As. Well, Roger,
we've talked about how in the early days you started thinking about cosmology when people really knew absolutely nothing about cosmology at all.
There was hardly anything about the stars that people would see. No, it's completely different.
There's absolutely, absolutely gigantic amounts of data and huge numbers of people poring over them in every way.
Uh, how? But you, I think, would feel that some quite fundamental things haven't really been answered at all.
I mean, the role of the cosmological constant and then the origin of the.
Well, yes. Tell me how you think things stand at the moment.
Well, I do. I suppose I must think about things somewhat differently because the problems that I have regarded as important over the years at a time,
scant attention these days. Well, I've always been very puzzled by the second law of thermodynamics and the direction of time and all that.
And with the various things it has to do with which maybe are offshoots in one way or another, like how one conscious perception relates to it.
But let's leave that aside for the moment. The main thing, which is a pretty obvious thing in a way, but which is almost totally ignored.
Now, you see, we're supposed to have this big bang origin of the universe.
And. If entropy, which is this measure of disorder, is increasing with time, it is what the second law tells us that means.
Well, okay. It's understandable if I have a. Glass of water and a splash as it goes on the ground.
And you don't see the opposite. That's entropy increasing. You don't see the entropy decreasing, but.
If you state this the other way around, it's the same statement but just phrased in the opposite direction.
It means as you go back in time, things get more and more and more ordered.
Entropy goes down and down and down. And where do you get where you get to this thing called the Big Bang?
And what's the best piece of evidence for the Big Bang?
Well, it's this microwave background. You see this radiation coming from all directions.
And this microwave background has one very important characteristic features.
Very early on by Kobe. A mission that you see firm equilibrium.
You see this beautiful spectrum, the Planck spectrum,
which indicates that what you're looking at was in thermal equilibrium was not equilibrium really, because it was expanding.
But taking that into account, that expansion is not an entropy increasing expansion.
It's a diabetic expansion.
And Tolman, the American cosmologist and physicists, fully appreciated that you were looking at something which was, in effect, thermal equilibrium.
Now that is, on the face of it, a paradox, because surely when you go back in time,
if the entropy is going down and down and down, it ought to be pretty small.
Yet what you see is something telling you that entropy was at its maximum.
Now it's never been said. You know, this is the great puzzle. Who says that?
Well, I've been saying it, but hardly anybody else.
Not only that, they don't say that, but they said this is what you expect in these standard cosmological models.
If you take completely random initial set, you that's what you get and that's what you expect.
And yeah, sure. And that's when they saw when Penzias and Wilson saw this thing.
And Dickie. And people would say, yeah, well, that's what we expected to see.
It's just the flash of the big bang you're seeing. Well, what about the entropy?
How can that be? Well, I think there's some irony here because people.
Tried to solve the Einstein equations for cosmology. And how do you solve them?
Well, you assume symmetry, because otherwise the equations are just too hard to solve.
And Friedman did this. He just assumed you have a very homogeneous, isotropic universe.
And now he was able to solve the equations. Einstein was rather unhappy with his creations initially, but nevertheless he did it right.
I certainly agree with his mathematics, but he thought he thought there must be something wrong somewhere.
But it's curious that that it's these models which have been what people have used ever since and since they use them.
It's just this is cosmology. And the fact that this is such an incredible assumption doesn't hit people.
And this is where the entropy is low. It's because all the ripples in the spacetime that could have been there weren't there,
and they were initially assumed not to be there because it's the only way they could solve the equations.
But then you get used to the idea they're not there because those are the models. But why weren't they there?
All these degrees of freedom in the gravitational free field could have been there.
And to see how extraordinary this assumption is,
you think of a collapsing universe which has all the irregularities, which might be there forms, black holes.
These black holes congeal, the entropy goes soaring up incredibly now that we have this constant hawking formula for the entropy in a black hole.
We now can make an estimate for how big that entropy is and how improbable the universe that we actually find ourselves to be in.
See, you might have had that that puzzle even before the big and microwave background was discovered because
that was attracted you to the to the Hoyle steady state model as a way of getting out of the Freedman.
It's true that I thought about the you see, I did think about the second law issue very much in connection with the the steady state model.
But there yeah, it was something that I worried about.
But then it seemed that the problem could be solved with the picture that they have with the hydrogen being uniformly distributed.
