00:00:29.960 past part two of the beginning, the final chapter of the beginning of infinity. This isn't the final
00:00:38.040 episode however. This is just the second in a series called the beginning and in last episode we were
00:00:45.160 talking about David's idea that we should call knowledge in science rather than calling it
00:00:53.400 scientific theories of or scientific facts about if we just agreed that every discovery in science,
00:00:59.560 every new discovery, was another grand scientific misconception. It would undo a lot of
00:01:05.400 epistemological problems, a lot of hang-ups that people have about following the science or
00:01:11.240 thinking that science is settled in some way. If we simply understood and took seriously the idea
00:01:16.520 that all knowledge contains misconception and error and therefore called it a misconception,
00:01:22.200 perhaps people would be more willing to change their minds and search for ways to improve
00:01:27.400 our knowledge, rather than believing in science as if it was some religious dogma. Now this is
00:01:33.240 true even in mathematics, as David said, because although theorems tend not to be shown false
00:01:40.360 once they've been proven, although it is possible, it is possible to find an error in a proof.
00:01:45.800 This is a rare situation. What is more common is that mathematicians gain a deeper understanding
00:01:53.720 of certain theorems. They find that they are not as foundational, fundamental, as deep as what
00:01:59.800 originally was taught. In fact, there's often something deeper. There's a more general case in
00:02:04.840 mathematics. And so let me go back to the book and reread or just read. And David writes,
00:02:12.680 optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is nearly there in any
00:02:19.080 sense or its foundations are. Yet comprehensive optimism has always been rare and the lure of the
00:02:24.920 prophetic fallacy strong. But there have always been exceptions. Socrates famously claimed to be
00:02:31.000 deeply ignorant and pop a road, quote from Papa. I believe that it would be worth trying to learn
00:02:36.680 something about the world, even if in trying to do so, we should merely learn that we do not know
00:02:41.320 much. It might be well for us all to remember that while differing widely in the various little bits
00:02:47.320 we know in our infinite ignorance, we are all equal from conjectures and refutations in 1963.
00:02:54.680 Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge.
00:03:00.440 Rejecting the idea that we are nearly there is a necessary condition for the avoidance of
00:03:05.080 dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny, pausing there just my reflection on that.
00:03:10.680 Remember Papa's deep truth about manifest truth and tyranny. He said, if I can recall,
00:03:21.720 the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny. And what he meant by that
00:03:29.800 is that once someone honestly believes thinks actually true that they have got in hand a final truth,
00:03:38.280 then many people will think that this is something that needs to be defended with their lives.
00:03:44.520 And perhaps they'd be right to do so if in fact they had the ultimate final truth.
00:03:49.480 The holy truth, this is the history of much conflict in the world, people thinking they have
00:03:56.520 the truth and they will fight to the death in order to preserve it. And so Papa is right to say
00:04:02.360 but the doctrine that truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny.
00:04:06.440 That these epistemological debates, questions, discussions are not in the abstract.
00:04:13.240 They have real world consequences. If you are a thoroughgoing fallibleist,
00:04:18.200 you're likely not going to insist on the death of your compatriots in order to defend a thesis,
00:04:25.800 which you do not think is the ultimate final truth. But on the other hand,
00:04:29.880 those other people might. But of course that then evokes Yitz, William Butler Yitz,
00:04:37.960 the second coming poem. I'll just read the most famous two lines where he writes quote from Yitz,
00:04:47.480 the best lack or conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. But we don't need
00:04:52.920 to go down that road. But in being fallibleists, we do not have to lack conviction and we do not
00:05:00.040 have to counter passionate intensity with impotent relativism. We can still claim to know
00:05:09.480 what we know and still be willing to defend the moral ideals and values that we think are
00:05:16.120 important for the maintenance of civilization. But we just don't have to be tyrannical about it.
00:05:21.720 We don't have to go to war over it. If war is brought to us, then we should be willing to have
00:05:28.040 the conviction to defend ourselves and enlightenment values. Okay, back to the book.
00:05:33.160 In 1996, the journalist John Horgan caused something of a stir with his book,
00:05:38.360 The End of Science, facing the limits of knowledge and the twilight of the scientific age.
