universe as synonyms. The universe is not infinite?
- [Michelle] Well, the disheartening and also lovely and encouraging answer to that is we don't know yet. We know we are absolutely certain we have not seen to the edge of the universe yet. Would you like me to break this down for you a little bit?
- [Anne] Yes.
- [Michelle] Okay. So our view, our observable universe, the universe we can observe right now has a very specific boundary. And that's because as you look farther and farther out into space, light takes more and more time to travel to you. It's in effect, a lot of people understand the sun takes eight minutes for light to travel the 93 million miles away that the sun is. The nearest galaxy in the sky is 2 million light years away, Andromeda, the nearest big galaxy. So with binoculars tonight, if you look up at Andromeda, you see it as it was 2 million years ago. So as you go farther and farther out and look farther and farther back in time, we see the universe get hotter and denser. And we see it change. We see the chemistry change. We see the objects change until finally you get to a barrier. If you look any direction in a giant sphere around the earth, pick any direction and look so far away that you're looking about 13.7 billion years ago. And at that time, the universe was so hot, it was as hot and bright as the surface of the sun. And we can't see any further than that.
- [Anne] We can't go past that.
- [Michelle] Telescopes can't see past that. So we know for a fact that we cannot see the entire universe. So we don't know whether it's infinite or whether there is some larger shape to the universe, shaped to space and time. Could there be other universes out there?
- [Anne] One of the things that's so fascinating, listening to you talk, it really becomes clear what Einstein said that space and time are the same thing. They're wedded to each other. You have written and talked incredibly movingly about how this perspective on the universe, your perspective as an astronomer, as a space scientist, helped you survive excruciating grief after the death of your husband. You and he talked in terms like this, I think right as he was during that last year as he was dying.
- [Michelle] Absolutely. He and I, we did the whole thing with our eyes open and holding hands and with the humility of not knowing even what time means, because this is nothing new. I mean, you mentioned Albert Einstein and he and a number of physicists more than 100 years ago, really did take it seriously that space and time are the same thing. And they don't seem to our brains. I mean, time seems to progress in one direction. While space, you can move in many directions, space may be infinite, whatever. They really thought that if you had the right perspective, and it would probably be not in our own three dimensions or four dimensions with time that you would see all of time as a complete whole thing. And so Andrew and I sort of took a deep breath and said, well, we're not really leaving each other. I'm going to have to go on now alone, but all time exists at once. And here I am holding your hand. And when the universe began, the first instant of time happened, I was here holding your hand. And when the universe ends, whatever that means, if it does, I'll still be holding your hand. I'll still be right here with you. Einstein wrote a letter to his best friend's wife after his friend had died and said, this person is still with us every bit as much as they were, every bit as alive. We are in a landscape of time, and they're kind of over the hill from us now. But now here we are over another hill where they're not. You just kind of let yourself dissolve into, again, like I said, the humility of really not even understanding what reality is. We kept that with us as we made that journey.
- [Anne] What was Andrew like? The two of you shared a profession. He was an astronomer too.
- [Michelle] Oh, he was my, he was, ah he was who I wanted to be in many ways. I really admired him to the depths of my soul. I mean, he was absolutely brilliant. He was a kind of a quantum optics person. He did interferometry, a technique of building a telescope that only works if reality is stranger than we know. An interferometer, yeah. I mean, this is how they made pictures of the giant black hole with the event horizon telescope, where they link telescopes all around the world to actually act as one single telescope. And in order to get these things to work, the same particle of light has to appear from that star or disc around the black hole. That same particle of light has to appear at all eight telescopes at once.
- [Anne] That's just so phenomenal that you actually have to zoom in on the same particle of light.
- [Michelle] If you can set your telescopes so accurately that they're actually down to the quantum mechanics level of accuracy, you can catch a particle of light at eight different places at once. And only then will the telescope work. So already we have proof that our idea of what space and time are is a simplification. Our brain is seeing a slice of something, but not the whole thing.