And then as it clump clumps into stars, that gives you an increase in the edge.
It's a bright idea because that is with the wrong model.
You see, you have a model with the hydrogen produced uniformly and as it clumps, it produces these hotspots.
It's the action of gravity, and gravity produces hotspots, and the sun is a hotspot in the dark sky.
And it's not that the sun is is hot, the sun is bright, gives us a life on the earth,
because if so whole sky was the same temperature of the sun, it'd be utterly useless.
It's the combination of the hot sun and the dark sky, and that's where the low entropy resides.
And that comes about through gravity. So it was this crucial thing, which yeah, already when I was thinking about Steady State,
I must have been thinking about that, although I can't quite pinpoint that.
But that's true. I did. I did worry about second law then.
But the fact that the hydrogen was dead is. Sharma Think about that too, because that's the sort of thing which I don't remember.
Yes, you should have. But while I wrote this article for the day, Hawking and Hawking Israel with the Editors, The Einstein Centenary Volume.
And this was I put this long article on about the study about the second law of thermodynamics.
I don't think I had discussed all those things with Dennis beforehand. But I did not have the particular idea that I had subsequently that.
Yes, yes. I didn't know how to characterise the particular way in which the Big Bang was special.
And that really comes out of studying the conformal structure. I mean, that's that's one thing.
Yes. Yes. In the earlier days, you wouldn't have, I think, had as much importance to you as you were in subsequent days.
Well, there are a number of things I noticed very early on which played very important roles later on, but I couldn't figure out early.
So one of them. Is this fact.
Just just a curious fact in mathematics. We're talking about four dimensions and we're talking about space time for one time, three space,
and we're talking about the vital curvature of our captures, the conformal curvature.
So if you have a metric, you don't know what the scale of things is, but you know what angles are or if you know what the light codes are.
That's another way of saying the same thing. That conformal structure tells you where the light comes out, but you don't know big from small.
Then the characterisation of the curvature is in this lower curvature w e while the curvature is a measure of the conformal curvature,
but it's also, in a sense, a measure of the gravitational degrees of freedom.
Now. In connection with twisters, but not specifically twisters.
I think it's thinking about it before that because I was looking at how you write in Spinners,
the zero mass field equations for all the different spins.
It was basically Dirac and though I had it,
although when he did the zero maths case for some reason he did it a different way, which I never fully understood.
But if you followed up Dirac's earlier paper and did it for zero maths, that's what you get.
You have this particular way of writing the different spins and the Maxwell equations.
You've just got to indices that and then use the. The graviton equation, if you like.
You've got four indices. It's just the same equation. Neutrino equation is just one if you consider it massless.
And so the the gravitational field is propagates and there's this wave equation.
I had this interesting talk about slightly anecdotal things.
Dirac never talked much, but I was a fellow at St John's College at the same time as director and a member at one
point asking him whether I could have a chat with him about some of the stuff you see,
because I knew he was interested in quantisation and relativity and so he agreed.
And so he went off and had this and I started describing this spin of stuff to him.
And I had this equation, this wave equation for me, for the for the spin to feel, you see.
And I said, I wondered if this might have anything to do with Quantisation using the two spinners, which he had.
It just absolutely does. But he didn't introduce the I don't know.
Nobody even to me. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. And so what he said is this in the use of qualities, I don't know.
You have to have a Hamiltonian, which is confidence so slightly.
But then the other thing yes, the other thing about this credit is the words that he said to me, where does that equation come from?
I said, Well, it comes from the bank identities. And he said, What are the banking identities?
And I thought, what? You don't know what they're being. You see, I'm here.
[INAUDIBLE] be doing all this quantisation. He obviously knew them. He just didn't know they were called the bank identities.
He knew the contract, the contracted words. Because of all that.
It was curious that I mean, I guess he he somebody who worked very much on his own, too.
So he knew all these equations, but he had no idea that those were called the banking identities.
That's a slight extra story.
But the point was this came later.
But the realisation that you had this propagation equation which made the gravitational equations look just like maximal equations,
but first it's been to that's been one. I mean, this was done already by Pauli in physics or something, but they didn't do it this way.
That is a much more complicated looking way. If you write in two spinners, it becomes completely obvious.
But then I started worrying about the conformal invariants, these equations.
And I was just struck by this curious fact that that equation is conformal, invariant with a particular weighting.