00:05:43.720 In it, he argued that the final truth in all fundamental areas of science,
00:05:48.200 or at least as much of it as human minds would ever be capable of grasping, had already been
00:05:53.080 discovered during the 20th century. Horgan wrote that he had originally believed science to be
00:05:58.360 open-ended, even infinite. But he became convinced that the contrary by what I would call
00:06:03.400 a series of misconceptions and bad arguments. His basic misconception was empiricism.
00:06:09.160 He believed that what distinguishes science from unscientific fields such as literary criticism
00:06:13.400 for loss of your art is that science has the ability to resolve questions objectively by comparing
00:06:19.000 theories with reality, while other fields can produce only multiple mutually incompatible
00:06:23.400 interpretations of any issue. He was mistaken in both respects. As I've explained throughout this
00:06:29.400 book, there is objective truth to be found in all those fields, while finality or infallibility
00:06:34.840 cannot be found anywhere. Horgan accepts from the bad philosophy of postmodern literary criticism.
00:06:41.000 It's will for confusion between two kinds of ambiguity. That can exist in philosophy and art.
00:06:46.040 The first is the ambiguity of multiple true meanings, either intended by the author or existing
00:06:50.920 because of the rich of ideas. The second is the ambiguity of deliberate vagueness, confusion,
00:06:56.280 equivocation or self-contradiction. The first is an attribute of deep ideas, the second and
00:07:01.080 attribute of deep silliness. By confusing them, one ascribes to the best art and philosophy,
00:07:06.920 the qualities of the worst. Since in that view readers, viewers and critics can attribute any
00:07:11.800 meaning they choose to the second kind of ambiguity. Bad philosophy. Bad philosophy declares the same
00:07:18.200 to be true of all knowledge. All meanings are equal, and none of them is objectively true.
00:07:23.320 One then has a choice between complete nihilism or regarding all ambiguity as a good thing in
00:07:28.760 those fields. Horgan chooses the latter option. He classifies art and philosophy as ironic fields,
00:07:35.160 are only being the presence of multiple conflicting meanings in a statement.
00:07:39.240 Okay, pausing their my reflection. So we have a great battle, a great battle for science. Is it
00:07:47.400 the beginning or is it the end? And now according to Horgan here, of course, things are coming
00:07:54.200 to an end. And you can find more writings of John Horgan more recently online, but they
00:08:01.000 basically circle the same ideas. I don't think he has given up on any of the claims he makes here.
00:08:08.440 At least I haven't seen him publicly a backtrack on anything. Even though Horgan's book was
00:08:14.280 published, Horgan's book was published back in, well, first published back in 96, republished
00:08:21.480 again in 98. So that's more than 10 years before the first publication, the beginning of infinity.
00:08:27.240 And I know for a fact that John Horgan interviewed David Deutsch and that interview, that wonderful
00:08:33.240 interview is available online. You can find it on YouTube. John Horgan speaking to David Deutsch
00:08:38.680 about the beginning of infinity. That's a wonderful conversation. I don't know why John Horgan
00:08:43.880 wasn't convinced because certainly since that discussion, he has made many of the same points
00:08:52.520 as he makes in the end of science. And one point he has brought up again and again,
00:09:01.960 in his book and in articles that he has written, is a kind of character assassination of
00:09:07.160 Karl Popper. I don't know why people wish to do this. Much the same occurs in Wittgenstein's
00:09:14.280 poker, where, well, to be fair, fans of Popper, some fans of Popper, who claim to have known Wittgenstein,
00:09:22.440 complained that Wittgenstein was not a particularly pleasant person to get along with.
00:09:26.440 Similarly, fans of Wittgenstein complained that Popper was a terribly annoying person or,
00:09:32.520 you know, he wasn't a particularly pleasant person. But of course, if you speak to fans of
00:09:36.760 Popper who met Popper, he was a wonderfully friendly person. I don't know what the point is of
00:09:42.520 of debating this, except that it reveals something about one's willingness to engage with the
00:09:50.600 ideas when you start talking about the person's supposed character. And John Horgan does this in
00:09:58.360 spades. John Horgan's probably a nice guy. I've never met him, but I know he likes to talk about
00:10:03.000 Popper's personality. And so if we go to the end of science, to the chapter called
00:10:08.840 The End of Philosophy, we can read about supposedly what Popper was like, because John Horgan
00:10:17.880 speaks about his personal encounter with Carl Popper because he goes to interview him.