- [Anne] So you are already used to thinking in terms of impossibility. I mean, things that seem impossible to the rest of us seemed real visceral to the two of you.
- [Michelle] So, Andrew was a wizard and he was always playing "Dungeons and Dragons" games. We loved dressing up as wizards. He was joyful and humble and friendly. And when he died, there's this brilliant man at NASA, I mean, it was all of the administrative assistants and the security guards and the people that said he tried to include us. He was so kind to us. And yeah so I mean, he gifted me with that. I mean, I, trying to figure out my identity after losing that 'cause we were each other's best friends. We didn't have a whole lot of other friends than each other. And that was a hard, hard journey. But I promised him that I would do it and he actually made me write it down. He wrote in Elvish a goodbye letter. And, he spoke Elvish. We were that type of nerds. And so he.
- [Anne] I was too. I kept up and my daughter kept a journal in Elvish and I.
- [Michelle] Yes.
- [Anne] I used to write in, yes, yes.
- [Michelle] So, I've got a tattoo that goes all around my body and it's him saying.
- [Anne] It's a hug.
- [Anne] Get out there, love, live. You know, off you go.
- [Anne] Wow. You had some time. I mean, he died of brain cancer.
- [Michelle] Exactly, we had that time.
- [Anne] So you did have some time to think about how he wanted to die, how you wanted to be together and to think about what it would be like for you afterwards. I'm sure it helped some, but.
- [Michelle] Yeah, oh, it did.
- [Anne] Your life still breaks.
- [Michelle] It does, it breaks entirely. And then you start a new one and there, I mean, there's nothing the same after the death of a spouse like that. I mean, it just, I mean, you have to mourn not only your husband Andrew, but you have to mourn the version of yourself. I mean, the version of myself that existed before his death is largely gone. It's changed. I've had to find new ways to breathe, new ways to walk and we all go on journeys like that. And so the empathy for each other that, like you said, a society that doesn't even wanna talk about grief, we're all left to reinvent the wheel. And just having somebody say, I'm with you on that journey too. Most of us, if we live a full, wonderful human life, we'll deal with deep grief,
- [Anne] And to a certain extent, I mean, we do all experience the kind of tragedy of living in time. You know, my two children are grown and off on their own and living their lives, and I'm really happy for that. But I feel grief that if I see a photo of the two of them building a sandcastle on a beach at age two and four, they are not those two and four year olds anymore. They are not anymore the children that I adored when they were little, those two children are gone and they don't even have continuous memories of who they were. And so, in this lesser way, we all know that experience that you're talking about of having carrying multiple universes in our heads and in ourselves. We are, none of us who we were, and the people that we love are not who they were in the past.
- [Michelle] I love the idea in Buddhism that the universe may just pop in and out of existence, with all of our memories intact and all this light traveling billions of years. There's actually some relevance for that, even in science, like you said, there are many lives we've lived, many universes we've lived in, and there may be actual physical branchings of this moment can lead to many universes, perhaps an infinite number of universes. But it also goes into the past that maybe different universes led to this moment. And so.
- [Anne] Do you mean that literally not just, I mean.
- [Michelle] Yeah.
- [Anne] It kind of sounds like science fiction, but I mean, do you really mean literally?
- [Michelle] You know, the idea that there could be many universes branching in all directions, it's sort of like just seeing things from a different perspective. You know, if time exists all at once, maybe if you can see in another dimension above that, you see different versions of time, both of the past and of the present. There's a cool thing which I'm not gonna claim is proof of this, but I think it's interesting. And one is the idea that there may not just be multiple futures. There's a future where I decide to go outside today, there's a future where I don't, and all of a sudden they both really exist. That this is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. One of the ways that a particle of light can be in eight telescopes at once is that those are all real, but separate universes. But the telescope can kind of dovetail them together because the telescope is set so accurately.