Conformal, waiting for the spinner. And we already have the interpretation of the.
Five curvature as being the conformal curvature, and therefore it has another conformal interpretation.
So it's a conformal object, but the weighting is different.
You have two different conformal weightings and it just strikes me, struck me there's something important here and I had no idea what it was.
Well, so very much, much later when I realise it is absolutely crucial in a certain way.
Which comes to this leap ahead. Yes. Because no, I will say yes.
Those reasons. Well, you are asking me about about the what about second law and what I thought was important.
And this big problem you see for a long, long time.
I just thought, like everybody else, that the big bang.
To understand it, we need quantum gravity. I mean, that's the that's the conventional view.
We need quantum gravity. Maybe it's string theory. Quantum gravity. Maybe it's loop quantum gravity.
Maybe it's this kind of going to gravity or the other kind of gravity or twist of quantum gravity.
But it's quantum gravity. Now, that means to me what it meant to me.
Quantum gravity must be a jolly funny theory, because the singularity is one of the reasons you're studying quantum gravity is to explain
the Big Bang Singularity radius or see other singularities black holes that are utterly,
completely different.
People used to say, Well, you know, you've got singularities in the black holes that tell you got the singularities and the Big Bang singularity,
the big bang F4 in the black holes, just the same thing. Times are going the other way around.
But it's not that utterly different. But it's this entropy thing.
The singularity is in black holes. Absolutely. While the curvature, while curvature goes completely dominates, Wales oscillates all over the place.
Complete, complete madness. In the Big Bang.
Com, as you could imagine. Think of the big bang as a great violent thing.
But it's but it's utterly regular. Gravitation, degrees of freedom, simply not activated.
Now, what kind of quantum gravity is going to give you these two utterly different extremes in the black hole?
Complete domination by the vial. Curvature in the.
Big Bang, while curvature seems to be zero, or at least very, very suppressed.
Okay. My view then was to say, oh, a quantum gravity must be a jolly funny theory with the time, not time asymmetric.
And if we're going to find quantum gravity here, you've got to put in time asymmetry somewhere else.
So that was my view until, well, I guess about eight or nine.
I forget how ago now it was that nine years ago.
I just had this idea I was thinking about. But it took me a long time to be persuaded when I said a long time, maybe about three years,
to be persuaded that the observations of these distant supernovae made by Perlmutter,
Perlmutter and Schmidt and RIESS had and convincingly showed that the universe is accelerating in its expansion.
And they it was all sort of touted as being this totally mysterious thing that nobody could understand.
Totally unexpected. And I should say, we're going to look at the whole cosmology book's cosmological constant.
Yeah, it's in all the cosmology books. I don't know why they thought it was.
Why it should. I think we should explain. We're talking about dark energy, which is neither dark.
No, no, no. It's a very bad name. Very bad name.
But nevertheless, that's what people call it. And it's it's there apparently fits in absolutely perfectly as far as we know now
with what the term ironsi introduced in 1917 for admittedly the wrong reason.
And he wanted to start at Universe. Well, half of his right and that's the only the only modification you can make that generally.
Absolutely. Yes. It's not just a term. It's not just a term.
It is the one thing you can do to general relativity without wrecking it, basically.
Yes. Without changing it in a radical way.
That's right. And so often I would take into consideration. That's some tactics.
The work I did in trying to look at squashing infinity down and making infinity look like a finite boundary,
and you can use the conformal invariants in max with equations or of of this equation that you get for the propagation of gravitons.
For that, it tells you what? How to study radiation feels by looking at infinity.
And I also knew that if there was a cosmological constant which was positive, the surface would be space like it would be now.
If it's not a zero cosmological constant time light, if it's negative, cosmological, constant.
Fortunately, it's not negative because that causes all sorts of problems.
Even though the string theorists seem to like it, a positive cosmological constant.
Is a completely different class of problems. I used to think it had bad features.
On reflection, it seemed to me there were just unusual features.
But now it was absolutely crucial because I was thinking about the very remote future and how boring it was going to be in the
very remote future where the black holes eventually disappear by hawking evaporation and there's nothing left of any interest.
And this goes on to eternity. But to me, eternity is not such a long time because I'm thinking of compressing it down by this conformal scaling.
This is what I mean by defeating time and go away.
Yes. Well, the argument was basically I mean, I tend to use this in lectures as a sort of joke, but it's the real argument.