00:10:23.960 And so because in part this series is very much a tribute to the work of Carl Popper,
00:10:33.560 let's give the other side a bit of a run. And so what does John Horgan say in this book about
00:10:41.880 Carl Popper? So he arrives at Sir Carl's house, and I'll just read it, and Horgan writes
00:10:51.320 when he arrives at the house. A tall handsome woman dressed in dark pants and shirt with
00:10:56.040 short dark hair answered the door. Mrs. Mu, she was only slightly less forbidding in person
00:11:01.880 than over the telephone. As she led me into the house, she told me that Sir Carl was quite tired.
00:11:08.280 He had undergone a spate of interviews and congratulations brought on by his 90th birthday
00:11:12.600 the previous month, and he had been working too hard preparing an acceptance speech for the
00:11:17.240 Kyoto Award known as Japan's Nobel. I should expect to speak to him for only an hour at the most.
00:11:23.960 I was trying to lower my expectations when Popper made his entrance. He was stooped, equipped
00:11:29.160 with the hearing aid and surprisingly short. I had assumed that the author of such
00:11:34.120 autocratic prose would be tall. Yet he was as kinetic as a phantom weight boxer.
00:11:40.200 He brandished an article I had written for Scientific American about how quantum mechanics was
00:11:44.520 compelling some physicists to abandon a view of physics as a wholly objective enterprise.
00:11:49.800 I don't believe a word of it he declared in an Austrian accented growl,
00:11:53.640 subjectivism, has no place in physics, quantum or otherwise. Physics he exclaimed,
00:11:59.160 grabbing a book from a table and slamming it down is that. This from a man who co-wrote a book
00:12:04.600 espousing dualism, the notion that ideas and other constructs of the human mind exist
00:12:09.160 independently of the material world, pausing there. Well, Popper was quite right, wasn't he?
00:12:15.080 To reject subjectivism in quantum theory. So I don't know what problem Hogan has here,
00:12:22.920 but he seems to be conflating this with Popper's apparently espousing dualism. I'm not sure
00:12:31.720 that's entirely true, by the way. It depends on what one means by dualism. After all,
00:12:37.960 I could argue the thesis that the mind is software running on the brain, which is hardware,
00:12:42.840 which is a form of dualism, that there is an abstract reality in a physical reality.
00:12:47.480 Dualism, there is number and there are atoms, dualism, but why that has anything to do with
00:12:55.800 whether or not one thinks that the laws of physics should be subjective, which is to say
00:13:02.360 the laws of physics have a place in them for consciousness at the fundamental level,
00:13:07.560 namely that your one's observing of an experiment affects the outcome of the experiment. I don't
00:13:12.040 know, but Hogan's upset about that. Let's go back to the book. Hogan writes of Popper.
00:13:19.960 Once seated, he kept darting away to forage for books or articles that could buttress a point,
00:13:25.800 striving to dredge a name or date from his memory. He needed his temples and greeted his teeth
00:13:31.560 as if in agony. At one point, when the word mutation briefly eluded him,
00:13:36.520 he slapped his forehead repeatedly and with alarming force shouting, terms, terms, terms.
00:13:43.400 Words poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum that I began to lose hope
00:13:47.480 that I could ask any of my prepared questions. I am over 90 and I can still think he declared
00:13:52.760 as if suspecting that I doubted it. He tirelessly touted a theory of the origin of life
00:13:58.440 proposed by a former student, Gunther Warchalsa, a German patent attorney who had a PhD in chemistry.
00:14:05.240 Popper kept emphasizing that he had known all the titans of 20th century science.
00:14:10.040 Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Popper blamed Bohr, whom he knew very well for having introduced
00:14:15.720 subjectivism into physics. Bohr was a marvellous physicist at one of the greatest of all time,
00:14:20.280 but he was a miserable philosopher and one couldn't talk to him. He was talking all the time,
00:14:25.000 allowing practically only one or two words to you and then at once cutting in.
00:14:29.960 Okay, pausing in my reflection. So what Horgon's saying there is that pop is name dropping.
00:14:38.680 All the while Horgon talking about his personal meeting with Popper in order to try and
00:14:46.440 characterize Popper in a particular way. And further saying that this
00:14:53.240 Niels Bohr was a miserable philosopher who was talking all the time, never allowing anyone to
00:15:02.360 talk at the same time. So in other words, Horgon's trying to say that Popper is like Niels Bohr.
