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From an interview with Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, for Stop Smiling.
SS: Have there been any shows that have challenged your own belief systems?
JA: Krulwich and I always have an argument that’s pretty familiar by now. He’s a God person and I’m not — I don’t believe in God. But he’s not a God person in that he imagines his grey beard grandpa kind of thing — more of an Einstein God, like there’s and order to everything. With that in mind, I had an interview with a physicist and we discussed probability versus certainty. The starting point of the discussion was, “The fact that you and I can discuss physics, that we can reflect: Is that just an accident, or is that important?”
Then he used an example of a ball being bounced off the wall. You don’t know where the ball goes until you examine it, which puts it in a fixed position. If you know how many electrons, the speed of them and all the other variables, you know exactly where the ball is going to go. There is no probability, there are only certainties. Nature made up its mind.
His point was that somehow our reflection and movement on the fabric of the universe should be taken into account in the laws of physics. Stuff that seems to exist outside of physics serves no role, has nothing to do with the ball. But here we are in the loop. It’s a closed loop and perhaps we are elements in the loop that exist to appreciate the universe. The universe is self-engineering. If you don’t take it as a closed loop, then we’re left in world where we have these laws of physics and we’ll never be part of it — unless there’s, like, God, which is always a conversation-stopper. One soution to that is to sort of say, “It works because we can ask how it works.” The physicist was asking all these questions and it spun me. Do I really believe we’re these exra elements that just float around? Suddenly for the first time I was taking a baby step toward believing some entity is at work with the loop and floating parts.
It’s powerful moments like that [we hope for]. We want to lead listeners to moments of wonder, not cheap thrills. We want people to stand before the universe and go, “Holy shit. There is awe and wonder and sadness”. We want to take them there.