You know, the universe gets so incredibly boring, but there won't be anybody of us, any of us around to be bored.
But mainly it's photons and you can't verbal photons very easily.
And so photons just go straight into this boundary.
And the picture I was having and getting very used to it was the idea of a boundary,
which if you've just got massive things, that boundary is like anywhere else.
And then the thought occurred to me, Well, you've got the space like boundary for the big bang.
My agent. You put them together. So it's an outrageous thought.
And I gave lectures on this, usually being careful to call it an outrageous idea before anybody else said it was outrageous.
But. As the years went by, I began to think more.
But I think originally I would have given it a reasonable chance of being right.
Reasonable chance. Maybe not 50%. There's no substance.
Isn't that true? Paul Todd's work and the way you see Paul Todd?
Yes. See, Paul Todd, I had the thing I called the vial curvature hypothesis, which was to say that the vial curvature as just a hypothesis,
a way of characterising the big bang, that as you have an initial type singularity like the big bang, the vial curvature should be zero.
But that's awkward to say because it's a singular state. What do you mean by tensor when it's singular and so on?
So Paul had a much neater way of expressing it, which was to say, you stretch it out,
stretch out the big bang mark and form a factor, which is something we did all the time for.
Yeah, the Friedman models, that was quite a standard thing. But to make that the conditioned on the Big Bang I think is an important step.
As Paul has originally, it only makes the vital curvature finite and doesn't necessarily zero.
But as I already knew the infinity of outcomes, you must be zero because of the way these things scale.
I said before that because there's a conformal factor in the scale, it must scale biochemistry to zero.
So if you stick them together, the zero of curvature must propagate through to be zero on the next.
Ian. So I started playing around with these ideas.
Half thinking it was completely crazy. I suppose enough thinking it's probably right.
And we end up with looking for circles in the sky.
Yes, yes, absolutely. Actually, something we can actually see.
Something to do with the mobius transformations of the sphere.
Oh, well, that's what could be more beautiful. Is this prediction.
It's. Well, you see, I was beginning. This didn't care.
Immediately, I got people to ask me about, you know, how could you tell if this is right?
And I thought sort of rather wrongly about gravitational radiation or something,
but it was later that it occurred to me, what's the most violent thing that could happen?
That might be a signal getting through. And so I was thinking of these collisions between supermassive black holes.
You see, we're on a collision course with Andromeda, the Andromeda nebula, and it has a black hole, which is, I forget, 20, 50 times bigger than us.
And we have a 4 million solar mass black hole and it's got a big one.
And they could be on a collision course.
They might well capture each other, spiral round boom when they swallow each other up, there will be one huge explosion in the form.
Almost entirely of gravitational waves.
And these gravitational waves, as I'm used to you at the boundary, they will come and they'll hit the boundary in a definite place.
What will they do when they get through? Well, because of the scaling, they can't exist as gravitational waves on the other side.
They have to scale down into another form.
And the equations tell us that you have to have a new duck.
Now, again, the word duck is a good one. But I think on the conformal cyclic cosmology scheme, which is what I'm talking about here.
Simply acronym or what you see is the scheme tells us that the gravitation, the information,
the gravitational waves propagates across but in the form of disturbances in this initial dark matter.
So you have dark material created and it will be given the kick by this rotational wave impulse.
They actually have another prediction,
apart from the circular features corresponding to the outgoing gravitational wave of the gravitational radiation.
You have a prediction for what dark matter will turn out. Yes. Is quite different.
That is true. People who describe themselves and I haven't shouted about that because I mean,
it's what I call the initial form of dark matter because it's massless originally it has to be massless.
But the equations also tell you that you have to grow mass so that you can't keep massless.
That's just an inconsistency. So the mass has to occur.
It must be tied in with Higgs mechanisms and so on.
It hasn't been as yet properly, but I think one has to understand more about particle physics.
How does the Higgs mechanism new the creation of mass in the early universe relate to the appearance of mass,
which comes in from the equations that you have here?
And this is another huge area of your thought really is how conformal symmetry is broken in different ways and which is broken,
which we see much more clearly by expressing things in twisted geometric terms.
You see that breaking explicitly, but there are all these different aspects too.
I've always been in two minds about that, yes.
I suppose the cosmological constant has changed a bit because I used to think one of my minds was that you have the.