- [Anne] Okay whoa. That's just mind blowing. When you said it's the eight telescopes zooming in on the one particle, I thought, okay, it's one particle in a particular moment of space time and all those telescopes are trained on this one particle. You mean the particle exists simultaneously in different?
- [Michelle] Yes.
- [Anne] Oh.
- [Michelle] Some people think it's something called quantum entanglement. And quantum entanglement is sort of, if you take two atoms and let them interact with each other and then separate them, somehow they'll kind of remember each other. We do this experimentally all the time in laboratories all over the earth. China did it up to their space station and back. You take two particles that were once close together, you move them apart. And all of a sudden now the universe says these two things are basically the same, even if they're separated by what we think of as a lot of space and time, a billion light years, they adjust simultaneously because the universe doesn't really care about what we think of as space and time. Space and time is not an intrinsic property of the universe. It's some way that our mind kind of breaks things down. And so now we wonder if space time itself, what is it made of? Maybe it's made of these entanglements, maybe we are entangled to everything. Maybe we're entangled to particles that are so far away from us now they're outside that limit of that background that's so hot and bright. Maybe we're entangled to everything in the universe.
- [Anne] I mean, and Michelle, we were talking about you and Andrew. I mean, of course I'm thinking, and maybe you and Andrew are still entangled together.
- [Michelle] Oh, absolutely.
- [Anne] Still.
- [Michelle] There's no way we couldn't be, spending so much time in proximity, sharing, I mean, every square foot of air has as a one with 27 zeros after its molecules, sharing molecules, you're entangled to everything. Not just in space, but also in time. Like I said, it doesn't so much help the human psychological aspect of grief, but it's a way of letting go and saying that we don't even understand what reality is yet. And we may just be looking at this wonderful huge shape that's the universe, our brain cuts it into slices. But I'm still every bit as much with him now. I don't expect to find another version of him in an afterlife. I don't know whether that's true or not, that's not our belief, but the belief that we had this time together and that that space time always exists. I mean, it's there. I mean, in that way, are we actually eternal?
- [Anne] Michelle Fowler is an astrophysicist. She spent nearly 30 years at NASA as a science communications director, science writer, producer and podcast host. Coming up, infinity and the spiritual journey of Albert Einstein. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and this is "To The Best of our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. We're talking about the science of infinity in this hour. And as you've probably noticed, there's one name that keeps popping up. Albert Einstein, the physicist who shaped much of our understanding of the space time continuum. Everybody knows his theory of relativity. Fewer realized that he also had a deep spiritual side. Einstein believed in math and mysticism. He thought of the human mind as a mirror of the infinite. To find out what exactly that means, Steve Paulson turned to Kieran Fox, author of a new spiritual biography of Albert Einstein called, "I Am a Part of Infinity".
- [Steve] The title of your book comes from a quote from Einstein. He said, I am part of infinity. What did he mean?
- [Kieran] Yeah, you seem individually. You seem separate. You seem like a tiny piece, but actually you're kind of in some deep sense, part of the entire matrix of everything. You know, look, it's everything around you, but it's also so much more. So, that concept of that the infinite can encompass so much, it's the entire world. It's you in your mind, everything you've ever thought, everyone you've ever known, all the stars out there in this whole universe. And it's even more than that. More than we can see. It has all this potential, this possibility. It hasn't been realized yet.
- [Steve] So it sounds like, I mean, not only does he use the word infinity, it suggests there's some sort of eternity that he's talking about. Am I getting that right?
- [Kieran] Yeah, I think so. It's not so much eternity as in terms of an immortality or a soul that you kind of live forever, but eternal in the sort of original sense of being outside of time or beyond time. And there's many quotes from Einstein that advocate this idea that time is not really a real thing. That it's kind of an illusion of the mind, just as the individual separation is an illusion.
- [Steve] Okay we're gonna unpack a lot of what you had just said, but I wanna step back for a moment and talk about how you got so interested in Einstein, because you have such an interesting path towards this. I mean, you're a neuroscientist, you're also a physician. So what led you to Einstein?