00:15:09.080 That's the insinuation here. That is the mean unfair insinuation here against a man who obviously
00:15:18.120 cannot defend himself. Back to the book, Horgon writes, As Mrs. Mu turned to leave,
00:15:26.920 Popper abruptly asked to define one of his books. She disappeared for him in few minutes
00:15:32.280 and then returned empty handed. Excuse me Carl, I couldn't find it she reported,
00:15:36.440 unless I have a description, I can't check every bookcase. It was actually, I think, on the right
00:15:41.720 of this corner, but I could have taken it away, maybe, his voice trailed off. Mrs. Mu somehow
00:15:46.760 rolled her eyes without really rolling them and vanished. He paused a moment and I desperately
00:15:51.480 seized the opportunity to ask a question. I wanted to ask you about, yes, you should ask me your
00:15:56.440 questions. I have wrongly taken the lead. You can ask me all your questions first, just pausing
00:16:01.400 there. This is all in quote marks. Now, I don't know, maybe Horgon had made a recording. It's silent
00:16:08.040 on that. Maybe he took copious notes. Maybe he has an idactic memory. I don't know. But
00:16:13.240 I'm suspicious about putting these quotes in quote marks. Quotes should be for the exact words
00:16:22.680 that somebody says. Perhaps Horgon's being very honest here, perhaps. Let's get back to the book.
00:16:32.120 Horgon writes, as I began to question Popper about his views, it became apparent that
00:16:36.360 its skeptical philosophy stemmed from a deeply romantic idealized view of science. He thus denied
00:16:42.360 the assertion often made by the logical positivists that science can ever be reduced to a formal
00:16:47.400 logical system in which raw data are methodically converted into truth. A scientific theory,
00:16:52.280 Popper insisted is an invention, an act of creation as profoundly mysterious as anything in the
00:16:57.480 arts. The history of science is everywhere speculative, Popper said. It is a marvelous history.
00:17:02.600 It makes you proud to be a human being, framing his face in his outstretched hands,
00:17:07.240 Popper interned. I believe in the human mind pausing my reflection. Well that's generous and that's
00:17:12.440 nice. I can believe that that is precisely the words of Popper and the way in which he would have
00:17:19.800 been excited to talk about history and the importance, the centrality of people. Okay, skipping a
00:17:25.240 little back to Horgon. Horgon writes, when I asked Popper if he thought that science was incapable
00:17:32.120 of achieving absolute truth, he exclaimed. No, no, and Shugis had vehemently. He liked the
00:17:37.480 logical positives before him, believed that a scientific theory could be absolutely true.
00:17:42.920 In fact, he had no doubt that some scientific theories were absolutely true,
00:17:46.760 although he refused to say which ones, but he rejected the positive beliefs that we can ever know
00:17:51.720 that a theory is true. We must distinguish between truths which is objective and absolute
00:17:56.120 uncertainty, which is subjective, and pausing my reflection. Well, I don't know about that. I would
00:18:03.240 much prefer to see that written in one of Popper's texts as to whether a scientific theory could
00:18:10.280 be absolutely true. He had no doubt. Popper had no doubt, and that's in quote marks as well, so I
00:18:17.160 have summed out that Popper said no doubt. Okay, skipping a little more, and I'll just end on this.
00:18:23.800 Just give you a taste of the end of science. Horgon writes of Popper. He thus scoffed at the hope of
00:18:34.360 some scientists to achieve a complete theory of nature, one that answers all questions,
00:18:39.320 quote from Popper. Many people think that the problems can be solved. Many people think the opposite.
00:18:43.880 I think we have gone very far, but we are much further away. I must show you one passage that
00:18:48.600 bears on this. He shuffled off again and returned with his book Conjectures and Refutations.
00:18:53.560 Opening it, he read his own words with reverence. In our infinite ignorance, we are all equal.
00:18:58.840 Okay, pausing there. I think I might have to do an episode, painful as it could be, breaking down
00:19:07.800 parts of Horgon's book. I mean, it really is the antithesis to so much that's in the beginning
00:19:16.840 of infinity. And I just think it lacks a certain generosity in the portrayal of Popper. We
00:19:27.160 why one cannot stick, I guess it's a certain kind of book. It's a narrative, but why one
00:19:32.280 cannot stick to discussing the ideas rather than the way in which Popper apparently
00:19:39.640 presented the ideas to Horgon or the mood that he was in, so on and so forth. I don't know.