If there's no cosmological constant, you have these Poincaré group twisters and that's you have a sort of exact sequence and
exact sequences play a big role in a lot of cosmology and twisted theory and so on.
But if you have a cosmological constant, you don't quite have an exact sequence, you have something which is inevitable and it changes one's attitude.
So I think that was a shift. The cosmological constant took me a little while to get used to, but with the cosmology, it becomes absolutely crucial.
You can't you can't do this cosmology without a cosmological constant.
So you must have dark energy, as it's called, and you must have dark matter, as it's called, because that has to be a new created scaling material.
Every time you go from one end to the next. And so therefore, in order that is not to pile up, it's got to decay away, too.
So it must, throughout the history of energy on the dark matter decays away, which I believe there is some rather feeble evidence for.
I don't know how much to trust it. I see most decay rather than clump together, which.
Yes, well, it was a black hole for a bit, but then it must eventually decay.
It must decay. Yeah. Otherwise it would build up. Yes.
And then just build that for me on the end and then you won't have to have a way of propagating.
So I think it's got to decay. But there are some it's not the evidence is not very strong.
But I heard two bits of evidence. One was from a lecture given by Stephen Weinberg when he seemed to suggest that the density,
the proportion of dark matter was larger in the very early universe than it is now.
The other thing I picked up on are none of these.
Neither these things may be right, but just picked up from because they sort of fit in with what I was thinking.
The other one was there are observations of of paranoia and I think in the region near the centre well of positrons,
I think that suggests that you see positrons or something in the region near the centre and they were these are co-products.
I think there is, as you may know, there may be lots of use that it may be a decay product of dark matter.
I had no idea then that no. Directly into photons they would go through.
They go through. Yeah. Not photons but some. Yeah.
I don't have strong views on that but it but it would, it would have to go eventually.
Yeah. So dark matter. Yes. But then the other thing, there's a more recent thing to it.
It may explain a lot of things you see, of course. And that's all the better, because there may be things that could contradict his.
And if there are things that can contradicted, as Bondy used to say, with a steady state model,
usually the steady state model is that it could be contradicted, and of course it was.
So one has to look out for these things. But there is this information which was released in March of.
This year, 2014 about these were called bicep2 observations where the claim is or was has been that this is the smoking gun of inflation.
I haven't said anything about inflation, but I should say that in this model of nine, key inflation can't be there.
It would spoil things.
Inflation is supposed to have been this exponential expansion, which is supposed to have taken place in the very, very early stages of the universe.
Initially the reasons put forward were ones that I always thought were just incorrect, having to do with the uniformity of the universe.
And that only works if you've got a uniformity there. Originally it doesn't.
You can see from general arguments that can't be an argument.
There are good reasons, though, that kept inflation going.
One of them being the scale invariance of the fluctuations in temperatures that you see in the microwave background.
And if you don't have inflation, need another explanation.
So to me, in a sense, there was inflation that was the exponential expansion of the Aeon prior to ours,
which is similar to an idea that Veneziano put forward some years before the scheme of mind.
So it's not a bad idea, but there are now much stronger constraints on what the inflationary I mean for people who
mean for inflation is somewhat they can viably well it's the modes that they claim to see.
There's a polarisation of photon polarisations that are seen probably are correctly seen in in the early universe.
But the conclusion that is made is that you see these things which couldn't arise from purely magnetic features.
They have to be so purely electric. They have to be magnetic.
They Yukos, which they couldn't have. It was purely electric.
Now, Paul Todd was talking to me earlier this year about.
Problems that there were about the creation of primordial magnetic fields.
And there are difficulties in ordinary cosmology about where they come from.
You partly see them in magnetic fields in these voids, regions where there are no galaxies.
Well, how on earth did the magnetic fields come about?
And the view seems to be that they must have been there right from the Big Bang and those who produce beamers.
So the idea is not just that the beam modes that claim are claim to be the
smoking gun of inflation and nothing of the sort but primordial magnetic fields.
And that those magnetic fields, according to the suggestion that Paul made to me, is that maybe they came through from the previous year, which.
They would on this scheme because they'd be attached to galactic clusters and those little places where the galactic cluster.
Impinges on the crossover surface. You have magnetic fields.
And then there was just very recently.
I was hearing about these things you said and was very rather alarmed by the Beamers and the fact that they seem to be proving inflation.