- [Kieran] Yeah, well there's a third part of my life I didn't mention, which is a lot of experience and interest and kind of long searching in the spiritual world, which started also very young, long before I ever did working professionally as a scientist or as a doctor. That goes back to when I was a teenager. My dad kind of had all these books from the sixties on the shelf, "The Tao of Physics" and John Lilly's psychedelic explorations. And I grew up with just kind of lived and breathed that growing up. And then I had this wild high school teacher who was actually lived in India every summer on their summer holiday with his guru. And he was teaching us meditation in class, which would probably, I don't know if that would be no big deal anymore or if that would be totally against the rules of sort of inviting religion in class today. But, so it wasn't long before I was really living that life. I was in a Buddhist monastery living as a student by the time I was think 21. And then went over to India and Nepal and spent quite a lot of time living with Tibetan monks trying to learn the Tibetan classical language of Tibet where you can read all the Buddhist scriptures. And so I've been looking for a long time to sort of merge that old life with the new life I came back.
- [Steve] I mean, the thing that's striking about what you're saying is, I mean, you were both studying these texts, but you're also living out this philosophy. You wanted to experience this.
- [Kieran] Yeah, absolutely. And I think for me, there was never any conflict. You know, I never had any super, I had, very intense experiences, but nothing supernatural happened. There was no miracles I couldn't explain. And so as I came back and did PhD and then did med school, and I was a postdoc in between, I was really looking for some way to combine these. And I started working on what will now be my next book of kind of understanding spirituality from a scientific evolutionary neurobiological point of view. And I kept coming across these quotes from Einstein that separation is an illusion. And then I really sort of started hitting on this worldview that integrates science and spirituality without any supernatural aspects, without any compromise for reason or integrity. And then I was truly hooked. And that became kind of the centerpiece of the book, actually. So.
- [Steve] Yeah, I mean, what's so striking about what you're saying about Einstein is that he made all these provocative and rather cryptic comments about spiritual experience. I mean, he called himself a deeply religious non-believer, and he said, science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind. And there's been a ton of debate about what he actually meant. I mean, atheists claim Einstein, people who have spiritual backgrounds claim Einstein. So do you have a clear sense of what his spiritual beliefs were?
- [Kieran] Yeah, and lemme just make like a broader methodological point, which is that the real problem is not that it's even that hard to understand, it's that everyone wants to pick a label ahead of time that they're already familiar with and put 'em in that box. And he's just not part of the boxes we're used to. I mean, there are labels, pantheism is a pretty good one, but if you try to cram him into atheist or typical believer or even agnostic, none of those work. And pantheist, he said in his own words, pantheist is kind of an imperfect approximation, but it's the closest thing he could get to.
- [Steve] Pantheist basically is you're saying God is nature. God is the natural order.
- [Kieran] I don't even like the word. I don't think Einstein did either, because it still attaches all this baggage of a kind of a biblical God and a personal God. I prefer to think of it as everything is divine or the divine is everywhere rather than that God is in the world. And again, I think even that is not really a great summary because there's another side to it, which is the kind of Pythagorean faith almost, that the order of the divine, the order of the natural world is mathematical. And in addition to that, we can know that mathematical order somehow because our rational or our intuitive minds can line up with that. And the reason we're able to understand it is because we're essentially equivalent to it. We're not these separate creatures or minds outside of it or on the sidelines looking at it, trying to understand. We're absolutely integrated with it. We're manifestations of it arising out of it.
- [Steve] Well, it also suggests that doing science, doing mathematical science, like physics, what Einstein did is some sort of spiritual practice in itself. I mean, maybe you get closer to the divine by doing your science. I mean, did Einstein feel that way?