00:19:45.400 It's all part of this same thing that one gets when discussing the work of Copper.
00:19:53.880 Namely, it is eventually brought up by someone that he didn't practice his own philosophy or take
00:19:59.320 his own philosophy seriously in some way or other. I don't know what the alternative is. I mean,
00:20:04.360 Horgon seems in some sense to almost understand what Popper's saying, but he rejects it anyway.
00:20:10.200 Okay, let's go back to the beginning of the infinity and remember that Horgon has just
00:20:17.240 distinguished philosophy, for example, from science, philosophy because in his conception
00:20:25.960 there are multiple consisting inter, multiple existing interpretations of any philosophical
00:20:31.160 doctrine. Therefore, you have what's called an ironic field in his mind and David Rites.
00:20:37.640 However, unlike the postmodernists, Horgon thinks that science and mathematics are the shiny
00:20:43.160 exceptions to all that. They alone are capable of non-ironic knowledge, but there is also
00:20:49.480 he concludes such a thing as ironic science, the kind of science that cannot resolve questions,
00:20:54.760 because essentially it is just philosophy or art. ironic science can continue indefinitely,
00:21:00.920 but that is precisely because it never resolves anything. It never discovers objective truth.
00:21:05.640 It's only value is in the eye of the beholder, so the future according to Horgon
00:21:09.640 beyond belongs to ironic knowledge. Objective knowledge has already reached its ultimate bounds.
00:21:15.320 Horgon surveys some of the open questions of fundamental science and judges them all
00:21:19.720 either ironic or non-fundamental in support of his thesis, but that conclusion was made inevitable
00:21:24.760 by his premises alone. For consider the prospect of any future discovery that would constitute
00:21:29.960 fundamental progress, we cannot know what it is, but bad philosophy can already split it
00:21:34.920 on principle into a new rule of thumb and a new interpretation or explanation.
00:21:40.360 The new rule of thumb cannot possibly be fundamental, it will just be another equation,
00:21:44.920 only a trained expert could tell the difference between it and the old equation.
00:21:49.080 The new interpretation will, by definition, be pure philosophy and hence must be ironic.
00:21:54.360 By this method, any potential progress can be preemptively reinterpreted as non-progress.
00:22:00.040 Horgon rightly points out that his prophecy cannot be proved false by placing it in the context of
00:22:04.920 previous failed prophecies. The fact that Mickelson was wrong about the achievements of the
00:22:08.920 19th century and the grounds about those of the 17th still imply Horgon was wrong about those
00:22:13.240 of the 20th. However, it so happens that our current scientific knowledge includes a
00:22:17.720 historically unusual number of deep fundamental problems. Never before in the history of human
00:22:22.840 thought has it been so obvious that our knowledge is tiny and our ignorance fast and so unusually
00:22:28.120 Horgon's pessimism contradicts existing knowledge as well as being a prophetic fallacy.
00:22:32.920 For example, the problem situation of fundamental physics today has a radically different structure
00:22:37.560 from that of 1894. Although physicists then were aware of some phenomena and theoretical issues,
00:22:44.360 which we now recognize as harbingers of revolutionary explanations to come,
00:22:49.320 their importance was unclear at the time. It was hard to distinguish those harbingers from
00:22:55.400 anomalies that would eventually be cleared up with existing explanations, plus the tweaking
00:23:00.840 of the sixth place of decimals or minor terms in a formula. But today, there is no such excuse for
00:23:06.680 denying that some of our problems are fundamental. Our best theories are telling us of fundamental
00:23:11.720 mismatches between themselves and the reality they are supposed to explain, pausing their
00:23:17.160 my reflection on this. And we'll leave it here for today because David's about to go into some of
00:23:28.200 those open questions. But I might just talk about my own favorite ones to do with these.
00:23:34.680 One of the first real anomalies found in fundamental physics that suggests something
00:23:40.200 is deeply misunderstood or deeply unknown, and we are certainly not the end of science,
00:23:45.640 is, well, something like Vera Rubin, the astronomer who studied the rotation curve of galaxies,
00:23:52.680 how fast the galaxy is rotating, spiral galaxies are rotating much faster than the
00:23:59.560 amount of matter that we can see should permit them to. In other words, there's more mass
00:24:05.800 in these galaxies than we can see if we rely upon our best explanation of gravity.