So everybody said since that would disprove. You see, inflation can't coexist with it for various reasons.
So I began thinking, well, maybe these are the things policy claiming should be there.
And then I. Emails.
My colleague by Gosden, who had met the person initially who had seen the evidence of these circular features, concentric circular features,
because these would be each time there's a black hole collision in the galactic cluster, there would be, boom, you see, that's one ring.
A little bit later, another one, boom. There's another ring.
And these would always be concentric because the central point is where that galactic cluster ends up.
So he was looking for looking at least three rings where the variance,
the variation of temperature around the ring is lower by a certain amount than the average.
And this was the test we were using for these things. And he claims to see lots of indications of these things, very non isotropic over the sky,
certain regions where huge numbers of them, other regions are practically nothing.
So when I heard about the beam, I said, well, I emailed this, you know, where is this region?
They're saying these things. Can you pinpointed on the sky? So he put a little ring.
So it's in here. And this was in in his Planck map.
So this was the recent more recently old ones with the W Matt when he looked at the plank map once and I looked at this picture.
Nothing whatsoever in that set up. Oh, dear.
So I look back at the old w matt ones, same place and bang there was a triple of rings right in the middle.
So then I emailed back and I said, well. Why don't I see them in the blank data?
So they said, Oh, well, I'll turn up the volume a bit. Didn't say quite like that. Looking at slightly lower signals.
And there there they are, absolutely right in the middle. More over.
Moreover, if these are pulled towards.
Well, if the beamers really are magnetic fields and if these rings are really from that galactic cluster in the previous aeon,
it's only just on the edge. Just from the geometry, it has to be where our past.
Like it's where the galactic cluster ends up.
And therefore, the temperature of these rings must be average.
See, the the distant ones, that signal is coming towards us and therefore warmer.
The close ones signal is going away faster and therefore cooler.
The ones which are just on the edge would be of average temperature.
I look at these rings, they're right. The colour coding is green, which means right in the middle.
So this is sort of exciting. Yes, it is. If this is right, when we can make prediction, well, we make the predictions anyway.
But we see because the Planck data hasn't come out yet on this.
And so it looks as though we might make a prediction of the sorts of places to look for where you should see birds.
Because those and if that's right see this is a second observational.
Feature of the scheme. But nobody pays any attention to the first one yet.
It's been almost completely ignored. I mean, there were exciting verifications of this.
We had last September.
Yes. Yeah. Well, Christoph Meissner gave a very nice talk where he explained his analysis, which is quite different from from Vargas John's analysis.
And he also saw significant evidence for these rings.
Yes. I guess looked at in a different way. But yes, it's the same the same feature.
But again. Oh, no, no attention paid.
Uh, on some different subject predictions.
How do you think things stand on the evidence of quantum mechanical?
Dependence, the biological structure of the brain.
And this is also you. There have been some interesting things in recent years.
Yes. Well, you see, first I should explain that I wrote my book, The Emperor's New Mind,
hoping that by the time I got to the end of the book, I would have some inkling of quantum effects could be relevant to the brain.
And I couldn't. There was it wasn't it kind of petered out there, but it did have the advantage.
I mean, I thought maybe I would inspire young people to do physics or something.
It was more rather ancient retired people who wrote to me or else it was somebody of a scientific subject.
And one of these was Stuart Harmer, who did read my book and he said, Well look, you may not know about these things called microtubules.
It's just, say, migrants. I never heard of them at that time.
These are the things that in mitosis, when the cell divides,
you'll see the chromosomes being pulled apart and these microtubules are dragging them apart.
They play all sorts of roles in cells generally, but they seem to have a particular role, according to Stewart anyway.
Stuart Nemeroff that they play a particular role in consciousness in the brain and his
business professional activity is putting people to sleep as an anaesthesiologist.
Arizona. And so unlike maybe many of his colleagues who are just interested in putting people to sleep,
he's sort of interested in actually what he's doing when he's putting people to sleep.
So and his idea has been and he tells me that there is now some good evidence that this is the case,
that general anaesthetics do act on directly on microtubules.
So these are little nanoscale tubes which are in all sorts of almost all cells in the body and in neurones.
But the argument is that they have a different role in neurones and that they play a central role in consciousness.
Something very interesting has come up on several things.
One is some observation about where you can track where the consciousness kind of appears, what part of the brain is involved.