- [Kieran] Einstein absolutely felt that way. And it's incredible 'cause lots of classical scholars who are not physicists at all came to the same conclusion that it's not just the right path to God, let's say, it is the mystical practice. I mean, mathematics, discovering mathematical laws is quite literally a revelation in their mind. This is the order underlying us. This is the order that gives rise to your mind and your brain and your own understanding as well as everything around you.
- [Steve] Well, I'm wondering how this felt, if that's the right word, for Einstein himself, because I mean, we tend to think of doing math as this hyper rational activity, this enterprise to sort of try to unpack the nature of the underlying order. And yet we tend to think of spiritual experience as not rational, as something else.
- [Kieran] What the physicists, and many mathematicians as well who do pure math have similar descriptions of the same experience, is that the intuitive leap when you suddenly realize how to connect all these different phenomenon in physics, say with a single simple equation, is this ecstatic experience. Like when you found equations for general relativity and for special relativity, he's in this kind of like religious daze working nonstop and it's almost killing him. And he's just kind of getting this download almost and getting knowledge of the divine order underlying all things. And even called the ideas a sudden illumination. It's like a rapture, the daily work. It's just kind of, it's like a religious devotion to keep working on these equations and trying to understand physics.
- [Steve] I mean, that's so fascinating because I mean, what you're really saying is that this was, I guess you would call it his spiritual practice. I mean he wasn't a meditator, he didn't, do anything in a conventional religious sense, but he had this profound sense that there was some deeper cosmic order. I mean, he talked about a cosmic religion.
- [Kieran] Yeah.
- [Steve] But his own path towards that was through doing science.
- [Kieran] Yeah. And he absolutely says this, I mean, in plain English or German I guess translated into English now. But he says really, really clearly, through my study of nature, I have cosmic religious feelings. It's that simple. Even I had to struggle with that because I was like, he must have meditated or something else. And I was like, no, I'm just not accepting what he's telling us. And straight up that he's on such a different level thinking about these things that yeah, it does feel like religious revelation. It feels like communion with the rest of the cosmos.
- [Steve] So you've mentioned Spinoza, and we should talk about him for a bit, 17th century philosopher who Einstein really gravitated toward. And like Einstein, he was Jewish, but in Spinoza's day he was kind of branded as a heretic because it was sort of unclear, what did he really think about God? You've said that maybe it's not quite right to call Spinoza a pantheist, but how would you, just very briefly, how would you describe Spinoza's general orientation in terms of how he talked about or wrote about these ideas?
- [Kieran] Yeah, so Spinoza's so fascinating, partly because he seems to kind of come outta nowhere. And some of that's just our ignorance of the era, and the records aren't great and we don't know a lot about his life or what he was reading. Many, many thinkers since Spinoza have seen him as almost this mere image of Eastern wisdom. It's almost like straight out of the or something. And yet he's this guy, he is very isolated, never left Holland. He didn't have any access to any eastern text. There was nothing really translated at the time. He didn't know any foreign languages. So he kind of came up with this on his own. Again, the pantheism term is tough because it's not just that, oh, look around everything and then call it God, and we're kind of done. It's a misunderstanding to say that God is the same as nature in the material physical sense. Because his point was that God is just as much in the mind, which we still cannot connect at all. And that's actually some part of what I work on as a neuroscientist, is trying to understand neuro correlative consciousness. And he said it's just as much mental stuff as it is physical stuff.
- [Steve] I mean, he's saying there's no sharp dividing line between mind and matter, between consciousness and the physical stuff of the world. And that is a really difficult idea to, for me to wrap my head around.
- [Kieran] Not only no sharp dividing line, no difference at all at a fundamental level. And that's, I think Einstein was getting at something very similar, but calling it different names including the arch force or the underlying energy. Again, really, really hard thing to even talk about or wrap your head around. But what I think is cool with Spinoza too is he talks about a special kind of intuition, almost, he calls it the third kind of knowledge that leads to an intellectual love of God or an intellectual love of the divine. And that sounds so much to me, like the mystical insight in many, many different traditions in eastern traditions. And what Einstein was trying to get at with his cosmic religious feeling, which is that it's not just an intellectual exercise. You actually, it's not like a psychic perception, it's just a different way of sort of seeing and feeling and integrating all the inputs that are coming in and gives you this feeling of the unity underlying it all.