00:24:11.320 Our best explanation of gravity, all you need to do is to know the mass of something that's
00:24:16.760 orbiting or rotating, like the earth as it goes around the sun. If you know the mass of the sun,
00:24:20.920 you should be able to calculate how fast the earth is going to orbit and indeed you can.
00:24:25.560 But with the galaxy, it doesn't seem to work out that the mass that you can see
00:24:29.880 is not sufficient to cause the velocity of the stars that are going around in that galaxy.
00:24:34.360 In other words, there appears to be dark matter. This is a huge thing. This is a huge question.
00:24:40.040 What is this dark matter? Is there a whole zoo of new particles out there that we cannot
00:24:44.840 detect that don't interact with anything but gravity? Possible. We just don't know. It's an open
00:24:50.360 question as to what the cause of these gravitational anomalies is. Do we need a new theory of gravity?
00:24:56.440 Either way, it's very interesting. Now, it could be the case, it could be the case,
00:25:00.600 that there is a systematic error going on with all the experiments, all the observations.
00:25:05.720 But there are many different observations. For example, the movement of entire clusters of galaxies.
00:25:11.080 So even if you could solve in some way the rotation curve by fiddling with the equations for
00:25:17.800 gravity, you haven't solved various other problems that appear to reveal the existence of dark matter.
00:25:25.080 Gravitational lensing is a very important one. This gravitational lensing idea is you can look at
00:25:30.840 extremely distant things like very, very distant quasars as the light passes by galaxies.
00:25:37.240 That can give you a measure of the mass in those galaxies. So even if you can fix this
00:25:42.360 rotation curve stuff by changing your equations of gravity, that doesn't fix this gravitational
00:25:47.400 lensing problem. You haven't fixed that one. The so-called pattern of anisotropies in the cosmic
00:25:55.000 microwave background radiation maps. We've got a number of those and the size of the anisotropies,
00:26:01.080 these little regions, cold and dark, cold and hot hot regions, slightly hotter and slightly
00:26:07.480 cold regions. The size of those has something to do with the amount of dark matter in the
00:26:11.720 universe as well and changing your equations of gravity. Won't fix that either. And then,
00:26:17.480 even more astonishing, is dark energy. Dark energy is a very much an open problem. And again,
00:26:25.720 unless we find there's systematic error in all the observations that we've made experimentally,
00:26:31.560 we have this issue of what is this energy driving the accelerating expansion of the universe?
00:26:38.760 It used to be thought, well, the Big Bang happened and so there is only three options that could
00:26:43.560 occur given what we know about gravity and given what we know about mass. That either the Big Bang
00:26:51.560 occurs and then we end up with a big crunch if the amount of matter in the universe is sufficient
00:26:57.000 to cause the entire universe to then fall collapse back in on itself to be crunch. Or perhaps it
00:27:03.880 could be kind of like a projectile. You throw a ball and it just expands and then it falls and stops.
00:27:10.520 Okay, that could be a kind of universe where there is a finely tuned balance between the amount
00:27:17.160 of mass and the amount of gravity. Or maybe just maybe the amount of matter in the universe
00:27:23.720 is insufficient to cause recalapse. And so you get this expansion that just goes on forever and
00:27:29.800 ever and ever increasingly slowly, slowly, slowly. And that was seen to be the most likely
00:27:35.560 candidate that, well, the first one that didn't seem to be any evidence for this big crunch.
00:27:40.120 The second one would have to be finely tuned, but the third one, okay, we just have this
00:27:44.280 gradually slowing down by infinite expansion in the universe. Well,
00:27:49.400 none of these three candidates, none of these three
00:27:53.480 derivations from our best theory of cosmology, Big Bang, actually turned out to be true.
00:28:01.800 The what appears to be the case is a massive problem. Is that the universe has expanded
00:28:08.280 after the Big Bang and now it's taking off and getting even faster. It's expanding faster and
00:28:14.200 faster and faster all the time. Is this something is driving it? Additional energy is pushing it.
00:28:19.800 A force, if you like, almost pushing space apart ever faster. What is this thing? Next episode, David,
00:28:29.080 being a real physicist, unlike me, is going to explain some more about this. And so we can go into
00:28:37.960 some detail. That'll be fun about dark energy. But for now, I think we leave it here. We've had
00:28:44.040 some depressing times with John Hogan. And we might have to do a separate episode on him. But