And one thing that always worried me for a long time about most explanations of consciousness in terms of computation or something,
is why is the cerebellum not conscious? It seems to be entirely unconscious.
Yet there are about half as many neurones in the brain and far more connections between neurones in the cerebellum and in the cerebrum.
Yet the cerebrum seems to be where consciousness comes about.
Well, these new observations have to do with these things called pyramidal cells.
There are six parameter cells, which are the sort of cells which look like pyramids, I suppose.
But they don't occur in the cerebellum at all.
They occur in certain parts of the brain, which is now identified as the major part where consciousness does come about.
And they are absolutely packed with microtubules, apparently. So this is one interesting development.
It sort of alters the picture somewhat.
But I've always been worried by why the cerebellum, with all these connections and so on, why isn't that indicate?
Why is that unconscious? But it seems to be it doesn't have these particular types of cells, and that may be a crucial thing.
But the other important development has to do with the experimental findings of.
And have been. Bandyopadhyay, who has been doing experiments largely in Japan with colleagues,
is an Indian doing experiments there and on individual microtubules where they measure the resistance with particular frequencies.
He finds that they're very particular frequencies where thing becomes extremely conductive in ways which are quite unlike classical conduction.
You see, I had the this complicated, roundabout route for thinking that quantum mechanics has to be playing a role,
and not just quantum mechanics, but beyond quantum mechanics.
So it's not just outrageous because people used to think, oh, well,
brain is all wet and messy, and how can you have coherent quantum mechanics going on there?
But I'm saying not only that, it's got to be at the level.
Extend it to the level where you start to see divergence from standard quantum mechanics.
Now, that's totally outrageous, you see. But my reasoning came from the girl things and saying, Well,
really seems that our understanding cannot be something of a purely computational character.
And it's very interesting because, of course, with Turing saved in his early years,
he was very I think he would been very alive to these questions much more than people who follow.
I can I can't imagine his computational model as a dog and as a because he
wrote this paper on Ordinal Logics and which was trying to go beyond systems.
And yeah, I mean, it's very difficult to tell. I mean, I think the success of computational methods during the war really got him going.
I think explore how much you could go in that direction.
But he was certainly worried about the fact that quantum physics is actually quantum mechanical.
Yeah, yeah. No, he's alive to that in a way that other people not exposed to.
But then you see, normally one would think you could you could compute this to any degree of accuracy as a sort of argument.
Maturing himself would make that what have what the Schrodinger equation does.
But then the standard quantum mechanics you then have to use the Schrodinger equation only is probabilistic, but then you have to have a measurement.
Well, he was very aware of the reductionist. Yes, that's right. They've been real too.
Yeah. Because I mean, you got that directly from von Neumann. That's right. That's it.
Which is probably also how you would. Yes. Yes, that's right.
That's my was the first professor of that very much. Yes. Yes.
So. But what's interesting is that now in biology,
it's not just in these microtubules because that's Bandyopadhyay has observations
which do seem to indicate something very strange is going on in microtubules,
which certainly is not classical. And how you explain it quantum mechanically.
Well, that's people don't even know how to explain high temperature superconductivity properly yet.
So this there are lots of things to understand there.
But now we know photosynthesis involves entanglements, essentially quantum mechanical effects, some things about nothing but bird navigation.
Is it? I think it is something.
Sensitivity to magnetic fields or some of these these things do seem to tell us that there is a lot more going on in biology,
which you simply can't explain purely classically perfume, apart from chemistry, which is already quantum mechanical.
But you see,
I'm saying you've got to have enough quantum mechanics that it's coherent across many neurones in a way which allows sufficient displacement of mass.
According to the scheme that I tried to develop with Doshi originally had a scheme like this and then for different with different motivations i.
Picked up on that idea, very similar, which is that when in severe variations,
if there's a mass enough mass displacement, then it goes over into classical alternatives.
But this is very frowned upon by most quantum mechanics people, because they think that quantum mechanics has to hold.
Invariably at all levels. But all experiments to date have only been at a level where you don't probe this area.
So there's experiments hiding in the wings there, too.
Well, thank you very much, Roger, for giving this talk. Well, time again, time is dominating.
Well, it's been a great pleasure for me.
It's always a pleasure to talk about these things and try to rake up as I maybe inspire someone who's watching this, to think it would be nice.
Who really knows? Who knows, right? Okay.