- [Steve] So to come back to the question of infinity, where do human beings fit into this 'cause it seems like we are finite by nature, of course we die. We are also limited by what our minds reveal to us. We're limited by our egos, by our sense of self. So given all of these limitations, is it possible for us to really get any sense of the infinite?
- [Kieran] Yeah, I think it is. And I think we don't think enough about how many of those limits are just conventional and can be transcended. And certainly that's kinda the main message of mystical traditions all through history, is that there's another state of consciousness is what we were talking earlier with Spinoza. There's this third kind of knowledge, and most of us, most of the time are completely lost in finite ego land and where there's sensations and there's reasoning and there's really nothing else. There's no higher intuitions, there's no higher insights, there's no mystical experience where the ego dissolves. But people talk about this actually all the time through spiritual literature. And now that psychedelics are kind of widespread, including, very, very potent psychedelics people, ordinary people have experiences like this all the time. Whether that makes them metaphysically true is kind of its own separate question, but certainly the experience can be had on a subjective level,
- [Steve] The experience being what? That you tap into this infinity?
- [Kieran] Yeah, I guess. And I think it's usually talked about, again, less as a journey or reaching something else as it is things that are in the way dropping away or dissolving. And so, in psychedelic literature we tend to call it ego dissolution. So it's not even so much that you fly up to some other realm and you go to heaven, is that the ego and all the sort of filters we've been talking about that see things as separate and space and time kind of melt away, and yet there's something still there left over.
- [Steve] I wanna come back to your own story. You said that writing this book on Einstein's spiritual journey changed you. How so?
- [Kieran] I think it's impossible to spend deeply engaged with this material and not start to feel it on a subjective level. And so I was in Palo Alto in medical school at Stanford, and there's beautiful, a lot of nature preserved down there, beautiful trails, forests, little rivers and streams. And I would go out hiking all the time after work in the evening for an hour or two just to sort of decompress. And I've been reading all this stuff for weeks and months sometimes. And it was a very vivid experience actually, of almost seeing, and again, nothing, you don't see anything different. It's just that what you see looks different and you can sort of see that there's this underlying energy manifesting in all these countless different ways. It's making flowers, it's making the water flow, it's making the trees grow. It's the blowing through the wind. This entire cosmos just sprouting and blooming and flowing and all this energy is being expended and where is that all coming from? And again, physics has an answer, but it doesn't quite go all the way and say, well what is that underlying energy or that force that moves everything and kind of creates these energy gradients? I tried to write the book to evoke that state in the reader. That's kind of the aim of the book on a cellular level. It's more just like, hey, can you really look at what's in front of us and realize that it is somehow unified and somehow comes from this underlying substrate and that we're part of it. That we're not separate. We're not walking around in this giant box called space. We're absolutely integrated with it on in every way from the physical level, the laws, the atoms we're made of. So.
- [Steve] That is a wonderful place to leave it. Thank you so much.
- [Kieran] Yeah, thanks so much, Steve. Thanks for having me.
- [Anne] Kieran Fox is the author of "I Am a Part of Infinity, the Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein". Steve Paulson was talking with him. Kieran is a physician and neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, where he studies neural mechanisms and the therapeutic potential of both meditation and psychedelics. Thanks to Charles Monroe King who produced this hour, he had help from producers Shannon Henry Kleber and Angelo Batista. Our technical director and sound designer is Tom Blaine with additional music this week from Amaran, Techtheist, and . The executive producer of "To The Best of our Knowledge" is Steve Paulson and I'm Anne Strainchamps. And no matter what is going on in the world or in your life today, I hope you find time to remember that you're maid of stardust and part of infinity.
- [Announcer 2] PRX.
